Seventeenth century England may be described by various adjectives, many of them indicating a divided society. This was a century of rebellion and reaction, of popery and puritanism, of factions and political parties, of Parliament and King, and finally, of Common Law and prerogative power. As the 1600's came to a close, the air of crisis gradually passed from the English scene to be replaced by the serenity, indeed the complacency, of the eighteenth century. But this newly stable England of squire and clergy rested on earlier achievements. Revolt succeeded and became accepted; popery was pushed, many hoped, into the farther reaches of hell; toleration was accorded trinitarian Protestants; patronage-based political parties began to dominate Parliament while Commons increasingly became the seat of power. But what happened in this period to prerogative monopoly, frequently utilized by both Tudor and Stuart monarchs to reward favorites at the expense of the economy? This neglected issue can be examined through attempts of the Royal African Company, chartered under the Restoration Stuarts, to enforce its patent.

New Aliens. By not being Others we define ourselves. We have always done so. In bad times the barbarians were at our gates; on more fortunate occasions we were at theirs. As we changed, so did our alter ego. A hundred-plus years ago in England, “we” were the upper classes, perhaps the middling lot aspiring upward. Primarily men. The Others populated the Empire, the East End of London, and even many social and geographic quarters closer to home. And if we were not men, we mostly pretended we wished we were. We wrote our history, as well as theirs. In time, growing familiarity transformed many strange aliens into us, an acquaintancy which led to multiculturalism, gender assertiveness, and subjectivism. In the process we found new aliens—the DWEM (dead white European males).

Some of us have maintained our moral righteousness throughout, whereas others have been skeptical all along. Having gone through a generation of a strong antipatriarchal/anticolonial writing, writers of different persuasions have come to reevaluate and pose challenges to the new edifice. Suspended between conflicting incredulous postmodernist sensibilities and a pragmatic sense that communication is maintained despite its announced demise, it seems an opportune moment to examine the new attitudes to writing (imperial) history in light of such questions as the role of agency within and against a dominant discourse, the place of morality in the writing of history, and the process of alienation mediated among competing victimizations.

As Stefan Collini remarks in a recent paper comparing twentieth-century French and British intellectuals, the sense that Britain has had no intellectuals has been a significant element in British national identity. Collini rightly observes, “Any discussion in contemporary Britain of the topic of ‘intellectuals’ is sooner or later touched by the cliché that the reality of the phenomenon, like the origins of the term, is located in Continental Europe, and that British society, whether for reasons of history, culture or national psychology, is marked by the absence of ‘intellectuals.’” One might add that a closely related assumption has been equally significant: namely, that while the British may have had some intellectuals, they have paid little attention to them. As Denis Brogan once said, in a typical observation on British culture, “We British don't take our intellectuals too seriously.”

The purpose of this article is to suggest an explanation for this feature of British national identity. As the recent literature on national identity tells us, a society's sense of national characteristics is culturally constructed; thus we should be skeptical about any assertions concerning either the absence of intellectuals or the lack of influence by intellectuals in British culture.

The narrative stories of nineteenth-century British history have been pulled seriously out of joint. At one time, not too long ago, the master narrative of nineteenth-century history seemed fairly straightforward. The nineteenth century raised the curtain on the modern age; its politics, economics, social relations, and culture presaged the world we know from our own times. If there was one organizing principle that the historiography privileged above all others, it was the idea of change. This was the century of growth and change—generally of a progressive kind. But new stories are now being told that force us to reconsider this picture. The spotlight is being directed toward themes of continuity that challenge the representation of the nineteenth century as the moment of modernity. It is this shift from change to continuity as the basic organizing principle of the field that is the starting point for this article.

The touch of continuity is everywhere. The traditional historiography rested secure in the conception that the nineteenth century was shaped and dominated by the fact of Britain as the first industrial nation. But current research has dissolved the Industrial Revolution into the long-term trends of economic growth; now the very name itself is jeopardized. Whereas the nineteenth century was once regarded as the age of the bourgeoisie, it is the landed elites and their various allies who now occupy center stage. The urban middle class has been returned to the provincial peripheries.

