-
Halls of Power: Changing Political and Administrative Culture at the Palace of Westminster in the Sixteenth Century Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Elizabeth Biggs
During the sixteenth century, the medieval Palace of Westminster went from being the most-used royal palace, where the king lived and worked alongside his administration, to becoming solely the home of the law-courts, Parliament, and the offices of state. At the same time, the numbers of individuals who came to the palace seeking governance or to take part in the business of the law-courts increased
-
Instructing the Young and Comforting the Aged in the Norwich and Norfolk Institution for the Indigent Blind, ca. 1805–55 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2024-03-01 Susannah Ottaway, Adam Smart, Michael Schultz
This article considers the ways that Enlightenment ideas and practices shaped the founding of the Norwich and Norfolk Institution for the Indigent Blind, and then analyzes the disparate approaches to the aged versus the working-age blind in its first half-century (ca. 1805–55). While we see change over time, we also find distinctive continuity in the ongoing close connections inmates kept with Norwich
-
“A Ceremony of National and Representative Character”: The Four-Nations Politics of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Alison Hight
In June 1887, Britons crowded the streets of London to celebrate Queen Victoria's fiftieth year on the throne. It was an opportunity to publicly revel in the social, political, economic, and imperial progress Britain had made during her historic reign. The Lord Chamberlain was tasked with organizing a formal jubilee ceremony at Westminster Abbey representative of the queen's diverse subjects. But this
-
An African American Anthropologist in Wales: St. Clair Drake and the Transatlantic Ecologies of Race Relations Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2024-02-22 Kieran Connell
In summer 1947, African American anthropologist John Gibbs St. Clair Drake arrived in Tiger Bay, the port neighborhood of Cardiff in South Wales, to begin field work for his doctoral thesis, “Race Relations in the British Isles.” Drake's academic reputation had already been established by the publication of Black Metropolis (1945), a seminal study of Chicago's so-called Black Belt that Drake co-authored
-
The Anarchist and the Technocrat: Herbert Read, C. P. Snow, and the Future of Britain Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2024-02-21 Matthew S. Adams
A conceptual revision occurred at the heart of anarchist theory between the end of the nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. As anarchist thinkers grappled with a state transformed beyond recognition by technological change, they reassessed their critique of state power and the rhetorical methods used to expose its inherent violence. Where nineteenth-century anarchists favored organic metaphors
-
Calico Madams and South Sea Cheats: Global Trade, Finance, and Popular Protest in Early Hanoverian England Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2024-02-16 Abigail L. Swingen
In the summer of 1719, woolen and silk weavers took to the streets in cities and towns across England to protest the East India Company's importation of cotton calicoes from South Asia. English weavers viewed these popular imports as hurting their economic livelihoods. During the protests, they violently turned their anger against women wearing calico, tearing off their clothes and even throwing acid
-
Care and Crisis: Making Beds in the National Health Service Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2024-02-16 Agnes Arnold-Forster, Victoria Bates
In July 1979, the Sunday Mirror published an article with the headline: “HOSPITALS AT CRISIS POINT: Jobs and beds to go in cash curbs.” In this article we explore the role of hospital beds in such public discussions of “crisis” within the British National Health Service (NHS). In the 1970s, the media and politicians paid increasing attention to bed numbers as an indicator of resource scarcity within
-
“Free Passage” for the “King's True Liegemen”: The Meaning of Free Trade in a Corporate Age, 1555–1624 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2024-02-16 David Pennington
Scholars of late have come to reevaluate and appreciate the achievements of merchant companies that fostered commercial networks and established new global trade routes. This research would seem to lend support to historians who have characterized early seventeenth-century calls for “free trade” as mere sloganeering driven by provincial merchants suspicious of the London-dominated corporations. This
-
Underground Empire: Charles Warren, William Simpson, and the Archeological Exploration of Palestine Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Jeffrey Auerbach
British army officer Charles Warren's archeological excavations in Jerusalem in the late 1860s on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund and Scottish artist William Simpson's paintings of those activities articulated a new kind of imperial space: the underground empire. The imperial underground was a place that had not yet been conquered and where the British had limited visibility. In contrast to
-
Contested Statues: The Clive Memorial Fund, Imperial Heroes, and the Reimaginings of Indian History Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2024-02-08 James Watts
