This short article describes the content and impact of the files related to the Watson Commission, a commission of enquiry empowered by British colonial government officials to investigate the causes and consequences of the riots that rocked the city of Accra (Gold Coast Colony) in 1948. They comprise a collection of reports and testimonies from a wide range of people from across the social, economic, and political spectrum of the colonial Gold Coast. In a colonial archive that often privileges the voices of British government officials, technocrats, and African politicians, this collection of 32 files represents an unprecedented insight into the lived experience of a wide range of individuals and communities, and documents the processes that led to independence for the nation-state of Ghana.

This essay inaugurates One British Archive, a new series in the Journal of British Studies. This short essay describes the little-known archive, libraries, and museum of Stonyhurst College in England. Stonyhurst represents a continuation of the College of St Omers, a Catholic institution started in continental Europe in the sixteenth century, when Catholics were routinely prosecuted in England. This transnational quality of British expatriate communities in Europe is reflected in the collections. The modern preparatory school contains not only the records of St Omers but also the papers and books of numerous local families and school children that passed through its doors. The current archive, libraries, and museum are thus a treasure trove for anyone pursuing studies into Catholicism, book history, British education, and more.

This article discusses the archives of Westbourne Park Baptist Church in London and its world-renowned pastor in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Dr. John Clifford. As leader of the National Passive Resistance League, the fiery Clifford came to be synonymous with the Nonconformist conscience at the height of its political influence in the early twentieth century. The article foregrounds the tension between what I call archival intimacy and archival precarity, while analyzing the power of seeing the diverse photographs in this collection as evidence of the gendered politics of passive resistance in the early twentieth century. Some— though not all—of the collection that I consulted at Westbourne Park Baptist Church in 2016 has now been transferred to the Angus Library, Regent's Park College, Oxford.

The English, and later British, settlement of Bencoolen was first established in 1685 and remained in British hands, barring French wartime occupation, until 1825, when it was handed over to the Dutch in a territorial exchange. Bencoolen was even elevated to the status of a Presidency in the second half of the eighteenth century. Why did the English East India Company and British officials maintain a presence in Bencoolen for so long? This article makes the case that multiple, overlapping visions of commercial and agrarian transformation, including projects focused on pepper and sugar cultivation, sustained British efforts to govern and maintain Bencoolen as part of a larger, trans-oceanic network of territories. Such visions of Bencoolen's economic and imperial potential evolved in sync with equally persistent concerns about Bencoolen's failure to become a thriving settlement. Yet even amid constant anxieties about producing enough pepper, maintaining a sizeable population, and generating sufficient revenue, numerous British imperial agents located in London and Calcutta as well as Sumatra argued over whether the settlement was likely to remain a permanent failure and how the problems that dogged it might be resolved. Thus, even in moments when Bencoolen appeared to be a failed outpost on the periphery of a growing British Empire, its success or lack thereof commanded the attention of British ministers and East India Company servants. In calling for Bencoolen's elevation, subordination, or even abolition as a settlement, Britons contributed to a wide-ranging discussion of what constituted a valuable colony and, indeed, empire.

This article considers the Clive Memorial Fund and the campaigns surrounding proposed statues to Robert Clive in London and Calcutta between 1907 and 1912. The author argues that this campaign was an attempt to glorify Clive's actions, focused on the battle of Plassey and its aftermath, as foundation stones for the Indian Empire. The statues were an anxious attempt to situate Britain as a natural part of Indian history, but the campaign instead provoked a developing Indian counternarrative around resistance to colonial rule, particularly from newspapers in Bengal. Although the fund garnered support in Britain, it was greeted in India with official irritation and widespread Indian opposition, highlighting the importance of considering imperial statues in their imperial frame. This reaction, demonizing Clive's treachery and praising his opponent, Siraj-ud-Daula, the nawab of Bengal, was indicative of the place of history in both Bengali nationalism and imperial self-identity. Using newspapers in Britain and Bengal and the correspondence of the Clive Memorial Committee, the author examines the competing narratives of history that emerged in the campaigns around the fund.

Scholars of late have come to reevaluate and appreciate the achievements of merchant companies that fostered commercial networks and established new global trade routes. This research would seem to lend support to historians who have characterized early seventeenth-century calls for “free trade” as mere sloganeering driven by provincial merchants suspicious of the London-dominated corporations. This article challenges this view and argues that free trade ideas had deep roots in early modern political culture. It traces the origins of these ideas to protests in the sixteenth century and shows how a broad coalition of interests drew upon ideas of property rights and the ancient constitution to challenge the new companies. So compelling were free trade arguments that they became a commonplace in the economic debates of an emerging public sphere. A reconsideration of the free trade campaign that is attentive to interactions and negotiations between the Privy Council, Parliament, and the public highlights the ability of the early modern state before the 1630s to readjust the political economy of the commonwealth.

