Anna Clark's presidential plenary to the 2018 North American Conference on British Studies in Vancouver, British Columbia, compares scandals over the mistreatment of patients and nurses that led to demands for popular control of hospitals in both Britain and New Zealand in the 1890s. A high death rate at the Chelsea Hospital for Women in London, located near a Pasteur Institute for animal research on vaccination, incited fears of human vivisection. The high death rate of nurses at the London Hospital provoked newspaper exposés and parliamentary investigations and calls for the municipalization of voluntary hospitals. In Christchurch, New Zealand, a debate over the rudeness of doctors and nurses enraged citizens. The flames of these scandals were sparked by newspaper agitation but fanned by feminists, socialists, trade unionists, and animal-rights organizations. In response to fears around experimentation, Fabian socialists Havelock Ellis, Harry Roberts, and Honnor Morten proposed democratic control of hospitals. These demands, focusing on patients’ rights and nurses’ health, differed from the hospital reform movement that urged hospitals to become more economical by forcing patients to pay. They also diverged from Beatrice and Sidney Webb's admonitions that the state must oversee citizens’ health for the nation to function efficiently. Although the calls for the democratic control of hospitals did not succeed, they might be seen as germs of a patient-centered approach to hospital care.

In the interwar years, authors Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, and Margery Allingham wrote popular detective fiction that explored possible roles for the aristocracy in an age of universal suffrage. Critics have seen these novels as nostalgic encomia for hierarchy and tradition. This article argues that they should be seen instead as part of a larger trend in interwar fiction that sought to make connections between aristocracy, national identity, and social cohesion. Far from celebrating an imagined idyllic past, these novels suggested possibilities for the continuing relevance of the nobility to the upholding of justice, and indeed, to the success of British democracy.

This article focuses on the contested development of judicial whipping as a marker and maker of status in the particular social, cultural, and political context of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In these years people disputed with special vigor who could be whipped and why, often in battles fought in and around parliaments and the Court of Star Chamber, and often invoking fears of “servility.” Tracing the rise and spread of judicial whipping, its linking with the poor, and disputes over its use, this article demonstrates how whipping served as a distinctively and explicitly status-based disciplinary tool, embedding hierarchical values in the law not just in practice but also in prescript. Some authorities thought the whip appropriate only for the “servile” and, indeed, both valuable and dangerous for its ability to inculcate a “slavish disposition.” After men of the gentry successfully asserted their freedom from the lash, so too did a somewhat expanded group of “free” and “sufficient” men. By the later seventeenth century, challenges over the uses of judicial whipping left it limited ever more firmly to people of low status, affixed by law to offenses typically associated with the insubordinate poor.

This article examines the formation and development of the concept of the Establishment in British political argument after its recoining in a celebrated article by the journalist Henry Fairlie in 1955. The author argues that the term “the Establishment” did not have a stable referent but rather acquired a range of possible meanings and uses as part of a new political vocabulary within which the course and significance of recent political and social change was contested, and that ultimately transformed social-democratic and conservative politics in Britain. The article situates the formation of the concept of the Establishment within a prolonged contestation of social and political authority in Britain during the middle of the twentieth century and traces the recoining of the term in conservative political commentary prior to Henry Fairlie's frequently cited 1955 Spectator article. From the late 1950s, it is argued, the concept acquired more distinctively contemporary meanings that enabled its adoption by Harold Wilson during the mid-1960s and its subsequent reappropriation by Margaret Thatcher in the mid-1970s. These usages registered and helped to accomplish fundamental political realignments, the understanding of which depends upon a close analysis of political and social concepts.

Histories of the English workhouse and its satellite institutions have concentrated on legal change, institutional administration, and moments of shock or scandal, generally without considering the place of these institutions, established through the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, in the emotional life course of poor inmates. This article uses working-class autobiographies to examine the register of emotional responses to workhouses and associated Poor Law institutions, and the range of narrative voices open to authors who recalled institutional residence. It also gives close attention to two lengthy narratives of workhouse district schools and highlights their significance in comparison to the authors’ family backgrounds and the representation of each writer in the wider historical record. It suggests that a new affective chronology of the workhouse is needed to accommodate room for disparity between the aspiration of systematic poor relief and the reality of individual experience within local interpretations of the law.

