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...classed as unfit, and these were divided into the wounded (uolnerati), the ill (aegri), and those with eye disease. The Latin word for those with this last condition is lippientes, which relates to the word lippitudo meaning ‘inflammation’. It’s striking that people with inflamed eyes were seen as a separate category of the sick. Eye disease may have been the most...

...nation. “There is not a single politician,” agreed the Spanish thinker Joaquin Xavier de Uriz, writing in 1801, “who does not accept the clear fact that the greatest possible number of law-abiding and hard-working men constitutes the happiness, strength and wealth of any state”. Statesmen and public-spirited individuals therefore devoted attention to building this healthy population. It was the productivity puzzle of the ......

...class, and gender helps us to unpick the politics of historical representation. It forces us to ask critical questions about how we construct our accounts of history and whose perspectives are prioritised. Historians have used different methods to analyse the archives of slavery. This has been described as ‘reading against the grain’ or ‘resistance reading’ –...