A conceptual revision occurred at the heart of anarchist theory between the end of the nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. As anarchist thinkers grappled with a state transformed beyond recognition by technological change, they reassessed their critique of state power and the rhetorical methods used to expose its inherent violence. Where nineteenth-century anarchists favored organic metaphors to emphasize the monstrosity of the state, twentieth-century anarchists tended to adopt a set of mechanical metaphors. This change focused attention on the idea of technocracy, and informed a more comprehensive assessment of the state's activities. This article analyses this innovation in anarchist political thought, before tracing it through to Herbert Read's critical appraisal of C. P. Snow's influential lecture “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” and Snow's response to Read. Their debate, in which Read challenged Snow's argument that the pursuit of technological and political modernization was essential to maintain the nation's international role and address the social and economic challenges of the mid-century, was a contest for Britain's future. Drawing on his anarchism, Read saw such ideas as an existential threat, with the unthinking promotion of a technological “revolution” imperiling “the tender shoots of all that is human.” Contextualizing Read in his anarchist intellectual milieu, this article recovers a neglected voice in British intellectual and cultural history, the complexities of an overlooked political tradition, and a radical vision of Britain's future that questioned the dominant assumptions of the age.

First used in 1980, “new romantics” was a term applied to describe a British youth culture recognized initially for its sartorial extravagance and penchant for electronic music. Closely associated with the Blitz nightclub in London's Covent Garden (as well as milieus elsewhere in the UK), new romantics appeared to signal a break from the prescribed aesthetics and sensibilities of punk, rejecting angry oppositionism for glamour and aspiration. In response, cultural commentators have often sought to establish connections between new romantism and the advent of Thatcherism and “the 1980s.” This article challenges such an interpretation, offering a more complex analysis of new romanticism rooted in nascent readings of postmodernism. It also shifts our understandings of the periodization of postwar British history and the concept of “popular individualism,” arguing that youth culture provides invaluable insight both to broader processes of sociocultural change and to the construction of the (post)modern self.

In the first half of the seventeenth century, several foreign plantations were established on wetlands drained during a wave of ambitious state-led projects across eastern England. The lines of solidarity and separation forged by this little-known episode in the history of migration pose important questions about how emergent notions of nationhood intersected with local and transnational, religious and economic communities. This article investigates the causes and consequences of the settlement of Calvinist refugees on drained commons in Hatfield Level. It argues that fen plantation expands understanding of the relationship between English agricultural improvement and imperial expansion in the British Atlantic, as migrant communities acted in the service of empires and states while forging transnational Protestant networks. As Calvinists and cultivators, however, the settlers were met with hostility in England. While the crown encouraged foreign plantation as a source of national prosperity, Laudian church authorities identified it as a threat to religious conformity, the state, and society, muddying depictions of English governors as guarantors of refugee rights. Local efforts to violently expel settlers from Hatfield Level, meanwhile, were rooted in fen commoners’ defense of customary rights, as parallel communities sought to enact rival environmental and economic models. The settler community interpreted these experiences through the lens of transnational Protestant adversity, entangling their quest for religious freedoms with their remit as fen improvers. Moving beyond dichotomous arguments about xenophobia, this article traces the transnational imaginaries, national visions, and emplaced processes through which collective identities and their sharp edges were constituted in early modern England.

As in many areas of pre-Reformation devotion, the dead were a conspicuous presence in English religious guilds of all sizes. Members joined in the expectation that the guild would say prayers and perform masses for their souls after death, and previous members and benefactors would be commemorated with regularity. This article, however, investigates a new avenue of the fraternal relationship with the dead: the practice of enrolling people after their death. Doing so shifts the paradigm of our understanding of the multidimensional functions of pre-Reformation society, commemoration, and guilds, privileging the experiences of both the dead and living equally, while highlighting the interplay of the spiritual and socioeconomic. Taking the extensive membership records of England's “great” guilds as its basis, this article reveals that postmortem enrollment was a practice both common and widespread, and it addresses questions of practicalities and motivations. As such, the richness of commemoration in late medieval society is demonstrated, and the importance of postmortem membership brought to the fore.

This article asks why many divines pushed for reform of the Church of England's use of excommunication after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. In response, it argues that, worried by what they perceived as widespread moral decline and the threat posed by the floodgates of Protestant dissent opened up by the Toleration Act of 1689, clergy became concerned that sentences such as excommunication were ineffective and the church would soon cease to be the chief arbiter of certain offenses. In contrast to existing historiography, this article suggests that the urge for reform was not confined to any particular section of the church. Instead, the reform of excommunication was a shared cause, although there was sharp disagreement about how to pursue it. However, despite enthusiasm for change, efforts for reform floundered because of partisan conflict and the legacy of the Tudor Reformation that continued to shape religious life in England well into the later Stuart period. Examining the debate about excommunication allows us to revise of our understandings of religion and politics in the last decades of the Stuart dynasty and further develop important concepts such as the long Reformation.

