The three fine essays that follow and the recent turn of the century provide the occasion for an assessment of the state of the early modern social welfare history endeavor. What do we know now about the poor and poverty relief in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that the great policy historians of the early twentieth century did not know? Why? What methodological assumptions and foci have emerged over the past hundred years, and how have they deepened our understanding of social welfare? What are the current points of research departure? With such a potentially vast historical literature to consider, I must dismiss at the outset any claim to complete thoroughness. I have, rather, organized the essay around eight clusters of work that have shaped the historiographical corpus.

For several years I have been exploring the projection of Britain in America during the late 1930s and the early 1940s. My focus has been on aspects of cultural propaganda initiated for the most part unofficially, although often with government complicity. Simply put, I have been concerned to discover what ordinary Americans were seeing and hearing and reading about England in the crucial years before the onset of the Second World War and, even more significantly, in the period from the summer of 1939 to American entry in December 1941.

On April 1, 1833, the debate in the House of Commons over the foundation of Sir John Soane's Museum took a surprising turn. The suggestion by Sir Robert Peel that perhaps Soane's collection could be deposited in the British Museum instead of in his own house led the discussion away from Soane into complaints—now brewing for decades—over the accessibility of that public museum. The most eloquent speaker was William Cobbett. Told by another member that “any person decently attired” would be admitted to the British Museum, Cobbett remarked that “those who had not decent dresses were required to pay for the maintenance of the Museum…. The chopstick in the country, as well as the poor man who mended the pavement in town, had to pay for the support of this place; and, if they derived no benefit from it, they ought not to be compelled to pay for it.” Similarly, on March 25, 1833, Cobbett argued that the subsidy of the museum should not be increased: “Why should tradesmen and farmers be called upon to pay for the support of a place which was intended only for the amusement of the curious and the rich, and not for the benefit or for the instruction of the poor? If the aristocracy wanted the Museum as a lounging place, let them pay for it.”

In his discussion of Joseph Conrad's fiction in The Political Unconscious Fredric Jameson writes:

This linkage of the sea with capitalism allows Jameson to deal with Conrad's novels (especially Lord Jim and Nostromo) as, to use Jameson's own phrase, socially symbolic acts—the sea is “the privileged place of the strategy of containment” and it provides Conrad a laboratory where “human relations can be presented in all their ideal formal purity.” Jameson has identified nautical fiction's important place in any story of the novel—the confining (yet paradoxically freeing) nature of the sea (and the ship) screens out the extraneous material of the world, forcing confrontation, laying bare power relations and allowing the writer to focus on the human condition. The sea allows for only the essentials: clearly defined hierarchies, and life and death on easy terms. Jameson links Conrad with high modernism and thus with capitalism, but his positioning of the sea in relation to power and history can be, I believe, “read back” and then applied (in a necessarily nascent form) to the literary sea of the eighteenth century.

On June 15, 1624, Dr. Robert Vilvane informed the mayor of Exeter by letter of his displeasure with the haphazard application of poor rates in the city. Vilvane, who owned property within the city and in the surrounding countryside, was protesting the high rates imposed on his modest holdings in the city, since he was already subject to what he felt were excessive assessments on his country properties. Vilvane pointed out that he had taken it upon himself to support the purchase of armor and powder for martial officers, along with voluntary contributions to the poor, to churches, and to “sundry other taxes.” Despite a debt to the city in the amount of £500 (on which he paid interest), he did “freely give 12d weekly to two poor families here, which else would fall into penury.” Having recounted all this, he considered that “there is little cause to hoist me so high to all payments, who (besides my house) have little here [in the city].” At the crux of his argument, he asserted, was “that a Rate to the Poor is no competent Rule…both because it is uncertain…and also unequal, because some are set up too high, and others too low, by fear or favour.” Vilvane had contributed to a certain collection for the poor in a particular part of the city and noted that “many murmur at this day” about the collection, since it appeared that the overseers “did not disburse above half the Contribution.” As an unwilling party to this scheme, the doctor was upset, as he felt others were: “[I] do profess myself in this but an Echo of the Multitude, which are much aggrieved.”

The relationship between nationalism and the land, observes Philip Bull in his recent study of the Irish land question, “formed a nexus which was so strong that the one issue became effectively a metaphor for the other.” Any student of nineteenth-century Irish politics can appreciate the force of this eloquent conclusion. Nevertheless, the preoccupation with the land by contemporaries and historians alike has relegated an important strand of economic nationalism devoted to manufacturing industry to a footnote in Irish history. The fate of manufacturing industry in the aftermath of the Union of 1800 is the subject of controversy among scholars suggesting, at the very least, substantial regional and sectoral variations. Contemporaries, however, were in little doubt that Irish manufacturing industry was suffering from terminal decline, a perception that had formed a regular reprise in public comment throughout the previous century. As John O’Connell wrote in 1849 “the question of Irish manufacturing has been, for more than a century and a half, one of the chief grounds of bitterness and bickerings” between Ireland and England.

By 1190, King Richard I of England (1189-1199) had departed for the Third Crusade and had settled on William Longchamp, royal chancellor and bishop of Ely, as the chief justiciar, the king’s regent during the royal absence. But before Richard had even left the European continent, Longchamp’s justiciarship had provoked a powerful reaction from those subjected to it. The hue and cry lifted against the chief justiciar by leaders of the revolt that ousted him included accusations that Longchamp filled England and its offices with “foreigners and unknown men” and that he ruled without the appares, associates whom Richard had included in the regency to assist the chief justiciar. Recent research has shown that the latter charge is patently untrue but the former, utilizing foreigners and others unfamiliar with England and its government, was fundamentally true, at least with regard to justice and the shrievalties. Does Longchamp’s style of management repeat itself with castles and what were the implications for him, the kingdom, and the king? A cursory glance at events during his justiciarship shows that castles played a large role in the narrative, from the massacre of the Jews at York Castle to the arrest of Archbishop Geoffrey at Dover Castle. Though the evidence is of a more tentative nature than that for judicial activity and shrievalties, Longchamp employed in this critical position men close to him, both personal dependents and tested curial servants, a pattern of appointment markedly different from that of the king. Richard I’s practices benefited the baronage, but the chancellor’s determination to bring as many castles as possible under his direct control worked to alienate the chief justiciar from his subjects and disastrously eroded his power base.

When Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes, he perpetuated the long tradition of foreign Protestants seeking shelter in England. England’s place as a religious refuge began after the Reformation; the resulting foundations of Stranger churches meant that a pre-existing community could advocate for the refugees. Yet, the religious attitudes that previously fostered an economy of entitlement for religious exiles no longer exercised the influence they once had. This meant that there was a distinct possibility that the Huguenot refugees of the 1680s could have become the first modern refugees.

In July 1648 John Bond, Master of the Savoy, delivered a thanksgiving sermon to the House of Commons, in which he praised God for the series of victories that the New Model Army had recently won in many parts of England and Wales. The tangled, multi-layered conflict known to posterity as the Second Civil War was still raging, rebel forces were holding out in Colchester and the Scottish army of the Engagement was marching south, but Bond—anxious to buoy up the Army’s allies and to cast down the spirits of its enemies—did everything he could to emphasise the universality of the recent successes. “The garment of gladnesse reacheth all over…the Land,” he declaimed, “the robe [of victory] reacheth from…Northumberland in the North, to…Sussex in the South…[and] from Dover…in the East, to Pensands, the utmost part of Cornwall, in the West.” Bond’s reference to Penzance would have struck a chord with many of his listeners, for accounts of an insurgent defeat in the little Cornish town had been read out in the House some weeks before. Yet, from that day to this, the rising at Penzance—and indeed the entire “Western dimension” of the Second Civil War have been largely forgotten.

This article is intended as a sequel to the one published in Albion 28, 4 ([Winter 1996]: 607–33). As with the earlier article, it reflects the wealth of recent scholarship and adopts a wide definition of politics, and there is a powerful element of choice and subjectivity. The last arises in part from the breadth of the subject. A definition of the political culture and process of the period that directs attention to cultural, religious, social and gender issues is not one that can be readily summarized by restricting attention to the world of Court, Parliament, and the political elite.

Last time I began with cultural politics, and it is worth renewing this approach because the role of discourses as both forms of political expression and the subject of historical study remain important. The most prominent book in this field was a disappointment. John Brewer's The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (1997) is a work about and of consumerism. The forcing house of eighteenth-century public demand provides the essential pressure for cultural modernization and for the definition of taste in this account. Consumerism has also structured Brewer's book as a cultural and intellectual artefact. As he acknowledges, he wanted to ensure that the book “would be a beautiful object,” and HarperCollins has amply fulfilled this requirement. The publisher was also responsible for fighting what Brewer terms the “alien abstractions” of the original prose, and presumably for the decision to dispense with footnotes. The book as consumer product contributes to the sumptuous cover illustration, a painting of “Sir Rowland and Lady Winn in the Library at Nostell Priory,” to the photograph of the relaxed author on the dust-jacket, and to the laudatory quotes from two big names, Simon Schama and Lisa Jardine, not noted for their work on the subject but then most potential purchasers would not know that.

Recent years have seen growing interest both in the influence of the British Empire on metropolitan culture—what John M. MacKenzie described as “the centripetal effects of Empire”—and in the relationships between gender and imperialism. Early studies of European women and imperialism described the activities of women as “memsahibs,” travellers and colonists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, challenged the notion that “women lost us the Empire,” and began to analyze the roles of white women in the “man’s world” of imperial rule. More recently attention has been drawn by Vron Ware, Barbara Ramusack and Antoinette Burton to the complex relationships between British and colonized women and, by Burton especially, to the ambiguities of “imperial feminism.” Nevertheless, apart from the well-documented female emigration societies, and the isolated study of Flora Shaw, colonial editor of The Times, by Helen Callaway and Dorothy O. Helly, the considerable activities of women as imperial propagandists have received little attention. This article traces the imperial activism of Violet Markham, the daughter of a Northern industrialist and sister of a Liberal M.P. who, roused from the aimless existence of Victorian young ladyhood by the Boer War, spent much of the Edwardian era promoting the cause of the British Empire. Through a study of her imperial career it explores the options available to an imperialist woman in an era when women were barred from formal politics, and when imperial politics in particular were considered a “masculine” preserve, and considers the obstacles—practical, ideological and psychological—which confronted her.

Historians of early modern Europe have become accustomed to the dichotomy of the deserving and undeserving poor, though they still debate the origins of the transformation of attitudes toward the poor and poverty. Historians have studied less carefully the ways in which these presumably static categories flexed, as individuals and officials worked out poor relief and charity on the local level. Military, religious, and social exigencies, precipitated by war, the Reformation, and demographic pressure, allowed churchwardens and vestrymen to redraw the contours of the deserving and undeserving poor within the broader frame of the infirm, aged, and sick. International conflicts of the early seventeenth century created circumstances and refugees not anticipated by the poor law innovators of the sixteenth century. London’s responses to these unexpected developments illustrate how inhabitants constructed the categories of die deserving and undeserving poor. This construction depended upon the discretion of churchwardens and their fellow officers, who listened to the accounts and read the official documents of the poor making claims on parish relief and charity.