December twenty-ninth of this year will mark the eight hundredth anniversary of the martyrdom of Thomas of Canterbury. There will be no such superfluity of books as commemorated the nine hundredth anniversary of the Conquest, the one hundredth of the American Civil War, or the fiftieth of the Soviet Revolution. Few will even recall the murder, since the propers have been deleted from the general calendar of the Roman Church. If Thomas's feast has been quietly dropped from the missal, his career has by no means been neglected by historians in recent years. New editions of the writings of participants in the dispute have appeared, new interpretations of the quarrel are numerous, and important new studies in the history of canon law have altered traditional perspectives on the dramatic confrontation. Now is therefore an opportune time to survey modern scholarship on the Becket controversy and to indicate fruitful directions for further research.

There is, first, the problem of context. The most recent scholarly study of the dispute is that of H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles. The eccentricities of the provocative, peppery, and erratic Governance of Mediaeval England have been amply, if cautiously, alluded to by reviewers. Richardson and Sayles commence their discussion of the relations of regnum and sacerdotium in the later twelfth century with the reign of Stephen, neglecting questions of continuity from the reigns of earlier Norman kings. They dispute the received interpretation of Stephen's Second Charter, of which the central clause has been generally interpreted to mean that this King granted benefit of clergy in some form to the English church.

Over the past decade, historians, journals, conferences, and even job advertisements have devoted attention to a new field of inquiry, “Britain and the world.” This emergent category is far from coherent but, despite a variety of approaches, shares a common assumption that Britain's interactions with the world beyond its shores enable us to better understand the histories of both Britain and the globe. Writing the history of Britain from a comparative, imperial, or transnational perspective is not wholly new. British historians have long worked comparatively in a predominantly European frame, while historians of empire and internationalism have also highlighted the importance of transnational and global frameworks. What, then, is signified by the articulation of “Britain and the world” as a new field? What do historians of Britain, and indeed historians of its empire and the world, stand to gain or lose from the promotion of Britain and the world as a field? What new skills, methodologies, and archives are required to become a historian of Britain and the world? We invited historians from different generations and national academies as well as with different ways of approaching the history of Britain in an extranational frame. Our hope is that these essays will open up debate and stimulate broader discussions about the changing nature of the field and our work as historians of Britain.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, for example, British imperialists were inspired with fervour and confidence. Nowhere was the inspiration stronger than amongst Australian colonists, who were beginning to thrill not only with the vicarious agony of exiles, but also with the virility of frontiersmen. Although the pull to the heart of the Empire was strong, the void beyond the red pale of civilization was beckoning too. In an increasingly hostile world it was encouraging to measure one's strength as part of the force of an Empire greater than Greece or Rome had known, and inspiring to feel that a colony's achievements were part of the historic mission of an imperialist power. It is not surprising, although it has been overlooked by European-centred historians of empire and by parochial historians of emerging nations, that the convinced and practising colonial imperialists were a significant force in shaping the ideals if not the strategy of European expansion, and in popularizing the creed, to the great comfort of the planners at “home” and the discomfort and bewilderment of local republicans.

The Boer War has become a symbolic episode in British imperial history and the spontaneous colonial participation a notable feature of it.

So read a typical entry from the diary of the widowed Mrs. L.M. Simpson, born in 1839. The continuing refrains of a lack of money, a sense of not belonging and an unwilling dependence reverberate throughout her diary. She celebrated (if that is not too cheerful a term for such a morose notation) her fortieth birthday while writing in this journal, and noted the passing of her former wedding anniversary and the birthdays of each of her deceased parents. The most important entries dealt with persons who are no longer with her and happy events that took place long ago. This lamentation from Mrs. Simpson provides a startling contrast with the picture presented by a large group of historians.

While discussing the status of knights in the eleventh century, F. M. Stenton observed briefly in a footnote:

The middle years of the eighteenth century in England were on the whole a period when few women made any impact on the public scene. Writing gradually became a respectable way for a woman to earn a living, but women writers generally confined their efforts to the novel, belle lettres, or instructional works. The most important exception was Catherine Sawbridge Macaulay. She began to publish first as an historian and then turned to topical political pamphleteering.