This article examines the rise of a culture of local petitioning, through which growing numbers of ordinary people sought to win the support of state authorities through collective claims to represent the “voice of the people” at the local level. These participatory, subscriptional practices were an essential component in the intensification of popular politics in the seventeenth century. The analysis focuses on over 3,800 manuscript petitions submitted to the magistrates across fifteen jurisdictions with “sessions of the peace” in England, with nearly 1,000 dating from before 1640. Over the course of the early seventeenth century many, if not most, English parishes witnessed attempts to persuade the authorities through collective petitioning. Groups of neighbors across the kingdom formulated their grievances, organized subscription lists, and articulated their own role in the polity as “the inhabitants” or “the parishioners” of a particular community. In so doing, they not only directly shaped their own “little commonwealths” but also unintentionally helped to develop habits of political mobilization in a crucial period of English history.

This article explores the links between anti-Catholicism in the United Kingdom and the acceleration of settler colonialism in British North America, and it does so by considering two group migrations from Catholic districts in the North West Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Occurring over 30 years apart, the Glenaladale settlement (1772) in Prince Edward Island and the Glengarry settlement (1803) in Upper Canada offer instructive insight into how anti-Catholicism activated Highland Catholic colonial agency. Not only did significant numbers of Highland Catholics choose to quit Scotland forever, but their settlement in places like Prince Edward Island and Upper Canada accelerated the process of settler colonialism and the establishment of the Catholic Church. The colonies at Glengarry and Glenaladale were peopled by settlers who were doubly motivated to settle in the empire. They stood to prosper economically—certainly—and they also stood to gain the freedom to practice their faith free of obvious interference. To the Indigenous peoples whose ancestral lands they settled, the consequences were not softened by this pretext for settler colonization, and too often the history of anti-Catholic discrimination in the four nations elide the fact that Catholics were enthusiastic colonizers elsewhere, and that the two processes were often related.

British army officer Charles Warren's archeological excavations in Jerusalem in the late 1860s on behalf of the Palestine Exploration Fund and Scottish artist William Simpson's paintings of those activities articulated a new kind of imperial space: the underground empire. The imperial underground was a place that had not yet been conquered and where the British had limited visibility. In contrast to picturesque and panoramic views that created an illusion of order and omniscience, Simpson's sketches depict an imperial presence that was confined, constrained, and in danger of collapse. Yet as the British began to probe this subterranean frontier, they turned the underground world into a place not just of darkness and danger but of exploration and excitement. In the process, Warren's work and Simpson's portrayal of it helped lay the foundation for Britain's eventual conquest of Palestine during the First World War by burrowing beneath Jerusalem's dilapidated Ottoman present in search of its ancient and Judeo-Christian past. Jerusalem was not the only node in Britain's nascent underground empire—British work there occurred alongside the construction of sewers and railway tunnels in London and the mining of gold and diamonds in Australia and South Africa—but it was in Jerusalem that an imperial underground was first and most fully articulated, a space that embodied both the precariousness and the potential of Britain's embryonic efforts to establish a presence in the Middle East.

In July 1979, the Sunday Mirror published an article with the headline: “HOSPITALS AT CRISIS POINT: Jobs and beds to go in cash curbs.” In this article we explore the role of hospital beds in such public discussions of “crisis” within the British National Health Service (NHS). In the 1970s, the media and politicians paid increasing attention to bed numbers as an indicator of resource scarcity within the NHS. While this in part reflected a genuine trend, it was also a powerful narrative device. The hospital bed has become a cipher for NHS resourcing and resilience, but throughout the twentieth century, there has been a tension between stories of declining bed numbers as a sign of “crisis,” and declining bed numbers as a marker of more efficient, high-quality healthcare. This article will show that the hospital bed was an extremely important political device because it was imbued with rich social and cultural symbolism, and that stories of declining bed numbers were not as straightforward as they first appear. While discussions in the public sphere tended to focus on bed numbers and waiting times, discussions in the healthcare sector and among policymakers attended to what beds could—and should—do for both patients and staff. Public rhetoric about decline was less about the object itself, and more about the role of the hospital bed as a symbol of care and as a politically pertinent shorthand for the health of the NHS as an institution.

