Scholarship on the women's suffrage movement in Britain has reached a curious juncture. No longer content to chronicle the activities or document the contributions of single organizations, historians have begun to analyze the movement's strategies of self-advertisement and to disentangle its racial, imperial, and gendered ideologies. Perhaps the most striking development in recent scholarship on suffrage, however, has been the proliferating discourse on militancy among literary critics, a development with which few historians have engaged. Yet, while militancy has spawned a veritable subfield in literary studies, continually generating new articles and books, these accounts portray the phenomenon in similarly reductive terms. After 1903 the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), under the leadership of Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst, revitalized a genteel and moribund women's suffrage movement. The WSPU introduced the use of militancy, first interrupting Liberal Party meetings and heckling political speakers, then moving to the use of street theater, such as large-scale demonstrations, and ultimately to the destruction of government and private property, including smashing windows, slashing paintings in public galleries, and setting fire to buildings and pillar-boxes. Once the Liberal government introduced forcible feeding as an antidote to the suffragette hunger strike, militants created a visual activism, dependent upon the exhibition of women's tortured bodies as spectacle. By this account, the activities of the WSPU became exemplary of what critic Barbara Green has called “performative activism” and “visibility politics” in early twentieth-century feminist praxis, creating “almost entirely feminine communities where women celebrated, suffered, spoke with, and wrote for other women,” and that “allowed women to put themselves on display for other women.”

Henry:
Then you perceive the body of our kingdom, How foul it is;
What rank diseases grow, and with what danger, near the heart of it.
Warwick:
It is but body, yet distempered, Which to his former
Strength may be restored with good advise and little medicine.
[Shakespeare, Henry IV]

Shakespeare's words remind us that in the learned traditions of Renaissance Europe, good advice remained more important than potent medicines for restoring both physical and political states to their previous strengths. As the lord advised the king, so a physician advised his patient, or lawyer his client, or minister his flock: preventing troubles was worth far more than cure, and the best remedy even when matters went wrong was good advice on how to return to a state of harmony. Still, plenty of quacks in politics and medicine, law and church, advocated strong measures, not helping people to live in accordance with their world but attempting to alter the conditions under which they lived. Bad advice and powerful remedies seemed to be everywhere, trampling good council and temperate behavior. The connections between learning and authority that lay behind claims to authority in general are especially well illuminated by the ways in which the physicians argued for possessing, maintaining, and extending their professional privileges.

Among all the number and variety of medical practitioners in early modern England, one small group self-consciously considered itself to be professional: the physicians. As one of the three learned professions surviving from the Middle Ages, the “medical profession” has been a crucial test case for various definitions of what a profession is or was.

The early Stuart period witnessed a startling transformation in the physical environment of the royal court. At James I's accession, Whitehall and the great courtier's palaces along the Strand still lay in an essentially rural landscape. To the south, Westminster was a compact town of perhaps 6,500 people, while to the north and east, the three Strand parishes of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, St. Mary le Savoy, and St. Clement Danes contained another 6,000, mostly concentrated in a narrow ribbon along the Strand itself. North of the Strand, the landscape remained open except for a thinner ribbon along High Holborn. Covent Garden was a pasture and orchard, containing a number of fine timber trees, St. Martin's church was still literally “in the fields“ and Lincoln's Inn Fields comprised over forty acres of open land. Dairying and market gardening were going concerns over much of what soon became the West End. Only a few years before, St. Martin's parish had experienced an enclosure riot.

On the eve of the Civil War, a continuous urban landscape extended from Temple Bar as far as Soho, and ribbons of development spread along both sides of St. James's Park, as far as Knightsbridge and Picadilly. The population of old Westminster had increased by about 250 percent, while the Strand area grew even more rapidly, with St. Martin's-in-the-Fields experiencing more than a fivefold increase to as many as 17,000 people. Had they been independent settlements, all three of the large West End parishes of St. Margaret's Westminster, St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, and St. Clement Danes would have ranked among the half dozen largest English provincial cities. In all, the western suburbs' population probably stood between 40,000 and 60,000.

