If coverture justified patriarchal control and legally erased many aspects of wives’ separate existence, did this mean that husbands in eighteenth-century England also enjoyed absolute authority over their wives’ sexual bodies? This article examines how contemporaries described the sexual boundaries between spouses and what wives could do when they had been violated by their husbands. Wives had few legal protections and limited social and economic resources to escape unwanted marital sex, but the small number who could afford the high costs turned to the ecclesiastical courts to legally separate from their husbands. The five case studies from the ecclesiastical courts explored here are exceptional, first, because sexual problems were at their core, and second, because unusual collateral evidence survives describing attorneys’ and judges’ opinions about spouses’ bodily rights within marriage. Whether they were seeking relief from reproductive toil, venereal infection, threat of sexual violence, or trauma from marital rape, these wives wanted to escape their husbands—but they faced hurdles. Because English ecclesiastical law did not explicitly identify sexual discord as justifying marital separation, the women's attorneys had to demonstrate that unwanted sexual relations were acts of cruelty. By invoking bodily safety, decorum and propriety, and sensibility and sympathy, advocates argued against husbands’ absolute conjugal authority. The author considers how broader transformations in beliefs about gender and sexuality may have resulted in giving wives slightly more room for protection by the second half of the eighteenth century, particularly when they faced the threat of marital rape or venereal infection.

This article explores the early modern understanding of the gut-mind relationship through a study of the beliefs and practices surrounding the hellebore plant in seventeenth-century England. Hellebore has been strongly associated with mental illness for most of recorded European history, and it is only during the past two centuries that it has lost this association. Taking a phenomenological approach, I demonstrate that the study of this specific plant, its representations, and its practices is significant not just to plant folklorists and medical historians but also to wider histories of culture, religion, emotion, and the body. The use of hellebore as a treatment for disorders of the mind reveals a fully embodied view of emotion in which the gut played a key role in shaping subjective experience. It also reflects a potently negative understanding of emotion as excremental matter, as something inherently impure, dangerous, and evil, warranting a violent remedy that was as punitive as it was therapeutic. By analyzing medical sources—herbals, pharmacopoeias, practitioners’ casebooks, and domestic receipt books—alongside devotional literature and religious polemic, I show that hellebore's symbolic importance was inseparable from its practical use as a treatment for mental illness, which depended upon an understanding of emotion and religious identity that accorded vital significance to the relationship between belly and brain.

This article opens up a new perspective on market liberalism's triumph in the late twentieth century through an examination of the political battles that were fought in Britain over the regulation of homework. Ubiquitous in the late Victorian era, this form of waged labor was curtailed by Edwardian wage regulations but resurged in the 1970s as a result of competition from low-wage economies abroad and fast-changing consumer tastes. Alongside growing use of homeworkers in consumer industries, new information technologies made it increasingly possible for some forms of professional work to move into the home. This article explores the debates that swirled around these different forms of homework, pitting antipoverty campaigners, feminists, and activists against ministers, employers, and civil servants. It shows how Conservative and New Labour governments failed to recognize the structural similarities between Victorian-style “sweated” labor and the emerging world of telework, freelancing, and self-employment, and how the intellectual excitement generated by Britain's transition toward a postindustrial future dovetailed with the New Right commitment to deregulation and the creation of “flexible” labor markets. A brief comparison with homework in the United States underlines the value of local, particular histories to our larger understanding of ideological change in modern societies.

Petitioning was a common form of protest, request, or expression across the British Empire, and historians of colonial rule and resistance have often drawn on petitions as sources to investigate particular controversies. This article assesses the significance, variety, and context of petitioning to the Imperial Parliament from both the British Isles and the colonies. To do so, we present new data drawn from more than one million petitions sent to the House of Commons in the period from 1780 to 1918, alongside qualitative research into a wider range of petitions to other metropolitan sources of authority. This range permits us to assess how colonial subjects across the empire demanded attention from Westminster and what the practice of petitioning reveals about the British self-image of parliamentary scrutiny and equality before the law.

