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35853 results in British history after 1450

Page 1 of 1793

Selling Sexual Knowledge
  • Medical Publishing and Obscenity in Victorian Britain
  • Sarah Bull
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2025
    Print publication:
    30 April 2025

The Strange History of Samuel Pepys's Diary
  • Kate Loveman
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    March 2025
    Print publication:
    31 March 2025
  • During the 1660s, Samuel Pepys kept a secret diary full of intimate details and political scandal. Had the contents been revealed, they could have destroyed his marriage, ended his career, and seen him arrested. This engaging book explores the creation of the most famous journal in the English language, how it came to be published in 1825, and the many remarkable roles it has played in British culture since then. Kate Loveman – one of the few people who can read Pepys's shorthand – unlocks the riddles of the diary, investigating why he chose to preserve such private matters for later generations. She also casts fresh light on the women and sexual relationships in Pepys's life and on Black Britons living in or near his household. Exploring the many inventive uses to which the diary has been put, Loveman shows how Pepys's history became part of the history of the nation.

The Settlement of the Poor in England, c.1660–1780
  • Law, Society, and State Formation
  • Naomi Tadmor
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2025
    Print publication:
    28 February 2025
  • In 1662, in the aftermath of the Restoration, parliament passed new legislation for the settlement and removal of the poor. Important provisions were finalised in no more than a few days. But once the settlement of the poor was set in law it became an agent of historical change that affected society, state formation, and the lives of millions in Britain and beyond for centuries to come. Within a few decades, practices of local government were transformed. In towns and villages hierarchies of social status and gender were affected. The rising empire employed the settlement administration to mobilise forces for large-scale international wars and to deal with soldiers' wives and children left behind. The huge number of bureaucratic forms generated following the new policies made a lasting impact on administrative culture. The Settlement of the Poor in England is about social change and about history's unintended consequences. It is also about the struggles and experiences of individuals and communities. It reminds us how the settlement legislation still resonates today. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Modern Britain, 1750 to the Present
  • 2nd edition
  • James Vernon
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2025
    Print publication:
    28 February 2025
  • This wide-ranging introduction to the history of modern Britain extends from the eighteenth century to the present day. Vernon structures his compelling narrative around the rise, fall and reinvention of liberal ideas of how markets, governments and empires should work. In this new edition, Vernon expands on four important themes: the history of the environment and climate crisis; global pandemics; the history of minoritised people of colour; and shifting ideas of democracy and sovereignty. This textbook offers a new global history of Britain, demonstrating how the world shaped the course of Britain's modern history. Richly illustrated with figures and maps, the book features textboxes, further reading guides, highlighted key terms and a glossary. A supplementary online package includes a study guide with discussion questions and links to additional primary sources. This textbook is an essential resource for introductory courses on the history of modern Britain.

Inquiring into Empire
  • Colonial Commissions and British Imperial Reform, 1819–1833
  • Lisa Ford, Kirsten McKenzie, Naomi Parkinson, David Andrew Roberts
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    February 2025
    Print publication:
    28 February 2025
  • This is the first history to grapple with the vast project of British imperial investigation in the years between the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 and the Great Reform Act. Beginning in 1819, commissions of inquiry were sent to examine law, governance, and economy from New South Wales and the Caribbean to Malta and West Africa. They left behind a matchless record of colonial life in the form of papers, reports and more than 200 volumes of testimonies and correspondence. Inquiring into Empire taps this under-used archive to develop a new understanding of imperial reform. The authors argue that, far from being a first step in the march towards liberalism, the commissions represented a deeply pragmatic, messy but concerted effort to chart a middle way between reaction and revolution which was constantly buffeted by the politics of colonial encounter.

The Age of Paper
  • The Bank Note, Communal Currency and British Society, 1790s–1830s
  • Hiroki Shin
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2025
    Print publication:
    31 January 2025
  • In the first detailed examination of Britain's transition to paper currency, Hiroki Shin explores how state, nation and community each played their respective role in its introduction. By examining archival materials and personal accounts, Shin's work sheds fresh light on societal, institutional, communal and individual responses to the transformation. The dominance of communal currency during the Bank Restriction period (1797–1821) demonstrates how paper currency derived its value from the community of users rather than the state or the intrinsic value of precious metal. Shin traces the expanded use of the Bank of England note – both geographically and socially – in this period, revealing the economic and social factors that accelerated this shift and the cultural manifestations of the paper-based monetary regime, from everyday politics to bank-note forgeries. This book serves as an essential resource for those interested in understanding the modern monetary system's historical origins.

