This paper was presented as the Presidential Address at the North American Conference on British Studies in Atlanta in November 2021.

In the Great War, home front schemes in support of wartime causes included the making and transportation of what were called smellies: homemade tokens and commercial gifts that invoked supposedly traditional British scents. For volunteers, this entailed the collection and distribution of homemade lavender and verbena bags as an allegedly effective—and practical—means of aiding those injured at the front. For others, like commercial perfumers, this meant the production of scented commodities like lavender water and eau de Cologne for transport to troops overseas. In both cases, supporters mobilized the symbolic power of perfumed items to promote a fictitious version of rural, white, English life that could allegedly be resumed after the conflict. These campaigns obscured the social, racial, gendered, and material realities of war. What resulted was a profoundly limited definition of British smells and, by extension, their idealized British recipients: white, English-born servicemen from across classes. While perfumed gifts were designed to comfort these select recipients and bring a sense of order to the front, accounts of gifts’ production and reception ultimately reveal fractures—and failures—in the deployment of national smells to order the disordered smellscapes of war.

Historians who write about emotion in wartime focus mainly on the experiences of front-line soldiers and of civilians under bombardment exposed to life-threatening events. However, in Britain in World War II, conscription, mobilization, and evacuation inflicted hugely disruptive separations on a large proportion of the population, and the emotions that they provoked have been under-examined. This paper excavates emotion in an unusually complete set of letters written by a British working-class couple between 1941 and 1946. Interpreting letter writing as a technology of the self, it explores their letter-writing practices and uses psychoanalytic theory to comprehend the anxieties that their letters document. Wartime and postwar separation, enforced by conscription, challenged their aspirations to a companionate marital style and added to the complexities of pregnancy and parenthood. The sickness and hospitalization of their baby in 1945–46, in the era before the establishment of the National Health Service, introduced a new dimension to separation. Occurring at a time when the couple were even further apart geographically than during the war itself and letters were the only regular means of connection, this trauma imposed massive marital and, particularly, maternal strain. By analyzing and contextualizing the increasingly fraught exchanges between a mother on her own and a man at the front line, this article throws new light on epistolary constructions of anxious separations and emotional dislocations in the long Second World War.

Why did British politicians on both sides of the Atlantic propose a confederal rather than incorporating union in 1754? This question has been difficult to answer because most scholars have focused on the Albany Plan of Union outside of its imperial context, seeing in the plan either evidence of nascent American nationalism, a point of divergence between American and British conceptions of empire, or a missed moment to establish parliamentary supremacy over America. I show instead that the British and American plans for confederal union in 1754 formed part of an intensely partisan and pan-imperial debate about the nature of the British imperial constitution. The failure to adopt a confederal imperial constitution in 1754 had more to do with the contingency of the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War than with diverging British and American visions of empire or nascent American nationalism.

Interrogating the relationship between politeness and violence in Warrane/Sydney, 1788–ca. 1816, this article investigates the impact of Enlightenment thought in the transoceanic British colonial world. The author argues that polite sociability was crucial to the imposition and self-justification of the British occupation of Eora country. Principally examining the published and personal journals and diaries of First Fleet officers, the author reveals how politeness was a display of European notions of civility understood within a stadial model of progress: Enlightenment ideology enabled the ruling naval elite to consider their invasion friendly, despite the lethal violence of colonial occupation. Foregrounding the construction and performance of a status-specific whiteness in colonial space, the author shows how politeness in the colonial context justified rather than mitigated violence. In so doing, they hope to destabilize our understanding of the Scottish Enlightenment, politeness, and violence. In what is primarily a study of Enlightenment and settler colonialism, Indigenous perspectives provide a crucial framework to comprehend the British naval elites’ commitment to the imposition of civility by force in Warrane/Sydney.

This article explores a sizable and largely unknown manuscript treatise from the 1670s, “Pax et Obedientia,” which discusses the Civil Wars, trade, the origins of government, toleration, plantations (especially Jamaica), and the royal supremacy, embedding within it a distinctive engagement with Hobbes and a particular vision of imperial composite monarchy. This first analysis of what “Pax” said, who wrote it, and why he did so in the way that he did nuances the present understanding of Restoration debates over a centralizing empire; it reveals the different forms that policy makers thought that empire might take, while also capturing a moment of transition between different meanings of imperium. The anonymous author's engagement with Hobbes further suggests how questions that later fell into the realm of political economy were discussed at the time, using the language of natural jurisprudence. In demonstrating the methodological necessity of utilizing both linguistic and institutional contexts, the authors argue that the apparent incoherence of “Pax” reflects an essential although ineptly executed strategy on the part of its author. Inchoate though the manuscript is, it offers a significant opportunity to understand the intellectual world of junior members of the government and to reconsider the intersection of political thinking and political action.

