The lower middle class has long had a bad press, for in common with other subaltern groups it has been more represented from without than within. Thus Victorian writers faced with the disquieting irruption of a new breed of petty bourgeois shop and office workers devised a parodic discourse of littleness, whose feminized tropes rendered the clerk as socially insignificant as the sequestered Victorian woman. George Grossmith's comic classic, Diary of a Nobody, pilloried the new social type in Mr. Pooter, whose smaller-than-life adventures stood for all that was ineffectual, pretentious, and banal in his class. Social commentators held the lower middle class responsible for the degeneration of civilization itself, stifled by their suburban respectability and addiction to mass culture. In Howard's End, E. M. Forster drew the clerk, Leonard Bast, with some sympathy but made him the book's major casualty, while belittling a class whose education was learned “from the outside of books.” In the interwar years the Marxist poet Christopher Caudwell likened the petty bourgeois world to “a terrible stagnant marsh, all mud and bitterness, without even the saving grace of tragedy.” George Orwell's fictional antihero from the same period, the insurance salesman George Bowling, characterizes the men of his class as “Tories, yes-men and bumsuckers.” It is still hard to hide a certain relish in repeating such charges, for putting the boot in on the lower middle class has long been the intellectual's blood sport, an exorcism, so we are told, of the guilty secret so many of us share as closet petit bourgeois denying our own class origins.

In the course of the past several decades, scholars have exposed Black people's long history of life and work in Britain, but their approaches to racial conflict have slighted the historical contingency of racial difference itself. Black workers have been presented as logical, visible scapegoats in an otherwise homogeneous working class, and interracial hostility as an ineluctable product of economic or sexual competition between two mutually exclusive and naturally antagonistic groups of working men. Scholars examining Black people's experience in Britain under the rubric “immigrants and minorities” have placed particular emphasis on racial conflicts, xenophobia, and prejudice, which they see as evidence of “traditions of intolerance” widespread in British society. Such interpretations leave unchallenged the assumption that racial or ethnic hostility is latent in social relations, resurfacing in any crisis. Whatever the intentions of their authors, such assumptions can all too easily be used to justify rather than to combat conflict and exclusion.

Intolerance, bigotry, prejudice, moreover, are not explanations for racial or ethnic conflict: in themselves they require explanation. In focusing on “attitudes,” and behaviors, these works neglect to examine the structural underpinnings of popular racism and xenophobia—in particular the ways that Black and white working people were positioned in relation to each other within a system also riven by class, gender, skill, and other power dynamics. What many scholars have taken for granted, indeed, is the objective or fixed quality of racial difference itself and its inexorably divisive effects.

In recent years, historians have conducted an extended debate on the nature and level of violence in early modern English society. This debate has come to focus on the murder rate as an index of violence and to turn on highly specialized points of statistical analysis. In some ways it can be characterized as a debate between optimistic and pessimistic historians. Lawrence Stone, representing the “pessimists,” paints a portrait of early modern society as violent, unloving, and uncaring until civilized by the eighteenth century; J. A. Sharpe, representing the “optimists,” emphasizes the problems of the data used by Stone and argues, like Alan Macfarlane, that English society in the early modern period was little different from that of today. J. S. Cockburn, the latest entrant into the fray, leans toward the optimists but has expressed some hesitation about the debate itself: he notes not only the serious problems with the data involved but also the difficulties of defining what constitutes a violent society, as “it is not at all clear that homicide rates are a reliable measure of the overall level of violent behavior in a particular society.” This caution suggests that we should take an entirely different approach to the problem of violence, to look for “the social meaning of violence.” We must move beyond the statistical data (important though they be) to a broader context for thinking about violence.

The way historians think about violence has been deeply influenced by the work of Max Weber and his assertion that “legal coercion by violence is the monopoly of the state”; it is often forgotten that the first word of that sentence is “Today.”

The prospect of l'Europe des régions, which appears to promise a simultaneous migration of power outward to a wider federal Europe and downward to the devolved regions — both goals to be achieved at the expense of the presently constituted national governments — has raised expectations in the periphery as well as concern in the established centers. The question of national identity is suddenly on the agenda and has evoked a response throughout the countries of Europe: an attempt to define a specifically European identity to accompany the little maroon passports carried by its citizens has also caused confusion in capital cities and thrown out a challenge to the peripheral nations and regions. In some respects such areas might already have arrived at the destination, for, unlike the English or the French, the Scots and the Welsh have for centuries sustained an identity without the protective buttressing of a state of their own. The Welsh, in particular, have survived despite the lack of a separate legal and educational system and a recent history that has witnessed massive immigration and integrationist pressures. A series of traditional identities of and for the Welsh has suddenly been rendered as redundant as a coal miner. The Welsh, nevertheless, are, in their contrasts and diversity, yma o hyd— “still here,” in the words of a popular song. It might be that there are pointers in the Welsh experience of national identity of how to move beyond the confines of that debate itself, a debate only just beginning among the English.

