During the decade before the American Revolution, the dissenting schoolmaster, James Burgh, became one of England's foremost propagandists for radical reform. All of the recent works on English radicalism and the ideological origins of the American Revolution recognize the important place of Burgh's magnum opus, the Political Disquisitions, in these movements. Burgh himself, however, has remained a shadowy figure. The process whereby he became a radical has not been explored; important nuances of his political philosophy are unknown; the scope of his radical actions are insufficiently appreciated; and the extent of his influence has not been fully evaluated. In short, there exist some rather incredible gaps in our understanding of the author of a work uniformly agreed to be the “standard source book for reform propagandists in the 1780's,” and “perhaps the most important political treatise which appeared in England in the first half of the reign of George III.” More importantly, in rectifying this situation it becomes obvious that Burgh's career raises some important questions about the character and development of late eighteenth-century English radicalism and suggests the need to qualify or modify certain current perceptions of that movement.

One of eleven children, Burgh was born in late 1714 in the rural Scottish community of Madderty, Perthshire. His father Andrew was minister of the parish Church of Scotland. His mother Margaret was an aunt of the famous Scottish historian William Robertson. Although almost nothing is known of James's youth, his writing indicates that his childhood was happy and the force of his parents' example was considerable.

This article explores the objects that were left as identifiers for the children abandoned to London's Foundling Hospital in the eighteenth century. Required by the hospital in order to permit a future reclaiming by a parent and to guard against a charge of infanticide, these tokens fulfilled an institutional priority. The token procedure, this article argues, resulted in a class of objects that can be aligned closely with elegy. Occasional objects, the tokens communicate maternal affection and a sense of dislocation. As distillations of grief and imaginative framings of loss, the foundling tokens constitute eighteenth-century artifacts of elegy.

In 1778, in response to news of the American alliance with France, the British government proposed a series of Catholic relief bills aimed at tolerating Catholicism in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Officials saw the legislation as a pragmatic response to a dramatically expanded war, but ordinary Britons were far less tolerant. They argued that the relief acts threatened to undermine a widely shared Protestant British patriotism that defined itself against Catholicism and France. Through an elaborate and well-connected popular print culture, Britons living in distant Atlantic communities, such as Kingston (Jamaica), Glasgow, Dublin, and New York City, publicly engaged in a radical brand of Protestant patriotism that began to question the very legitimacy of their own government. Events culminated in June 1780, with five days of violent, deadly rioting in the nation's capitol. Yet the Gordon Riots represent only the most famous example of this new, more zealous defense of Protestant Whig Britishness. In the British Caribbean and North America, unrelenting fears of French invasions and the perceived incompetence of the government mixed with an increasingly confrontational Protestant political culture to expose the fragile nature of British patriotism. In Scotland, anti-Catholic riots drove the country to near rebellion in early 1779, while in Ireland, Protestants and Catholics took advantage of this political instability to make demands for economic and political independence, culminating in the country's legislative autonomy in 1782. Ultimately, Catholic relief and the American alliance with France fundamentally altered how ordinary Britons viewed their government and, perhaps, laid the foundations for the far more radical political culture of the 1790s.

As part of protectionist policy in eighteenth-century Britain, imported silks were banned from being sold. Although it is known that bans on imported textiles were widely broken, there have been few systematic studies of the contraband trade in silks. Using customs' records, this article shows how smuggling supplied the demand for imported consumer goods. The illegal trade in silk was diverse, bringing in a variety of products from Asia and Europe. The evidence supports a market segmentation analysis of the different products and their consumers. The trade with Asia supplied “populuxe goods” in the form of handkerchiefs that appealed to a broad, middling customer base. These were brought into the country by the East India Company's trading network. By contrast, continental Europe provided contraband for the high-fashion market. These silks were distributed in more informal and personal ways—travelers and diplomats being the main offenders. The official response to these black markets differed, with silks from Europe posing particular problems for enforcement. Finally, this article provides a reassessment of the transnational influences—specifically the relative importance of Asia and Europe—on production and consumption of consumer goods in Britain.

This article explores how photographs were used as evidence during the early Northern Ireland Troubles. In particular, it focuses on the collection and use of images at the Scarman Tribunal, which investigated the disturbances of the summer of 1969, and the Widgery Tribunal, which sought to ascertain the sequence of events surrounding Bloody Sunday. Through close readings of how photographs were used at these two tribunals, the article shows how the existence of certain photographs served to anchor discussions of trajectories of violence around certain places and moments, illustrates how photographs taken for publication in newspapers were reread as evidential documents, and indicates the range of plausible truths each photograph was understood to provide. The study shows the importance of exploring the processes and mechanisms through which the state made sense of Northern Ireland to understand how causal accounts of conflict were produced and authenticated—and how, in turn, those explanatory regimes shaped the policies of the British state and the responses of local communities, and became embedded in historical writing on the Troubles.

