Petitioning was a common form of protest, request, or expression across the British Empire, and historians of colonial rule and resistance have often drawn on petitions as sources to investigate particular controversies. This article assesses the significance, variety, and context of petitioning to the Imperial Parliament from both the British Isles and the colonies. To do so, we present new data drawn from more than one million petitions sent to the House of Commons in the period from 1780 to 1918, alongside qualitative research into a wider range of petitions to other metropolitan sources of authority. This range permits us to assess how colonial subjects across the empire demanded attention from Westminster and what the practice of petitioning reveals about the British self-image of parliamentary scrutiny and equality before the law.

Customs activity during the 1690s has mainly been studied from a fiscal-military perspective that attributes administrative growth and bureaucratic efficiency to the rise of fiscal necessities in the wake of the Nine Years’ War. This article challenges that view with a focus on the one truly momentous change of the Customs during the 1690s: the establishment of a preventive coastal police. Changes in the Customs were occasioned not primarily by fiscal concerns but resulted from the government's preoccupation with Jacobitism and the successful lobbying of Parliament by the wool interest. As the politics of the wool ban before 1689 demonstrate, coastal policing was a losing bargain in fiscal terms and mainly reflected the interests of certain sections of the merchant community. Fiscal pressures alone do not, therefore, explain the fundamental reform of the Customs in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. The beginnings of systematic coastal policing are instead linked to the rise of Parliament and anti-Jacobite precautions of William III's government. The article offers a new, coherent picture of such changes and calls into question the validity of a central assumption about the rise of the fiscal-military state in Britain after the Glorious Revolution, suggesting a more complicated explanation for fiscal reforms.

This article takes the opening of the Brook Advisory Centres in London (1964) and Birmingham (1966) as a comparative case study for exploring the public debate on youth sexuality. The two centers were the first in postwar Britain specifically dedicated to the provision of advice on birth control and emotional problems to unmarried and young people. By focusing on an initiative that launched amid rising concerns over illegitimacy and promiscuity, the article engages with the debate over social change in the 1960s and the so-called permissive society. The author argues that the notion of responsibility became a key paradigm for supporters of a new sexual culture. Combining archival material, media analysis, and oral history interviews, the author shows that in constructing the need for a service for unmarried people, the Brook Advisory Centres faced accusations of encouraging promiscuity. Their main line of defense was the production of a narrative that stressed the notion of responsibility and moral guidance for unmarried people in avoiding unwanted babies. And in the debate around youth sexuality, locality mattered. In Birmingham, the prospect of formal contraceptive advice for unmarried girls was violently opposed by church members and family-planning doctors, whereas London witnessed the creation of a viable discourse with an emphasis on sexual responsibility.

Although anti-Catholicism and anti-Jacobinism primed many Britons to fear what one observer called “the hordes of vagabond French” who reached their shores in the fall of 1792, others launched widespread relief efforts. Among the more remarkable was the Wilmot Committee. This subscription charity convened in September 1792, channeling donations from the public to destitute French priests at a time when the British government remained hesitant to directly aid refugees from revolutionary France. This article situates the committee's particular structures in both their eighteenth-century philanthropic contexts and Britain's history of aid to foreign refugees. It then traces interconnections between charitable giving and wartime exigencies, arguing that the Wilmot Committee, which managed relief efforts first to clergy and then also to laity throughout the subsequent war years in an evolving partnership with government, played a crucial role in shaping and shifting attitudes toward foreigners during an era of ideological revolution. Ultimately, the committee worked alongside legislation like the Aliens and Emigrant Corps Acts to underline that foreigners of different religious persuasions—provided their loyalties were confirmed, their principles appropriate, and their backgrounds appealing—might be mobilized to strengthen national interests. By the 1790s, shared opposition to revolutionary republican ideology came to supersede shared Protestantism in predicting foreigners’ utility to Britain.

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.

Among the multitude of enemies facing the newly born English republic, the Presbyterians of Ulster posed a threat at once ideological and military. Such supporters of the new regime as John Milton derided the “blockish presbyters” of a “remote” province and denounced them as Scottish intruders upon English soil. But the threat they posed lay not only in their capacity to mobilize an armed population but to do so around religious and political positions drawn from a common stock of ideas present across the three kingdoms. The twin dangers could be made to serve polemical purposes within domestic English debate as the Commonwealth sought to counter the religious ambitions and constitutional challenges of those they branded as “Scottified” Presbyterians. In Ulster, the short-lived Presbyterian “revolt” proved a remarkable though fleeting success. Its proponents cultivated these transplanted ideas into fertile if fragile growth in the form of armed organization and communal mobilization. This episode attests to the importance of localizing ideology in precise contexts, and to the fact that print was only one vector, if a vital one, for its transmission.

The First World War introduced new tasks into British policing. One significant addition was the close and systematic surveillance of aliens residing in Britain, a role never before undertaken by the British police and one that would previously have been considered un-English. During the war, various official bodies participated in the regulation of the lives of foreigners, but the police played a crucial part. Foreigners hailing from enemy countries, particularly Germans, bore the brunt of police attention, which can be described as nothing short of discriminatory and oppressive. This article examines the new responsibilities of the British police for controlling German nationals and the public response to the new policing. It also assesses the police's wartime performance and the implications of their conduct for the lives of these Germans, all of which has hitherto been little explored. The police were widely considered, both by large segments of the British public and in many other countries, as the best police force in the world, morally superior to other constabularies, especially in their relatively tolerant attitudes toward the public. Their conduct in a time of national crisis, and particularly the degree of tolerance they exercised in their relations with a hated, indeed outcast minority, offers an illuminating case study.