This article considers the Clive Memorial Fund and the campaigns surrounding proposed statues to Robert Clive in London and Calcutta between 1907 and 1912. The author argues that this campaign was an attempt to glorify Clive's actions, focused on the battle of Plassey and its aftermath, as foundation stones for the Indian Empire. The statues were an anxious attempt to situate Britain as a natural part
-
Excommunication in Postrevolutionary England, 1689–1714 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2024-02-08 Pranav Jain
This article asks why many divines pushed for reform of the Church of England's use of excommunication after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. In response, it argues that, worried by what they perceived as widespread moral decline and the threat posed by the floodgates of Protestant dissent opened up by the Toleration Act of 1689, clergy became concerned that sentences such as excommunication were ineffective
-
Fen Plantation: Commons, Calvinism, and the Boundaries of Belonging in Early Modern England Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2024-02-02 Elly Dezateux Robson
In the first half of the seventeenth century, several foreign plantations were established on wetlands drained during a wave of ambitious state-led projects across eastern England. The lines of solidarity and separation forged by this little-known episode in the history of migration pose important questions about how emergent notions of nationhood intersected with local and transnational, religious
-
One British Archive: The Treasures of Stonyhurst College Libraries Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2024-01-25 Chelsea Reutcke
This essay inaugurates One British Archive, a new series in the Journal of British Studies. This short essay describes the little-known archive, libraries, and museum of Stonyhurst College in England. Stonyhurst represents a continuation of the College of St Omers, a Catholic institution started in continental Europe in the sixteenth century, when Catholics were routinely prosecuted in England. This
-
“Lavender for Lads”: Smell and Nationalism in the Great War Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2024-01-09 Jessica P. Clark
In the Great War, home front schemes in support of wartime causes included the making and transportation of what were called smellies: homemade tokens and commercial gifts that invoked supposedly traditional British scents. For volunteers, this entailed the collection and distribution of homemade lavender and verbena bags as an allegedly effective—and practical—means of aiding those injured at the
-
Winston Churchill versus E. D. Morel, Dundee, 1922, and the Split in the Liberal Party Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-12-14 Jim Tomlinson
In the November 1922 general election in the two-member seat of Dundee, Winston Churchill, Liberal member of Parliament for the city since 1908, lost his seat to Edwin Scrymgeour (Prohibitionist) and E. D. Morel (Labour). Before 1914, Morel, like Churchill, had been a member of the Liberal Party, and this article compares the political trajectory of Churchill and Morel across the war period in order
-
From Rejection to Reconciliation: Protestantism and the Image in Early Modern England Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-12-04 Tara Hamling, Jonathan Willis
The idea that Protestantism in post-Reformation England was inherently hostile to the visual arts has a long history and has become embedded across an interdisciplinary scholarship and within popular consciousness. While more recent historiography addresses numerous exceptions to this prevailing trend, this article provides a new assessment of how English Protestantism in a more positive mood not only
-
Readers, Writers, and Riots: Race, Print Culture, and the Public in Liverpool 8 in the Early 1980s Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-11-17 Jack Webb
This article analyzes the print culture of the Black and multiethnic community known as L8 in the northern British city of Liverpool. Through a critique of printed materials, including newsletters, magazines, and pamphlets all written, produced and read within the locale, the author assesses the construction of a community that was at once imagined and lived. This print infrastructure facilitated a
-
Gambling and Elizabethan Gentlemen Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-11-13 Patrick Seymour Ball
Before the mid-seventeenth century when a developing understanding of probability transformed gambling, English gaming took place in the community rather than in dedicated institutions like casinos and so represented and interacted with more general social behavior. Different communities gambled differently; they had different status under the law. This article considers gentlemen's gambling, arguing
-
Landscapes of Hope and Crisis: Dereliction, Environment, and Leisure in Britain during the Long 1970s Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-11-13 Otto Saumarez Smith
This article surveys plans that envisioned new leisure uses for derelict landscapes in Britain from about 1966 to 1979. These plans were an attempt to transform areas of Britain in ways that cut across issues ranging from deindustrialization to planning, landscape, environmentalism, industrial heritage, and leisure. The author argues for the importance of the profession of landscape architects in setting
-
Edward Alford and the Making of Country Radicalism Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-11-07 Robert Zaller
Resentment of monopoly and purveyance, weariness with the burdens of a long war, and the fears and hopes attendant upon the accession of a new and foreign dynasty were all focussed by the meeting of James I's first parliament in 1604. If there was nothing entirely new in these elements, there was novelty and danger in the concurrence of so many grievances at a time when the sense of external crisis
