Whether Puritanism gave rise to a “work ethic,” and, if so, what the nature of that ethic was, has been a source of controversy since Max Weber published The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism more than seventy years ago. Experienced polemicists have waged international wars of words over its terms, and tyros have won their spurs in the battle. With repect to England, there is at present no agreement either about the reality of a peculiarly Puritan work ethic or about the impact, if any, that such an ethic might have had on the attitudes and behavior of the emerging capitalist bourgeoisie, if such a species indeed existed as a distinctive social class or group in the early modern period. In fact, since perfectly sane and competent historians have questioned on the one hand, whether “Puritanism” is more than a neo-idealist reification of a nonentity, and on the other, whether the early modern middle class is more than a myth, it might be the better part of wisdom to inter the remains of these vexed questions as quietly as possible. What follows is not a perverse attempt to flog a dead horse, if it is dead and a horse, but rather on the basis of a different perspective and different evidence to resurrect a part of what Timothy Breen has called “the non-existent controversy.”

Anthony Ashley Cooper, the third earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713), would have recoiled at any implication that he was a libertine. His antipathy to libertinism is obvious, and examples are plentiful in his writings. His major work, the Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711), consistently uses the words “libertine” and “rake” as insults; in all of his writings sensual pleasures are disparaged as base and animalistic threats to human virtue. And despite the third earl's widespread reputation as a freethinker in matters religious, he always insisted that liberty of thought did not imply a freedom from moral restraint.

Certainly Shaftesbury's early reputation was more that of a shy and unsociable recluse rather than that of a rakish mondain. In 1721, John Toland thought it necessary to defend his late friend from accusations of unsociability, not of licentiousness. He claimed that Shaftesbury's enemies “gave out that he was too bookish, because not given to play, nor assiduous at court; that he was no good companion, because not a rake nor a hard drinker, and that he was no man of the world, because not selfish nor open to bribes.” Toland also remarked how Shaftesbury frowned upon the “extravagant liberties” taken by “both sexes” even without having lived “to see masquerades, or the ancient Bacchanals revived, nor to hear of promiscuous clubs.” Indeed, Lord Ashley's own private papers reveal that he was quite uncomfortable in the polite world of England's social elite; he much preferred the pastoral tranquillity of his Dorset estate and the relaxed company of his most trusted friends.

It seems impossible to begin an article these days without invoking, either as saint or devil, the shade of Sir Lewis Namier. Those who inhabit regions remote from the classic years around 1760 are absolved from acquiring more than a general understanding of the reversionary interest, the Court and Treasury party, and the rest of the Namierite stock in trade. Yet the merits and limitations of the methodology must concern and fascinate scholars who reassess the traditional interpretations of other periods of English history. They should not, as the Master of Peterhouse has warned, swallow the Namier method whole. But used with due caution, it may offer valuable insights for other centuries besides the eighteenth. The rigorous compilation and analysis of biographical data, the penetration of ideological smokescreens to the deeper motives behind them, the ruthless discarding of outworn shibboleths like “party,” the careful use of sociological criteria: at their best the Namierites have much to offer historians of other periods. Sir John Neale has applied the method, with modifications, to the reign of Elizabeth I, Norman Gash has carried it into the age of Peel, while the authentic members of the school proceed with their task of cleaning up the eighteenth century.

The winds of Namierite change have begun to blow only fitfully, however, in the seventeenth century. One reason for this, perhaps, is that historians of the Stuart period have generally been absorbed in destroying each other on the gentry battlefield, or attempting in more constructive ways to solve the politico-economic problems of the “Century of Revolution”; there has been less effort applied to the details of parliamentary affairs.

Some translation and joining of realms may turn to much good, and the wealth and tranquillity of many. As if we had a King for your Queen, or you [Scotland] a King for ours, it had been a goodly translation: to have united both realms in dominion, regiment and law, as they be in nature, language, and manners…. If you and we had joined together: it had made no great matter, on which side the King had been, so he had been religious…. It is religion and likeness of manners, that join men together … Where there is one faith, one baptism, and one Christ: there is narrower fraternity then, if they came out of one womb. (John Aylmer, An Harborowe for Faithful and Trew Subjectes, 1559)

Me-thinketh it were to be wished of all wise men and her Majesty's good subjects, that the one of those two Queens of the isle of Britain were transformed into the shape of a man, to make so happy a marriage, as thereby there might be an unity of the whole isle. (Henry Killigrew to Robert Dudley, 31 December 1560)

In 1559, John Aylmer responded to John Knox's First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women in order to win support for Elizabeth I's accession to the English throne. According to Aylmer, Knox identified as the “greatest inconvenience” of female rule the fact that the realm would be transferred to “strangers” when the queen married, ceding to her husband, as her superior, the power that had been invested in her.

