This paper was presented as the Presidential Address at the North American Conference on British Studies in Atlanta in November 2021.

Interrogating the relationship between politeness and violence in Warrane/Sydney, 1788–ca. 1816, this article investigates the impact of Enlightenment thought in the transoceanic British colonial world. The author argues that polite sociability was crucial to the imposition and self-justification of the British occupation of Eora country. Principally examining the published and personal journals and

Early Stuart England was awash in handwriting. Handwriting was the medium of property records, law, account books, and scholarly note taking. A large share of government was conducted through handwritten policy briefs, registers, and circular letters. Equally, it was the medium of prisoners, beggars, petitioners, and village wits. Collectors compiled handwritten poems, prophecies, speeches, recipes

This article concerns two manuscript tracts by Sir Robert Cotton, the Answer to Certain Military Men regarding Foreign War (1609) and Twenty-Four Arguments on the Strict Execution of the Laws against Seminary Priests (1613). To the limited extent that these tracts have been studied at all, historians have read them as artifacts of the Jacobean regime's internal counseling process. Through analysis

The first substantive theory of free speech as a secular political right was concocted by two anonymous London journalists, Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, in their best-selling, endlessly reprinted newspaper column, Cato's Letters (1720–1723). Though its ideals became hugely influential, especially in the American colonies, Trenchard and Gordon's motives and the peculiar biases of their theory remain

The 1622 publication of Imprisonment of Mens Bodies for Debt marked the beginning of a decades-long tradition of anti-carceral activism in London's prisons. By recovering prison activists’ practices of publication and republication, the article reveals a vibrant world of textual production in prisons that enabled political interventions grounded in the material and structural conditions of incarceration

The spectacular collapse of the Liberal Party in Britain has often been regarded as the result of a crisis in Liberal values, supposedly provoked by the unprecedented militarization of British society during the Great War. However, this interpretation typically fails to recognize the extent to which the most important and visible legacies of that process of militarization were accommodated within the

In 1919, a parliamentary act reconstructed the relations between the British state and the Church of England. The passage of this act had considerable constitutional, political, ecclesiastical, and religious significance, and it is best understood by considering all of these aspects together. The church obtained a new statutory status, a large degree of self-government, and a special legislative procedure

This article is based on a unique dataset of 75,448 written descriptions of tattoos on British criminal convicts who were either transported or imprisoned during the period from 1791 to 1925. Combining both quantitative evidence (provided as visualizations) and qualitative evidence, it shows that, rather than expressing criminal identities as criminologists and sociologists argued, convicts’ tattoos

The impending collapse of Waterloo Bridge (built 1811–1817) in 1923 led to wide-ranging debate among professional and political elites about the need for preserving or replacing the bridge and about London's inadequate river crossings in general. Over a fifteen-year period, cabinet-level discussions on the problem of the Thames bridges occurred every year; the government struck a number of committees

Using evidence from underused manuscript and archaeological material as well as printed texts, the author demonstrates that the early Virginia plantation was far from a disaster. Focusing on the period 1609–1618, the author situates the colony within the globally connected environments of early modern trade and empire. The author reveals how the expectations of the colony's proponents were met on a

Early nineteenth-century Bengal is frequently used as a case study to demonstrate how debates over press liberties acquired additional stakes in colonial settings. Yet existing scholarship overlooks how the expansion of Britain's military presence overseas during and after the Napoleonic Wars complicated reformist ambitions for a free press. In India, army officers formed a significant proportion of

The (in)capacity of the House of Stuart to provide competent royal government, in both Scotland and England, has been a staple topic in the historiography of the British Isles. Despite the increasing volume and sophistication of recent research in this area, the long shadow of past analytical habits of mind still colors modern approaches to the subject. This has been the case with King James VI and

This article explores a sizable and largely unknown manuscript treatise from the 1670s, “Pax et Obedientia,” which discusses the Civil Wars, trade, the origins of government, toleration, plantations (especially Jamaica), and the royal supremacy, embedding within it a distinctive engagement with Hobbes and a particular vision of imperial composite monarchy. This first analysis of what “Pax” said, who

This essay discusses the reading records of Francis Russell, 1587–1641, later 4th Earl of Bedford. Drawing from a previously unstudied manuscript notebook from 1620 to 1622, the author demonstrates the importance of Russell's private archive at Woburn Abbey as an important repository for political, literary, and cultural history in the early Stuart age. The notebook evidences how a nobleman of Russell's

