This article surveys plans that envisioned new leisure uses for derelict landscapes in Britain from about 1966 to 1979. These plans were an attempt to transform areas of Britain in ways that cut across issues ranging from deindustrialization to planning, landscape, environmentalism, industrial heritage, and leisure. The author argues for the importance of the profession of landscape architects in setting the agenda for tackling industrial dereliction. It then shows these issues playing out in three locations: in the Lea Valley, in Stoke-on-Trent, and in Telford New Town. Derelict landscapes were a visual manifestation of the various crises that continue to structure historians’ accounts of the 1970s, but the author shows how the response to the issue was characterized by an almost utopian optimism that these problems could be resolved in a way that would stimulate new forms of living.

In 1919, a parliamentary act reconstructed the relations between the British state and the Church of England. The passage of this act had considerable constitutional, political, ecclesiastical, and religious significance, and it is best understood by considering all of these aspects together. The church obtained a new statutory status, a large degree of self-government, and a special legislative procedure that augmented the privileges of its ecclesiastical establishment. All this was achieved without the intense political struggles that had accompanied many church and state issues during the previous hundred years. The apparent ease of the Enabling Act's passage was symptomatic of transformations in the relationship between the Church of England and nonconformity, in public religion, and in the character of British politics. But it was also the outcome of an impressive feat of persuasion and organization. Although the act did not secure the intended degree of spiritual independence, as became painfully evident during the parliamentary prayer book crisis in 1927–28, it placed the church establishment in a more secure position, allowing it to reform its administration and finances and to gain further advantages and new forms of relevance in future years.

This article offers a microhistory of a forgotten panic that engulfed the north Indian city of Allahabad in 1870, when the city's European residents began to anticipate a revolt by the native infantry. Rumors of this looming event, I argue, confirmed suspicions that ill-advised income tax legislation and military retrenchment had created a combustible situation. The apparent threat of insurrection was therefore symptomatic of a more systemic ailment: burgeoning distrust between the government of India, local officials, and British civilians. Rather than undertaking counterinsurgent action against dissident Indians or so-called Wahhabi agitators, the central administration attempted to tamp down European critique of its policies. I thereby foreground the government's confrontational relationship with the Anglo-Indian press and analyze its legalistic efforts to police the new telegraph lines that brought the false news of this fictitious mutiny to metropolitan notice.

Early Stuart England was awash in handwriting. Handwriting was the medium of property records, law, account books, and scholarly note taking. A large share of government was conducted through handwritten policy briefs, registers, and circular letters. Equally, it was the medium of prisoners, beggars, petitioners, and village wits. Collectors compiled handwritten poems, prophecies, speeches, recipes, and anecdotes. The number of English people who knew how to operate a printing press was probably in the low hundreds, the number who could write at least a bit likely in the hundreds of thousands. Writing was accessible, widely understood, and practiced. It was the medium to hand.

The spectacular collapse of the Liberal Party in Britain has often been regarded as the result of a crisis in Liberal values, supposedly provoked by the unprecedented militarization of British society during the Great War. However, this interpretation typically fails to recognize the extent to which the most important and visible legacies of that process of militarization were accommodated within the Liberal Party itself. Between 1918 and 1929, more than a hundred ex-servicemen were elected to Parliament as Liberal MPs, and scores more stood as Liberal candidates. This article examines how these men negotiated, presented, and performed their military identities within the framework of postwar electoral politics; analyzes how they operated in Parliament; and traces the longer-term trajectories of their political careers. It challenges the assumption that Liberals were temperamentally or ideologically incapable of engaging with the war's legacies, demonstrating the ability of Liberal candidates to exploit the iconography and rhetorical tropes of military service when appealing to an electorate that had been profoundly shaped by the experience of war and military mobilization. Liberals sought to contest Conservative Party attempts to monopolize the politics of patriotism after 1918 by constructing gendered electoral appeals that acknowledged the unstable meanings of the Great War and the ambiguous status of the men who had fought in it. However, the inability of Liberal politicians to unite around a shared understanding of what the war had meant ultimately prevented them from exploiting the memory of the conflict as effectively as their Conservative and Labour rivals.

