The chapter analyses the significance of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen in public awareness, and the stages of formalized Holocaust memory which have followed. These include the introduction of compulsory Holocaust education in schools in the 1990s and the institution of Holocaust Memorial Day in 2001, followed more recently by the reopening of the Imperial War Museum Holocaust galleries and plans for a UK Holocaust Memorial. Memory of the catastrophic genocide has remained hard to reconcile with that of the emphasis on wartime triumph which characterizes national recall in Britain, and this incompatibility continues to influence public conceptions of the Holocaust. Yet popular works of fiction and film, such as the television drama The Windermere Children (2020) about the post-war rehabilitation of child camp survivors in the Lake District, can have the effect of turning self-congratulation into self-reflection by urging that past generosity be repeated in the present, despite Britain’s departure from the European Union. The emphasis on Holocaust literacy could offset the tendency to mythologize Britain’s role in winning the Second World War in winning the Second World War.

Chapter 26 explores the role of the English language and the culture of Britain on Goethe’s development. The influences began in his childhood, and became particularly significant in his twenties, owing not least to his friendship with Herder and their shared enthusiasm for Shakespeare and Ossian. The chapter also emphasises the importance of visitors from Britain in furthering Goethe’s knowledge of a country to which he never travelled himself, and examines his relationship with contemporary British writers, above all Byron and Carlyle. It closes with an overview of the reception of Goethe in Britain.

Three themes permeate most discussions of Australia’s relationship with Europe. The first is that relations are marked by extreme asymmetry. On one side there stands a large and economically powerful group of states, increasingly organised within the European Union (EU); on the other, a middling power that belongs to no regional bloc and possesses limited international clout. The second is that Australia’s relations with Europe are largely driven by trade issues, especially issues in the agricultural sector. And the third is that Australia’s close bilateral links with Britain are still a central feature of its European policy.

The Conclusion delves into the strategic and legal legacies of the Seven Years’ War. It ties the Seven Years’ War and the unresolved tensions around maritime neutrality to the outbreak of Anglo-Dutch and Anglo-Spanish hostilities during the American War of Independence. It does so by examining the peace treaty of 1763 wherein no new significant arrangements were made about neutral rights between the Spanish and the British. The argument is made that the ambiguity of existing treaties left both governments room to continue negotiations whilst the Rule of the War of 1756 would provide an understanding of how British prize courts would treat neutral ships in future conflicts. The chapter examines the legacy of the Court of Prize Appeal and the thinking behind the rule. It discusses how the court and the rule were used in subsequent conflicts through the Napoleonic Wars and the role that individual judges took in making the rule a critical or underplayed element of British maritime strategic thinking. The rule loomed large in British maritime law for many wars after Hardwicke created it and it is, perhaps, one of the best illustrations of the link between law, sea power, and strategic thinking.

To write of the British Commonwealth is to write of things but half-expressed, of intangibles which so often make up the realities of life. At many points the forces and attitudes which operate are not easily susceptible to analysis. The responses are those which cannot be exactly measured. Such a view invites, and usually receives, criticism, especially from those without the Commonwealth. It is dismissed as nonsense or self-deception. No doubt there is not a little of both in the easy phrases of public pronouncement, but even when hedged about by qualification—the existence of material and security gains, divergences between member states and even between groups within a single member state—something remains which cannot be defined satisfactorily in constitutional, procedural, or material terms. The substance of the Commonwealth today is a blending of historical experience, sentiment, material interest and national advantage; and combined with these is the belief that voluntary association on a basis of freedom of decision represents a positive contribution to the defence of the dignity of the individual and to the creation of a more stable international society.

This chapter investigates Caroline Watson’s understudied theatrical subjects which testify to her technical mastery and ambitious agenda as a printmaker and provide a lens for examining how gender, printmaking hierarchies, and patronage impacted her exceptional career as a female stipple engraver. Her prints of female Shakespearean characters, Garrick Speaking the Ode and Sarah Siddons as Euphrasia, after Robert Edge Pine, from the early 1780s, and her two large plates for Boydell’s Shakespeare Gallery in the 1790s affiliated her with Shakespeare and the most significant artistic enterprise of the late eighteenth century. In terms of scale, narrative complexity, and narrative scope, Watson’s theatrical prints demonstrate her extraordinary skill as a stipple engraver and challenge gender and printmaking hierarchies. Appointed Engraver to the Queen in 1785, Watson signed her prints, publishing a number under her own name, and supported herself comfortably through her printmaking. Despite her professional achievement and technical prowess, her extended independent career was circumscribed by hierarchies of gender that paralleled artistic hierarchies.