Before the mid-seventeenth century when a developing understanding of probability transformed gambling, English gaming took place in the community rather than in dedicated institutions like casinos and so represented and interacted with more general social behavior. Different communities gambled differently; they had different status under the law. This article considers gentlemen's gambling, arguing that in the absence of other constraints, notions of honor had a key role in shaping that activity. Contemporary accounts such as Sir John Harington's “Treatise on Playe” suggest that high-stakes wagering fell into the anthropological category of deep play, whereby gamesters staked excessive sums to win renown for their daring; secondly, it appears that such behavior was seen as a young man's activity, with older men condemning immoderate wagering as their ideas about what was honorable shifted as they matured and became integrated into the community. In addition to age-related changes of attitude to gambling, a tension existed between Elizabethan ideals of gentlemen's gambling behaviors and individual gamesters’ real circumstances. Some had limited money for wagering, others little time; youths from gentle families were sometimes indentured as apprentices or otherwise in situations that altered their relationships to time, money, and regulation. Consequently, even within this single sector of Elizabethan society, attitudes to gambling acquired a high level of complexity.

In this article, I defend the view that the Northern Ireland Troubles can usefully be described as an ethnic conflict. I critically examine two manifestos on this subject, those by Richard Bourke and Simon Prince respectively, which rest on misrepresentations of the scholarship on Northern Ireland. The issues raised by these historians are relevant to the historiography of nationalism and the study of civil war. I focus on the coincidence of religious affiliation and political allegiance in Ulster and the mechanisms by which patterns of conflict have been reproduced over time, suggesting several reasons why historians and political scientists have turned to the notion of ethnicity to describe the persistence of antagonism in the North of Ireland. In the final section, focusing on the loyalist agitator John McKeague, I argue that the literature on ethnicity helps historians to understand the outbreak of the Northern Ireland conflict better than does the singular concentration on democratic ideas recommended by Bourke and Prince.

This article analyzes the print culture of the Black and multiethnic community known as L8 in the northern British city of Liverpool. Through a critique of printed materials, including newsletters, magazines, and pamphlets all written, produced and read within the locale, the author assesses the construction of a community that was at once imagined and lived. This print infrastructure facilitated a collective sense of L8 as a marker of identity and belonging in a city and a nation that otherwise often harbored racialized hostility to the residents’ economic and political interests. Such a commitment to the locale, the author asserts, became a key factor in organizing the collective action taken by the residents in the 1981 Toxteth protests. Before and after that event, the neighborhood's print culture served to justify to residents the reasons for taking violent action against the state. Equally, this source material highlights the fissures and divergences between neighbors in their deliberations over the definitions—and limitations—of such a community and its relation to the nation. The author thus offers new ways to think about Black British protest in close relation to the specific political and social dynamics of neighborhoods across Britain.

Napoleon III's 1860s intervention in Mexico mystified some British observers. For many others, however, it raised urgent questions about the duties of European civilization and the future of global order. This article argues that the affair forced attitudes toward other European countries' overseas imperial projects into sharp political focus, and that in doing so it revealed incipient shifts in the center of gravity of Victorian liberalism. France's Second Mexican Empire split opinion in the Liberal Party and press, throwing light on wider disputes about the parameters of legitimate imperial intervention, the reach of the principles of nationality and self-determination, the political needs of disordered multiracial polities in less-developed parts of the world, and Europe's proper relations with Spanish America. But most Liberals who engaged with the enterprise condemned it, a fact that lays bare a changing balance of power between what historians have called “liberal imperial” and noninterventionist arguments in the 1860s. The failure of the intervention, moreover, did much to affirm powerful partisan narratives about French politics, which helped to buttress the electoral ascendancy of the Liberal Party.

The actions of Dr. Isabel Grant in creating the Highland Folk Museum in Scotland in the 1930s reflect how pleasure interacted with gendered identities to form modern feminine selves in the mid-twentieth century. In examining the subjectivity of Grant and her associates through material, textual, and visual sources from the museum, I interrogate both emotional and representational aspects of her development of living history. I suggest that, along with a sense of care and duty in such museums, women such as Grant were attracted by the opportunities of imaginative play and that they formed identities that were not reducible to either traditional or modern women's roles; instead, they were drawn to a form of historical engagement that allowed them to work outside such labels, sometimes as eccentrics. Their play was more serious and nonironic than were many other forms of interwar modern culture, and living history initiatives since then have built on this modern-but-not-modern appeal.