Descended on both sides from Whiggish City businessmen, Catherine Sawbridge of Olantigh, Kent, married in 1760 George Macaulay. He was a Scots born physician who had wide connections in London, both among Scots and medical men, and among political radicals and non-conformists. Perhaps the most important intimate of the Macaulay circle was Thomas Hollis, a well-to-do republican barrister, bibliophile, and collector of objects of vertu. Other radical friends included several dissenting ministers, among them Caleb Fleming, Theophilus Lindsey, Richard Baron, and Richard Price, and several writers on historical and political subjects, including William Harris, Adam Ferguson, and James Burgh. Catherine's brother, John Sawbridge, was active in City politics, where he had connections both by inheritance and marriage. Thus the Macaulay household offered a meeting place for both theorists and active politicians.

To Clarendon, the English Civil War was an exercise in folly, pride, and the tragic corruption of the species. Since then, many a thesis has been advanced to explain the Great Rebellion, only to fall before fresh generations of skeptics, each demolishing a predecessor's orthodoxy to set up their own. But old notions die hard. They linger in the words and concepts that once expressed them, which remain impregnated with the old meaning even when the nominal definitions have changed. Such a concept is that of the “Opposition” in early Stuart England. Its history is virtually coextensive with the historiography of the English Revolution, and it remains today at the center of the debate on the origins and meaning of the Revolution.

The concept of an Opposition in prerevolutionary England can be traced back to the eighteenth century. David Hume, writing of the 1620s, saw party conflict as an inherent and fundamentally progressive element in the clash between privilege and prerogative. The “wise and moderate,” he asserted, “regarded the very rise of parties as a happy prognostic of the establishment of liberty.” Here already is the germ of the Whig interpretation, which emerges full-blown a century later in Macaulay:

On March 24, 1603, the day on which Elizabeth was both dead and alive, James VI not only inherited the English throne, but also the Queen's Catholic subjects and the policy which she and her council had devised to contain and render neutral a potentially rebellious minority. Unlike religious minorities on the continent, however, the recusants were not an armed force waiting to defend their freedom to worship. Rather, they were a minority considered dangerous because of their potential as rebels. In dealing with that potentially rebellious group James's policy differed from continental solutions to the problem of religious minorities. His policy was based on his firm belief that the human conscience was inviolable and that “force never helped in religious matters and that gallant men should not be forced to die as martyrs.” These beliefs led James to attempt to introduce religious toleration in England. Previous treatments of the first three years of James's reign and previous analyses of the Oath of Allegiance of 1606 have failed to see that James was using the oath as the basis of religious toleration. The oath solved both the problem of religious authority and the problem of fidelity to a monarch with whom one differed in religion, because the oath recognized the King's God-given authority as a monarch while not denying that the Bishop of Rome did have a spiritual authority over the Englishmen who belonged to his church. If Catholic subjects accepted that oath, James would grant them a limited form of toleration.

The diffusion of knowledge preoccupied middle-class elites in early industrial England. While factory production promised a future of material abundance, an unsettled and menacing social environment threatened this vision of endless progress. Education constituted a cornerstone of the liberal creed embraced by the industrial middle class, and diffusing knowledge offered the hope of raising up the “lower orders” to social responsibility and respectability. A properly arranged distribution of knowledge held out hope for an ordered and orderly social existence.

But the diffusion of knowledge meant more than simply uplifting the working class. Its significance extends beyond the problematic historical question of “social control.” An utterly new society was rising in the industrializing urban agglomerations of provincial England. An expanding middle class of businessmen and professionals claimed this world as its own. They pursued political power on both local and national stages and fought for reform in economic and social policy. A strongly felt sense of stewardship prompted the industrial middle class to devote great resources and energies to shaping the new urban environment.