-
Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White: Providence Against the Evils of Propriety Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-11-07 Jerome Meckier
The tendency persists to separate the artful storyteller in Collins from the less successful thesis novelist. Like Wells and, to a lesser degree, Lawrence, Collins developed too strong a sense of mission. Beginning with Man and Wife, his novels seem encumbered with social protest. Collins's “old-fashioned” opinions, especially the remark that the “primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell
-
For King, Country, and Patron: The Despensers and Local Administration, 1321-1322 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-11-07 Scott L. Waugh
As the royal government in England expanded from the twelfth century onward and touched more aspects of the economy and society, landlords tried to control the administration and to protect their interests by retaining royal officers as their private clients. Simultaneously, lords built their own administrations to manage their estates and households. As clients, administrators could move easily between
-
Lloyd George's Acquisition of the Daily Chronicle in 1918 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-11-07 J. M. McEwen
Five weeks before the armistice in November 1918 an unprecedented thing happened in Britain. The control of a modern popular newspaper passed from private ownership into the hands of the prime minister of the day. Ever since David Lloyd George assumed the premiership twenty-two months earlier there were signs aplenty that relations between Downing Street and Fleet Street had entered a new era. But
-
Cornwall Politics 1826-1832: Another Face of Reform? Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-11-07 Edwin Jaggard
It is now more than six years since Professors D.C. Moore and R.W. Davis battled it out, toe to toe like a pair of heavyweights, over the “other face of reform” in Buckinghamshire. The controversy began, it will be recalled, when Davis in his book on Bucks electoral politics addressed himself to Moore's conclusions about a country-based reform movement. Moore suggested that it was composed of ultra-Tories
-
John Colet’s Opus de sacramentis and Clerical Anticlericalism: The Limitations of “Ordinary Wayes” Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-11-07 Peter Iver Kaufman
“I wilnot give my dogge that bred that some prestes doth minister at the Alter when thei be not in clene lyff.” (statement attributed to Elisabeth Sampson, 1509)How subversively anticlerical was late medieval Catholic reform in England? Were Elisabeth Sampson or perhaps John Wyclif the reformer or malcontent at hand, one might expect scholars rapidly to identify reform with subversion. But if John
-
The Fall of the Godolphin Ministry Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-11-07 Clayton Roberts
Much has been written about the fall of Robert Harley in 1708, little about the fall of the Godolphin ministry in 1710. Yet a comparison of the two events casts a flood of light upon the nature of politics in the reign of Queen Anne. This is especially true if the historian asks the question: why did Robert Harley succeed in 1710 where he failed in 1708? For succeed he assuredly did in 1710 and fail
-
From Amateur to Professional: The Case of the Oxbridge Historians Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-11-07 Rosemary Jann
“What was wrong with the historical reaction at the end of Victoria's reign, was not the positive stress it laid on the need for scientific method in weighing evidence, but its negative repudiation of the literary art, which was declared to have nothing whatever to do with the historian's task.” Writing in 1945, G.M. Trevelyan was overly pessimistic in assuming that this “negative repudiation” had
-
The English Palatinates and Edward I Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-11-07 James W. Alexander
The origin and original nature of medieval English palatinates has been a hardy theme of medieval English constitutional history at least since the seventeenth century. Earlier work on the topic by this author was essentially negative, dealing with what palatinates were not rather than with what they were; it is now time to offer the thoughts which follow. This article presents no conclusions based
-
William Pitt, Taxation, and the Needs of War Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-11-07 Richard Cooper
William Pitt had no desire for a war with France in 1793. While the French had lurched from bankruptcy to revolution to war, he had kept England at peace for a decade and successfully repaired the damage done to government finance by the American War. Such had been Pitt's intention from the start, according to his Cabinet colleague, Lord Grenville, who later wrote that “his views and measures…were
-
The Politics of Polemic: John Ponet's Short Treatise of Politic Power and Contemporary Circumstance 1553-1556 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-11-07 Barbara Peardon
In her biographical note on John Ponet, C. H. Garrett observed that although there was “little good” to be said of him as a man, as a political pamphleteer Ponet had attracted less attention than was his due. Although W. S. Hudson and W. Gordon Zeeveld have remedied this deficiency to a considerable extent, the precise connections between Ponet's Short Treatise of Politic Power and the contemporary
-