The Forced Loan of 1626–27 has traditionally been regarded as one of the milestones of early seventeenth-century politics. The great nineteenth-century Whig historian S. R. Gardiner saw it as the product of “new counsels” by which Charles I came increasingly to rely on the royal prerogative, and he depicted the opposition to this as a principled defense of Englishmen's liberties. Others writing in the same tradition have generally echoed these views. Thus the loan has been presented as the climax to a first stage of struggle between “Court” and “Country” or as a staging post on the “high road to Civil War.” Latterly, however, this verdict has come into question.

With the work of “localist” and “revisionist” historians we have come to appreciate more clearly the extent of attachment to the local community and the continual striving toward consensus in relations between king and subject. This has led to a general revaluation of what have traditionally been regarded as clashes of principle. Local historians have stressed that opposition to taxes generally owed far more to backsliding and provincial inertia than to any concern for constitutional propriety. And a greater understanding of the problems of administration—particularly in wartime—has led to a recognition that government decision making was often a reflex action, prompted by the immediate need to make ends meet. These insights have been incorporated into the work of Conrad Russell, who has provided the most recent assessment of the loan.

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.

Ladies who kept private schools attended by young ladies are familiar figures in Regency and Victorian novels: ridiculous ladies, such as Miss Pinkerton, who kept a rather elegant establishment in Vanity Fair, sensible ladies like Mrs. Goddard, whose more modest school was attended by Jane Austen's Emma; scheming ladies such as Mrs. Kirkpatrick, who set her cap for Molly Gibson's father in Mrs. Gaskell's Wives and Daughters. Memorable mostly for their personal quirks, their qualities of character, these ladies all fit comfortably in the framework of the domestic drama.

Although sport and recreation are vital segments of human life and culture, they have generally been neglected by social historians. Serious scholars still know too little about these important subjects even in England, where a spectacular sports explosion occurred during the nineteenth century. Cricket is perhaps the most English of all games and has long been regarded as an important national symbol. Any careful study of it is therefore likely to throw useful light on the English mores and character. By focusing on such complex themes as status, class-distinctions, social mobility, paternalism, and snobbery, this paper will try to fit Victorian county cricket into a broader socio-cultural context. This study of amateurs and professionals will attempt to provide some insights not only into the basic economics of Victorian cricket (which deserve more attention than they have received hitherto), but also into the intricate relationships between masters and servants and the interesting English attitudes towards professionalism in sport.

Betting, corruption, and professionalism had been integral elements in English cricket during the Hanoverian age. The Victorians discarded the first two and kept the third, while for a long time trying to exclude all three from soccer. In the end, they failed and had to accept professionalism in Association football in 1885. Curiously, none of this soul-searching occurred in cricket where professionalism was always quite simply regarded as a necessary evil. First class cricket, in fact, sprang directly out of professionalism. It was the touring professionals who taught the Victorians how to play as well as sell the game. Without the work of the All England and United Elevens during 1845-70, county cricket might never have evolved as it did.

In 1763 few Europeans doubted the enormous importance of their Caribbean possessions, a fact indicated by the ready willingness of the French to cede Canada in order to regain British-occupied Martinique. The British were no different, and in the West Indies they were in the process of establishing a New World aristocracy whose riches were based upon African slavery and the production of tropical crops. The British prized their Caribbean territories, especially since the sugar revolution that had begun during the mid-seventeenth century first in Barbados where the crop had become dominant by 1660 and then in Jamaica. British planters continued their success in the Leeward Island settlements of Antigua, St. Christopher, Nevis, and Montserrat, where entrepreneurs converted their lands to sugar cane by the early 1700s. West Indian planters became influential within the British Empire, and exercised profound social, political, and economic importance in the metropolis. By the eighteenth century they were the richest colonists within the empire; they were landed aristocrats who could have vied in wealth and prestige with their counterparts in Britain.