The aftermath of the Second World War saw massive efforts to promote morale management across British industry. While these new discourses and industrial practices have often been explained in terms of the development of expert knowledge, this article places them at the center of the politics of social reconstruction. While the proper management of morale was linked to greater productivity, this article argues that it was often their assumed benefits regarding social cohesion and harmony that mattered most. It shows the ways in which government officials, management experts, and social scientists mobilized the perceived links that the war had forged among morale, collective sacrifice, and democratic citizenship and thus turned the workplace into a privileged site for the manufacture of consensus.

The English Civil War and Interregnum produced an astounding number of political tracts, pamphlets, and broadsides that have long fascinated historians and bibliographers. The lack of any effective control over pamphlet content after the elimination of the Court of Star Chamber in the summer of 1641, coupled with the use of printed propaganda by both the king and Parliament, combined to create a body of free-speaking literature that is unmatched in scope and daring. Extensive microfilming and cataloguing projects have made the pamphlets widely accessible to study, but have failed to answer basic questions about the nature of the pamphlets themselves. Fbr example, how soon after an event could a pamphlet be available? How many pamphlets were actually being printed (and when) as opposed to what was being entered in the registers of the Stationers' Company of London? In other words, what could a concerned citizen find for sale at the bookstalls on a given morning?

It is probably impossible to answer these questions for more than a fraction of the pamphlets. Yet, by examining what records do remain, it is possible to gain at least a sense of what the pamphleteers were capable of in serving a public avid for news.

The fact that the reform bill of 1867 was the work of a Conservative government has always seemed paradoxical, although it became clear soon after its passage that the bill was less of a paradox than supposed at first. Like the great Reform Act of 1832, the Act of 1867 produced profoundly conservative consequences, and they were conservative with a large as well as a small “c,” conservative in a narrowly partisan as well as a broadly social sense. The Act was certainly conservative in that it was an early concession to public opinion, or what Burke would have called a timely Reformation. It postponed further reform for nearly 20 years, and as G. D. H. Cole said ironically, that was a considerable achievement. In the general election of 1874 there were already signs that the bill had produced a great deal of solidly Conservative voting in the suburbs that ringed the large English borough constituencies. Moreover, when reform did come again in 1884 and 1885, it shifted constituency boundaries to take in middle class Conservative suburbs, and by creating electoral districts that were more or less equal, it shifted representation in the direction of the southeast, a commercial region dominated by light industry and therefore eminently Conservative. After 1885 there were many more constituencies, and they were smaller and cheaper to contest. It is very likely also that they were more homogeneously middle or working class, and that more Conservative politicians were now coming from the middle class and more Liberals from the working class. The electorate and the parliament which it influenced were moving in a recognizably modern direction after 1885, without having suffered the dire democratic fate envisioned in 1867.

This brief account of Tocqueville's ideas on aristocratic society and government in England is intended to serve as a sort of introduction to the longer papers that follow in this symposium. For some years the subject of English aristocratic power in the 19th century—especially in connection with the First and Second Reform Acts—has been much discussed. The discussion has dwelt on such questions as whether the aristocracy grew or declined in power, whether the Reform Acts made for a growth or loss of power, whether aristocratic leadership knew precisely what it was doing, and so on. So far this discussion has been carried on, so to speak, exclusively from the inside: that is, in terms of contemporary English events and ideas. In Tocqueville, who was both an Anglophile and an informed and penetrating observer of England from the 1830s until his death in 1859, we have a distinguished outsider. His ideas are always interesting for their own sake. For this symposium they have the added merit of touching on some of its central themes. On occasion, his ideas may strike the reader as exaggerated, ambiguous, even inconsistent, certainly without system. But they are usually suggestive, and merit the historian's serious attention.

Tocqueville's first impression of the English aristocracy was one of great power—a power rooted in its monopoly of landowner ship. As he saw it, the contrast between the French landowning aristocracy and the English was that between an aristocracy, on the one hand, that was land poor, and an aristocracy, on the other hand, that was richly endowed in land. Tocqueville also saw that if landed property did not always lead to economic power—since agriculture did not pay that well—it had a special quality, as compared to other forms of wealth, which was bound to lead to political power.

The theme of violence in Chartism has always attracted historians. To a large extent, although less so recently, they have accepted the Chartists' division of themselves into advocates of “moral” and “physical” force. Historical writers have found a ready supply of stirring quotes in Chartist speeches to illustrate the passions of a people aroused. And they have dwelt on the actual and potential demonstrations of violence with a lingering fascination. Yet, in all this discussion there has been little systematic examination of the phenomenon of violence in Chartism or any attempt to assess its relative degree of intensity. True enough, recent study by George Rudé on protest and crime in the first half of the nineteenth century has been illuminating, and Dorothy Thompson provided some stimulating analysis in the introduction to The Early Chartists. But no full scale study of the role of violence yet exists.