During 1661 and 1662 Scotland experienced one of the largest witch hunts in its history. Within the space of sixteen months no fewer than 660 persons were publicly accused of various acts of sorcery and diabolism. The hunt began to the east of Edinburgh in the villages and small burghs of Midlothian and East Lothian, where 206 individuals were named as witches between April and December 1661. The hunt did not remain restricted to that area, however, as the privy council busily issued commissions to local authorities throughout the country to try suspected witches. We do not know how many people were executed during the hunt, but the report of John Ray, the English naturalist, that 120 were believed to have been burned during his visit to Scotland suggests that the total number was substantial. It is true that some of the witches tried in the justiciary court (the central Scottish criminal court, also known as the justice court) were acquitted, and a number of those who were simply named as accomplices never actually came to trial. This should in no way, however, detract from the size and importance of the hunt. At no other time in Scottish history, with the possible exception of 1597, were so many people accused of witchcraft within such a brief period of time. Indeed, the hunt, which involved four times the number of persons accused of witchcraft at Salem in 1692, was comparable to the large witch hunts that occurred on the European continent during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

William Pitt's 1785 proposal for a free trade area between Britain and Ireland attempted to use free trade as a mechanism of imperial integration. It was a response to the agitation for political reform in Ireland and followed the attainment of legislative independence in 1782. The proposal aimed at coordinating economic and fiscal policy between the kingdoms without imposing explicit political controls. This article establishes that the measure failed because of the lack of consensus around the idea of free trade. Three contrasting ideas of free trade became apparent in the debates around the propositions of 1785: imperial or neomercantilist free trade, Smithean free trade, and national or neo-Machiavellian free trade. Imperial free trade was critical of monopolies but sought to organize trade to the benefit of the imperial metropole; Smithean free trade saw open markets as a discipline that assured efficiency but required imperial institutional frameworks, legally secured, to function. Neo-Machiavellian free trade asserted the right of every political community to organize its trade according to its interests. The article establishes the genealogy of these three positions in pamphlet debates and political correspondence in Britain and Ireland from 1689 to 1785. It argues that majority political opinion in Ireland, with exceptions, understood free trade in a neo-Machiavellian sense, while Pitt was committed to a Smithean ideal. The propositions collapsed because these internal tensions became more evident under the pressure of criticism. Liberal political economy did not of itself offer a route to a British exceptionality that finessed the tensions inherent in empire.

When the Duke of Northumberland set out from London op July 14, 1553, to play the role of kingmaker and usurp the throne from Mary Tudor in favor of his daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Grey, he remarked prophetically, “the people press to see us, but not one sayeth God speed us.” Yet even without the vocal support of the London mob, his position seemed invincible to informed observers; and so unlikely did the prospect of Mary's accession appear to her supporters, that the four Imperial ambassadors estimated that her desperate resistance would last no more than a few days and that everything for which they and their master had labored would be ruined.

The sudden reversal of Northumberland's fortunes has led historians to conclude that his army was not as powerful as the ambassadors feared: hatred for the upstart and loyalty to the house of Tudor combined to make the upper classes forget their recently-acquired church land and flock to Mary's banner. In their opinion Northumberland had to make do with whatever rabble he could muster from the streets of London, and thus his army was no match in size or quality to that which thronged to Mary at Framlingham. With the weight of informed opinion behind him, Professor Bindoff could confidently conclude: “But this time there was not even a battle. Northumberland's puny force was no match for the thousands who, in the greatest mass-demonstration of loyalty ever accorded to a Tudor, flocked to Mary's camp, and he fell back before them to Cambridge.”

In December 1832 and January 1833 the British reoccupied the Falkland Islands or the Malvinas. This reassertion of British sovereignty began an uninterrupted period of control that lasted until 2 April 1982, when armed forces of the Republic of Argentina forced the surrender of the British governor and garrison at Stanley, the capital of what the British had come to call “The Falkland Islands Dependency.” The Argentine occupation ended with a surrender to British arms on 14 June 1982. These celebrated events of recent times brought forth a fundamental question, here addressed: Why did the British possess the islands in the first place? The British government's motivation for reoccupying the Falklands in 1832–33 is insufficiently explained in existing historical literature, though the legal intricacies are known. Julius Goebel the Younger, a student of international law, termed the contest for sovereignty of the islands a “struggle.” However, his work, a study in international legal history, was not based on strategic, maritime, and economic considerations and, moreover, did not probe the question of British motivation in reoccupation. V. F. Boyson's history of the islands is a valuable survey but it inadequately investigates the same theme and the precise period under consideration. Other histories of the Falklands written in English do not examine the matter of motivation in depth. Argentine sources are extensive and see the British reoccupation as illegal. They tend at the same time to recite the arguments for sovereignty over the Malvinas; and one Argentine historian has called the reoccupation “the third English invasion,” in reference to two previous occupations by the British in 1765 and 1771. The following inquiry seeks to rectify these matters and is based on British documents, particularly in-letters of Commanders-in-Chief on the South American station. These reports to the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty reveal two concerns: firstly, the infringement by Argentine and American traders and marine exploiters in territory and territorial waters traditionally claimed but not effectively occupied by the United Kingdom and, secondly, the importance of the Falklands as a base from which to safeguard the sea routes of the southern oceans.