The role of women in revolutions has recently excited a good deal of scholarly interest. Innovative studies have appeared on women in the English Civil War, the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution that have not only rescued women from oblivion but also modified and enlarged understanding of the revolutions themselves. But for the English Revolution of 1688-89 there has been, aside from biographical studies of the two future queens, Mary and Anne, very little published work on the role of women. My purpose is to remedy that situation, and to broaden the inquiry by addressing four major questions: (1) what role did women from all social groups, lower, middle, aristocratic and royal, play in the Revolution: (2) why, in view of customary restraints, did they enter the public arena; (3) what influence did they have on the Glorious Revolution; and (4) what influence did the Revolution have on women? Underlying these queries is the basic question of what are the contextual conditions that encourage or even make possible women's participation in revolutions?

Such a topic requires changes in the questions customarily used in studying political history. If politics is defined in traditional terms simply as the competition for and exercise of power by individuals through their office, voting, and decision making, then there is nothing to say about women in the Glorious Revolution. Women, whatever their social status, had no direct access to the levers of conventionally-defined politics. They did not vote, sit in either house of Parliament, or hold office on any level of government, unless they were queens. In a predominantly patriarchal society, females, except for widows, were customarily subordinate to their fathers or husbands and confined to the sphere of the family and household.

By its beauty and grace the sailing ship invites that nostalgic sentimentality often bestowed upon relics of the past. Visitors who notice the inscription on the Cutty Sark at Greenwich are asked to share this veneration: “Here to commemorate an era the Cutty Sark has been preserved as a tribute to the ships and men of the merchant navy in the days of sail. They mark our passage as a race of men/ Earth will not see such ships as these again.” The image of the “glorious” last days of sail is largely the creation of retired seamen-writers. In an unfinished essay written just before his death in 1924, Joseph Conrad summarizes the era of the sailing ship with typical nostalgia:

“Doom” without “decadence” — like the death of a beautiful woman in her prime — is the seaman-writer's usual elegy for the sailing ship.

The Free Port Act of 1766 was an important reform in British political economy during the so-called imperial crisis between the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) and the American Revolution (1775–1783). In an explicit break from the letter if not the spirit of the Navigation Acts, the act opened six British ports in the West Indies (two in Dominica and four in Jamaica) to foreign merchants trading in a highly regulated number of goods subject to various duties. Largely understudied, this legislation has been characterized in most previous work on the subject as a fundamental break from British mercantile policies and meant to benefit North American colonial merchants. This article proposes a different interpretation. Based on the wider context of other imperial free port models, the loss of conquests such as French Guadeloupe and Martinique and Spanish Havana in the 1763 Paris Peace Treaty, a postwar downturn in Anglo-Spanish trade, and convincing testimonies by merchants and colonial observers, policy makers in London conceived of free ports primarily as a means of extending Britain's commercial empire. The free port system was designed to ruin the rival Dutch trade economically and shackle Spanish and French colonists to Britain's mercantile, manufacturing, and slaving economies. The reform marks a key moment in the evolution of British free trade imperial designs that became prevalent in the nineteenth century and beyond.

To its late-Victorian participants, London “Society” was one of those abstractions, like “the young,” that deteriorated with each passing generation. For decades chroniclers of Britain's clannish ruling circles had lamented the diminishing refinement, morals, and breeding of those highest sections of elite society that migrated to the capital each spring for the parliamentary and social “season.” Thus, when the press, with many contributors from the aristocracy itself, launched a new campaign against London Society in the last years of Victoria's reign, the charges had a familiar ring. Society was expanding alarmingly, abandoning its standards, worshipping notoriety and opulence, and abdicating serious responsibilities in the pursuit of frivolous amusement. If the criticisms contained few surprises, the intensity of the alarm was unprecedented. Beginning in 1874, with The Way We Live Now, Anthony Trollope's novel of a greedy and credulous beau monde, and continuing through a series of journal articles bearing titles such as “The New Society,” “The Deterioration of English Society,” “The Sins of Society,” and “The Enlargement of London Society,” critics subjected the aristocratic elites and the informal institutions of the London season to fierce scrutiny and nearly universal diagnosis of advanced illness.