Immigration was essential to trades reliant on fashion and high skill in London around the turn of the sixteenth century. This article explores the patterns of migration to the city by continental goldsmiths between 1480 and 1540 and the structure of the communities they formed. It argues that attitudes to migration within the London Goldsmiths’ Company, which governed the trade, were complex and shifted in response to evolving national legislation. A social network analysis of the relationships between alien masters and servants indicates how the alien community changed and adapted. Taking a view across the traditional late medieval and early modern period boundary allows for a deeper understanding of how attitudes to migration and to migrant communities changed as London's population began to grow.

Domesday Book, which is usually considered to be the product of William the Conqueror's great survey of England in 1086, is one of the most important sources of English medieval history. This article contributes to the vigorous and long-standing debate about the purpose of Domesday Book. It does so by exploring the light cast by some of William's royal acta on the activities and concerns of the king and his advisers while the Domesday survey was in progress. These are linked to the difficult political and military circumstances confronting William and his followers in 1085–86 and their desire to deal with these by strengthening the stability, legitimacy, and security of their regime in England. The article also casts additional light on the importance and dating of the relevant acta.

This article argues for a reconsideration of the origins of Restoration sexual politics through a detailed examination of the effusive sexual polemic of the English Revolution (1642–1660). During the early 1640s, unprecedented political upheaval and a novel public culture of participatory print combined to transform explicit sexual libel from a muted element of prewar English political culture into one of its preeminent features. In the process, political leaders at the highest levels of government—including Queen Henrietta Maria, Oliver Cromwell, and King Charles I—were confronted with extensive and graphic debates about their sexual histories in widely disseminated print polemic for the first time in English history. By the early 1650s, monarchical sexuality was a routine topic of scurrilous political commentary. Charles II was thus well acquainted with this novel polemical milieu by the time he assumed the throne in 1660, and his adoption of the “Merry Monarch” persona early in his reign represented a strategic attempt to turn mid-century sexual politics to his advantage, despite unprecedented levels of contemporary criticism. Restoration sexual culture was therefore largely the product of civil war polemical debate rather than the singular invention of a naturally libertine young king.

This article examines the Scottish Covenanters’ initiatives to revamp educational provision in the Gaidhealtachd, the Gaelic-speaking portions of Scotland, from the beginning of the Scottish Revolution in 1638 to the Cromwellian conquest of Scotland in 1651. Scholars have explored in detail the range of educational schemes pursued by central governments in the seventeenth century to “civilize” the Gaidhealtachd, but few have engaged in an analysis of Covenanting schemes and how they differed from previous endeavors. While the Statutes of Iona are probably the best-known initiative to civilize the Gaidhealtachd and extirpate the Gaelic language, Covenanter schemes both adapted such policies and further innovated in order to serve the needs of a nascent confessional state. In particular, Covenanting schemes represented a unique and pragmatic way to address the Gaidhealtachd's educational deficiencies because they sought practical accommodation of the Gaelic language and preferred the matriculation of Gaelophone scholars into the universities. These measures not only represented a new strategy for integrating the Gaelic periphery into the Scottish state but were also notable for the ways in which they incorporated Gaelophone students into Scotland's higher education orbit—a stark departure from the educational situation in Ireland. By drawing on underutilized manuscript and printed sources, this article examines how the Covenanters refurbished education in the Gaidhealtachd and posits that the Covenanter schemes represented a key facet of the broader process of state formation in 1640s Scotland.

In the run-up to the Second World War, the War Office agreed to organize territorial units that recruited specifically on the grounds of English Welsh dual identities. These formations, which comprised the 99th London Welsh Heavy Anti-Aircraft regiment and the 46th Liverpool Welsh Royal Tank Regiment, began recruiting in 1939 from English cities with significant Welsh populations. This article explores the mobilization and performance of English Welsh identities during the Second World War and reflects upon why, at a time of global conflict, some English men opted to enlist on the basis of Welsh antecedents. Relatively little attention has been paid to the plurality of British identity in wartime or to how the existence of what historian Thomas Hajkowski has called “hybrid ‘dual identities’” within the constituent countries of the United Kingdom informed the functioning of Britishness during the Second World War. Making use of previously unpublished and original life-writing sources, this article illuminates the significance of dual identifications across two nations at once—in this case, Wales and England—within the multinational state of Britain at war. Overall, by examining the intersectionality between subjective wartime constructions of kin, home, and nation(s), it points to how a sense of dual identifications could feed into recruitment patterns and potentially bolster combat motivation and morale. By highlighting the interconnectedness between constituent nations of Britain, and the complexities of identity formation within Britishness, this article adds to the literature that complicates the notion of fixed singular national identities and underscores the importance of dual identifications within and across the borders of the constituent nations in advancing our understanding of twentieth-century Britain.