This essay explores debates over political membership and rights within empire from the interwar British Caribbean. Although no formal status of imperial, British, or colonial citizenship existed in this era, British Caribbeans routinely hailed each other as meritorious local “citizens,” demanded political rights due them as “British citizens,” and decried rulers' failure to treat colored colonials equally with other “citizens” of the empire. In the same years, the hundreds of thousands of British West Indians who labored in circum-Caribbean republics like the United States, Panama, Cuba, Venezuela, and Costa Rica experienced firsthand the international consolidation of formal citizenship as a state-issued credential ensuring mobility and abode. This convergence pushed British Caribbeans at home and abroad to question the costs of political disfranchisement and the place of race within empire. The vernacular political philosophy they developed in response importantly complements the influential theories of citizenship and rights developed by European thinkers of the same generation, such as T. H. Marshall and Hannah Arendt.

If clothing can be said to have political and cultural meaning, then the same must surely be true of its absence. In the British Empire, where the calibration of difference was paramount, nakedness acquired hierarchical significance. The sensibilities of the Victorians clashed with those of their colonial subjects on this topic over and over again, and nakedness came to define savagery and subjecthood. Through the optics of scientific literature, popular photography, and art, this essay examines the colonial politics of nakedness, its gendered dynamics, and the tensions between the erotic and the scientific.

At a cabinet meeting on November 4, 1956, Anthony Eden came face to face with the unravelling of his ill-starred premiership. As two leading cabinet colleagues, Lord Butler and Lord Salisbury, insisted that British military operations in Egypt would have to be ended, the prime minister found it impossible to repress any longer his overwrought and excitable temperament. According to the journalist James Margach, “Eden was emotionally overcome. He broke down in tears and cried: ‘You are all deserting me.’ He was in total collapse, weeping unashamedly. Then he went upstairs to compose himself.” Within two months Eden had resigned. His successor, Harold Macmillan, deliberately set out to create a very different emotional environment around him. In place of Eden's petulant volatility came an emphasis on self-control and steady nerves. In the words of David Maxwell Fyfe, who served under both premiers, Eden's “chronic restlessness” gave way to “a central calmness” under Macmillan. The new prime minister adopted an air of nonchalance and indifference, and according to one of his aides, “anyone who got excited got short shrift.” The contrasting public styles of Eden and Macmillan is a commonplace in the political history of the 1950s and has been credited with facilitating the recovery in Conservative electoral fortunes in the aftermath of the Suez debacle. However, Eden's breakdown and Macmillan's apparent “unflappability” can also be identified as sites on which to explore how dominant codes of masculine emotional culture were manifested in the world of politics.

The late Victorians popularized several ideas which have tended to obscure what was actually going on in intellectual matters in the early part of the nineteenth century. One of these is the notion that, whenever science and religion came into contact, some degree of scientific excellence was sacrificed, if only because the scientists themselves believed in the theological ideas. Another is the judgment that Dean Stanley, a “passive peaceable Protestant” always seeking compromise, was the typical Broad Churchman. And a third is the acceptance of Leslie Stephen's description of an arid “Cambridge rationalism” not only as enlightening (which it is) but also as complete.

These and other similar misconceptions could be propagated because the later Victorian intellectual “aristocracy” or “self-reviewing circle,” as described so well by Noel Annan, was not continuous with that of the earlier period. Such physical descendants as did remain, notably Matthew Arnold and Leslie Stephen, played quite different roles in the new circle from those which their fathers had filled in the older, looser, grouping. The founders of the new aristocracy selected their mythic figures with an eye to current usefulness rather than with strict attention to the history of the earlier generation. This was to be expected. One could not expect Thomas Huxley to emphasize the great abilities of the geologist Adam Sedgwick when it was just such a reputation which supported “the old Adam” in his attack on Darwin's theories.

In order to indicate the inadequacy of the three conceptions listed above, and others like them, it is the purpose of this article to use the indirect method of sketching the coming together of those men who were the mentors not only of Darwin but also of Stanley, of Tennyson, of Frederick Denison Maurice, of Lord Kelvin, and of James Clerk Maxwell.

One of the great themes of modern history is the movement of poor people across the face of the earth. For individuals and families the economic and psychological costs of these transoceanic migrations were severe. But they did not prevent millions of agriculturalists and proletarians from Europe reaching the new worlds in both the Atlantic and the Pacific basins in the nineteenth century. These people, in their myriad voyages, shifted the demographic balance of the continents and created new economies and societies wherever they went. The means by which these emigrations were achieved are little explored.

