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 legal protections and limited social and economic resources to escape unwanted marital sex, but the small number who could afford the high costs turned to the ecclesiastical courts to legally separate from their husbands. The five case studies from the ecclesiastical courts explored here are exceptional, first, because sexual problems were at their core, and second, because unusual collateral evidence survives describing attorneys’ and judges’ opinions about spouses’ bodily rights within marriage. Whether they were seeking relief from reproductive toil, venereal infection, threat of sexual violence, or trauma from marital rape, these wives wanted to escape their husbands—but they faced hurdles. Because English ecclesiastical law did not explicitly identify sexual discord as justifying marital separation, the women's attorneys had to demonstrate that unwanted sexual relations were acts of cruelty. By invoking bodily safety, decorum and propriety, and sensibility and sympathy, advocates argued against husbands’ absolute conjugal authority. The author considers how broader transformations in beliefs about gender and sexuality may have resulted in giving wives slightly more room for protection by the second half of the eighteenth century, particularly when they faced the threat of marital rape or venereal infection.

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 expressed a broad range of subjects, affinities, and interests from wider popular and even mainstream culture. The diverse occupations held by convicts, the contexts in which tattoos were created, and incidental references to tattooing in other parts of society all point to a growing phenomenon that was embedded in Victorian culture rather than constituting an expression of deviance or resistance. Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, tattooing became fashionable within elite society. These findings not only shed light on the significance of tattooing as a form of cultural expression but also undermine the myth that nineteenth-century criminality was the product of, as contemporary commentators termed it, a distinct “criminal class.”

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 and a royal commission on solving cross-river traffic issues. A powerful elite lobby formed to fight for the preservation of old Waterloo Bridge, and the building of a new bridge at Charing Cross, a constitutional squabble arose over the respective authorities of Parliament and of London municipal government over the bridges, and a rancorous debate among politicians, town planners, architects, engineers, and the general public raged over the issue of the existing and proposed new bridges. A number of issues were at play and are discussed, but ultimately this article argues that it was competing, temporally connected conceptions of modernity that divided the two camps into preservationists and rebuilders.

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 variety of levels, and the colony was successfully undertaken through the mediation of global pressures and English corporate culture within the specific local spaces of North America. The Virginia plantation was self-sufficient, economically diverse, and integrated conceptually and practically into the wider activities of its investors and leadership. Through this interpretation, this article contributes to the understanding of practices of colonization in early modern America and the connectedness of English overseas activities and the awareness of the Virginia Company participants’ of the colony's place within wider, global economies.

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 European population and were both enthusiastic readers of and contributors to the fledgling colonial press. Using the example of the Calcutta Journal, one of India's first daily newspapers, the author shows how the boundaries of what officers could and could not publicize in the press were negotiated through legal proceedings and disciplinary action and through debate within the newspaper itself. The preservation of military discipline was the primary motivation for press regulation during this period, and the military continued to be viewed as an exception to the rule even as commitment to government intervention began to wane. Yet within the military itself, officers strenuously debated their right to speak out and claim their place within the public sphere. These disputes reflect wider divisions within the army and reveal the ambiguous position of Britain's military at a time when the relationship between state and civil society was being reconfigured.

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 I, as with other Stuart sovereigns. Scholarly accounts of the Jacobean period have been affected by a persistent Anglocentricity in this field. Such attitudes have done little for the broader topic of post-Reformation politics and threaten to close several available avenues of research and interpretation. Here it is argued that accounts of Jacobean politics need to be located in their appropriate contexts in order to avoid presentist distortion in future research and publication on this topic and related issues of the period.

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 countering racism—and to challenge redevelopers’ neglect, the group published booklets celebrating the area's working-class past. But the project's archived oral histories show that residents remembered an area forged by different ideals. Their nostalgia was for participation in empire through the docks as much as for an idealized working-class community. Residents rarely distinguished between the interconnected losses of imperial purpose and social cohesion. I frame these tensions as a heritage encounters, making three key arguments. First, memories of youth in the imperial metropole informed residents’ perceptions of the late twentieth-century nation, despite recent scholarly efforts to separate them temporally and conceptually. Second, contrary to their predominance within histories of postwar class identity, deindustrialization and urban change were popularly understood within a larger, postimperial narrative of local and national decline. Finally, a close reading of this project offers a vivid case study into the fragility of British multiculturalism in the 1990s and 2000s.