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.

Although Richard II's Irish expedition of 1394–95 has attracted considerable scholarly attention, the focus has largely been on Richard's relations with the colonial administration in Ireland, pointing mainly to the colonial government's plea for greater royal investment in the colony as the main factor underpinning Richard's decision to intervene in Ireland. Little attention, by comparison, has been devoted to exploring the king's relations with both the Gaelic Irish and Gaelic Scottish nobility. Using Richard's relations with the expanding Gaelic world as the main case study, this article reconsiders how developments in the Gaelic west influenced the king's decision to intervene in Ireland. Set against the backdrop of Anglo-Scottish relations and the Hundred Years’ War, the article draws on a broad range of Gaelic sources from Ireland and Scotland, English and Scottish governmental records, and material from the Avignon papacy. It uncovers and traces the development of the main Gaelic Irish and Gaelic Scottish dynasties during the late fourteenth century, their relationships with one another, and their unfolding connections with the English and Scottish crowns. By locating Richard's expeditions within the broader archipelagic context, this article argues that the wider Gaelic world, though on the geographic periphery of Ireland and Scotland, was capable of exerting a far greater degree of influence on the course of “British” politics than has previously been acknowledged.

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.

This article presents the first addition in recent years to the canon of the British eighteenth-century statesman and political thinker Lord Bolingbroke (1678–1751), a manuscript essay “On the Character of a Great Patriot.” For the first time, this article identifies Bolingbroke as the likely author of this unascribed, undated, and untitled essay in the Senate House Library manuscript collection. Using internal and contextual evidence, the article demonstrates that the “Character” is a description of Bolingbroke's opposition colleague William Pulteney, and that it was written in the final months of 1731, most likely for publication in the opposition journal the Craftsman. The “Character” dates from a period in which Bolingbroke wrote very little, and it is thus a crucial addition to his biography as well as an early exposition of his theory of opposition politics. Moreover, study of the essay shows that Bolingbroke drew extensively on the example of Pulteney when formulating his idea about the necessity of a systematic opposition party, not fully formulated until On the Spirit of Patriotism (1736). The “Character” thus sheds further light on the important relationship between political practice and theory in the age of Walpole.

Immigration and its consequences is one of the most contentious issues in the contemporary world, and historians are engaged in this debate by offering a longer-term perspective. In recent years, research on the United Kingdom's population has placed greater emphasis on population movement in shaping Britain's story, identifying waves of migrants from elsewhere alongside migration within Britain. One neglected aspect of this narrative, however, is the migration of Scots to England, particularly in the age of the regal and parliamentary union, when the changing political relationship between the two kingdoms had an impact on the scale, geographic spread, and opportunities and obstacles of that migration. While a minority of Scottish migrants were unwelcome, or chose to return home, the overwhelming weight of evidence is for those migrants who remained in England. The focus in this article is on that majority group for whom migration was a positive experience, thus raising questions about why these Scots were so successful and why they faced so little native opposition. That process of segmented assimilation offers an insight into the formation of Britain and the shifting ground of national identity associated with the emerging British state. The Scots, moreover, provide a model for “successful” migration, suggesting that a range of factors—principally, an educated, culturally malleable, and economically responsive migrant population, alongside an institutionally and attitudinally flexible host community—need to be in place in order to optimize the chances of migrant assimilation.

The polemic surrounding the 1753 Jewish Naturalization Bill was one of the major public opinion campaigns in Britain in the eighteenth century, as well as the most significant event in the history of Britain's Jews between their seventeenth-century admission and nineteenth-century emancipation. The bill proposed to offer Jews a private act of naturalization without the sacramental test. A costly and cumbersome process, the measure could have had only minor practical impact. Due to its symbolic significance, however, the bill ignited public clamor in hundreds of newspaper columns, pamphlets, and prints. What made it so resonant, and why was the opposition so successful in propagating opposition to the motion? It has been commonly argued that the entire affair was an instance of partisan conflict in which the Jews themselves played an incidental role. This paper throws light on the episode from an alternative perspective, arguing that a central reason for its resonance was that the discussion on the Jews evoked concerns with the expanding financial market and its sociopolitical implications. As Jews had by that time become emblematic of modern finance, they embodied contemporary anxieties about the economy, national identity, and their interrelations.