The 1650s saw an influx of young women to skilled apprenticeships in London's companies. Apprenticed to women through the names of their husbands, they practiced seamstry and millinery in a wide range of guilds. The preprinted forms by which these girls were indentured demonstrate the means by which a long-established city institution both made room for women, incorporating them into the culture of company, and kept them marginal. A series of print and manuscript adaptations marked out girls’ forms, paying particular attention to the rules around marriage, and resulting, by the late seventeenth century, in a new trend towards non-sex-specific forms. This article argues that record keeping was both symbolically and concretely important for women's work and that the material culture and context of these print objects can shed a new light on gender roles at a key juncture in the histories of work, contracts, and the city.

In the early 1960s, the College of African Wildlife Management opened in northern Tanzania. The institution was designed to lessen the impact of decolonization by training the first generation of African wildlife wardens in the tradition of their European predecessors. The product of racialized narratives about African violence and the growth of international conservation organizations, the college could be understood as a straightforward neocolonial institution designed to perpetuate British and western influence over land and animals in East Africa. In contrast, this paper pays close attention to the circumstances and context of the college's founding, the debates over funding and control, and its institutional culture. These aspects all suggest that African governments sought to use the college as a vehicle for pursuing the Africanization of the civil service and for formalizing a contractual relationship with international organizations about mutual obligations not only to Tanzania's wildlife sector but also the country's political economy. This focus on a conservation institution created in the early days of independence demonstrates that the work of decolonization continued after independence, and that expatriate personnel and culture remained embedded in new nations, informing our narratives of decolonization, conservation, and nationalism.

In 1772, entrepreneur George Cartwright brought five Inuit people to England from Nunatsiavut (Labrador). Most of their time was spent in London, where they encountered many of the city's sights and experienced its social divisions and environmental conditions. This article explores their voyage, challenging the notion that “primitives” such as the Inuit visitors were necessarily awed into submission by the urban landscape. Rather, they understood it according to their own cultural logics and even articulated critiques of the city. Illustrating the entanglement of urban and Inuit spaces and places across the Atlantic, and ending by telling the story of the death of four of the five visitors from smallpox in 1773, the article argues for a new kind of scholarship that shows connections between Indigenous and urban histories at the transoceanic and imperial levels.

The inscription on Robert Owen's monument in Kensal Green cemetery, London, begins: “He originated and organized infant schools.” This claim, though disputed during his lifetime, is now generally acknowledged and has become part of the familiar story of Owen. For fifty years after his death in 1858, however, Owen was remembered chiefly as a cooperator, secularist, and Utopian socialist, and Frank Podmore in his definitive biography of Owen published in 1906 observed that “the name of Robert Owen is little known to the present generation as an educational reformer.” Thanks to Podmore's work and later that of another Fabian, G. D. H. Cole, Owen's role as an educator became more fully recognized. Subsequent biographies and educational dissertations elaborated (or, perhaps more accurately, repeated) details of Owen's educational activities and ideas. More recently A. E. Bestor, through a brilliant examination of the American material, showed the close relationship between education and Owenite communitarianism.

In modern evaluations of Owen and his work a large place has thus been rightly accorded to education. The spectacular nature of the experiment at New Lanark, the advocacy of a nonviolent and widely acceptable method of social change, and Owen's repeated emphasis on the importance of education in character formation all contributed to a focusing of attention on this aspect of his achievement. “The basis of Owenism,” wrote Cole, “was his [Owen's] theory of education.” Evidence for this view came from Owen's statements on the relation between education and social reform and from descriptions of the detailed workings of his infant school.

Natural law is one of the oldest concepts in Western philosophy. When the Psalmist asked Yahweh, “What is man that Thou art mindful of him,” he was struggling with the same problem that occupied thoughtful men in Greece: the need to understand man as he is and in his potentiality. Unlike the unknown Biblical poet, however, Plato and Aristotle found an answer with the aid of reason rather than revelation. For them, man is an entity in process of becoming, possessing an essential, cognizable nature that gives rise to certain inclinations he must fulfill. Until the Enlightenment, the idea of man's nature and his need to realize it served as the focus of much of secular thought, out of which developed principles of government and a distinctive ethic. But ordinary people were touched only by the practical consequences of such things. The great law codes and the teachings of the church combined with philosophy to work out the individual's relationship to others according to a teleological conception of law rooted in the very nature of things. Understandably, the ontological theses and conclusions drawn from the theory of natural law remained irrelevant and unknown to common folk.