This article seeks to rethink the nature and significance of the fortnightly magazine Private Eye during its first two decades. Existing accounts have interpreted it almost exclusively through the lens of the “satire boom” (1961–63), and suggest that, in the final analysis, the magazine neither desired nor advanced any substantial critique of the political status quo. Besides neglecting its investigative facets, among other elements, these readings make the mistake of seeking to frame the significance of the magazine in conventional ideological terms. This article puts these neglected elements back into the picture and argues that the magazine is best understood as enacting a militant form of the kind of cynicism—at once outrageous and morally outraged—analyzed by Peter Sloterdijk and Michel Foucault, and other scholars in their wake. This provides a much more satisfying account of the many facets of Private Eye as these evolved during the 1960s and 1970s, including its affinities with various currents in postwar journalism and countercultural expression. Above all, it allows us to recast the politics of Private Eye as a form of moral protest that was expressed in the assumption of an intrinsically antagonistic relation toward “politics” and authority per se.

In the summer of 1719, woolen and silk weavers took to the streets in cities and towns across England to protest the East India Company's importation of cotton calicoes from South Asia. English weavers viewed these popular imports as hurting their economic livelihoods. During the protests, they violently turned their anger against women wearing calico, tearing off their clothes and even throwing acid on some victims. Their actions spurred widespread condemnation, but the weavers got what they wanted in the end. In March 1721, an act banning the importation and use of all calico cloth in Britain received royal assent. On that same day, an act arranging the first in a series of financial rescues of the South Sea Company in the wake of the South Sea Bubble became law. Drawing from a range of archival and printed sources, the author explores the political and cultural connections between the calico crisis and the South Sea Bubble and investigates how reactions to both episodes intersected ideologically with fears of Jacobitism and foreign invasion and with broader anxieties about gender, the social order, and the political influence of financial corporations.

This article examines an understudied chapter in the history of British socialist thought: the consumer-based socialism theorized by the Fabian and Labour Party advisor Leonard Woolf between 1913 and 1920. Exemplifying what used to be referred to in negative terms as “interwar idealism,” Woolf is now widely considered one of the chief architects of imperial and foreign policy for the British Labour Party between 1914 and 1945. Throughout this period, he was also a patient and committed advocate for a cooperative model of participatory, rank-and-file democracy founded on the organization and practices of the Co-operative Movement, whose socialist, transformative aspirations Woolf found most fully realized in the Women's Co-operative Guild under the leadership of Margaret Llewelyn Davies. Woolf's interest in radical democratic templates places him in a line of British utopian thought that looks to small-scale models of popular self-government as test cases for overall social transformation—ranging from Robert Owen's communes, through William Morris's medieval craft guilds, to the guild socialism advocated by G. D. H. Cole and R. H. Tawney. At the same time, in identifying the consumer rather than the producer as the means and ends of social change, Woolf's proposals for a socialist commonwealth emerge as an alternative to most socialist thought, a rarely examined case in a British politics of consumption which, as Matthew Hilton has shown, has traditionally offered itself as a “middle” or “third way” solution to a party political system dominated by the interests of capitalists and workers.

In June 1887, Britons crowded the streets of London to celebrate Queen Victoria's fiftieth year on the throne. It was an opportunity to publicly revel in the social, political, economic, and imperial progress Britain had made during her historic reign. The Lord Chamberlain was tasked with organizing a formal jubilee ceremony at Westminster Abbey representative of the queen's diverse subjects. But this proved a difficult undertaking for a multinational kingdom with a vast overseas empire. Grievances over seating in Westminster Abbey, jubilee honors, and an absent royal family fostered varying degrees of solidarity and rivalry among the United Kingdom's four constituent nations. The Irish Question and imperial expansion—matters in which Victoria was personally invested—heightened four-nations sensibilities and influenced participation in the festivities. The queen's Golden Jubilee both reflected and inspired four-nations thinking, and it revealed public concerns that the British union might exist as a hierarchy of nations rather than as a collaborative venture among equal members. As the institutional embodiment of tiered society, the Crown became an outlet for subjects to explore questions and modes of belonging within the global British world. A four-nations analysis of Victoria's 1887 jubilee shows that despite its unifying function, the modern British monarchy has struggled to harmonize the United Kingdom's multinational perspectives.

During the sixteenth century, the medieval Palace of Westminster went from being the most-used royal palace, where the king lived and worked alongside his administration, to becoming solely the home of the law-courts, Parliament, and the offices of state. At the same time, the numbers of individuals who came to the palace seeking governance or to take part in the business of the law-courts increased over the course of the century. While Westminster had earlier been a public venue for governance and royal display, the increasing absence of the English monarch from the palace created alternative uses. Political culture came to focus on Westminster as entirely separate from the court. This article explores how these changing uses created new forms of political and administrative culture. It examines how the administrative offices, particularly the Exchequer, were remade to accommodate changing financial demands and the increasing contact between individuals and the Crown. It argues that the repurposing of the Palace of Westminster created a distinctly different set of relationships between the Crown and the public. This gave the institutions that called the palace home the space to develop as bodies that drew their legitimacy from their representation of the community of the realm as a whole.