A helpful move in that direction was made recently in an article by Thomas Milton Kemnitz on the variety of Chartist strategies. Alongside the traditionally recognized policies of moral and physical force, Kemnitz argues that there was a third strategy of intimidation through “the language of menace.” Its chief practitioner, he suggests, was Feargus O'Connor, who modelled his Chartist agitation on experience with Catholic Emancipation and Parliamentary Reform. Although Kemnitz presents no explicit evidence that O'Connor consciously adopted a course which stood midway between moral and physical force, it is certainly demonstrable that the effects of O'Connor's actions were psychologically rather than physically coercive. Kemnitz assists us when he suggests that we think of Chartist pressure in terms of gradations of coercion rather than just two alternatives.

Recent writing on the English Reformation has been dominated by the so-called revisionists. While not all revisionist historians have advanced an identical interpretation of the Reformation, the broad outline of their argument is neatly summarized in the opening lines of J. J. Scarisbrick's The Reformation and the English People: “On the whole, English men and women did not want the Reformation and most of them were slow to accept it when it came.” While earlier writers argued that the Reformation period represented a sharp break in English history with a definitive rejection of Catholicism, revisionists have asserted that there was considerable continuity in the religious life of sixteenth-century men and women. The Catholic Church was strong and vital and commanded considerable loyalty among the laity, and changes to religious doctrine and practice generated considerable hostility. The demise of the Catholic Church in England was not assured, and the success of the Protestant Reformation was the result of a long straggle fought from above that was won only during the middle years of Elizabeth's reign.

The revisionist interpretation has commanded wide attention and support. It currently stands, in many respects, as the new orthodoxy of English Reformation historiography. Most historians now concur on the profound attachment of many men and women to the doctrine and worship of the Catholic Church and their reluctance to abandon them. Nevertheless, a number of questions about the revisionists' interpretation of the Reformation and English religiosity remain.

So says Keith Grahame Feiling with great wistfulness of the passing of the turbulent times surrounding the abortive Second Stuart Restoration and its impact on English and Irish social and political life in the opening page of his The Second Tory Party, 1714-1832.

Prior to this time the Irish philosopher and patriot George Berkeley, author of the celebrated Treatise on the Principles of Human Nature and the ingenious Querist was a member of that same circle and after the breaking of the circle charges of Jacobitism that had been levelled at the members of this brilliant and select group trotted behind his footsteps as he moved through the remaining decades of his life. The following pages are an attempt to explain Berkeley's connections with the Augustan Circle and to mitigate the criticisms brought against him by those opposed to the views of some of that group.

This article examines an imperial scandal concerning the treatment of patients in the lunatic asylum of Kingston, Jamaica, that highlighted the inadequacies of the imperial government. A significant moment in the development of colonial public health policy, this scandal also spoke to broader questions of postemancipation imperial governance. At the heart of the scandal was a debate about whether standards of treatment developed in Britain—symbolized by the image of the ideal asylum and the ideology of moral management—could and should be implemented in colonies. This debate was all the more fraught because the designation of moral management as the official protocol was recent, its implementation incomplete, and its underlying ideas contested. Nevertheless, despite the instability of these ideas, during the scandal and its aftermath, actors treated them as a monolithic package of standards before making them the definitive model for all colonial institutions. Indeed, the scandal helped further bolster moral management in Britain.

This self-promoting editorial in the Star in 1891 made a critical point: labor issues were becoming a standard feature in daily newspapers. Sweating, loopholes in factory legislation, and the famous Dock and Match Girls’ strikes were among the subjects found in the pages of papers such as the Star. This trend in reporting was part of the “New Journalism” that developed in England between the 1880s and 1914. In an attempt to cater to the tastes of mass audiences, there was a shift in emphasis from parliamentary and political news to sports, gossip, crime, and sex. Papers, for instance, reported on the brutal Jack the Ripper murders in the East End of London. New journalists and editors, like W. T. Stead and Thomas P. O’Connor, also produced interviews, exposes, and political editorials in order to influence public opinion and promote what Stead called “government by journalism.” Stead produced what has been called the most successful piece of scandal journalism of the nineteenth century, “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” which depicted young girls for sale to older men. Passage of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, which raised the age of consent for sex to sixteen, was one of its political consequences.

The social reality of the merchant community of King’s Lynn played an integral role in the formation of Margery Kempe’s self-image throughout her life. In her young-formative years, Lynn’s merchant elite imparted personal, commercial, ethical, and religious values. As the daughter of John Brunham, one of the most influential members of Lynn’s elite, the merchant community also provided Margery with status, security, comfort, and self-worth. Even in her later years as Margery formulated her holy self-image as she questioned, and eventually rejected, the role imposed on her by Lynn’s merchant culture as the daughter of Brunham and wife of John Kempe, she continued to identify herself through that culture. When asked by the mayor of Leicester in 1416 or 1417 to identify herself, Margery confidently replied, “Sir, I am of Lynn of Norfolk, a good man’s daughter of the same Lynn, who had been mayor five time of that worshipful borough and alderman also many years, and I have a good man, also a burgess of the said town, Lynn, as my husband.”