In the midst of the English Civil War, the concept appeared in the welter of disputes and conflicting plans for the revitalization of all aspects of English life, invoked by ordinary men who were neither philosophers nor theologians, neither jurists nor statesmen. This paper considers the use of natural law by one group, the Levellers, at a dramatic moment in the turbulent period following the king's imprisonment.

In the decade preceding the establishment of the Romanov dynasty in 1613, Muscovite Russia went through a catastrophic period known as the Time of Troubles which was characterized by political unrest, famine, regicide, social upheaval, and foreign intervention. In the final, darkest years of the Time of Troubles many people doubted that Muscovy, which for a time lacked a ruler or even a central government, would be able to survive as an independent state. It appeared more likely that Catholic Poland would conquer the country or that Sweden would come to dominate it. The English, who had established diplomatic and commercial relations with Muscovy in the 1550s and who watched events there with considerable interest, were horrified by reports that the Poles had captured Moscow, that the Swedes had seized much Russian territory, and that factions of the Muscovite lords were negotiating with their aggressive neighbors for a foreign tsar. This eventually led the English to contemplate acquiring North Russia and the commercially important port of Arkhangel'sk for themselves. As strange as it seems, for a brief period of time King James I actually dreamed of adding part of Muscovy to his “empire.”

In his seminal work, The Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800, Lawrence Stone cites legal change as part of the evidence for his claim that a new sort of family marked the eighteenth century. Property law especially is pointed to as proof that the patriarchal family had given way to what has come to be known as the affective family. It was, of course, natural to seek a basis in law for a theory of family development. Law at any time tells us much about family life. It is certainly fundamental to changes that are said to mark the affective family. Because of an increase in affect (or in another word, love) it is claimed that the new family type saw an increase in the independence of children, and an increase in the status and property of women. Indeed, recognizing the importance of law, Stone has found each of his three stages in family history to be paralleled in property law. The discussion of law does not occupy much space; but it occupies strategic space. Law is the first, or almost the first, thing discussed in each of the stages of the family. The legal arrangements governing property are not just a part of the evidence for the theory; they are a most important part. They can be seen to provide the framework, the hard structure, on which the theory is built. “The hardest evidence”—Stone's words—for the great change he sees in the eighteenth century he finds in law.

The British Liberal Party underwent a succession of crises in the years 1886-1905 which nearly destroyed it as a coherent political entity. Perhaps the most critical divisions in the 1890s were those concerning the leadership struggle, so well described by Peter Stansky in his Ambitions and Strategies, and the search for a domestic policy which would qualify the party as the major force for reform in the face of the emerging Labour alternative. But both of these problems and the divisions which stemmed from them were linked with the perennial and highly visible divisions over foreign and imperial policy. Stansky has shown how the imperial question was tied to the Harcourt-Rosebery struggle for the leadership in succession to Gladstone and how concentration on this issue detracted from attention to the more pressing question of finding a viable and attractive domestic program. Jeffrey Butler, Bernard Semmel, and Bernard Porter have illustrated other aspects of the problem of imperial policy.

Historians have long recognized the seriousness of the crisis in the party during the Boer War, when divisions of opinion concerning the war and general imperial policy were formalized in competing organizations, and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman fought a frustrating campaign to consolidate his leadership and maintain the party as a functioning unit. Most of the attention, however, has centered on the leaders of the party and on the organization — the Liberal League, which grew out of the Imperial Liberal Council in 1902 — which represented the Liberal Imperialist wing inspired by Lord Rosebery.

