Editorial

Among the overarching themes of this issue are locality, particularly as it is transformed by empire; commemoration, through myths and documentation; and gender and sexuality.

Ursula de la Mare gives us an account of the women factory workers' strikes in Bermondsey in 1911. She assesses the strike action in the contexts of national trade unionism and the initiatives of some leading women in the labour movement, but comes down hard on the side of the primacy of local circumstances and local agency in this remarkable expression of 'necessity and rage'. Steve Hindle's presentation of contrasting local and national narratives of the enclosure riots of 1607 documents the local origins of the Levellers, while throwing new light on the genesis of both Shakespeare's Coriolanus and England's Civil War. Guy Beiner turns to local memories of the 'theft of the cannon chains' during the French expeditionary force's brief sojourn in Ireland in 1798, in order to examine how shifting nuances and inflections in the narration of this 'folk memory' reflect deep and persistent local conflicts. Beiner holds out the possibility of using local narratives as a way of uncovering 'subaltern vernacular discourses' about the past.

Linking locality with the global politics of empire, the 'national honour and new patriarchal compacts' analyzed by Janaki Nair, in her account of interwar Mysore, reveal the paradoxical intersection between local and imperial politics of gender. Nair examines the competing and intersecting strategies of British and Indian elites to regulate women's sexuality and to define the boundary between licit and illicit sexuality.

Edward Ross Dickinson sees the European history of late nineteenth-century Germany through an imperial lens: extending recent attempts to foreground the significance of (the relatively few) German forays into extra European colonialism, he examines the consequences for both Poland and Germany of the latter's eastward expansion. Concepts and structures of legal citizenship developed in the wake of this expansion foreshadowed even more sinister developments in the 1930s. Dickinson also reminds us of the political, social and cultural links between Germany and the Hapsburg (Austro-Hungarian) empire, and highlights the ways in which German-speaking imperial networks forged links ranging from Samoa to Silesia, with the cultural balance always tilted towards a vast European heartland.

Our theme of commemoration runs through several sections of this issue. Shirli Gilbert addresses the little-known history of oral historians who, immediately after World War Two, made recordings of the songs of Holocaust survivors. She describes the great range of their findings and explores the reasons why the music selected for public memorializing of the Holocaust makes virtually no use of this resource. The theme of documentation emerges, too, in Beiner's article: he shows that it was under the auspices of the Irish Folklore Commission in the mid twentieth century that the first systematic attempts were made to collect and collate oral narratives and folk memories in Ireland. The role of schoolteachers and young people in collecting oral histories in Ireland points to a key contradiction: officially-sanctioned history has had little place for collective memory, even as it remains the most vital way in which most people 'learn' about the past.

Issues of gender and sexuality are embedded in de la Mare's depiction of the role of women in the British trade-union movement in the early twentieth century, and also in two of our contributions on empire, those of Nair and of Susan Pedersen. While Nair addresses the regulation of prostitution in interwar India, Pedersen examines the different feminisms in evidence in the responses – often involving policy on prostitution and related issues – of Western women to colonialism and neo-colonialism in the same period. She focuses in particular on women's engagement with the Permanent Mandates Commission of the League of Nations, and with the political work and writing of Winifred Holtby. Sexuality receives further treatment in our 'Archives and Sources' section. Matt Cook shows how the attempt to explore and document the life of Joe Orton is complicated by the concerns of different writers and historians over how gay history should be presented to a 'straight' world; and Sue...