This short article describes some of the archival materials held at Shulbrede Priory, located in West Sussex, England. This private home in Haslemere also serves as an archive containing materials related to the Ponsonby family and presents exciting research opportunities for historians of early twentieth-century Britain. The collection includes material related to the composer Hubert Parry and the diaries of Arthur and Dorothea Ponsonby. Additionally, it contains manuscript and photographic materials related to the Ponsonby's daughter, Elizabeth—particularly her involvement with the so-called Bright Young People of the 1920s and 1930s. As it remains a private home, this archive also compels us to think about the nature of family histories.

English Catholic history continues to tread new ground, revisit old theories, and draw together theoretical and geographical frameworks. However, it continues to struggle to be accepted as part of the “mainstream” narrative of English history. In this review essay, I explore three key areas of growth related to the study of sixteenth-century English Catholicism: returning Catholics to the “high politics” of England; a renewed emphasis on gender, particularly the role of religious women; and an international/transnational orientation that reaffirms the close ties between Britain and the Continent. Recently reviewed works include Lillian Lodine-Chaffey, A Weak Woman in a Strong Battle: Women and Public Execution in Early Modern England (2022); Michael Questier, Catholics and Treason: Martyrology, Memory, and Politics in the Post-Reformation (2022); Susan Cogan, Catholic Social Networks in Early Modern England (2021); Javier Burguillo and María José Vega, eds., Épica y conflicto religioso en el siglo XVI: Anglicanismo y luteranismo desde el imaginario hispánico, (2021); Cormac Begadon and James E. Kelly, eds., British and Irish Religious Orders in Europe, 1560–1800: Conventuals, Mendicants and Monastics in Motion (2022); Frederick Smith, Transnational Catholicism in Tudor England: Mobility, Exile, and Counter-Reformation, 1530–1580 (2022); Alexander Samson, Mary and Philip: The Marriage of Tudor England and Habsburg Spain (2020); Deborah Forteza, The English Reformation in the Spanish Imagination: Rewriting Nero, Jezebel, and the Dragon (2022); Liesbeth Corens, Confessional Mobility and English Catholics in Counter-Reformation Europe (2019) as well as work by Michael Questier and Peter Lake.

This article was presented as the Presidential Address at the North American Conference on British Studies in Baltimore in November 2023.

Fire is a material and social process that is different in different periods and places. This article examines the fires set during the largest, and last, uprising of the enslaved in Jamaica, which occurred in the island's western parishes after Christmas 1831. It argues that different sorts of fire were central to processes of production and everyday life under plantation slavery, and examines what the burnings of 1831–32 reveal about the fight against enslavement in the early nineteenth century. A close reading of the records of the trials that followed the uprising details the methods used to burn plantations; the decisions over what to burn and what to save; and the contested social and political relations involved in encouraging or extinguishing the flames. This demonstrates that fire was a material means of creative destruction for the rebels that turned the everyday practices of commodity production and coerced social reproduction against the plantation infrastructure; that destroying buildings by fire both denied and made claims on the land, and sought to remake the Jamaican landscape for other forms of inhabitation; and that the collectivities forged through fire were inevitably shaped by both shared endeavors and tensions within and between groups of plantation inhabitants facing an uncertain future. Overall, it seeks to understand the use of fire in the 1831–32 uprising to fight for freedom as part of a “politics of habitation.”

In his brief ministerial career, John Stuart, third Earl of Bute, undertook a project to remake how the king's ministers would perform. Eschewing the personal power accorded to ministers like William Pitt and the Duke of Newcastle under George II, Bute and the young King George III attempted to reform the cabinet into a place of debate, unity, and resolution where administration was shared by all ministers equally. In this they were following the moral and aesthetic sensibilities of the age into a new form of political arrangements, adapting the 1688 settlement into a structure capable of administering territorial empire so long as one did not look too closely at issues of sovereignty or representation. The seemingly small and inconsistently applied shift nonetheless had enormous consequences as it shaped the hemisphere-defining policies of Bute's ministry: the Treaty of Paris of 1763 and the Royal Proclamation of 1763 that followed close on its heels. While historical accounts of Britain's 1763–83 imperial crisis tend to focus on the revenue schemes of 1764–65 as the primary origin point for conflict, Bute's “cabinet revolution” played a larger role than has generally been acknowledged in setting the stage for grander visions of imperial power and the larger protests over that power.

This article looks again at the history of British migration policy in the 1940s and 1950s by centering international and imperial politics, and by drawing on archives related to shipping. These sources suggest that the British government sought to reactivate a system of race-segregated mobility across the Empire-Commonwealth after the Second World War. This involved subsidizing fares for emigrants bound for Australia, transporting migrants from Europe to the UK, and withdrawing shipping from routes that connected the Caribbean to the UK. Very soon, however, these policies came under strain. There were not enough deep-sea ships to meet demand for berths to Australia or to bring over recruited European migrants. Then the Australian government found new ways to ship migrants from continental Europe by signing a deal with the International Refugee Organization, challenging UK policy to keep Australian immigration British. Meanwhile, new routes were opened up from the Caribbean and South Asia to the UK. These trends raised a host of dilemmas for policymakers and all related to transport infrastructure. Thinking about transport can deepen our understanding of migration history, and the article's conclusion suggests some of the ways that taking such an approach can contribute to existing explanations for the government's fateful decision to amend the UK's nationality and citizenship legislation during the 1960s.

Chronic coin shortages plagued Ireland and Britain's American colonies throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Despite complaints, every proposal to mint money in early modern Britain's overseas Atlantic empire failed, whether in Ireland, the Caribbean, or North America. This article explains why. Although the rulers in the court and Parliament were sometimes enthusiastic about colonial mints, the Officers of the Royal Mint exercised enduring influence and managed to obstruct each of these projects. The evolution of the Mint officers’ advice into a maxim of monetary uniformity allowed the doctrine of “one certain standard” to survive the ensuing decades of upheaval as it shed its visible politics. While their advice grew out of the particular politics of the early Restoration, it gained special power and durability when it took on the character of technocratic expertise. Still, an investigation of the same actors’ treatment of a parallel issue—the rates of the foreign coins that circulated in colonies—reveals that an authoritarian style had an enduring hold on imperial monetary policy. This article offers an explanation for the British Empire's peculiar monetary geography, and also demonstrates the way that seemingly apolitical technical knowledge can disguise a potent politics.

During the nineteenth century in Ireland, agents of the colonial state like the police, along with the administrators that they served, forged an association between political motivations and Irish agrarian violence. They did so not only through the policing of Irish violence, but through the methods used by the colonial state to categorize, process, record, and archive it. Central to this endeavor was the category of “outrage.” Using this category, the Irish Constabulary created a record that impressed an association between Irish violence or criminality and political resistance. Because the British colonial state had control over the production of the archive, it also dictated the metanarratives present in this “archive of outrages” that gave form and function to the colonial state's fears that Irish violence represented a budding insurrection or a desire to fracture the Union. By perpetuating this logic in document and archival form, Dublin Castle (the seat of the British government's administration of Ireland) helped create the very demon that it sought to exorcise—that of Irish nationalist action and sentiment.