Most emigrants directed themselves to the cheapest destinations. The Irish, for instance, migrated primarily to England, Scotland, and North America. The general account of British and European emigration in the nineteenth century demonstrates that the poor were not well placed to raise the costs of emigration or to insert themselves into the elaborate arrangements required for intercontinental migration. Usually the poor came last in the sequence of emigration.

The passage to Australasia was the longest and the most expensive of these migrations. From its foundation as a penal colony in 1788, New South Wales depended almost entirely on convict labor during its first four decades. Unambiguous government sanction for free immigration emerged only at the end of the 1820s, when new plans were devised to encourage certain categories of emigrants from the British population. As each of the new Australian colonies was developed so the dependence on convict labor diminished.

There is now a strong case for banning the word “community” from all academic writing and an even stronger one for banning it from the vocabulary of politics. As one early modern historian has put it, the word is becoming a “shibboleth.” It is employed where “group” or “society,” for example, would be more appropriate, and, worst of all, its use is often not just a matter of slack thought but expresses an implicit hankering for some mythical past when there were “communities.” The increasing overworking of the word by politicians and other public figures can be related to an uneasy feeling that the sense of belonging and of mutual obligation implicit in the idea of “community” are disappearing. Accordingly, if they call things “communities” often enough, that will somehow create them. This prelapsarian attitude to communities is, as we shall see, quite as fundamental to historical use of the term. It is the purpose of this article to examine critically how the word has been applied in relation to the medieval English gentry, to ask whether there can be any legitimate use in this context, and to look at the types of identity, whether communitarian or not, that may have obtained among this important group within medieval society.

Historiographically, the “gentry community,” as is well-known, first appeared in the seventeenth century, specifically in the work of Alan Everitt.

The war against France was the most potent force for change in English government and politics in William III's reign, but during those same years the contest for control of the lucrative East India trade also set off strong reverberations at Whitehall, in parliament, and even in the constituencies. Ever since its reorganization in the 1650s, the East India Company had been subjected to intermittent attack from a motley array of foes: some questioned the desirability of the bullion-greedy trade to the Far East, others disputed the Company's exclusive commercial privileges held under the royal charters of 1661 and 1683 and argued for a regulated company, and from the early 1680s onwards a number of once prominent Company members (most notably, Thomas Papillon) challenged the directorate of Sir Josiah Child. In turn, the Glorious Revolution ushered in the decisive phases of the dispute between the Company and its enemies — a controversy finally brought to a peaceful conclusion only in the closing months of William's reign.

By 1689, the struggle for control of the East India trade had already developed a “constitutional” dimension and taken on a political tinge. On the one hand, there was the question, first raised by the critics of the early Stuarts, whether any group could be endowed with a commercial monopoly by virtue of royal charter alone. On the other hand, there was the issue of the Child clique's close identification with the Stuart Court during the 1680s — a “Tory” posture Sir Josiah and his associates had adopted in order to ward off challenges to their own predominance and to the Company's privileges.

“Speenhamland” is a word popularized by late nineteenth-century historians as a derogatory term for the systematic subsidization of laborers' wages by allowances paid from the poor rates. This system was thought to have flourished in southern and agrarian England in the early nineteenth century, the size of the allowances determined by the size of the family and the price of bread. The unwitting “villains” were the Berkshire justices who met at the Pelican Inn, located in a tithing of Speen Parish. Moved by corn dearth and a terrible winter, the justices on May 6, 1795, set in train the fatal hemorrhaging of the Old Poor Law that, in turn, led to the draconian Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834.

Myth this may largely be, and it has been explored elsewhere; however, no one questions that subsidizing the employed from the poor rates, including allowances in aid of wages, occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is in this sense that “Speenhamland” is used here, but to suggest a radically different and mainly constructive consequence for British economic and social development.

For subsidizing the employed poor, when it took the form of nonresident relief, could function as a kind of “Industrial Speenhamland” (freshly coined), to wit: a system of parochially funded labor migration that promoted a work force for expanding industries. This subsidization could include allowances in aid of wages as well as other welfare benefits in times of sickness and unemployment—all at the expense of the home parish or township, not of the places in which the factories and industrial workshops were located.