Attempted assassinations have only rarely been given sustained and systematic attention by historians. This article focuses on a series of attempts to assassinate members of the British royal family across the nineteenth century. In exploring the responses of political elites and wider publics to these attacks, the author argues for the development of a robust and enduring script with which to navigate

The actions of Dr. Isabel Grant in creating the Highland Folk Museum in Scotland in the 1930s reflect how pleasure interacted with gendered identities to form modern feminine selves in the mid-twentieth century. In examining the subjectivity of Grant and her associates through material, textual, and visual sources from the museum, I interrogate both emotional and representational aspects of her development

If coverture justified patriarchal control and legally erased many aspects of wives’ separate existence, did this mean that husbands in eighteenth-century England also enjoyed absolute authority over their wives’ sexual bodies? This article examines how contemporaries described the sexual boundaries between spouses and what wives could do when they had been violated by their husbands. Wives had few

Using recently released papers, we analyze an attempted neoliberal policy revolution in 1980s Britain—the attempt to restrict the state pension to a minimal flat-rate benefit and supplement it with personal pensions. In the process, the government would abolish both the state earnings-related pension and collective employer-provided occupational pension schemes that then covered about half the workforce

Napoleon III's 1860s intervention in Mexico mystified some British observers. For many others, however, it raised urgent questions about the duties of European civilization and the future of global order. This article argues that the affair forced attitudes toward other European countries' overseas imperial projects into sharp political focus, and that in doing so it revealed incipient shifts in the

This article analyzes the activism of Eastside Community Heritage in London's Docklands, circa 1997 to 2003, following its establishment by community activists concerned by the British National Party's electoral success in the postindustrial area. Eastside attributed local racism to deindustrialization and unaccountable, exclusionary redevelopment. Aiming to recenter solidarity against economic injustice—thereby

This article explores the early modern understanding of the gut-mind relationship through a study of the beliefs and practices surrounding the hellebore plant in seventeenth-century England. Hellebore has been strongly associated with mental illness for most of recorded European history, and it is only during the past two centuries that it has lost this association. Taking a phenomenological approach

This article argues that the radical religious movements emerging during the English Revolution were indebted to a wider range of influences than is commonly assumed. This overarching argument is advanced through a close examination of a specific religious rite practiced by English General Baptists during the 1640s and 1650s: during this period, many General Baptists began to lay hands upon newly baptized

Following several attempts to fashion a broad-based national church from the Church of England by reforming the Act of Uniformity (1662), the failed Comprehension Bill that accompanied the Toleration Act (1689) was the final such proposal tabled in Parliament. Although historians have examined moments when comprehension reappeared in eighteenth-century confessional discourse, less attention has been

The unique anxieties experienced by married couples remain under-examined aspects of both the First World War and the early twentieth century. Drawing on the writings of four upper-middle-class couples, this article reveals the complex ways in which couples sought to maintain intimacy across transnational time and space during the war. The author argues that, elements of modern marriage were clearly

This article examines the Lady Kennaway assisted emigration scheme, designed to send women from Ireland's workhouses to the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony in Southern Africa. First proposed by Colonial Secretary Henry Labouchere in 1857, the scheme's purpose was to provide wives for the British German Legion, which had been resettled to British Kaffraria the previous year. Initially, the plan

In the past two decades, the decline of the British aristocracy and its apotheosis, the hereditary peerage, have received scant scholarly attention. Major historical works in the 1960s to the 1990s laid much responsibility for the decline on features of the British aristocracy that are anachronistic in modern capitalist societies, such as their landed, rentier status, conspicuously sumptuous lifestyles

In the summer of 1894, Claud Cardew, then at British Central Africa, asked his brother in England to send him a violin. In tracing the violin's trajectory from metropole to colony, this article combines two inquiries. It probes, firstly, the emotional vocabulary surrounding Claud's request, and secondly, the technology underpinning the British Empire mail. Closely reading the Cardew family letters

This article tracks the remarkable role played by a commercial property developer, the Arndale Property Company, in the transformation of urban Britain across the second half of the twentieth century. This was an era of great change in cities, as urban environments were remodeled and urban centers had to adapt to deindustrialization and the rise of a consumer-driven and service-dominated economy. Arndale