Women’s labour and contributions to the print publishing industry are all too frequently hidden in plain sight beneath the names of their male relatives. Between 1740 and 1800, at least twelve women in London independently managed businesses that published or retailed prints: Elizabeth Bartlet Bakewell, Ann Harper Bryer, Elizabeth Lyfe D’Achery, Mary Salmon Darly, Elizabeth Griffin, Hannah Humphrey, Dorothy Clapham Mercier, Hester Griffin Jackson Pulley, Mary Brown Ryland, Mary Baker Overton Sayer, Susanna Sledge, and Susanna Parker Vivares. This chapter surveys their careers, which stand as a representative sample for a much larger total number. Ranging from the renowned to the completely unknown, these women form a disparate group in terms of their origins, means of entry into the field, aesthetic interests, political beliefs, duration and scale of their firms, and widely varying levels of success. Reconstructing their histories demonstrates women’s ongoing contributions to the business of publishing and selling prints in eighteenth-century London.

The country the different prime ministers have led and the political system over which they have presided have been vastly different. In this chapter, we explore some of the more momentous technological, political, cultural, and social changes that impacted on the office over the 300 years. Only by appreciating these factors, which have been perhaps under-considered in the literature on the office to date, can a rounded appreciation of the office’s survival it be achieved. The sheer pace and extent of these changes makes the continuity and survival of the office of prime minister over the full 300 years, and the adaptability of the individuals involved, even more remarkable.

This chapter offers a historical power analysis from the Saxons to the end of Pitt the Younger’s premiership. In the liminal premiership, the ‘key’ minister/advisor behind the monarch, or Oliver Cromwell during the republic, had serious power, but cannot be considered a prime minister as their power was wholly dependent on the monarch, and the complex machinations of court politics. The important innovation is how the role of ‘lead’ minister developed, with the monarch’s agreement, into the more independent ‘prime’ minister. We contend that only with Robert Walpole’s accession to the office did the power of prime minister become apparent, the primary reason being the monarch’s (George I) reliance on Walpole to control Parliament for spending and the protection of the monarch’s power. However, it was only with Pitt the Younger’s premiership, which truly established more formal parts of the office – particularly the Treasury, the state/economy and the Cabinet – that we see the beginnings of the modern office we know today.

Translation plays a significant role in Chapter Ten, which maps out women writers’ contributions to a transnational European culture, focussing on British and French fiction. Although not exclusive to the Romantic period, connections between literary women were particularly productive. If Staël served as an important model, other influential women whose lives and works complicate notions of a distinct national literature also contributed to an international Romantic culture, including Brun, Genlis, Charrière, and Krudener. Popular genres that engaged with the foreign in the 1790s included émigré novels and travel writing. Women also participated in the public sphere through the unfairly trivialised salon culture. After reviewing a number of salons, including those of Albrizzi, von Kurland, Varnhagen, Moira, and the Hollands, the chapter then explores female contributions to education theory, including Madame de Genlis’s British legacy; women’s place in the novel market, contextualising Austen by placing her side by side with two little known novelists, Mary Charlton and Elizabeth Meeke; female translations as important forms of cultural mediation, particularly those of Isabel de Montolieu; and, finally, female-edited or -authored periodicals, concluding with Sarah Harriet Burney and her possible translation of Feijoo’s defence of women.

This chapter looks at the impact of the American Revolution and its war on both Britain and Ireland. Its central concern is to explore whether Britain and Ireland can be incorporated in the Atlantic Revolution thesis, first advanced by Robert Palmer, which suggests the migration of revolutionary impulses eastwards. The argument developed here lays less emphasis on the inspiration provided by the democratic ideas associated with the American Revolution than on the importance of British military setbacks and ultimate defeat in the War of American Independence. It also highlights domestic and wider imperial influences on reform within Britain and Ireland, which also seem to have played a more significant role than the democratic tendencies of the American Revolution. By no means all the different reform programs and proposals in Britain and Ireland envisaged movement in a democratic direction. Indeed, the chapter makes the case for our considering most of the calls for reform in this period as attempts to turn the clock back, and recover lost or declining safeguards against misrule, or remedy long-standing grievances, rather than as forward-looking attempts to embrace democracy.