The Overseer State
  • Slavery, Indenture and Governance in the British Empire, 1812–1916
  • Sascha Auerbach
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2025
    Print publication:
    31 January 2025
  • In this compelling work, Sascha Auerbach offers a bold new historical interpretation of late-stage slavery, its long-term legacies, and its entanglement with the development of the modern state. In the wake of abolition, from the Caribbean to southern Africa to Southeast Asia, a fusion of government authority and private industry replaced the iron chains of slavery with equally powerful fetters of law and regulation. This 'overseer-state' helped move, often through deceptive and coercive methods, millions of Indian and Chinese indentured laborers across Britain's imperial possessions. With a perspective that ranges from Parliament to the plantation, the book brings to light the fascinating and terrifying history of the world's first truly global labor system, those who struggled under its heavy yoke, and the bitter legacies left in its wake.

Protestant Bodies
  • Gesture in the English Reformation
  • Arnold Hunt
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2025
    Print publication:
    31 January 2025
  • Religious worship is an embodied act, consisting not of words alone, but of words and gestures. But what did early modern English Protestants think they were doing when they went through the motions of worship? In Protestant Bodies, Arnold Hunt argues that the English Reformation was a gestural reformation that redefined the postures and motions of the body. Drawing on a rich array of primary sources, he shows how gestures inherited from the medieval liturgy took on new meanings within a drastically altered ritual landscape, and became central to the enforcement of religious uniformity in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Protestant Bodies presents a challenging new interpretation of the English Reformation as a series of experiments in shaping and remaking the body, both individual and collective, with consequences that still persist today.

Discovering Britain and Ireland in the Romantic Period
  • Grand Tours
  • Edited by James Watt
  • Alison O'Byrne
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2025
    Print publication:
    31 January 2025
  • Even as members of the social elite participated in the European Grand Tour, travellers, writers, and readers increasingly recognized that Britain and Ireland might offer sights and experiences to rival the continent. This collection examines the practice and representation of tourism on 'home' ground during the period when modern Britain was invented and became a powerful and prosperous imperial nation. Interdisciplinary essays explore the diverse variety of tours and tourist agendas – artistic, industrial, leisure, scientific – and they address the ways in which travellers' 'discovery' of Britain and Ireland was an active and often self-critical process that potentially encompassed encounters with the alien and unfamiliar. Considering travellers from the wider world as well as from within Britain and Ireland, contributors discuss the function of comparative reference in contemporary travel-writing, as tourists often thought with and through others as they reflected on the distinctiveness and significance of the sites that they visited.

Monopolizing Knowledge
  • The East India Company and Britain's Second Scientific Revolution
  • Jessica Ratcliff
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    January 2025
    Print publication:
    31 January 2025
  • In the nineteenth century, an ambitious new library and museum for Asian arts, sciences and natural history was established in the City of London, within the corporate headquarters of the East India Company. Funded with taxes from British India and run by the East India Company, this library-museum was located thousands of miles away from the taxpayers who supported it and the land from which it grew. Jessica Ratcliff documents how the growth of science at the Company depended upon its sweeping monopoly privileges and its ability to act as a sovereign state in British India. She explores how 'Company science' became part of the cultural fabric of science in Britain and examines how it fed into Britain's dominance of science production within its empire, as well as Britain's rising preeminence on the scientific world stage. This title is part of the Flip it Open program and may also be available open access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Managing Mobility
  • The British Imperial State and Global Migration, 1840–1860
  • Philip Harling
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    December 2024
    Print publication:
    31 December 2024
  • Between 1840 and 1860 the British Empire expanded rapidly in scale, with rampant annexation of territory and ruthless suppression of rebellion. These decades also witnessed an unprecedented movement of people across the Empire and around the world, with over 2.6 million emigrants leaving Britain in the 1850s alone. Managing Mobility examines how the British imperial state facilitated the mass migration of its impoverished subjects as labor assets, shipped across vast expanses of ocean to contribute to the economy of the Empire. Philip Harling analyzes the ideological framework which underpinned these interventions and discusses the journeys taken by emigrants across four continents, considering the varied outcomes of these significant projects of social engineering. In doing so, this study demonstrates how the British imperial state harnessed migration to ensure and maintain a racialised global economic order in the decades after Emancipation.