Looking back on his tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty from 1771 to 1782, Lord Sandwich considered that one of his most important accomplishments was the introduction into the royal dockyards of task work for shipwrights — “a matter very little known in the world, but the only material improvement … which will enable us to build and repair a much larger number of ships.” Task work had long been universal in private shipyards, and its use in the navy's own yards was discussed at intervals for eighty years at least before its adoption in 1775. But opposition to the method — from the Navy Board and the shipwrights and their officers — was entrenched. Arguments against it, having once prevailed, afterwards were seemingly invincible, their mere invocation being enough to stop further consideration. The obstacles after so long a time might have been insuperable to one less confident and determined than Sandwich. Indeed, the innovation when it was made produced a strike of shipwrights which forced its partial abandonment before the scheme had properly been tried.

Task workers, instead of being employed for a fixed daily wage with an additional allowance for overtime, were paid according to the amount of work actually performed, the ship itself being divided into parts, for each of which an over-all labor price was established and apportioned equally among the men. The advantages of the method appear on the face of it overwhelming. The shipwrights were encouraged to work steadily and rapidly in order to increase their earnings, which thus were greater than those of the day workers.

We are so used to the “revisionist” account of the English Reformation as a story of Protestant failure and of (relative) Catholic success that it is easy to forget how late sixteenth-century English Catholicism was once viewed by scholars not as an innocent parish pastime or a culturally conservative reaction to puritan evangelical excess. In the older narratives of the religious struggle in early modern England, historians recounted a fierce battle—the papal excommunication of Queen Elizabeth, the endless plotting to promote the dynastic claim of Mary Stuart, and foreign enterprises to invade the realm and put paid to the Tudors. Here the politics of disagreement about religion engendered a fair measure of violence on the part of the state toward some of its Catholic subjects, and this confrontation has come down to us most vividly through the martyrological narratives in which leading Catholic clerics described the sufferings of the faithful. Yet these narratives were themselves deliberately depoliticized. The context of the state's proceedings was largely cut away, and the actions and opinions of the Catholic martyrs that so irritated the regime were glossed over as part of an incisive rhetorical statement that Catholics died for their religion, not for any treasonable inclinations on their part. This was a brilliant polemical reply to the official propaganda that described Roman Catholic Englishmen as not merely ungodly but a lethal threat to the security of the state. In the regime's opinion, and in the antipopish canon that developed at this time, they were a fifth column of dissent set fair to exploit and assist foreign attempts to unseat the Tudor regime. The language of antipopery rode continually on a fear of domestic plots and schemes to meddle in the settlement of religion and the succession to the throne.

The noun “radical” as applied to reformers who held advanced views came into general use in the early nineteenth century. It was at first used in a derogatory sense, denoting, as Walter Scott wrote in 1819, “a set of blackguards.” However, it was taken up by the subjects of the intended abuse and quickly acquired a certain respectability—so much so that by 1830 one middle-class radical was recording that “the term Radical once employed as a name of low reproach, has found its way into high places, and is gone forth as the title of a class who glory in their designation.” Reformers from across the political spectrum were soon being designated “radical,” as can be seen from the application of the term to individuals as diverse in outlook as Lord Durham, Richard Oastler, and Bronterre O'Brien.

This eclecticism has led historians to pronounce the concept useless as a tool of historical analysis. If any tradition at all emerges from studies of English radicalism, then it is a tradition of liberal humanitarianism, a pattern of reform that is nonclass and nonideological. At best “radical” retains its original adjectival power of describing a root-and-branch reformer, an individual who worked to change quite substantially existing economic, political, or social structures by word or deed. But the evident contradictions and discontinuities in the so-called “radical tradition” have made historians balk at making further claims than these. This essay, however, is a provisional attempt to shift the focus away from the personalities and the specificities of reform movements in their peculiar conjunctural moments to the operation of radicalism as a powerful ideology that, far from being nonclass and nonideological and despite (or even possibly because of) its internal contradictions, has profoundly influenced class development and class relations.