This article examines British understandings of the laws and legal traditions that regulated slavery in French and Spanish colonies in the late eighteenth century, particularly between the American and French Revolutions. Based on reports from those with firsthand knowledge of different slave systems, many imperial commentators contended that enslaved persons under French and Spanish rule were treated more humanely—and consequently worked more efficiently—than those in British jurisdictions. Advocates of slavery reform therefore looked to the slave management strategies of competitors to help advance their cause. For some, appropriating foreign slave regulations became a central feature of programs designed to lessen the brutality of slavery and eventually bring about emancipation. For others, highlighting the comparatively benign treatment of enslaved workers in French and Spanish islands served as a way to pressure the British government to more proactively police slaveholding in its own colonies. By exploring calls to emulate the slave regulations of rival empires, this article provides a window onto shifting British attitudes toward both slavery and imperial governance during a period of major political and economic change in the Atlantic World.

From the beginning of the seventeenth century, Englishmen professed as Benedictine monks in mainland Europe began returning to their homeland. Until that point, the Catholic mission to England had been run by secular clergy and Jesuits, relationships between the two clerical parties growing increasingly troubled over how the Catholic Reformation should be implemented in England. The arrival of the Benedictines saw the offering of a “third way” to England's proscribed Catholics. Yet with the various missions dependent on lay Catholic resources and support both in England and in mainland Europe, it was necessary for the Benedictines to justify their presence in this often fraught environment. As such, they forcefully laid claim to contemporary English Benedictine martyrs against rival claims by other clerical groups. These battles for validation reached a new level of intensity following James I's serving of the Oath of Allegiance. This article explores how competing groups of English missionary clergy sought to justify their presence in England. Taking the case of two conflicting images of the executed George Gervase, it argues that the contest for martyrs sheds new light on the ways in which martyrdom was exploited by different groups; it also contributes to debates about the Oath of Allegiance, which was threatening to derail the wider Catholic Reformation across mainland Europe. By placing these clashes over English religious identity in both domestic and international contexts, the article makes evident that events on the peripheries of mainland Europe affected discussions at its center.

John Locke's comparison of the mind to a blank piece of paper, the tabula rasa, was one of the most recognizable metaphors of the British Enlightenment. Though scholars embrace its impact on the arts, humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences, they seldom consider why the metaphor was so successful. Concentrating on the notebooks made and used by the schoolchildren of Enlightenment Scotland, this essay contends that the answer lies in the material and visual conditions that gave rise to the metaphor's usage. By the time students had finished school, they had learned to conceptualize the pages, the script, and the figures of their notebooks as indispensable learning tools that could be manipulated by scores of adaptable folding, writing, and drawing techniques. In this article, I reveal that historicizing the epistemology and manipulability of student manuscript culture makes it possible to see that the success of Locke's metaphor was founded on its appeal to everyday note-keeping activities performed by British schoolchildren.

Histories of human rights tend to focus on defining moments, clear instances of universalism triumphant. If we hold to this model, the 1855 campaign on behalf of French republican—or democratic socialist—refugees was a failure. The refugees, expelled from Jersey in the Channel Islands for a libel of the queen, were little liked, and the campaign on their behalf did not yield the desired results, enabling them to return to Jersey. Yet, as this article argues, the failed campaign ought to be judged by different measures than the campaigners’ desired results, for we see in it the dynamics of refugee crises down to the present: an ongoing attempt to make refuge a universal norm in the face of persistent doubt that the refugees in question were “worthy” of staying. The French refugees and their supporters drew public attention to a right that they claimed derived from precedent, the British constitution, and moral principle. Though they did not succeed in their immediate cause, campaigners drew the admission even from naysayers that there was a “right to refuge”—but one the naysayers would not agree must be upheld at all costs.