Founded in 1760, the Cambridge Botanic Garden was designed to serve the theological interests of the university by developing a collection of living plants from across the globe. Exploring the construction and layout of the garden, its global network, methods of managing information, and the accessibility of the collection during the professorship of Thomas Martyn between 1762 and 1825, this article casts new light on the motivations for founding and managing a botanic garden in Cambridge. It shows how communication structures adapted as the British Empire contracted in the Americas and expanded into Asia and the Pacific, classifying species in the physical garden later inventoried in a series of published catalogues. It suggests that growing interests in natural theology intertwined the university with the expanding British Empire, developing a collection designed to educate students in the influence of divine providence on the vegetable kingdom.

This article concerns two manuscript tracts by Sir Robert Cotton, the Answer to Certain Military Men regarding Foreign War (1609) and Twenty-Four Arguments on the Strict Execution of the Laws against Seminary Priests (1613). To the limited extent that these tracts have been studied at all, historians have read them as artifacts of the Jacobean regime's internal counseling process. Through analysis of the both the structure of the Jacobean regime's knowledge economy and the two tracts and contextualizing them, the author argues that these were, instead, innovative exercises in publicity, designed to defend existing Jacobean policy against so-called country criticism. Designed to circulate widely among the kingdom's social elite—indeed, more than two dozen handwritten copies of each tract survive—the manuscript pamphlets played on Cotton's reputation as an antiquary to legitimize the Jacobean regime's most controversial policies. More broadly, the tracts demonstrate the dilemma of a Jacobean regime caught between the geopolitics of peace and interconfessional diplomacy and the expectations of a domestic political elite nurtured on the values and expectations of confessional war.

This is the revised transcript of a roundtable on the death of Queen Elizabeth II, presented at the North American Conference on British Studies in Chicago in November 2022. It includes an account of the many meanings of Queen Elizabeth II for her subjects and discussion of why so many at home and in the Commonwealth were devoted to her. The panel also touches on the significance for the monarchy of Elizabeth's passing, the meaning of queenship, and the importance of Elizabeth's gender for British women. An account of the queen and the Commonwealth focuses particularly on imperial optics and the queen's desire to be seen as the ruler of the Commonwealth. The panel concludes with the personalized account of a transnational scholar regarding the degree to which the media manufactured the appearance of grief over the queen's passing.

This essay discusses the reading records of Francis Russell, 1587–1641, later 4th Earl of Bedford. Drawing from a previously unstudied manuscript notebook from 1620 to 1622, the author demonstrates the importance of Russell's private archive at Woburn Abbey as an important repository for political, literary, and cultural history in the early Stuart age. The notebook evidences how a nobleman of Russell's wealth, stature, and influence prepared for political office, and more broadly, how he educated himself. The notebook contains a wide variety of texts, among them histories, sermons, poetry, political pamphlets, treatises, news, and gossip, much of which Russell brought to bear on the acute political Bohemian crisis then emerging, and on its consequences for domestic politics (for example, the 1621 Parliament). The notebook's contents also reveal more about early modern reading practice and the organization of knowledge and suggest the many networks of circulation through which Russell acquired his books, manuscript tracts, and oral information.

The 1622 publication of Imprisonment of Mens Bodies for Debt marked the beginning of a decades-long tradition of anti-carceral activism in London's prisons. By recovering prison activists’ practices of publication and republication, the article reveals a vibrant world of textual production in prisons that enabled political interventions grounded in the material and structural conditions of incarceration. Anti-carceral activism relied on the varied uses of print and manuscript that formed part of the day-to-day experience of incarceration. These local practices were combined with new processes of national political communication, from parliamentary petitioning and news printing in the 1620s, to manuscript pamphleteering and the demand for legal texts in the 1630s, and the explosion of radical printing and political agitation in the 1640s. Operating at the intersection of quotidian textual practice and developing forms of political communication, prison activism became engaged in wider currents of national debate. Thus, the article demonstrates how a relatively marginal social constituency could utilize these modes and networks of political communication across multiple media and how, in turn, such groups could both develop connections to radical political networks and come to imagine their cause as part of a wider political moment.