This article argues that British historiography's secularization debate is largely misconceived, being enmeshed in secular ideological assumptions inherited from the West's secular revolution of the 1960s. It therefore introduces an alternative, postsecular paradigm for understanding British secularization, which conceptualizes secularity as an ideological culture in its own right, religion as secularity's othering category, and secularization as the positive dissemination and enactment of secularity. British Christianity declined gradually from around 1900, but widespread secularization in this positive sense could only happen once British public discussion had embraced secularity's ideological framework, which it did in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Before the mid-1950s, British discussion had routinely adhered to a “Christian civilization” metanarrative, which insisted that “religion” is essential to long-term social stability, such that “secularization” is a regrettable step backward in human development. Yet in the late 1950s and early 1960s British discussion abruptly embraced secularity's rival metanarrative, which states that “religion” is a primordial condition unnecessary in “advanced” societies, such that “secularization” is an irreversible step forward in human development. This conceptual revolution was contingent, culturally specific, and importantly influenced by radical rereadings of Christian eschatology. Nonetheless, it created both the secular revolution of the 1960s, and the ideological framework within which the British secularization debate continues to be conducted today.

In the mid-twentieth century, the Family Planning Association emerged in Britain as one of the largest providers of infertility diagnosis for men and women. In the early years of the century, women were coming to birth control centers seeking cures for their childlessness, well before those centers began officially offering infertility investigation and treatment. What changed by mid-century was the emergence of a determination not only to welcome infertility patients at birth control clinics but to establish the clinics as centers for infertility research and care. Beginning in the late 1930s, eugenicists concerned with the impact of population decline on the social acceptability of birth control formed an alliance with feminist medical professionals determined both to empower women in involuntarily childless marriages to understand and address the causes of their infertility and to shift the paradigm of infertility treatment away from its over-focus on the female body. This political marriage of convenience gave birth to a large-scale movement to diagnose both male and female infertility through the auspices of the Family Planning Association. The organization's infertility program, in turn, spurred the development of infertility as a field of medical research in postwar Britain and encouraged the expansion of National Health Service provision of infertility care.

Selling to strangers was a significant occupational hazard for retailers in late Georgian Britain, one that was hard to avoid. The dangers were especially great in larger towns and cities, where shopkeepers were dependent on a steady stream of passing trade composed of a large number of customers that they did not know. Though traders risked financial loss and even possible prosecution by accepting counterfeit banknotes, refusal to accept them meant losing vital custom. In areas of growing urban populations, tradesmen and women thus faced an increasingly tricky dilemma in their day-to-day business as they dealt with more strangers whose trustworthiness and personal credit were extremely hard to gauge, at a time when banknote forgery was on the rise. The decisions that retailers made about both banknotes and the individuals who presented them for payment illustrate some of the ways that town dwellers sought to navigate the rising anonymity of urban society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This article suggests that traders relied on a series of techniques that in previous experience usually worked: examining banknotes and those strangers who presented them with care, relying on the expertise of neighbors and members of their household, and dealing by preference with individuals who appeared to be linked to their local community. These behaviors demonstrate that “modernity” might have affected the lives and outlooks of ordinary Londoners in unexpected and contradictory ways, some strongly linked to older forms of society.

Conventional typologies of lordship and its relationship with royal power in the territories of the English crown emphasize the precocious distinctiveness of royal power as against noble lordship, with the latter consequentially bound by an essentially restrictive territorialized model. Drawing particularly on the example of the kingship/lordship of the Isle of Man, this article considers the manifestations of sub-kingship from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries as a way of understanding the complexity of manifestations of sovereignty in these territories. It assesses the use of royal titles and associated ceremonial and issues such as forms of dating. Also considered are some of the practical manifestations of “sovereign” power, seen in rights associated with justice, taxation, and relations between princes, and in the capacity to exclude the intervention of others in these spheres. From the discussion emerges an understanding of royal power as more variable in its footprint and shared in many spaces by men conventionally seen as part of an undifferentiated aristocracy. The reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII have usually been seen as the final point at which centralization through the power and authority of the English monarch obliterated any remaining echoes of sub-kingship in the North Atlantic archipelago, ending once and for all the possibility of a shared space between kingship and lordship. In considering the historiography of this moment, and evidence for continuity through Henry VIII's reign, the article raises questions about lordship and its political and cultural boundaries in the late medieval and early modern periods.