In recent years a great deal of scholarly energy has been expended in attempts to identify differing religious parties and movements in Elizabethan and early Stuart England. On the one hand, J.F.H. New has described the actions of Anglicans and Puritans as “teleological acts – attempts to make practice conform to preconceived philosophies.” He believes that Anglican and Puritan doctrines derived from quite different conceptions of human moral capacity, conceptions which were distinct from their sixteenth-century origins and which grew more so as time passed. On the other hand, Charles and Katherine George have insisted that we can at best talk about minor differences of emphasis and of degree within a doctrinally unified “English Protestant mind” before 1640. There were, so this thesis goes, no really significant Anglican-Puritan ideological distinctions, and therefore religious differences had nothing to do with the coming of the English Civil War. The effect of these efforts has been to make historians aware that defining the terms “Anglican” and “Puritan” is a much more difficult enterprise than used to be thought. Despite the Georges' book, the terms are still being used; but New's argument about their meaning has not gone uncriticized.

It would be impossible in a short article to deal with all of the points raised in this extensive debate. The present purpose is to concentrate upon only two of many points of difference between writers traditionally identified as Anglicans and Puritans by means of their activities, attitudes, and associates.

In the later eighteenth century, two schemes were introduced in Parliament for extending the practice of handing over the bodies of executed offenders to anatomists for dissection. Both measures were motivated by the needs of the field of anatomy, including the improvement of surgical skill, the development of medical teaching in the provinces, and public anatomical demonstrations. Yet both failed to pass into law due to concerns about the possibly damaging effects in terms of criminal justice. Through a detailed analysis of the origins and progress of these two parliamentary measures—a moment when the competing claims of anatomy and criminal justice vied for supremacy over the criminal corpse—the article sheds light on judicial attitudes to dissection as a method of punishment and adds to our understanding of the reasons why, in the nineteenth century, the dread of dissection would come to fall upon the dead poor rather than executed offenders.

In the days before Christmas 1805, William Thomas Fitzgerald's Nelson's Tomb; a Poem made its appearance in London book shops. Fitzgerald was one of the foremost loyalist versifiers of his day—and had previously published an ode to Nelson after the Battle of the Nile. When he took pen in hand, Britain was mourning Nelson's recent death at Trafalgar. Nelson's Tomb then, considered the manner in which Britons would mark his passing. Nelson's funeral would be, Fitzgerald boasted, “no hireling pageant.”

Fitzgerald's words conveyed the contemporary loyalist sense that the funeral for Lord Nelson would be genuine, ordered, harmonious, and widely acceptable—that it would avoid the accusations of artificiality and the expressions of dissent that had greeted previous patriotic pageants such as the Naval Thanksgiving of 1797. At first glance, Fitzgerald's expectation would seem to accord with the recent orthodoxy concerning state spectacle in Britain during the wars of 1793–1815, an orthodoxy holding not only that the public pageants of the period were an important manifestation of the particular brand of patriotism that loyalists were interested in marketing but also that the product itself had unifying and socially cohesive effects. But Nelson's funeral—which was held on 9 January 1806 and drew crowds of between twenty and thirty thousand people—has not been widely treated as a loyalist spectacle, largely because those who have considered it have joined Linda Colley in recognizing its apparently iconoclastic nature. Colley was attentive to the state pageants of the period; they featured in her argument for the privileging of a cult of monarchy in officially consecrated expressions of British nationalism.

Under Elizabeth and the early Stuarts the English developed a relationship to time—current time within the cycle of the year and historical time with reference to the past—that set them apart from the rest of early modern Europe. All countries followed a calendar that was rooted in the rhythms of ancient Europe and that marked the passage of time by reference to the life of Christ and his saints. But only in England was this traditional calendar of Christian holidays augmented by special days honoring the Protestant monarch and the ordeals and deliverances of the national church. In addition to regulating the seasons of work and worship, the calendar in England served as a reminder of the nation's distinctiveness, of God's mercies, and of England's particular religious and dynastic good fortune. Other Protestant communities, most notably the Dutch, enjoyed a comparable myth of historical exceptionalism—a replay of the Old Testament—but no other nation employed the calendar as the English did to express and represent their identity. Early modern England, in this regard, had more in common with modern America, France, or Australia (with Independence Day, Bastille Day, Australia Day, etc.), than with the rest of post-Reformation Europe.

This article deals with changes in calendar consciousness and annual festive routines in Elizabethan and Stuart England. It examines the rise of Protestant patriotism, and the shaping of a national political culture whose landmarks were royal anniversaries, the memory of Queen Elizabeth, and commemoration of the Gunpowder Plot. It opens a discussion on the vocabulary of celebration and the degree to which festivity was sponsored and orchestrated in the interest of national consolidation or partisan position. And it will show how calendrical observances that at first helped unite the crown and nation became contentious, politicized, and divisive.