Selling to strangers was a significant occupational hazard for retailers in late Georgian Britain, one that was hard to avoid. The dangers were especially great in larger towns and cities, where shopkeepers were dependent on a steady stream of passing trade composed of a large number of customers that they did not know. Though traders risked financial loss and even possible prosecution by accepting counterfeit banknotes, refusal to accept them meant losing vital custom. In areas of growing urban populations, tradesmen and women thus faced an increasingly tricky dilemma in their day-to-day business as they dealt with more strangers whose trustworthiness and personal credit were extremely hard to gauge, at a time when banknote forgery was on the rise. The decisions that retailers made about both banknotes and the individuals who presented them for payment illustrate some of the ways that town dwellers sought to navigate the rising anonymity of urban society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This article suggests that traders relied on a series of techniques that in previous experience usually worked: examining banknotes and those strangers who presented them with care, relying on the expertise of neighbors and members of their household, and dealing by preference with individuals who appeared to be linked to their local community. These behaviors demonstrate that “modernity” might have affected the lives and outlooks of ordinary Londoners in unexpected and contradictory ways, some strongly linked to older forms of society.

Over the course of the German occupation of the British Channel Islands from 1940 to 1945, a number of letters of denunciation were sent by islanders to the German authorities, accusing fellow islanders of violations of occupation law or of anti-German activity of one sort or another. The German occupiers were ambivalent toward the denunciations. While recognizing their usefulness in maintaining order and the respect for German rule, they found both the letters and their writers distasteful. The local British authorities in Jersey and Guernsey also found the letters problematic; the consequences for the individuals targeted in the letters could be dire, and the impact on island society as a whole was significant, both during the occupation and beyond liberation in May 1945. The extent and nature of resistance and collaboration have been contentious issues in the historiography of the occupation of the Channel Islands, and these letters have been cited as evidence that islanders were unduly cooperative with the Nazis. This article examines the surviving letters of denunciation, and by placing them into the wider contexts of Nazi Europe and the historiography of denunciation in totalitarian states, argues that denunciation in the Channel Islands, far from being exceptional, was quite typical of the practice throughout the Nazi empire.

Edward Doyley led English Jamaica for most of its first decade. Sent as part of a military force intent on conquering the island, he rose to a position of command in the army as a result of his survival and seniority. Eventually he took charge of the navy and civilian affairs as well. Wielding theoretically vast powers he lacked official authorization from any central authority for much of his tenure. His correspondence requesting support for the island reveals the needs of a newly conquered colony, enumerating the requirements that an expanding imperial center must fill as England moved more decisively toward engagement in the wider world. Scholarly debates over state building that emphasize military and naval expansion as a driving force, and debates about state formation focusing on negotiations between central and local authorities, speak to the experience of early Jamaica. Doyley's circumstances place him in a position between the two ideal situations described in that literature.

This article explores the impact of the 1654 ordinance against challenges, duels, and provocations. Despite the Council of State's original intentions, this legislation offered non-elites the opportunity to prosecute threatening and abusive language as “provocations,” recasting interpersonal conflicts as dangerous to society rather than to an individual's “common fame.” Indeed, many of the cases prosecuted at the Middlesex sessions centered on “provocative” behavior that questioned normative social and gender relations, revealing how the Protectorate's anti-dueling legislation provided a new weapon in contests over social power. Comparing the creation and implementation of the 1654 ordinance, this article argues that the Protectorate's legislation exposed the connections between the regulation of social interactions and the preservation of the social and political order.

Historians have not paid close attention to the activities of freebooters operating out of Dunkirk in the late 1620s. This essay corrects that omission by first studying the threat from Dunkirk to England's east coast and then addressing how the central government, counties, and coastal towns responded. A surprisingly rich vein of manuscript material from Great Yarmouth and particularly from the Suffolk fishing community of Aldeburgh informs this case study of the impact of this conflict around the North Sea.

The scholarly consideration of the marketing of luxury goods like paintings in Renaissance Europe has rightly concentrated on the Italian and Netherlandish experiences, while the discussion of an English retail market for paintings has focused on a later era. This article investigates the retail sale of painting in Tudor and early Stuart times. It asks what sorts of paintings were sold, who sold them, and what sorts of spaces accommodated such sales. Whereas conventional art historical research has concentrated on the production and sale of portraits, the discovery of an early seventeenth-century list of coat of arms painters holding retail shops in London adds additional support to the prominence of arms painting in such retail sales. This article considers the social context underlying the importance of displaying coats of arms and shows that arms painters engaged in the retail sale as well as the production of arms. The article proceeds to examine the varieties of retail spaces in which sales took place and concludes with a consideration of how retail sale of paintings contributed to London's role as a cultural center.