Britons and British subjects with family members deeply involved in the transatlantic economy were an important feature of University life. These students, who grew in number due the increasing profits of the slave economy and the underdeveloped state of tertiary education in the colonies, were accepted and nurtured by fellows and masters who, in many cases, owned plantations, held investments in the slave trade, or had family members serving as governors in the North American colonies. In following the experiences of these students, the chapter details the lives and struggles of undergraduates, particularly those who traveled abroad to Cambridge, and the emotional and personal bonds that fellows and their young charges developed. The chapter is a reminder that, when considering institutional connections to enslavement, political economy was but one side of the story – the emotional, social, and cultural bonds between the sons of enslavers and their fellow Britons were also integral.

Following the colonisation of Ireland, North America, and the Caribbean, British society, politics, and the economy were forever transformed by the growing transatlantic empire. The University of Cambridge was intimately connected to that Atlantic world. The introduction provides context on Cambridge’s history and the long-term development of racial slavery, examining how enslavement and the plantation economy were of incredible significance to British life from the beginning of the seventeenth century through to the end of the American Civil War and beyond. More than a history of plantation owners purchasing stately homes or consumers eagerly consuming sugar, a case study of Cambridge’s town and gown communities highlights the vast spectrum of connections, ties, and interests that many Britons held to a slave empire.

Venturing beyond Britain’s established railway lines, this chapter investigates fictional entanglements with late-nineteenth-century ambitions to build a railway tunnel between England and France. It explores debates surrounding the proposed Channel Railway (1880–82), showing how fiction exacerbated fears about what (other than trains, passengers, and freight) such a line might carry. Thomas Hardy’s 1881 novel A Laodicean depictstransport and communications infrastructures enabling and impeding cross-Channel understanding. By linking A Laodicean to the Channel railway debates, this chapter reveals the political stakes of connection in a text that has attracted critical attention for its treatment of telegraphy and the postal service. Hardy’s rich railway soundscape of subterranean rumblings and distant disturbances taps into late nineteenth-century preoccupations with the reverberative qualities of industrial architecture. A by-product of the machine ensemble, reverberation could be both heard and felt. In this chapter, reverberation becomes evidence of the leakiness of a supposedly rational system, and with errant sounds working against the railway’s vector-like ideal.

This chapter examines migration in Late Antiquity, focusing on the movement of peoples and its role in shaping the post-Roman world. It challenges traditional narratives of mass invasions, instead emphasising the complexity of migration processes and their varied effects on political, social and cultural transformations. The chapter draws on archaeological evidence, including settlement patterns, burial practices and material culture, alongside historical sources such as chronicles. It highlights key migration episodes, including the movements of the Goths, Anglo-Saxons and Slavs, analysing how their settlements and artefacts reflect patterns of mobility, integration and adaptation. The chapter also considers new methodologies, such as isotope and aDNA analysis, to refine our understanding of ancient migrations. Central is the notion that migration was not always a violent invasion but often a gradual, negotiated process. While some groups displaced populations, others integrated with existing societies. The chapter stresses that the scale and nature of migration varied and calls for an interdisciplinary approach, combining archaeology, history and scientific methods, to better assess the role of migration in the transition from the Roman world to medieval Europe.

The fragmentation of the European art market after the First World War resulted not only from the war itself but also from deliberate legislative choices. Post-1918 legislation was enacted in a climate of emergency, influenced by the imperative to generate fiscal revenue and protect art. Paris’s decline as an art hub was exacerbated by well-meaning but ill-conceived export and tax regulations, hindering its ability to regain pre-war prominence. Fears of economic and political seizure influenced Weimar policymakers, worsening German isolation. In contrast, Britain opted for minimal postwar intervention. These legislative approaches reflected different economic trajectories as much as they did postwar mentalities. The state’s attempt to protect art, extract profit from it, and avoid economic and cultural expropriation was a symptom of postwar nationalisation. It dealt the final blow to an already weakened European auction system.

The First World War marked a shift from liberalism and internationalism to a period characterised by nationalisation, ethnicisation of citizenship, and economic protectionism. The art market’s history aligns with these narratives, highlighting the fragmentation of a European trade zone and the disruption of a transnational trade equilibrium. The war prompted significant structural transformations in these markets, with Germany seeing a surge in art investment as a hedge against inflation. In Britain, art sales were driven by tax obligations and national service investments. Conversely, the French market struggled, facing stagnation and a focus on preserving existing collections due to the threat of destruction. Neutral countries such as the Netherlands and Switzerland maintained stable art markets, fostering avant-garde movements and serving as hubs for buyers and sellers. The year 1914 catalysed structural transformations in these markets, highlighting how modern warfare altered art’s perception, value, and trade.

In this chapter, we argue that while it has often been suggested that utility models are a product of late nineteenth-century German thinking and that they are foreign to the United Kingdom, utility model protection was first introduced to the United Kingdom in the Utility Designs Act 1843. As such, it is clear that utility model protection has a long established (albeit somewhat tarnished) pedigree in British law and that utility model protection came into force in the United Kingdom some fifty years before its German counterpart. In this chapter we highlight the key features of the Utility Designs Act 1843, the way the Act was received, and speculate on the reasons why the Act was forgotten

In this chapter, my aim is to characterize settlement patterns and social organization from the end of the second century BC to the middle of the first century AD in the areas of Britain which became the Roman Province of Britannia. The aim is not to provide a detailed account of the archaeology of the period, for it is already the subject of a considerable and growing specialist literature which deserves a fuller synthesis than space here allows. Instead the salient characteristics are discussed and themes introduced which are to be taken up in the remainder of this volume. These themes are particularly related to the development of the agricultural economy and its productive capacity; regional variations in the settlement pattern, and thus perhaps social formation; and the organization of social power. These aspects will be treated in more detail than has been customary in recent studies of Roman Britain, as to understand its Romanization we must first understand what pre-Roman Britain was like.

Focusing on the efforts to recover, repatriate, and rebury thousands of fallen soldiers from the China-Burma-India Theater, this chapter analyzes how the disparate treatment of American bodies and Chinese bodies defined the Sino-American relations in the immediate postwar period. The first part of this chapter examines how well-established institutions, ambulant resources, and cooperative regimes enabled US servicemen to salvage the bodies of American soldiers from distant theaters of war to reinter them in national and private cemeteries on American soil. The second part addresses the struggle of the Chinese government in Nanjing, the Chinese military command in India, and the Chinese communities in Burma to provide proper burials for the dead of the Nationalist expeditionary forces. China lacked the formal institutions and infrastructure to manage war graves in foreign territories, and failed to garner the support of local authorities. When the political chaos of the Chinese Civil War led to the cessation of funding from the Nationalist government, the graves of Chinese soldiers in India and Burma fell into oblivion.

The jurisdictional complexity and layered sovereignty of empires converted struggles over rights – their definition, deployment, and distribution – into contests over authority. This chapter examines the close relationship between authority and rights, together with the emergence of variegated rights regimes, in the British, Spanish, and Russian empires. All three empires relied on long-standing routines for assigning different sets of rights to different categories of subjects. This approach to the history of rights is different from the familiar focus on the circulation of ideas about natural or universal rights. The chapter examines the politics of rights in relation to imperial claims of protection over various groups and in coerced labor regimes. It then turns to the question of how conflicts over rights inside empires influenced global stratification. The right to be sovereign – the right to give rights, to order them, and to protect them – emerged in the long nineteenth century as a capacity possessed and decided by European imperial powers.