This article discusses the development of techniques and practices of murder crime scene photography through four pairs of photographs taken in England between 1904 and 1958 and examines their “forensic aesthetic”: the visual combination of objective clues and of subjective aesthetic resonances. Crime scene photographs had legal status as evidence that had to be substantiated by a witness, and their purpose, as expressed in forensic textbooks and policing articles, was to provide a direct transfer of facts to the courtroom; yet their inferential visual nature made them allusive and evocative as well. Each of four pairs of photographs discussed reflects a significant period in the historical evolution of crime scene photography as well as an observable aesthetic influence: the earliest days of police photography and pictorialism; professionalization in the 1930s, documentary photography, and film noir; postwar photographic expansion to the suburban and middle class, advertising images of the family and home; and postwar elegiac landscape photography in the 1950s and compassion shown to infanticidal mothers. Crime scene photographs also demonstrate a remarkable shift in twentieth-century forensic technologies, and they reveal a collection of ordinary domestic and pastoral scenes at the moment when an act of violence made them extraordinary.

Charles I's Star Chamber prosecution of the lawyer William Prynne, the minister Henry Burton, and the physician John Bastwick generated both contemporary and historiographical controversy, mostly concerned with their writings, their trial, and their punishment in London. This article turns attention to their unusual offshore incarceration on the islands of Jersey, Guernsey, and the Scillies between 1637 and 1640. It examines the material, social, and spiritual circumstances of island detention, and shows how the “puritan martyrs”1 coped with separation from the world. Though the discourse of martyrdom invited a compilation of miseries, invoking scriptural comparisons, this triumvirate experienced isolation that did not necessarily incapacitate them. Prynne savored the hospitality of his jailers, Burton smuggled out polemical tracts, and all three found inspiration in the book of Revelation, written by St. John while a prisoner on the island of Patmos. Each returned to the fray in the 1640s, writing works of witness and justification. Their experience of island imprisonment provided a model and an inspiration for dozens more who were similarly confined during the Protectorate and the Restoration.

The clay tobacco pipe is a “British thing” distinct to its time, but that is a partial provenance. Although many thousands have been unearthed in Britain or described in British archival records, the pipe is also evidence of early globalized trade, imperial ventures, and material translation across cultures. Its Britishness is contingent. This small relic accompanied complex enterprises where a new-style masculinity arose, new racial categories were framed, and a new sociability took root.

For those who by the end of the twentieth century came to be termed “survivors” of child sexual abuse, different genres and forms have been available to narrate and evaluate that abuse. This article explores the reception and practical results of such disclosures: the unpredictable effects of telling, and the strategies of containment, silencing, or disbelief that greeted disclosures. I make note of the ethical challenges of writing the history of child sexual abuse and conclude that twenty-first-century observers have been too ready to perceive much of the previous century as a period of profound silence in relation to child sexual abuse. At the same time, historical and sociological accounts have also been too ready to claim the final third of the twentieth century as a period of compulsive disclosure and fluency in constructing sexual selves. The history of child sexual abuse reveals significant barriers to disclosure in the 1970s and 1980s, despite new visibility of child sexual abuse in the media and through feminist sexual politics. Attention to such obstacles suggests the need to rethink narratives of “permissive” sexual change to acknowledge more fully the ongoing inequities and hierarchies in sexual candor and voice.

This article reappraises the debate about war prevention in the Bryce Group, the first study circle in Britain to devise a plan for the League of Nations. While scholars have tended to associate pro–league of nations activists with idealism, more focused accounts of the group have mostly depicted its postwar plan as a product of realistic thinking. Drawing on the underused manuscripts of the intellectual founders of the League of Nations, this study first reveals that their early thinking defies simple categorization. Not only was their war prevention plan realistic about the role of armed force but it also depended critically on idealistic expectations about the moral force of public opinion. This article shows that realistic and idealistic views could rarely be separated, and both developed the group's plan for peace, which incorporated the collective use of force as a crucial element of the postwar order. A mixture of the two views, however, hardly ensured consistencies and a balance between them. The paradox of collective security discussed by the group in 1914–15—that peace at least in part rested on the threat of force—was unresolved by the foundation of the League, and remains intact to this day.