The Free Port Act of 1766 was an important reform in British political economy during the so-called imperial crisis between the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and the American Revolution (1775–1783). In an explicit break from the letter if not the spirit of the Navigation Acts, the act opened six British ports in the West Indies (two in Dominica and four in Jamaica) to foreign merchants trading in a highly regulated number of goods subject to various duties. Largely understudied, this legislation has been characterized in most previous work on the subject as a fundamental break from British mercantile policies and meant to benefit North American colonial merchants. This article proposes a different interpretation. Based on the wider context of other imperial free port models, the loss of conquests such as French Guadeloupe and Martinique and Spanish Havana in the 1763 Paris Peace Treaty, a postwar downturn in Anglo-Spanish trade, and convincing testimonies by merchants and colonial observers, policy makers in London conceived of free ports primarily as a means of extending Britain's commercial empire. The free port system was designed to ruin the rival Dutch trade economically and shackle Spanish and French colonists to Britain's mercantile, manufacturing, and slaving economies. The reform marks a key moment in the evolution of British free trade imperial designs that became prevalent in the nineteenth century and beyond.

The historiography of the Financial Revolution in Scotland remains underdeveloped. This article addresses that gap by rounding out the rough sketch that currently represents our understanding of Scotland's Financial Revolution by focusing on the formation of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Scotland's first new financial institution in more than thirty years when it emerged in 1727. The case is made that the Scottish Financial Revolution was a complex movement, very often separated from the state and driven by the agency of Scotsmen at home and abroad, and that 1727 denoted a phase of the revolution in which financially innovative projects returned to the country after a period of absence. The article demonstrates how the progress of the Financial Revolution ebbed and flowed in the country, contingent upon political circumstances, from the nascent economic developments of the 1690s and on to the political upheaval of the early eighteenth century.

After World War II, Great Britain faced major economic problems, which the government sought to rectify by reviving export markets and achieving a favorable balance of trade. One overlooked component of reconstruction was a decision to recognize tourism as an “invisible export,” a way to draw currency, especially American dollars, into the country. However, in a period characterized by scarcity, rationing, and austerity measures, the endeavor presented enormous challenges. The situation was exacerbated by the advent of the Marshall Plan in 1948. It required British participation in a European-based tourism scheme that jeopardized the success of Britain's own initiative and, ironically, could potentially undermine the economic benefits that Marshall Plan participation was supposed to provide. In exploring the history of British tourism policy in this era, this article shows the extent to which the Marshall Plan compromised an important aspect of British reconstruction policy. It can thereby better inform our understanding of the complexities of postwar reconstruction and of Britain's guarded response to aspects of the Marshall Plan—particularly the American initiative to promote greater European economic integration in the immediate postwar era.

This article explores the complexity surrounding the politics and emotions of internationalism and humanitarian work in interwar Britain by using as a lens the public and official responses to assisting “refugee children.” Analysis of British responses to refugee emergencies after the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, and the Nazi persecution of Jews and other minorities suggests that attitudes shifted dramatically between the arrival of Basque child refugees in May 1937 and the Kindertransports in late 1938. Charities and refugee committees, many of them faith-based, had to negotiate the spaces between nation, ideology, and emotion to successfully raise funds for refugees. All appeals were to “save” children, and yet the responses and the amounts raised were vastly different. Campaigns to support almost four thousand Basque children proved politically polarizing and bureaucratic. In contrast, the immediate and widespread response to fund-raising to bring ten thousand children to Britain in 1938 suggests that a significant change in attitudes and fund-raising practices had taken place in a short time. Unlike the political divisions that hampered support for the Basque children, Britons from all walks of life appeared by 1938 to embrace the emotional and financial cost of internationalism in a way they had not only a year before.

In the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion of 1745, the British state enacted a series of restrictive legal measures designed to pacify the Scottish Highlands and crush the military power of the Gael. With the evolution of scholarly work on the British state, these measures are increasingly seen through the prism of state power, with the Scottish Gàidhealtachd cast as the victim of a fiscal-military system determined to impose obedience on its territory and peoples. In analyzing the implementation and enforcement of the laws passed between 1746 and 1752, this article challenges this narrative. By focusing attention on the legal system—particularly with regards enforcement—this article considers the local reception of the laws and the ideological, legal, and bureaucratic limitations to state authority. Yet it also explores how clan chiefs and traditional elites, who were the primary target of the legislation, quickly turned the laws to their own advantage. This analysis challenges the idea of effective state intervention in the Gàidhealtachd after 1746 and instead brings attention to how parliamentary legislation was mobilized by regional actors to local ends in ways that cast a long shadow over the history of the Scottish Highlands.

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.