This article reconstructs a crucial episode in the relationship between the English crown, its subjects and the kingdom's immigrant population. It links the murder of about forty Flemings in London during the Peasants’ Revolt in June 1381 to the capital's native cloth workers’ dissatisfaction with the government's economic immigration policy. We argue that, in the course of the fourteenth century, the crown developed a new policy aimed at attracting skilled workers from abroad. Convinced that their activities benefited the common profit of the realm, the crown remained deaf to the concerns of London's native weavers, who claimed that the work of exiled Flemish cloth workers in the city encroached on their privileges. Confronted for more than twenty-five years with political obstruction, the native weavers increasingly resorted to physical aggression against their Flemish counterparts, which came to a dramatic conclusion in 1381. The dissatisfaction of London's cloth workers and the massacre of the Flemings thus had much in common with the frustrations over the royal government's policy that had been fermenting for decades among many other groups in society: all came to the surface during the Peasants’ Revolt.

This article examines ordinary priests in late medieval England who, despite clear guidelines to the contrary, employed and lived with female servants. Ecclesiastical legislation frequently and firmly warned priests against living with women, including servants, because of the potential for sexual temptation, scandal, or both. Historians have long assumed that most clerical households were homosocial, but looking closely at the living arrangements of ordinary parish priests reveals a different story. Evidence from the dioceses of Hereford and Lincoln suggests that elite clerical expectations were often ill-suited to the social and economic realities of parish life, and priests’ living arrangements reflect this incompatibility. Distrust of female clerical servants was heightened during periods of church reform, when these women bore the brunt of both reforming rhetoric and action.

Throughout the reign of Charles II, a growing number of Catholics entered into the civil and military infrastructure of the overseas colonies. While Maryland was consolidated as a center of settlement, a new crop of English and Irish officeholders shaped the political development of Tangier, New York and the Leeward Islands. Their careers highlighted the opportunities of overseas expansion as a route into the public domain: a chance for Catholics to sidestep the penal restrictions of the three kingdoms and construct an alternative relationship with the crown. This article examines the emergence of Catholic authority within the plantations, and situates the experiment within larger shifts in strategic and ideological debate over English colonization. I suggest that experiences in the colonies invigorated economic and political strategies that became central to the advancement of Catholic interests in the domestic realm. While colonial trade bolstered Catholic estates against penal pressures, the new settlements provided the training ground for attempts to demonstrate the compatibility of confessional pluralism with commercial flourishing and civil allegiance. The effect, however, was to raise conflict in colonial politics and heighten anxieties in the domestic realm over the effects of overseas plantation. I argue that by uncovering a neglected sphere of “recusant history” we gain new insights into the ideological fragilities that disrupted the pursuit of territories overseas. Catholic promotions exposed a growing tension between the “Protestant interest” and the principles and practices that informed the expansion of the Stuart realm.

This article examines an imperial scandal concerning the treatment of patients in the lunatic asylum of Kingston, Jamaica, that highlighted the inadequacies of the imperial government. A significant moment in the development of colonial public health policy, this scandal also spoke to broader questions of postemancipation imperial governance. At the heart of the scandal was a debate about whether standards of treatment developed in Britain—symbolized by the image of the ideal asylum and the ideology of moral management—could and should be implemented in colonies. This debate was all the more fraught because the designation of moral management as the official protocol was recent, its implementation incomplete, and its underlying ideas contested. Nevertheless, despite the instability of these ideas, during the scandal and its aftermath, actors treated them as a monolithic package of standards before making them the definitive model for all colonial institutions. Indeed, the scandal helped further bolster moral management in Britain.

This article examines how the East India Company's 1856 annexation of the Indian Kingdom of Awadh informed British Conservative responses to the Indian Revolt in 1857 and 1858. Addressing scholarship on Britain's reaction to the revolt and political engagement with Indian empire, this study reveals that Conservatives interpreted this event with a veneration for locality and prescription. Criticism from company officials and Awadh's deposed royal family informed Conservative perceptions that British exploitation and westernization were responsible for military rebellion and popular upheaval. Principally, this reflected Conservative skepticism regarding liberal modernity as well as support for prescribed aristocratic, propertied, and established church interests in Britain. Their response, expressed in Parliament and supported in conservative periodicals, was the 1858 Queen's Proclamation authored by Edward Smith-Stanley, the 14th Earl of Derby's Conservative government. The proclamation established a lasting imperial framework which defined the crown's obligation to uphold India's political, social, and cultural differences and separation from Britain. Future Conservatives strengthened British views of India's distinctiveness by supporting perceived traditional leaders and customs over uniform western administration and education.

New technologies significantly increased the reach of advertising from the late nineteenth century. Some aspects of this phenomenon, such as advances in printing methods, are well known. Others, in particular its controversial leap into the sky, have received far less attention. Though no longer seen as the home of divine portents, the sky did not become “empty space” in the modern era: it was still freighted with significance. This meant that the various attempts made by entrepreneurs from the 1880s to bring advertising to the skies were often met with hostility, even panic. In exploring these responses, this article resists depicting opponents of aerial advertising as oversensitive aesthetes or technophobes. Rather, it explores the ways in which urbanization and commercial development imbued the sky with new meanings. The sky was imagined as man's most valuable connection to nature in an urban society, a precious but endangered part of the nation's heritage, and an essential counterweight to consumer society. Aerial advertising therefore represented an unjustifiable commercialization of a priceless public space. The rejection of this form of advertising did not involve denying modernity, but achieving an accommodation with it.

Between 1931 and 1947, the American industrialist Henry Ford financed a British agricultural experiment at the Fordson Estate in the Essex countryside. This article analyses the Fordson experiment as it developed from a limited attempt to test the merits of American farming methods into a wider model for remaking British industry and society. Focusing closely on Sir Percival Perry, a Conservative Party activist and Ford's partner in the venture, it explores the extent to which the experiment sought to harmonize modern technology with traditional patterns of life. In doing so, the article places the history of the Fordson Estate within the paradigm of interwar conservative modernity. By tracing Perry's participation within a network of industrial paternalist organizations and delineating his connection to the interwar conservative movement, the article demonstrates that conservative modernity stood largely outside formal party politics but was central to the praxis of interwar conservatism. It highlights an experimental, radical, and utopian form of conservative politics that aimed to foster conservative rural citizens.