During the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, English men and women replaced their existing oral and object-based arithmetical practices with literate practices based on Arabic numerals. While the adoption of Arabic numerals was incentivized by continental commercial developments, this article argues that England's increasing literacy rates and the development of vernacular arithmetic textbooks enabled changing arithmetical practices. By exploring the qualities of printed books, analyzing marginalia in arithmetic textbooks, and examining changing educational advertisements and curricula over time, we can demonstrate the importance of literacy and literature to early modern arithmetical education.

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 examines the Royal Navy's implementation between 1690 and 1710 of new and publicly controversial policies, grounded in quantitative technologies, to manage the multitude of English seamen. These policies and their promotion can be profitably interpreted using the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics. Naval biopolitics meant mobilizing and promoting political arithmetic in the service of the fiscal-naval state. Thus, naval biopolitics was both a new model of statecraft and a form of state publicity, that is, a genre of works that strove to influence government policy and public opinion by promoting projects that a polemicist argued the state could and should undertake to better govern its subjects. The directives, legislation, and pamphlet literature of naval biopolitics projected a fiscal-naval state capable of counting, tracking, and mobilizing the national stock of seamen onto its ships in a predictable, salubrious, and, most crucially, orderly fashion. However, English naval biopolitics endured much longer as a genre of state propaganda than as a method of mobilizing the population of seamen onto ships.

This article challenges the dominant historical paradigms used to analyze imperial plant and animal transfers by examining the role of fodder crops in early colonial development in New South Wales and the Cape of Good Hope. In Alfred Crosby's enduring formulation of ecological imperialism—that is, the ecological transformation of temperate colonies of settlement by European plants, animals, and pathogens—was a largely independent process. To Crosby's critics, his grand narrative fails to acknowledge the technocratic management of plant and animal transfers on the part of increasingly long-armed colonial states from the mid-nineteenth century. Yet neither approach can adequately explain the period between the decline of Britain's Atlantic empire in the 1780s and the rise of its global empire in the 1830s, a period dominated by an aggressive ethos of agrarian improvement but lacking the institutional teeth of a more evolved imperial state. Traveling fodder crops link these embryonic antipodean colonies to the luminaries of the Agricultural Revolution in Britain. The attempt to transfer fodder-centric mixed husbandry to these colonies points to an emerging coalition of imperial ambition and scientific expertise in the late eighteenth-century British Empire.

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) is well known as one of the earliest and most vociferous critics of Benthamite utilitarianism. However, Carlyle understood Benthamism as the culmination of a much longer eighteenth-century tradition of Epicurean thought. Having been an enthusiastic reader of David Hume during his youth, Carlyle later turned against him, waging an increasingly violent polemic against all forms of Epicureanism. In these later works, Carlyle not only rejected the pursuit of “pleasure” as an appropriate end for the life of the individual, but also took umbrage with Epicurean accounts of sociability as the philosophical underpinnings of laissez-faire, representative democracy, and “public opinion.” For Carlyle, self-interest, no matter how “enlightened,” balanced, or channeled by institutions, could never provide a stable foundation for a political community. Carlyle's contemporaries were aware that his work was intended as an attack on the Epicurean tradition. When John Stuart Mill attempted to defend Epicureanism against Carlyle, several of the latter's disciples and sympathizers responded by extending Carlyle's earlier censures on Epicureanism.

The Scottish Reformation Society's The Bulwark (1851–present) was the Victorian era's most influential anti-Catholic periodical, a reputation based on its self-proclaimed devotion to “facts.” Attempting to counter a unified Catholic Church in a period of pronounced intra-Protestant conflict, the Bulwark sought to root religious controversy in the increasingly popular phenomenon of statistical inquiry. The Bulwark’s obsession with collating and interpreting religion-based numbers was unique not for its existence, but for its sheer extent. It thus exemplifies how “official” statistical documents, methods, and conclusions were translated into the concerns of popular religious culture. In particular, the Bulwark’s ongoing surveys of Catholicism's “progress,” intended to frighten Protestants into action, weaponized statistical discourses that were used in more measured fashion elsewhere. To that end, the Bulwark argued that only Protestants had the right mindset to put religious statistics into a proper explanatory framework, whereas Catholics manipulated their own data for dishonest rhetorical purposes that the Bulwark disclaimed. The Bulwark’s statistical turn, which bypassed the sectarianism of its theological articles, positioned it as a voice uniting the interests of all Protestant readers against Parliament's dangerously tolerant brand of liberalism.

This article takes an unexplored popular debate from the 1860s over the role of dueling in regulating gentlemanly conduct as the starting point to examine the relationship between elite Victorian masculinities and interpersonal violence. In the absence of a meaningful replacement for dueling and other ritualized acts meant to defend personal honor, multiple modes of often conflicting masculinities became available to genteel men in the middle of the nineteenth century. Considering the security fears of the period––European and imperial, real and imagined––the article illustrates how pacific and martial masculine identities coexisted in a shifting and uneasy balance. The professional character of the enlarging gentlemanly classes and the increased importance of men's domestic identities––trends often aligned with hegemonic masculinity––played an ambivalent role in popular attitudes to interpersonal violence. The cultural history of dueling can thus inform a multifaceted approach toward gender, class, and violence in modern Britain.