One of the most exciting and influential areas of research in eighteenth-century history over the last fifteen years has been the study of crime and the criminal law. It is the purpose of this essay to map the subject for the interested nonspecialist: to ask why historians have chosen to study it, to explain how they have come to approach it in particular ways, to describe something of what they have found, to evaluate those findings, and to suggest fruitful directions for further research. Like all maps, the one presented here is selective. The essay begins with a general analysis of the ways in which the field has developed and changed in its short life. It then proceeds to consider in more detail four areas of study: criminality, the criminal trial, punishment, and criminal legislation. This selection makes no pretense of providing an exhaustive coverage. A number of important areas have been omitted: for example, public order and policing. However, the areas covered illustrate the range of approaches, problems, and possibilities that lie within the field. The essay concludes with a discussion of the broader implications of the subject.

The Development of the Field

Before the 1960s crime was not treated seriously by eighteenth-century historians. Accounts of crime and the criminal law rarely extended beyond a few brief remarks on lawlessness, the Bloody Code, and the state of the prisons, often culled from Fielding, Hogarth, and Howard. There were exceptions, but they fell outside the mainstream of eighteenth-century history. The multiple volumes of Leon Radzinowicz's monumental History of the English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750 began to appear in 1948, but Radzinowicz worked in the Cambridge Law Faculty and the Institute of Criminology, and, as Derek Beales has pointed out, his findings were not quickly assimilated by historians.

(George Bernard Shaw)

Thus wrote George Bernard Shaw on behalf of the Fabian Society in October 1900. Shaw recognized what many historians have subsequently failed to see: the meaning of imperialism inside British politics was not fixed. Rather, the terms “empire” and “imperialism” were like empty boxes that were continuously being filled up and emptied of their meanings. Of course, the same was true of other political concepts: the idea of patriotism, for instance, was constantly being reinvented by politicians. But the idea of empire was all the more vulnerable to this sort of treatment because it was sensitive to changing circumstances at home and abroad and because it had to take account of a colonial as well as a British audience. Furthermore, the fact that opinion in Britain was widely felt to be ignorant or indifferent to the empire meant that politicians had to be particularly careful in deciding what sort of imperial language to use.

This article will consider what contemporaries meant when they spoke of empire, how its meaning varied between different political groups in Britain, and whether it is possible to point to a prevailing vision of empire during the period between the launch of the Jameson Raid in December 1895 and the outbreak of the Great War in 1914.

It was Harold J. Laski who said “the road from Constance to 1688 is a direct one,” and he did so when speaking of the constitutional theories enunciated by the Conciliar thinkers and put into practice at the Council of Constance. These closely related theories had their roots deep in the corporative thinking of the medieval canon lawyers but sprang into prominence during the years after 1378, when the Western Church was divided first into two and then into three “obediences” under the sway of rival claimants to the Papacy. Basic to all the Conciliar theories was the central insistence that the final authority in the Church lay not with the Pope but with the whole body of the faithful and that the Pope possessed, therefore, not an absolute but merely a ministerial authority delegated to him for the good of the Church. This belief made it possible to appeal from the obduracy of the rival pontiffs to the decision of the faithful as expressed through their representatives assembled in a General Council of the whole Church, and such a possibility was actualized at the Councils of Pisa (1409) and Basel (1431-1449) and, most strikingly of all, at Constance (1414-1418). There it found expression, not only in the judgment and deposition of popes, but also in the promulgation of the decree Sacrosancta (1415), which declared:

Of all the immigrants arriving in Britain in the middle of the twentieth century, none attracted as much attention from whites as West Indian men. This was initially explicable by their being the first nonwhites to settle in large numbers. Around ten thousand arrived during the Second World War (more than Britain's entire prewar black population) and, although some two-thirds of them were hurriedly repatriated after 1945, returning ex-servicemen formed the majority of passengers disembarking from the Empire Windrush on 21 June 1948: year zero for mass black immigration. For the following decade, most of the Commonwealth immigrants coming to Britain each year were West Indian, and, of these, men outnumbered women by a ratio of roughly two to one.

In the late 1950s and 1960s, as their womenfolk joined them and as South Asians formed an ever-increasing proportion of new arrivals, it became clear that the prominence of West Indian men was more than merely numerical. It was cultural, stemming from the fascination-cum-revulsion of whites who customarily regarded them as vicious, indolent, violent, licentious, and antifamilial. These qualities were thought to differentiate them from their South Asian counterparts, who overcame an unsavory reputation acquired in the fifties to be viewed as the new Jews, placid and hard-working family men whose strict endogamy nullified their sexual charge. Much the same could be said for West Indian women, who posed less of a threat to white sensibilities on account of being considered less intemperate and sexually predatory than men.

On August 14, 1868, Thomas Wells was executed behind prison walls in Maidstone. According to the The Times, the event passed off so quietly that the public perhaps failed to note the significance of the occasion. With his death the drama of the public execution came to an end. “It is,” the newspaper explained, “emphatically one of those reforms which are hard to realize before they are made, but which, once made, seem so simple and unobjectionable that they are treated almost as a matter of course.” On the face of it, this passage seems to capture the salient features of the episode. In the decades leading up to abolition, opinion was deeply divided about the value of the death penalty and the wisdom of public executions. The Times itself, almost to the last moment, resisted the change. But once the issue was resolved in favor of privacy, no voice demanded their return. There were no demonstrations protesting the reform. Even the arguments once used to defend the publicity of punishment disappeared from view.

