The English, and later British, settlement of Bencoolen was first established in 1685 and remained in British hands, barring French wartime occupation, until 1825, when it was handed over to the Dutch in a territorial exchange. Bencoolen was even elevated to the status of a Presidency in the second half of the eighteenth century. Why did the English East India Company and British officials maintain a presence in Bencoolen for so long? This article makes the case that multiple, overlapping visions of commercial and agrarian transformation, including projects focused on pepper and sugar cultivation, sustained British efforts to govern and maintain Bencoolen as part of a larger, trans-oceanic network of territories. Such visions of Bencoolen's economic and imperial potential evolved in sync with equally persistent concerns about Bencoolen's failure to become a thriving settlement. Yet even amid constant anxieties about producing enough pepper, maintaining a sizeable population, and generating sufficient revenue, numerous British imperial agents located in London and Calcutta as well as Sumatra argued over whether the settlement was likely to remain a permanent failure and how the problems that dogged it might be resolved. Thus, even in moments when Bencoolen appeared to be a failed outpost on the periphery of a growing British Empire, its success or lack thereof commanded the attention of British ministers and East India Company servants. In calling for Bencoolen's elevation, subordination, or even abolition as a settlement, Britons contributed to a wide-ranging discussion of what constituted a valuable colony and, indeed, empire.

This short article describes the content and impact of the files related to the Watson Commission, a commission of enquiry empowered by British colonial government officials to investigate the causes and consequences of the riots that rocked the city of Accra (Gold Coast Colony) in 1948. They comprise a collection of reports and testimonies from a wide range of people from across the social, economic, and political spectrum of the colonial Gold Coast. In a colonial archive that often privileges the voices of British government officials, technocrats, and African politicians, this collection of 32 files represents an unprecedented insight into the lived experience of a wide range of individuals and communities, and documents the processes that led to independence for the nation-state of Ghana.

First used in 1980, “new romantics” was a term applied to describe a British youth culture recognized initially for its sartorial extravagance and penchant for electronic music. Closely associated with the Blitz nightclub in London's Covent Garden (as well as milieus elsewhere in the UK), new romantics appeared to signal a break from the prescribed aesthetics and sensibilities of punk, rejecting angry oppositionism for glamour and aspiration. In response, cultural commentators have often sought to establish connections between new romantism and the advent of Thatcherism and “the 1980s.” This article challenges such an interpretation, offering a more complex analysis of new romanticism rooted in nascent readings of postmodernism. It also shifts our understandings of the periodization of postwar British history and the concept of “popular individualism,” arguing that youth culture provides invaluable insight both to broader processes of sociocultural change and to the construction of the (post)modern self.

A confluence of societal changes, particularly hardening racial attitudes following the Indian Mutiny in 1857 and the Morant Bay Rebellion in 1865, resulted in widescale disillusionment with imperial humanitarian projects in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. As this article demonstrates, however, the membership and income of the Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS) increased at precisely the moments when this disillusionment was at its sharpest. This article combines quantitative and qualitative methods to assess the nature of the Society's mid-century membership base, demonstrating that, rather than a monolithic decline, a humanitarian polarization took place in response to imperial crises that led some (largely Tories) to disillusionment and others (largely Whigs) to entrenchment. Furthermore, by attending to discursive trends within speeches at APS annual meetings as well as in private correspondence between members and the secretary of the Society, I explore how APS members explained the connection between their own lives and the treatment of distant Indigenous peoples in the colonies. Finding that British Indigenous rights activism was only seldomly expressed in terms of Indigenous peoples themselves, I show that support for the APS was most commonly related to concerns for friends and family living in the colonies, along with disquiet about the impact of colonial injustices on international competition. This enabled Indigenous rights activists to continue their efforts in the face of disillusionment with the capabilities of racialized “others.”

This article seeks to rethink the nature and significance of the fortnightly magazine Private Eye during its first two decades. Existing accounts have interpreted it almost exclusively through the lens of the “satire boom” (1961–63), and suggest that, in the final analysis, the magazine neither desired nor advanced any substantial critique of the political status quo. Besides neglecting its investigative facets, among other elements, these readings make the mistake of seeking to frame the significance of the magazine in conventional ideological terms. This article puts these neglected elements back into the picture and argues that the magazine is best understood as enacting a militant form of the kind of cynicism—at once outrageous and morally outraged—analyzed by Peter Sloterdijk and Michel Foucault, and other scholars in their wake. This provides a much more satisfying account of the many facets of Private Eye as these evolved during the 1960s and 1970s, including its affinities with various currents in postwar journalism and countercultural expression. Above all, it allows us to recast the politics of Private Eye as a form of moral protest that was expressed in the assumption of an intrinsically antagonistic relation toward “politics” and authority per se.

This article examines the rise of a culture of local petitioning, through which growing numbers of ordinary people sought to win the support of state authorities through collective claims to represent the “voice of the people” at the local level. These participatory, subscriptional practices were an essential component in the intensification of popular politics in the seventeenth century. The analysis focuses on over 3,800 manuscript petitions submitted to the magistrates across fifteen jurisdictions with “sessions of the peace” in England, with nearly 1,000 dating from before 1640. Over the course of the early seventeenth century many, if not most, English parishes witnessed attempts to persuade the authorities through collective petitioning. Groups of neighbors across the kingdom formulated their grievances, organized subscription lists, and articulated their own role in the polity as “the inhabitants” or “the parishioners” of a particular community. In so doing, they not only directly shaped their own “little commonwealths” but also unintentionally helped to develop habits of political mobilization in a crucial period of English history.