John Goodwin and the Origins of the New Arminianism Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-11-07 Ellen More
Between the accession of Charles I in 1625 and the restoration of Charles II in 1660 Calvinism lost its hold over English religious life. The effect of Arminianism on this decline has yet to be fully understood. The impact of the early English Arminians, the circle of Archbishop Laud, is, to be sure, well known. Less appreciated is the emergence of an Arminian critique of Calvinism from within the
-
Concepts of Political Obedience in Late Tudor England: Conflicting Perspectives Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-11-07 Richard L. Greaves
Primarily because of the Reformation, political obedience became an increasingly significant issue in Tudor England. The success of Henry VIII's break with Rome resulted partly because the state could use the established church to inculcate in the populace the notion of loyalty to the civil government as a Christian duty. Despite the vacillations of Henrician ecclesiastical policy and the more radical
-
Emancipation to Indenture: A Question of Imperial Morality Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-11-07 William A. Green
Between the abolition of slavery, 1834, and World War I, more than a half-million laborers were introduced to the British West Indies under terms of indenture. Indenture implies unfreedom, the exploitation of people forced into exile by misfortune or misadventure. It is an alien concept in modern Western society, and the transoceanic transport of thousands of African and Indian workers during the nineteenth
-
Confederal Union and Empire: Placing the Albany Plan (1754) in Imperial Context Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-09-06 Steve Pincus
Why did British politicians on both sides of the Atlantic propose a confederal rather than incorporating union in 1754? This question has been difficult to answer because most scholars have focused on the Albany Plan of Union outside of its imperial context, seeing in the plan either evidence of nascent American nationalism, a point of divergence between American and British conceptions of empire,
-
Ethnicity and Conflict: The Northern Ireland Troubles Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-08-03 Ian McBride
In this article, I defend the view that the Northern Ireland Troubles can usefully be described as an ethnic conflict. I critically examine two manifestos on this subject, those by Richard Bourke and Simon Prince respectively, which rest on misrepresentations of the scholarship on Northern Ireland. The issues raised by these historians are relevant to the historiography of nationalism and the study
-
Making a Trade of Preaching: Clergy, Labor, and Political Economy between the Interregnum and Restoration Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-08-03 Simon Brown
Many writers of political economy in the 1660s and 1670s agreed that there were too many clergy and divinity students in England. This surplus of ministers and aspiring clerics, they argued, would better contribute to the public if they worked as productive laborers in agriculture and manufacturing. The question of whether preaching constituted labor had been a contentious theological debate in the
-
National Orphans and a Nation's Trauma: Experience, Emotions, and the Children of the 1916 Easter Rising Martyrs Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-07-25 Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid
This article begins the work of recovering and understanding children's unique experiences during the Irish Revolution by exploring the history of a diverse group of children and young people bound together by their fathers’ politics during and after the 1916 Easter Rising. In tracing the children of the executed and martyred rebel leaders of the Easter Rising, I seek to challenge and extend the way
-
Intermittent Citizens: Scotland's Travellers, Welfare, and the Shifting Boundary of State and Voluntary Action in the Early Twentieth Century Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-07-24 Becky Taylor
This article explores the shifting relationship between Scottish Travellers, voluntary and mission action, and the state. Examining missionary and state attempts to settle, assimilate, and turn Scots Travellers into so-called good citizens in the first decades of the twentieth century—initially during the First World War and later in a designated camping scheme in Perthshire—reveals three things. First
-
Panic, False News, and the Roots of Colonial Fear Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-07-24 Zak Leonard
This article offers a microhistory of a forgotten panic that engulfed the north Indian city of Allahabad in 1870, when the city's European residents began to anticipate a revolt by the native infantry. Rumors of this looming event, I argue, confirmed suspicions that ill-advised income tax legislation and military retrenchment had created a combustible situation. The apparent threat of insurrection
-
“My Heart Is a Piece of Stone”: Anxious Separations and Emotional Dislocations in British Correspondence from the Long Second World War Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-06-05 Penny Summerfield
Historians who write about emotion in wartime focus mainly on the experiences of front-line soldiers and of civilians under bombardment exposed to life-threatening events. However, in Britain in World War II, conscription, mobilization, and evacuation inflicted hugely disruptive separations on a large proportion of the population, and the emotions that they provoked have been under-examined. This paper
-
