In an age when both the traditional book form and the world that the British Empire made are arguably in crisis, it is remarkable that big books on British imperialism abound. Contributors to this roundtable assess scale and genre as well as content in their discussion of the claims and impact of John Darwin's tome, The Empire Project. John Darwin's response is also included.

How did the British monarchy respond to the multiple challenges of early twentieth-century mass democracy? Historians have separated the growth of constitutional sovereignty from the practice of a welfare monarchy, or from royalty as decorative and media friendly. This article argues that the political transformation of the modern monarchy was inseparable from innovations to its style and presentation. Opening with the dramatic constitutional crisis that confronted George V and his advisors in 1910, I show how the monarchy's entanglement in high politics forced the crown to assume an increasingly neutral, arbitrarial stance on industrial disputes and on the Irish question, despite the king's own conservatism. Simultaneously, George V invested in styles of royal accessibility and informality that contrasted sharply with other major European dynasties, in a series of royal tours across the industrial heartlands of England and Wales in 1912 and 1913. Extensively covered by the national and imperial press and by the newsreels, these visits to the strongholds of laborism promoted a vision of patrician democracy that drew heavily on traditions of organic, one-nation conservatism. But they also positioned royalty and the people in a new imaginary relationship that was more personal and intimate. Both versions had long-term consequences for the British monarchy across the twentieth century.

This article examines marginalia as a form of radical writing practice in the period immediately after the First World War. It focuses specifically on a densely annotated copy of the second part of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's My Diaries, which covers on 1900–1914 and was published in 1920. The annotator, John Arthur Fallows (1864–1935), was a former Church of England clergyman and Independent Labour Party politician, and the article asks what motivated him to leave such an explicit record of his engagement with the book in its margins. Blunt recast his original diary entries to show how the outbreak of the First World War had arisen from the prewar imperialist policies of the Entente. Fallows, meanwhile, used his copy of My Diaries to inscribe a permanent record of his responses to Blunt's writing, which were shaped by his own memories of prewar radical-left political action. The dual record of textual engagement that can be recovered from this copy of My Diaries provides insight into how two British radicals “read” the causes of the First World War in the period between the Armistice and the conclusion of the Paris Peace Accords.

Napoleon III's 1860s intervention in Mexico mystified some British observers. For many others, however, it raised urgent questions about the duties of European civilization and the future of global order. This article argues that the affair forced attitudes toward other European countries' overseas imperial projects into sharp political focus, and that in doing so it revealed incipient shifts in the center of gravity of Victorian liberalism. France's Second Mexican Empire split opinion in the Liberal Party and press, throwing light on wider disputes about the parameters of legitimate imperial intervention, the reach of the principles of nationality and self-determination, the political needs of disordered multiracial polities in less-developed parts of the world, and Europe's proper relations with Spanish America. But most Liberals who engaged with the enterprise condemned it, a fact that lays bare a changing balance of power between what historians have called “liberal imperial” and noninterventionist arguments in the 1860s. The failure of the intervention, moreover, did much to affirm powerful partisan narratives about French politics, which helped to buttress the electoral ascendancy of the Liberal Party.

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 the NHS. While this in part reflected a genuine trend, it was also a powerful narrative device. The hospital bed has become a cipher for NHS resourcing and resilience, but throughout the twentieth century, there has been a tension between stories of declining bed numbers as a sign of “crisis,” and declining bed numbers as a marker of more efficient, high-quality healthcare. This article will show that the hospital bed was an extremely important political device because it was imbued with rich social and cultural symbolism, and that stories of declining bed numbers were not as straightforward as they first appear. While discussions in the public sphere tended to focus on bed numbers and waiting times, discussions in the healthcare sector and among policymakers attended to what beds could—and should—do for both patients and staff. Public rhetoric about decline was less about the object itself, and more about the role of the hospital bed as a symbol of care and as a politically pertinent shorthand for the health of the NHS as an institution.

The apparent lack of representations of the Titanic disaster in Britain between the start of the First World War and the end of the 1950s was due, not to a lack of interest, but to active resistance to such representations. Shipping interests, the press, government, and the public all opposed portrayals of the catastrophe, but their opposition depended much on the medium by which the sinking was to be represented, on the broader international context, and on the nature and status of individual memories of the events of 1912. Questions of fact, fiction, national prestige, and the ethics of representation dominated the first half century of the Titanic's cultural history in the United Kingdom.

Between the founding of Jamestown in 1606 and the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, images of Indigenous men and women rose and fell on the great seals of the British Atlantic colonies. At the peak of this process, “the Indian” was the most persistent seal icon save for that of the arms and image of the monarch himself. This essay traces the sigillary Indian's illustrious career, as evolving imperial structures and legal debates about the nature of empire positioned and repositioned him (and her) in relation to just claims of authority. Early depictions reflected the settler colony concerns of private charter companies, justifying claims to land, not the rule over people. Royal colonies, by contrast, imagined Indians as a form of vassal, essential aids in the procurement of raw materials from the land. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, the image of the Indian had yielded to classical motifs and representations of the land through maps, mirroring the increasing centrality of territoriality to British imperial thought. Taken together, seal images of Indians in the British Atlantic present the rise and fall of a visual paradox: depicting Indigenous people as symbols of authority over white settler colonies.

This article examines the Lady Kennaway assisted emigration scheme, designed to send women from Ireland's workhouses to the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony in Southern Africa. First proposed by Colonial Secretary Henry Labouchere in 1857, the scheme's purpose was to provide wives for the British German Legion, which had been resettled to British Kaffraria the previous year. Initially, the plan appeared to be of benefit for both Ireland and the Cape Colony. According to colonial officials and emigration commissioners, Ireland would be rid of a superfluous population, the Irish women would attain social and economic advancement, and the Eastern Cape would gain much-needed female settlers. Emigration authorities quickly found their optimism tempered by realities, however, as many Irish Poor Law guardians and workhouse women refused to participate. The Lady Kennaway scheme—so named after the ship that carried the emigrants—demonstrates the ways in which local interests could, and often did, shape imperial practices. Moreover, in tracking the decisions of emigration commissioners in London, colonial officials in Southern Africa, Poor Law guardians in Ireland, and potential female emigrants, this analysis reveals the multitude of individuals who molded Britain's mid-nineteenth-century imperial project.

Music has been steadily rising up the historical agenda, a product of the emergence of sound studies, the history of the senses, and a mood of interdisciplinary curiosity. This introductory article offers a critical review of how the relationship between music and politics has featured in extant historical writing, from classic works of political history to the most recent scholarship. It begins by evaluating different approaches that historians have taken to music, summarizes the important shifts in method that have recently taken place, and advocates for a performance-centered, contextualized framework that is attentive to the distinctive features of music as a medium. The second half examines avenues for future research into the historical connections between music and politics, focusing on four thematic areas—the body, emotions, space, and memory—and closes with some overarching reflections on music's use as a tool of power, as well as a challenge to it. Although for reasons of cohesion, this short article focuses primarily on scholarship on Britain and Ireland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, its discussion of theory and methods is intended to be applicable to the study of music and political culture across a broad range of periods and geographies.