This article explores the shifting relationship between Scottish Travellers, voluntary and mission action, and the state. Examining missionary and state attempts to settle, assimilate, and turn Scots Travellers into so-called good citizens in the first decades of the twentieth century—initially during the First World War and later in a designated camping scheme in Perthshire—reveals three things. First, many of the techniques used to manage Travellers’ behavior were not exceptional but rather can be seen as part of the wider armory deployed by welfare workers and reformers in this period. Often they used the particular sites of the mission hall, schoolroom, and camping ground to inculcate good citizenship. Second, the boundary between state and voluntary action was never fixed. And third, exploring how this boundary shifted over time can lead to a better understand of how Travellers were positioned as citizens at a time when both who was considered a citizen and what that might mean were profoundly changing. In this way, this article not only extends our understanding of Gypsy and Traveller history but also contributes to histories of the state, citizenship, and voluntary action.

Much has been made of the ideological connection between the mental world of servitors in Elizabethan Ireland and the origins of early English colonial endeavor in North America. In this vein, the case of Sir Ralph Lane, the first governor of the Roanoke colony and, later, muster-master general of Ireland, would seem to present a historiographically promising test case, one that might not only link Ireland and the Roanoke Colony but also could show, following recent suggestions, how attitudinal, behavioral, and aspirational commonalities existed between early modern English military culture and the ethos of early English colonial endeavor. Lane's record on both sides of the Atlantic, however, rather than painting a picture of the applicability of martial virtue and military discipline at times of crisis, demonstrates instead the stark reality of the impulsive and appetitive culture of the garrison in the Elizabethan period and its corrosive effects. Lane's remarkable capacity for corruption, willful mismanagement, and wily self-defense in an Irish context in fact amplifies and complements troubling tendencies that scholars have recently detected in Lane's famous discourse of his government in what was commonly termed Virginia printed in Hakluyt's Principal Navigations. Lane can indeed serve as an emblem of common features shared by Elizabethan Englishmen drawn to office in Ireland and Elizabethan/Jacobean Englishmen drawn to settle in Virginia, but largely because of his mendacity, venality, and irresponsibility.

Using recently released papers, we analyze an attempted neoliberal policy revolution in 1980s Britain—the attempt to restrict the state pension to a minimal flat-rate benefit and supplement it with personal pensions. In the process, the government would abolish both the state earnings-related pension and collective employer-provided occupational pension schemes that then covered about half the workforce and owned about a quarter of all shares listed on the London Stock Exchange. Unusually, our focus is not primarily on ministers, as we unpick an attempted revolution that would have refashioned every worker in Britain as an investor-capitalist. Rather we focus on a sub-ministerial center of political power, the No. 10 Policy Unit, and the influence on it of the Centre for Policy Studies, a right-wing think tank. In doing so, we confirm the latter's importance as source of neoliberal ideas for the architects of policy change in the 1980s and reveal the centrality of the Policy Unit as a source of motive power for Britain's neoliberal revolution. We also, however, highlight the relative pragmatism of ministers as they backed away from the Policy Unit's attempted revolution, choosing instead to implement a more evolutionary set of reforms.

The idea that Protestantism in post-Reformation England was inherently hostile to the visual arts has a long history and has become embedded across an interdisciplinary scholarship and within popular consciousness. While more recent historiography addresses numerous exceptions to this prevailing trend, this article provides a new assessment of how English Protestantism in a more positive mood not only came to terms with the image but actively embraced it. In identifying patterns of thinking within a wide body of contemporary comment, we offer a chart in the mode of early modern figurative diagrams to emphasize the diverse criteria that Protestants weighed when considering whether an image was suitable for its intended purpose, from the circumstances of its making and using through audience response to location, medium, subject matter, and patron. In doing so, we stress the importance of historicizing the sense of the terms civil and religious use, which do not map neatly onto a modern reading of secular and sacred spaces. We further illustrate how the criteria of the model operated in practice, through detailed analysis of two extant artworks commissioned by committed Protestants, highlighting keen engagement with pictorial art in theory and in practice. The shift in emphasis from rejection to reconciliation captures the spirit of English Protestantism's negotiation and rapprochement with the image over the period ca. 1560–ca. 1640.

