This essay reconsiders the character and significance of Edmund Burke's attitude to the seventeenth-century civil wars and interregnum. Burke may have venerated the “revolution principles” of 1688–89 over those of the 1640s, not least in the Reflections on the Revolution in France in which he notoriously compares English dissenting radicals to regicidal Puritans. Yet his response to the first Stuart revolution is more complex than has commonly been allowed and is closely bound up with Burke's earlier parliamentary career as a prominent member of the Rockingham Whig connection. The revival of an anti-Stuart idiom within the extra-parliamentary opposition of the 1760s, together with the mounting conflict with the North American colonies, gave renewed prominence to the memory of the civil wars within English political discourse. The Rockinghamites attempted to exploit this development—without compromising their own, more conservative reading of seventeenth-century history—but they were also its victims. In the years that followed, Burke and his colleagues were repeatedly identified by their political opponents with the spirit of Puritan rebellion and Cromwellian usurpation. These circumstances provide a new perspective on Burke's interpretation of the nation's revolutionary past; they also offer important insights into his writings and speeches in response to the French Revolution.

From the middle of the eighteenth century until the late 1830s, the idea of enslaved people as “peasants” was a commonplace among both antislavery and proslavery writers and activists in Britain. Slaveholders, faced with antislavery attacks, argued that the people they claimed to own were not an exploited labor force but a contented peasantry. Abolitionists expressed the hope that after emancipation, freedpeople would become peasants. Yet the “peasants” invoked in these debates were not smallholders or tenant farmers but plantation laborers, either held in bondage or paid low wages. British abolitionists promoted institutions and ideas invented by slaveholders to defend the plantation system. The idea of a servile and grateful “peasant” plantation labor force became, for British abolitionists, a justification for the “civilization” and subordination of freedpeople.

A major town planning dispute between church and state in Galway in the 1940s over the location for a new school provides a lens for rethinking Ireland's distinctive engagement with modernity. Using town planning and urban governance lenses, this article argues that existing scholarship on the postwar Irish Catholic Church overstates its hegemonic power. In analyzing the dispute, it critiques the undue focus within European town-planning studies on the state and on the supposedly “rational” agendas of mid-century planners, showing instead how religious entities forged parallel paths of urban modernity and urban governance. It thus adds an Irish and an urban-planning dimension to existing debates within religious history about urbanization and secularization, showing how adaptive the Irish Catholic Church was to high modernity. Finally, with its focus on a school building, it brings a built environment angle into studies of education policy in Ireland. In seeking to revisit major historiographical debates within town planning, religious history, and studies of urban modernity, the article makes extensive use of the recently opened papers of Bishop Michael Browne of Galway, a noted public intellectual within the Irish Catholic Church and a European expert on canon law.

This article asks how and why bells maintained their central place in political culture between 1660 and 1832, a question that can best be approached from the perspective of histories of the emotions and senses. Such a consideration of bells allows us to extend the concept of “emotives” to encompass material culture. Often believed to “speak,” bells were fundamental to a binary emotional regime: the joy and sorrow they expressed and created were essential to perceptions of deference, community, and national feeling. But they could also be inverted and used a form of resistance. For those outside the religious or political status quo, bells could instantiate forms of emotional suffering. Tracing the “listening public” of which bells were part demonstrates the importance of the freedom to hear in the eighteenth-century public sphere. In this context, the ascription of material and emotional agency to bells was a useful rhetorical tool. Its deployment in newspaper reports of ringing, which served to encourage certain ways of listening, points to the importance of both text and sound in creating a “listening public.” But this listening public was also marked by forms of emotional suffering and exclusion that trouble the place of practices of celebration in any nascent “English” or “British” identity.

The history of the Scottish East India Company of 1617 is a history of partnerships and rivalries within and between Scotland and England. The company was opposed by the merchants of the royal burghs in Scotland and by the East India Company, Muscovy Company, and Privy Council in England. At the same time, it was supported by the Scottish Privy Council and was able to recruit Dutch, English, and Scottish investors. The interactions between these groups were largely shaped by the union of the crowns, which saw James VI accede to the thrones of England and Ireland and move his court to London. Scotland was thus left with an absentee monarch, decreasing the access of Scottish merchants to the king while increasing the importance of court connections in acquiring that access. Regal union also created opportunities for Scots to become part of the London business world, which, in turn, could lead to backlash from English interests. Having developed in this context, the Scottish East India Company speaks to how James VI and I approached patronage and policy in his multiple kingdoms, how commercial rivalries developed in England and Scotland, and how trading companies played a role in constitutional developments in Stuart Britain.

In the past two decades, remembrance has emerged as one of the dominant preoccupations in Irish historical scholarship. There has, however, been little sustained analysis of the relationship between gender and memory in Irish studies, and gender remains under-theorized in memory studies more broadly. Yet one of the striking aspects of nineteenth-century commemorations of the 1798 and 1803 rebellions is the relatively prominent role accorded to women and, in particular, Sarah Curran, Pamela Fitzgerald, and Matilda Tone, the widows of three of the most celebrated United Irish “martyrs.” By analyzing the mnemonic functions these female figures performed in nineteenth-century Irish nationalist discourse, this article offers a case study of the circumstances in which women may be incorporated into, rather than excluded, from national memory cultures. This incorporation, it is argued, had much to do with the fraught political context in which the 1798 rebellion and its leaders were memorialized. As the remembrance of the rebellion in the first half of the nineteenth century assumed a covert character, conventionally gendered distinctions between private grief and public remembrance, intimate histories and heroic reputations, and family genealogy and public biography became blurred so as to foreground women and the female mourner.

This essay uses Predictor, the first home pregnancy test, to reexamine the doctor-patient relationship in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, a tumultuous period associated with permissiveness, women's liberation, and the erosion of medical authority. It shows how the rise of self-testing contributed to a realignment of the power dynamics among women, doctors, and pharmacists. It argues that the humble home pregnancy test kit merits a place—alongside the birth control pill and abortion law reform—in histories of health consumerism and reproductive choice in the twentieth century.