Alien subsidies suggest that many men and few women immigrated to England between 1440 and 1487. This article examines the one exception to this pattern: the large numbers of Scotswomen assessed as aliens in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Northumberland in 1440. It considers why so many women are found in these particular returns, what we can know about them, and how this knowledge might change our histories of women, labor, and mobility in both Scotland and England.

Historians have seen the mid-1660s as a period of significant distress in many sectors of the English economy. With population pressure diminishing, agricultural prices moved away from the benefit of producers, and rent and land values stabilized. Indeed, landowners were futher burdened by the imposition of higher levels of taxation in the wake of debts generated by the Civil War and the Commonwealth. Moreover, English merchants complained that Dutch competition limited the expansion of their overseas commerce, while the Second Dutch War (1664–67) severely dislocated trade and incurred heavy public expenditure and even higher levels of taxation. The outbreak of plague in London, followed by the Great Fire, further interrupted trade at the commercial and transport nexus of the economy. Hence, war finance and the rebuilding of London put pressure on the stock of loanable funds in a period characterized by a generally low level of prices. Interest rates had fallen gradually with the increase in the availability of capital in the first half of the seventeenth century, yet this trend, according to Christopher Clay, “was unquestionably retarded by the extensive government borrowing associated with the succession of civil and foreign wars between 1642 and 1674.” Of course, in seventeenth-century England, a maximum rate of interest was set by statute. The medieval prohibition on usury was first broken in 1545, setting a ceiling of 10 percent per year.

In early October 1642, a tract of forest and deer chase in the Severn valley, northwest of Gloucester, known as Corse Lawn, became the site of a grisly spectacle. Richard Dowdeswell, a steward of the property, described the scene in a letter to Lionel Cranfield, earl of Middlesex, the absentee owner resident in Great St. Bartholomew in London. Dowdeswell delivered terrifying news of how “a rising of neighbors about Corse Lawn” destroyed more than 600 of Middlesex's deer in a “rebellious, riotous, devilish way,” a hideous consequence of what Dowdeswell termed “this time of liberty.” Dowdeswell rode to the scene from his estate at Pull Court, a few miles from the chase, and “appeased the multitude, yet some scattering companies gave out in alehouses that they would not only destroy the remainder of deer but rifle your Lordship's house at Forthampton and pull it down to the ground and not let a tree or bush stand in all the chase.” The deer massacre became an assault on the chase, the forest, and the manor house of Forthampton, an estate close to the chase but not included in the meets and bounds of the forest. Middlesex's tenant at Forthampton Court, his brother-in-law Henry Osborne, prudently moved his household to Gloucester until Dowdeswell acquired a formal statement of protection from the earl of Essex to defend the forest, the deer left in the chase, and the house in Forthampton.

It is a truism that the most distinctive features of the peculiarly English genius in politics are moderation and compromise. The sources of this spirit must be sought throughout the whole fabric of English history, but it should be easier to examine some of the stages by which it emerged onto the conscious level of political thought. How long have Englishmen spoken of political moderation as a good in itself? Herbert Butterfield awards to the Whigs the honor of contributing to modern British history their instinct for compromise. Locke has often been thought of as doing the same. But Toryism has come in for its share of the credit, and a student of John Dryden's thought has suggested that the Tory Dryden well illustrates the tradition of avoiding political extremes and reconciling liberty and authority. This is a fruitful suggestion, and it may be carried further by seeking evidence of this tradition in the predecessors of the Tories, the royalists of the Civil War period. These latter, far from being diehards or extremists, were the advocates of a political mean, and tried to defend at once the king's authority and the subject's liberty. In some degree, this is now widely conceded, but the significance of this moderation is not as clear as it ought to be, because its nature is not understood. When it is understood, it will be possible to say that the most important characteristic of seventeenth-century English royalism was not its defense of the king, but its defense of political moderation and limited government.