Paul Rich has written that “nationalism in English society has not been a subject that has especially interested historians until comparatively recently.” This judgment could equally be applied to what Gerald Newman has described as that “mere primitive feeling of loyalty,” the less complex and far more ancient phenomenon of patriotism, which, for the purposes of the present article, will simply be taken to mean “love of country.” In the last few decades, the attention given to patriotism by British historians has grown rapidly. However, historians of party politics, particularly those interested in the late nineteenth century, have proved something of an exception to this rule. Although few would dispute Lord Blake's view that “‘patriotism’ … has usually been a valuable weapon in the Conservative armoury,” even work done on the tory party has avoided serious discussion of the subject. Most writers, particularly those of textbook studies, have found it difficult to move beyond rather general allusions to the Conservatives' transformation into the party of patriotism in the 1870s, with “Disraeli's speeches of 1872–3” and his “performance at Berlin in 1878” establishing once and for all “the image of the Conservative party as the champion of national honour.” This argument, of course, owes much to Hugh Cunningham's important History Workshop article of 1981, which put forward the view that patriotism—originally an antistate and libertarian “creed of opposition”—had by the late nineteenth century passed from the hands of the radicals into the possession of the political Right.

During the Kenyan Emergency of 1952–1960, one of the most violent episodes in the history of the British Empire, humanitarian organizations colluded with the colonial state to shore up British power. This article examines how aid agencies that claimed to exemplify the progressive internationalism of the postwar period participated in colonial violence. Far from condemning the brutality of the imprisonment and torture during the Kenyan Emergency, aid organizations were deeply implicated in parallel projects for women and children that sought to achieve the same objectives: the remaking of Kikuyu hearts and minds and the weakening of anticolonial resistance. Far from acting as a check on colonial violence in an era of burgeoning rights discourses in 1950s Kenya, self-proclaimed “impartial” internationalist organizations, while claiming to uphold values of universal humanity, worked as auxiliaries to the colonial counterinsurgency. Taking their cue from military counterinsurgency in 1950s Malaya, humanitarians sought to win “hearts and minds” and undertook material provision for imprisoned anticolonial activists and their families on behalf of the colonial state. They did so by importing new humanitarian expertise developed in wartime Europe and adapting it to fit within racist, colonial norms. In providing this allegedly impartial expertise, humanitarian organizations lent credence to the myth that rehabilitation in Kenya was a progressive program enacted by a liberal empire to modernize its subjects, rather than a ruthless attempt to stymie anticolonial resistance by any means necessary. In this case, postwar humanitarian internationalism did not challenge colonial brutality but enabled it.

In 1832, a royal commission was appointed to investigate the operation of the poor laws in England and Wales, and two years later legislation was adopted on the basis of the commission's recommendations. For most contemporaries the passage of this measure, the so-called New Poor Law, seemed to promise significant, perhaps even radical, change in the administration of poor relief. An ancient system of parochial government was to be supplanted in the localities by a series of larger poor law unions and boards of guardians, whose discretion was to be limited by responsibility to a national bureaucratic authority in London. No less dramatic was the relief policy that the new law envisioned. It was generally understood that the poor law commissioners appointed under the act were to direct their main efforts to the establishment of a system of workhouses, wherein relief could be accorded under conditions that rendered the pauper's lot “less eligible,” that is, less attractive, than that of the poorest independent laborer. Through such means, it was hoped, an end might be made to what was seen as a long-established and widespread practice of supplementing the inadequate wages of the laboring poor out of the poor rates.

While the tendency of recent work has been to question the practical effect of this legislation on the actual distribution of aid, the problem remains of explaining the motivations and intentions of the men who promoted a measure of such seemingly abundant and far-reaching implications.

This article proposes that late medieval English men may have outnumbered women by a significant margin, perhaps as high as 110 to 115 men for every 100 women. Data from both documentary and archaeological sources suggest that fewer females survived to adulthood and that those who did may have died younger than their husbands and brothers. Historians of medieval England have said little about the possibility of a skewed sex ratio, yet if women were indeed “missing” from the population as a whole in a significant and sustained way, we must reinterpret much of the social, economic, gender, and cultural history of late medieval England.