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.

What better laboratory for an experiment in racial integration could there be than the nascent community of a new town? The architect Roy Gazzard posed this question in 1969, as he embarked on designing the new town of Killingworth in northern England. A self-proclaimed “social engineer,” Gazzard applied his experience as a town planner in colonial Uganda to shaping a new community in the postimperial metropole. Historians have long recognized the way that built forms were translated from metropole to colony, but the reverberations of colonial planning in the postwar European welfare states have received little attention. In this article I use intellectual biography to chart the trajectory of notions of community, spirituality, space, and place as they migrated from colonial Uganda to postimperial Britain. I focus on the career of Roy Gazzard, an outspoken social engineer and devout Christian, who hoped to use his colonial urban planning experience to counter what he saw as the increasingly secular and centrifugal forces in modern British society. An examination of letters, private paper, lectures, planning documents, and diagrams held in the newly opened archive of Gazzard's work illuminates the course of colonial expertise as it was refracted back into the postcolonial metropole.

Sir John Gladstone made a fortune as a Demerara sugar-planter and a key supporter of the British policy of amelioration in which slavery would be “improved” by making it more “humane.” Unlike resident planters in the British West Indies, who were firmly opposed to any alteration to the conditions of enslavement, and unlike abolitionists, who saw amelioration as a step toward abolition, Gladstone was a rare but influential metropolitan-based planter with an expansive imperial vision, prepared to work with British politicians to guarantee his investments in slavery through progressive slave reforms. This article intersects with recent historiography highlighting connections between metropole and colony but also insists on the influence of Demerara, including the effects of a large slave rebellion centered on Gladstone's estates (which illustrated that enslaved people were not happy with Gladstone's supposedly enlightened attitudes) on metropolitan sensibilities in the 1820s. Gladstone's strategies for an improved slavery, despite the contradictions inherent in championing such a policy while maintaining a fierce drive for profits, were a powerful counter to a renewed abolitionist thrust against slavery in the mid to late 1820s. Gladstone showed that that the logic of gradual emancipation still had force in imperial thinking in this decade.

This article re-examines existing narratives of British permissiveness and secularization through a discussion of the Church of England's role in shaping the 1967 Sexual Offences Act and ongoing debates on homosexuality in the 1970s. It suggests—contrary to existing narratives of religious decline and marginalization—that the views of church commentators, and the opinions of the Established Church more generally, remained of real cultural and political influence in the years leading up to the 1967 Act. Religious authorities were thus more responsible for the moral landscape of the permissive society than historians previously assumed. Nevertheless, British permissiveness was full of contradictions, not only in terms of the unexpected ways in which reform was shaped and brought about, but in terms of the constraints of the new moral settlement which decriminalized homosexual behavior within modest boundaries. Such contradictions were not confined to the opinions of religious commentators—they were the genuine essence of the position on which the moral consensus in favor of homosexual law reform was based. Through a consideration of the final collapse of this moral consensus in the years after 1970, this article reassesses questions of the nature and timing of British secularization. It considers how the Church of England, although anticipating and shaping earlier developments in approaches toward sexual morality, unintentionally left itself out in the cold in the years after 1970, as progressive opinion began to move away from the consensus on which the 1967 Act had been based.

In the late twentieth century, a new justification for the Church of England's establishment emerged: the church played an important social and political role in safeguarding the interests of other religious communities, including non-Christian ones. The development of this new vision of communal pluralism was shaped by two groups often seen as marginal in postwar British society: the royal family and missionaries. Elizabeth II and liberal evangelicals associated with the Church Missionary Society contributed to a new conception of religious pluralism centered on the integrity of the major world religions as responses to the divine. There were, therefore, impulses towards inclusion as well as exclusion in post-imperial British society. In its focus on religious communities, however, this communal pluralism risked overstating the homogeneity of religious groups and failing to protect individuals whose religious beliefs and practices differed from those of the mainstream of their religious communities.