Maritime Metropolis
  • London and its Port, 1780–1914
  • Sarah Palmer
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    November 2024
    Print publication:
    28 November 2024
  • Nineteenth-century London was not only the greatest city of its time but it had an equally immense port. Although the relationship between the two physically shaped the city and profoundly affected the lives and livelihoods of its inhabitants, historians have always told their stories separately. Sarah Palmer's authoritative work instead paints a picture of London as a maritime hub driven by trade, shipping, marine insurance, shipbuilding and meeting the needs of seafarers ashore. Drawing on disparate archival materials from dock company records, the National Archives, the London Metropolitan Archives and more, she reveals both the economic importance of international and domestic sea-borne trade and the unique urban geography it created. In creating this more interconnected understanding of Britain's capital, Palmer argues that the nineteenth-century transition from sail to steam didn't just affect London's port, but transformed the city and its economy with an impact comparable to that of the railways.

  • 1 - Race, Military Spectacle and the West India Regiments

  • David Lambert, University of Warwick
  • Book:
    Soldiers of Uncertain Rank
    Published online:
    17 October 2024
    Print publication:
    31 October 2024, pp 1-24

  • Summary

    This introductory chapter provides an overview of the origins of the West India Regiments in the late eighteenth-century Caribbean. It then introduces key concepts that will be used throughout the book, especially that of ’military spectacle’ (from Scott Myerly) as well as ’martial hybridity’, which is a take on Homi Bhabha’s formulation. The chapter goes on to argue that the Black soldiers of the regiments are an important but hitherto ignored feature in what Catherine Hall termed the ’war of representation’ that was fought over slavery and the image of people of African descent. It ends by outlining the structure of the rest of the book.

  • 2 - The Spectre of a Black Soldiery

  • David Lambert, University of Warwick
  • Book:
    Soldiers of Uncertain Rank
    Published online:
    17 October 2024
    Print publication:
    31 October 2024, pp 25-52

  • Summary

    This chapter examines the effort against the establishment of the West India Regiments in the 1790s. The spectre of insurrection in Saint-Domingue was a constant presence and critics of the regiments frequently likened them to Haitian soldiers, formerly enslaved insurgents, Maroons and other ‘brigands’ that opposed the British across the Caribbean in this period. Yet, White West Indians were not opposed to the arming of African men per se but favoured the use of irregular ‘black shot’, a form of military service that remained constrained by the bonds of slavery. In this way, the chapter not only explores the deeply held prejudices and phobias that made the West India Regiments so feared but also the contradictions in White West Indian and broader pro-slavery thought revealed by attitudes to military service.

  • 4 - The Reorientation of the West India Regiments

  • David Lambert, University of Warwick
  • Book:
    Soldiers of Uncertain Rank
    Published online:
    17 October 2024
    Print publication:
    31 October 2024, pp 84-113

  • Summary

    This chapter considers a key change in the military spectacle of the West India Regiments in the mid-to-late 1850s when the uniform for all ranks below commissioned officer was altered to one inspired by France’s Zouave forces. Representing a form of martial rebranding, this was a dramatic shift that ended the policy of using the same basic uniforms as other British Foot Regiments. Two interpretive frames for this ‘Zouavisation’ of the West India Regiments are offered. First, there was a desire to emulate and replicate the picturesque valour that the French Zouaves had displayed in the Crimean War, a sentiment strongly expressed by Queen Victoria herself. Second, there was an effort to assign uniforms that were more sensitive to the local conditions in which British military units operated. In the case of the West India Regiments, this policy served to inscribe racial differences between troops, as demonstrated by the fact that the officers of the regiments were not required to wear Zouave-style uniforms. This change reflected shifting ideas about people of African descent, as well as about tropicality, in this period.

Page 1 of 1793