Anna Clark's presidential plenary to the 2018 North American Conference on British Studies in Vancouver, British Columbia, compares scandals over the mistreatment of patients and nurses that led to demands for popular control of hospitals in both Britain and New Zealand in the 1890s. A high death rate at the Chelsea Hospital for Women in London, located near a Pasteur Institute for animal research on vaccination, incited fears of human vivisection. The high death rate of nurses at the London Hospital provoked newspaper exposés and parliamentary investigations and calls for the municipalization of voluntary hospitals. In Christchurch, New Zealand, a debate over the rudeness of doctors and nurses enraged citizens. The flames of these scandals were sparked by newspaper agitation but fanned by feminists, socialists, trade unionists, and animal-rights organizations. In response to fears around experimentation, Fabian socialists Havelock Ellis, Harry Roberts, and Honnor Morten proposed democratic control of hospitals. These demands, focusing on patients’ rights and nurses’ health, differed from the hospital reform movement that urged hospitals to become more economical by forcing patients to pay. They also diverged from Beatrice and Sidney Webb's admonitions that the state must oversee citizens’ health for the nation to function efficiently. Although the calls for the democratic control of hospitals did not succeed, they might be seen as germs of a patient-centered approach to hospital care.

Domesday Book, which is usually considered to be the product of William the Conqueror's great survey of England in 1086, is one of the most important sources of English medieval history. This article contributes to the vigorous and long-standing debate about the purpose of Domesday Book. It does so by exploring the light cast by some of William's royal acta on the activities and concerns of the king and his advisers while the Domesday survey was in progress. These are linked to the difficult political and military circumstances confronting William and his followers in 1085–86 and their desire to deal with these by strengthening the stability, legitimacy, and security of their regime in England. The article also casts additional light on the importance and dating of the relevant acta.

This article examines the Scottish Covenanters’ initiatives to revamp educational provision in the Gaidhealtachd, the Gaelic-speaking portions of Scotland, from the beginning of the Scottish Revolution in 1638 to the Cromwellian conquest of Scotland in 1651. Scholars have explored in detail the range of educational schemes pursued by central governments in the seventeenth century to “civilize” the Gaidhealtachd, but few have engaged in an analysis of Covenanting schemes and how they differed from previous endeavors. While the Statutes of Iona are probably the best-known initiative to civilize the Gaidhealtachd and extirpate the Gaelic language, Covenanter schemes both adapted such policies and further innovated in order to serve the needs of a nascent confessional state. In particular, Covenanting schemes represented a unique and pragmatic way to address the Gaidhealtachd's educational deficiencies because they sought practical accommodation of the Gaelic language and preferred the matriculation of Gaelophone scholars into the universities. These measures not only represented a new strategy for integrating the Gaelic periphery into the Scottish state but were also notable for the ways in which they incorporated Gaelophone students into Scotland's higher education orbit—a stark departure from the educational situation in Ireland. By drawing on underutilized manuscript and printed sources, this article examines how the Covenanters refurbished education in the Gaidhealtachd and posits that the Covenanter schemes represented a key facet of the broader process of state formation in 1640s Scotland.

The historiography of the Financial Revolution in Scotland remains underdeveloped. This article addresses that gap by rounding out the rough sketch that currently represents our understanding of Scotland's Financial Revolution by focusing on the formation of the Royal Bank of Scotland, Scotland's first new financial institution in more than thirty years when it emerged in 1727. The case is made that the Scottish Financial Revolution was a complex movement, very often separated from the state and driven by the agency of Scotsmen at home and abroad, and that 1727 denoted a phase of the revolution in which financially innovative projects returned to the country after a period of absence. The article demonstrates how the progress of the Financial Revolution ebbed and flowed in the country, contingent upon political circumstances, from the nascent economic developments of the 1690s and on to the political upheaval of the early eighteenth century.

This article explores the complexity surrounding the politics and emotions of internationalism and humanitarian work in interwar Britain by using as a lens the public and official responses to assisting “refugee children.” Analysis of British responses to refugee emergencies after the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, and the Nazi persecution of Jews and other minorities suggests that attitudes shifted dramatically between the arrival of Basque child refugees in May 1937 and the Kindertransports in late 1938. Charities and refugee committees, many of them faith-based, had to negotiate the spaces between nation, ideology, and emotion to successfully raise funds for refugees. All appeals were to “save” children, and yet the responses and the amounts raised were vastly different. Campaigns to support almost four thousand Basque children proved politically polarizing and bureaucratic. In contrast, the immediate and widespread response to fund-raising to bring ten thousand children to Britain in 1938 suggests that a significant change in attitudes and fund-raising practices had taken place in a short time. Unlike the political divisions that hampered support for the Basque children, Britons from all walks of life appeared by 1938 to embrace the emotional and financial cost of internationalism in a way they had not only a year before.

Nurses and their labor are essential to the provision of health care. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the flagship institution of postwar British welfare, the National Health Service. When it launched in 1948, a shortage of thirty-five thousand nurses endangered its future. This article examines the National Health Service's nursing shortage and its most enduring solution: the recruitment of Caribbean and African nursing staff for struggling British hospitals. It follows the manner in which British civil servants, hospital administrators, and nursing leaders came to recruit nurses from the colonies and the deep ambivalence that marked their project. What began as a reformulated colonial development project gave rise to a sprawling and unregulated market for nursing labor that powered the National Health Service for decades. The so-called dark stranger, deemed unworthy of membership in the national community, in fact carried out its most intimate work—caring for the bodies of sick white citizens.

As part of the “One British Thing” series, this essay explores Ena V. McDonald's The Hair Weavers Text-Book, published in 1967, as a source for exploring Black women's intellectual histories in Britain during the twentieth century.