But The Times meant something more by the phrase “one of those reforms.” It indicated a belief that the abolition belonged to a special category of measures, those that contributed to the progress of civilization in England. The idea that civilization demanded the end of the public execution figured prominently in reform arguments, and occupied just as important a place in later interpretations of the change. A liberal member of Parliament, John Hibbert, in pointing to an execution in 1866, explained that “no one anxious to promote civilization could wish to see the recurrence of a scene of that kind.”

I

“The punishment of death shocks every mind to which it is vividly presented,” wrote Edward Gibbon Wakefield in 1832. It “overturns the most settled notions of right and wrong.” H. G. Bennet announced in Parliament in 1820 that he thought an execution “weakened the moral taste or sensibility of the people.” Such high-minded but platitudinous phrases frequently recurred in the early nineteenth-century debate over the criminal law, though historians have had a difficult time knowing what to make of them. Yet for all their vagueness such expressions do reveal a sensibility whose outline we can trace and whose influence we can measure. In drawing a connection between feeling and morality Wakefield appealed to social assumptions and values that were popular among humanitarians. Criminal law reformers proposed a new and exacting standard for the administration of justice: “Punishment,” argued James Scarlett, “ought to be consonant to the feelings and sympathies of mankind; and … those feelings ought to be enlisted on the side of the administration of justice.” They argued that the heavy reliance on the death penalty was a mistaken policy. The gallows aroused dangerous passions that signaled the existence of intractable social antagonism. They opposed such a spectacle with reforms that aimed at the promotion of a social union founded on shared feeling.

Chartist political rhetoric was pervaded by images of domestic misery typified in these quotes. Historians have traditionally understood this stress on domesticity as a simple response to the Industrial Revolution's disruption of the home, either denigrating it as inchoate proletarian rage or celebrating it as a heroic defense of the working-class family. But domestic discontent was nothing new in the 1830s, for drink, wife beating, and sexual competition in the workplace had plagued plebeians for decades—if not centuries. Why then did it become such a potent political issue in the 1830s and 1840s? Following Gareth Stedman Jones, the question must be answered by analyzing Chartist domesticity not just as a reflection of social and economic changes, but as a trope that performed specific political functions in Chartist language.

The Reform Act of 1867 was one of the decisive events, perhaps the decisive event, in modern English history. It was this act that transformed England into a democracy and made democracy not only a respectable form of government (the United States was never quite respectable), but also, it was soon taken for granted, the only natural and proper form of government. To be sure, the act had to be supplemented by others, household suffrage in the boroughs, as provided by the Act of 1867, being several steps removed from universal suffrage. But once this first step was made, no one seriously doubted that the others would follow. The Act of 1867, perhaps more than that of 1832, deserves the title of the Great Reform Bill. For while 1832 had no necessary aftermath in 1867, 1867 did have a necessary aftermath in 1884, 1918, 1928 — the later acts that genuinely universalized the suffrage, not only for Britain but for all those countries that took Britain to be the model of a parliamentary government.

It is all the more bewildering, therefore, to inquire into the history of this act and to find it so meandering, purposeless, fortuitous, so full of what Herbert Butterfield has called “the most useless things in the world” — useless, that is, if one expects meaning or sense in history. John Morley, trying to make sense of an affair that struck him as “one of the most curious in our parliamentary history,” wistfully concluded: “When we have made full allowance for blunder, caprice, chance, folly, craft, still reason and the nature of things have a share.”

John Rous did more than record the news that reached his isolated parish in Suffolk; he also recorded the local discussions of these reports. The latter practice was potentially dangerous. Two recent royal proclamations had expressly prohibited discussions of “affairs of state,” and, as Rous's diary reveals, these private talks could easily become extended critiques of royal policy. Perhaps for that reason Rous, the local parson, consistently sought to be a moderating influence: “I would alwaies speake the best of that our King and state did, and thinke the best too, till I had good groundes” to do otherwise. Unfortunately for Rous, he found it increasingly difficult to “speake the best” in the mid-1620s as Charles I dissolved parliament after parliament, collected taxes of dubious legality, and experimented with the established church; “our Kings proceedings have caused men's mindes to be incensed, to rove, and projecte.” Popular projections, moreover, led to the edge of “an insurrection”; in such an increasingly tense atmosphere, Rous was fearful that one misplaced word would fuel reports that “the whole state were revolting.”

His most severe trial came in 1627 when Charles I interrupted an otherwise disastrous war against Spain to invade France. The motive for the Ré expedition quite simply baffled Rous's parishioners. When the parson refuted the criticism of Mr. Paine, one of his parishioners, Paine simply “would not heare it by any meanes: but fell in generall to speake distastfully of the voyage and then of our warre with France.”