It is more than thirty years since Ayatollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran, issued a fatwa (religious decree) calling for the execution of the British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie, whose third novel, The Satanic Verses, was published in 1988. But the ‘Rushdie Affair’ has yet to be subject to a sustained analysis by historians. Journalists and political scientists continue to focus on the fatwa, despite the fact the protests against the novel in Britain – where The Satanic Verses is primarily set – predated Khomeini’s decree by two months. This article fills this lacuna by shifting attention onto the emergence of the campaign against The Satanic Verses in Britain and in Bradford especially, where a copy of Rushdie’s ‘blasphemous’ novel was infamously burnt by Muslim protestors. It shows how an earlier set of campaigns fought in Bradford by Muslim activists paved the way for the city to become a key site of protest against both Rushdie and his novel. The protests that greeted The Satanic Verses were shaped by the contradictory nature of Britain’s emergence as a multicultural society, I argue, and the political complexities thrown up by the hybridized milieu Rushdie had sought to use his fiction to evoke.

The involvement of melancholy had the potential to undermine the authority of early modern individuals’ religious experiences, reframing their spiritual afflictions as the mere product of a distempered body. This article refines our understanding of the shifting relationship between melancholy and spiritual experience in the second half of the seventeenth century in England. Focusing on the views of Presbyterians and Independents, it explores how various interests and voices shaped attitudes to the disease throughout the challenges of growing anti-enthusiasm and post-Restoration nonconformity. By emphasizing the voices of sufferers themselves and including examination of a range of overlooked texts, it demonstrates that women and laypeople often diverged from learned views when describing their spiritual struggles. Complicating existing narratives, it suggests that sufferers from both groups avoided using melancholy as an explanatory factor in accounts of religious experience in the 1650s to ’70s, before increasingly incorporating the condition in the 1680s and ’90s. The involvement of melancholy remained fraught, however, and under continual negotiation. Bringing manuscript sources into conversation with published texts, the article argues that differences of opinion existed both between and within Presbyterian and Independent communities, as well as between those who suffered from melancholy and those who did not.

There has been debate about the extent to which the English old poor law could operate as a system of social discipline. This article looks closely at an almost completely neglected set of sources, petitions by local communities asking to stop (or cut) a pauper’s relief, to assess how far poor relief was used as a disciplinary tool. Taking 182 appeals by Lancashire townships from the Civil War to the appearance of workhouses in the county, it suggests that poor relief operated robustly as a system of labour discipline, but only weakly as a wider tool of behavioural control. There is some evidence that townships wanted to end doles to those engaged in ‘bad’ behaviour, such as excessive drinking, gambling, or insubordination, but such cases were infrequent. Far more important were attempts to stop relief where paupers could work or could support themselves through their own productive assets. In turn, townships’ focus on the ability to work suggests that ‘deserving’ poverty was understood in terms of bodily impotence, whilst the need to restrict poor relief to those who were ‘necessitous’ required officers to engage in close surveillance of the poor and their bodies.

In 1881, Patrick Ford, the Irish-American nationalist editor of the New York Irish newspaper The Irish World and American Industrial Liberator, published The criminal history of the British empire, a collection of five letters that he had written to William Gladstone. In The criminal history, Ford constructed a comprehensive account of British imperial history, beginning with England’s conquest of Ireland, before detailing the colonization of North America, Britain’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade, the American Revolution, British rule in India, the opium wars, and Britain’s contemporary colonization of Africa. This article contributes to scholarship on American views of the British empire in the post-bellum United States. In exploring how Ford constructed a Manichean interpretation of world history, where the British imperial project devastated every region it invaded, the article analyses Ford’s reasons for writing and publishing the letters that formed The criminal history. Finally, the article shows that Ford’s central purpose was to foster a visceral hatred of the British empire among his Irish-American readership, to maintain a commitment to their ethnic heritage as proud Irish people, and to encourage his readers that a better future would soon arrive, when the British empire was finally a relic of the past.