Brazen as Falstaff, Devious as Iago: Sir Ralph Lane's Approach to Holding Office in Ireland and Virginia Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-06-05 Rory Rapple
Much has been made of the ideological connection between the mental world of servitors in Elizabethan Ireland and the origins of early English colonial endeavor in North America. In this vein, the case of Sir Ralph Lane, the first governor of the Roanoke colony and, later, muster-master general of Ireland, would seem to present a historiographically promising test case, one that might not only link
-
Forum: The Death of Queen Elizabeth II: Meaning and Media Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-06-05 Nicoletta F. Gullace, Arianne Chernock, Radhika Natarajan, Laura Beers
This is the revised transcript of a roundtable on the death of Queen Elizabeth II, presented at the North American Conference on British Studies in Chicago in November 2022. It includes an account of the many meanings of Queen Elizabeth II for her subjects and discussion of why so many at home and in the Commonwealth were devoted to her. The panel also touches on the significance for the monarchy of
-
Empire and the Theology of Nature in the Cambridge Botanic Garden, 1760–1825 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-05-29 Edwin D. Rose
Founded in 1760, the Cambridge Botanic Garden was designed to serve the theological interests of the university by developing a collection of living plants from across the globe. Exploring the construction and layout of the garden, its global network, methods of managing information, and the accessibility of the collection during the professorship of Thomas Martyn between 1762 and 1825, this article
-
English Laws, Global Histories; or, What Makes a Court Supreme? Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-03-03 Paul D. Halliday
This paper was presented as the Presidential Address at the North American Conference on British Studies in Atlanta in November 2021.
-
Politeness, Civility, and Violence on the New South Wales “Frontier,” 1788–1816 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-03-03 Rosi Carr
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
-
Special Forum: Handwriting and Power in Early Stuart England Introduction Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-03-03 Noah Millstone
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
-
Sir Robert Cotton, Manuscript Pamphleteering, and the Making of Jacobean Kingship during the Short Peace, ca. 1609–1613 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-03-03 Noah Millstone
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
-
Liberty, Slavery, and Biography: The Hidden Shapes of Free Speech Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-02-02 Fara Dabhoiwala
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
-
Print Networks, Manuscript Pamphleteering, and the Development of Prison Politics in Seventeenth-Century London Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-01-26 Richard Thomas Bell
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
-
“Send a Soldier to Parliament”: Ex-servicemen, Masculinity, and the Legacies of the Great War in Liberal Electoral and Parliamentary Politics Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-01-25 Matthew Johnson
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
-
The Church of England and Constitutional Reform: The Enabling Act in British Politics and English Religion, 1913–1928 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2023-01-09 Philip Williamson
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
-
Convicts and the Cultural Significance of Tattooing in Nineteenth-Century Britain Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2022-12-20 Zoe Alker, Robert Shoemaker
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 Battle of the Bridges”: Temporal Modernity in the Reimagining of Interwar London's Cityscape Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2022-12-20 Stephen Heathorn
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
-
Reinterpreting the Virginia Plantation, 1609–1618 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2022-12-20 Edmond Smith
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
-
“Pernicious Publicity”: The East India Company, the Military, and the Freedom of the Press, 1818–1823 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2022-12-20 Callie Wilkinson
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 Reputation of James VI and I Revisited Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2022-12-20 Michael Corrie Questier
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
-
Hobbes, Empire, and the Politics of the Cabal: Political Thought and Policy Making in the Restoration Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2022-12-19 Matthew Ward, Jacqueline Rose
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
-
Reading in Crisis: Francis Russell's Reading Records and the Beginnings of the Thirty Years’ War Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2022-12-12 Sebastiaan Verweij
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
-
“An Offence New in Its Kind”: Responses to Assassination Attempts on British Royalty, 1800–1900 Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2022-12-06 Gordon Pentland
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
-
“I Could Never Hope for Anything More Rewarding”: Pleasure, Selfhood, and Emotional Practices in the Forming of the Highland Folk Museum in the 1930s Journal of British Studies (IF 0.764) Pub Date : 2022-12-06 Kate Hill
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