Many writers of political economy in the 1660s and 1670s agreed that there were too many clergy and divinity students in England. This surplus of ministers and aspiring clerics, they argued, would better contribute to the public if they worked as productive laborers in agriculture and manufacturing. The question of whether preaching constituted labor had been a contentious theological debate in the late years of the Interregnum, and the proposals advanced by commentators like William Petty and Edward Chamberlayne to put ministers to other work assumed that clergy were comparable to profane professionals who labored for their keep. This article traces how this fraught question continued to confront schemes of political economy that otherwise sought to avoid religious controversy. In the 1670s, Christopher Wase responded to calls to limit clergy and free schools with an innovative survey and arguments drawn from empirical evidence, scriptural exegesis, and economic principles. Wase was one among other contemporaries who assigned a productive place for learning despite its irreducibility to a form of labor. His efforts thereby elevated the status of the clergy on a foundation of economic premises arrived at through engagement in theological debate.

Attempted assassinations have only rarely been given sustained and systematic attention by historians. This article focuses on a series of attempts to assassinate members of the British royal family across the nineteenth century. In exploring the responses of political elites and wider publics to these attacks, the author argues for the development of a robust and enduring script with which to navigate physical attacks on the sovereign and his or her family. Overall, this script tended to support the monarchy by articulating visions of the proper relationship between crown and people and contrasting these with political regimes in Europe and elsewhere. It also, however, served to highlight some of the key tensions within a modernizing institution between accessibility and publicity on the one hand and security on the other.

This article begins the work of recovering and understanding children's unique experiences during the Irish Revolution by exploring the history of a diverse group of children and young people bound together by their fathers’ politics during and after the 1916 Easter Rising. In tracing the children of the executed and martyred rebel leaders of the Easter Rising, I seek to challenge and extend the way trauma has been conceptualized and applied by historians of Ireland's revolution, instead arguing that the methodologies of the history of emotions and experience offer more fruitful terrain to explore. In this way, trauma is not an essentializing state of being but instead is navigated, renegotiated, and resurfaced throughout one's life, frequently into old age. Leaning into the inherent uncertainty that writing about children's emotional experiences entails, I read into, across, and against fragmentary and diverse sources to recover the stories of these children who were plunged into national prominence by their fathers’ executions. I also acknowledge my own emotional response to these children's stories and seek to explore the methodological value of this affect in the archive for historians of the Irish Revolution.

The first substantive theory of free speech as a secular political right was concocted by two anonymous London journalists, Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, in their best-selling, endlessly reprinted newspaper column, Cato's Letters (1720–1723). Though its ideals became hugely influential, especially in the American colonies, Trenchard and Gordon's motives and the peculiar biases of their theory remain unexplored. John Locke's theorizing of personal liberty while accepting patriarchy and slavery has been much studied; that of Cato's Letters, a comparably significant text, not at all. Drawing on a wealth of newly discovered materials in British, Caribbean, and American archives, the author explores the telling roles of gender and especially race in early Anglophone ideals of free speech, connecting them to the lived experiences of Gordon, Trenchard, and their shadowy publisher, Elizée Dobrée. The article thus reframes our understanding of one of the most important Anglo-American political works of the eighteenth century, and exemplifies how to approach free speech historically, as both a theory and a practice. Freedom of expression does not simply arise from the lessening of “censorship” and restraint, nor is it ever equally accessible to all. Visibly and invisibly, like every kind of liberty, it always has a particular shape.

In the November 1922 general election in the two-member seat of Dundee, Winston Churchill, Liberal member of Parliament for the city since 1908, lost his seat to Edwin Scrymgeour (Prohibitionist) and E. D. Morel (Labour). Before 1914, Morel, like Churchill, had been a member of the Liberal Party, and this article compares the political trajectory of Churchill and Morel across the war period in order to understand how their positions had diverged. While still a Liberal in party affiliation in 1922, Churchill was en route back to the Conservative Party, while Morel had become a prominent figure in the Labour Party. In examining this divergence, the aim is to shed light on one of the key issues of British politics in early twentieth-century Britain: the divisions in the Liberal party that undermined its place as one of the two leading political parties. The purpose is not to displace arguments about long-run socioeconomic change undermining the Liberals, nor of the severe impact of total war on Liberal thinking about the scope of state action; rather, it is to use this example to also stress the significance for the party of sharp divergences over war and peace, and more broadly, the conduct of foreign policy.