Customs activity during the 1690s has mainly been studied from a fiscal-military perspective that attributes administrative growth and bureaucratic efficiency to the rise of fiscal necessities in the wake of the Nine Years’ War. This article challenges that view with a focus on the one truly momentous change of the Customs during the 1690s: the establishment of a preventive coastal police. Changes in the Customs were occasioned not primarily by fiscal concerns but resulted from the government's preoccupation with Jacobitism and the successful lobbying of Parliament by the wool interest. As the politics of the wool ban before 1689 demonstrate, coastal policing was a losing bargain in fiscal terms and mainly reflected the interests of certain sections of the merchant community. Fiscal pressures alone do not, therefore, explain the fundamental reform of the Customs in the wake of the Glorious Revolution. The beginnings of systematic coastal policing are instead linked to the rise of Parliament and anti-Jacobite precautions of William III's government. The article offers a new, coherent picture of such changes and calls into question the validity of a central assumption about the rise of the fiscal-military state in Britain after the Glorious Revolution, suggesting a more complicated explanation for fiscal reforms.

It is now nearly forty years since John Burnett, David Vincent, and David Mayall compiled their invaluable and much-used three-volume finding aid, The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated, Critical Bibliography (1984–1989), and established working-class autobiography as an important documentary source for exploring the lives of the working poor. Life writing now forms the basis of historical research into areas such as the emotions and domestic life that had hardly been imagined at the time that the annotated bibliography was produced. Yet as research into working-class autobiography has extended into new domains of enquiry, there has been less innovation in methodology. Historians typically use autobiographical material to pursue deep-reading strategies and unpack the meaning, experience, and identity of individual writers rather than generalize about working-class life more broadly. In this article I offer an alternative strategy: to take the autobiographical corpus and read it at scale in order to better understand fatherhood in Victorian Britain. Through a combination of intensive and extensive reading, I demonstrate that many working-class men failed to live up to expectations as breadwinners, and I explore the ramifications of that failure for the women and children with whom they lived.

This article tracks the remarkable role played by a commercial property developer, the Arndale Property Company, in the transformation of urban Britain across the second half of the twentieth century. This was an era of great change in cities, as urban environments were remodeled and urban centers had to adapt to deindustrialization and the rise of a consumer-driven and service-dominated economy. Arndale was at the forefront of these changes, installing dozens of shopping centers in British towns and cities from the 1950s to the 1990s. The company imported American-inspired commercial architectures, furnishing cities with new landscapes of consumption and mass leisure through which the affluent society was encountered and made concrete. Arndale was also a driving force in the growing financialization of urban property development that began in Britain as early as the 1950s and gathered pace as the century wore on. The company's history thus illuminates important shifts in economic activity and cultural life that had far-reaching impacts on British cities and society. It also highlights Arndale's role at the heart of the postwar urban renewal order, showing how far the company's success depended on its status as a favored partner to public planning authorities pursuing town center redevelopment. The centrality of such public-private developmental partnerships, often overlooked, particularly within adjacent urban disciplines, reveals much about the precise contours and political economy of the British postwar settlement.

This article is based on a unique dataset of 75,448 written descriptions of tattoos on British criminal convicts who were either transported or imprisoned during the period from 1791 to 1925. Combining both quantitative evidence (provided as visualizations) and qualitative evidence, it shows that, rather than expressing criminal identities as criminologists and sociologists argued, convicts’ tattoos expressed a broad range of subjects, affinities, and interests from wider popular and even mainstream culture. The diverse occupations held by convicts, the contexts in which tattoos were created, and incidental references to tattooing in other parts of society all point to a growing phenomenon that was embedded in Victorian culture rather than constituting an expression of deviance or resistance. Indeed, in the late nineteenth century, tattooing became fashionable within elite society. These findings not only shed light on the significance of tattooing as a form of cultural expression but also undermine the myth that nineteenth-century criminality was the product of, as contemporary commentators termed it, a distinct “criminal class.”

In the summer of 1894, Claud Cardew, then at British Central Africa, asked his brother in England to send him a violin. In tracing the violin's trajectory from metropole to colony, this article combines two inquiries. It probes, firstly, the emotional vocabulary surrounding Claud's request, and secondly, the technology underpinning the British Empire mail. Closely reading the Cardew family letters alongside postal documents, the author argues that for Claud, the violin's delayed arrival triggered a tangled nexus of anxieties, stemming from both the colonial racial hierarchy and the changing expectations surrounding modern technology. Much like the cultural connotations carried by the violin itself, efficient mail delivery denoted racial superiority. Furthermore, the empire mail gained significance in the minds of British users for its racially loaded function as potentially mitigating colonizers’ anxiety in the face of outnumbering locals. Yet the violin's failure to arrive when expected led to mounting anxiety, as claims for colonizers’ dominance cracked in the face of unstable postal communications. The story of Claud Cardew's violin thus offers a framework that may be used to unravel similar emotional entanglements surrounding Western technologies set to work within empire.

This article provides new insights into long-standing debates on lord-tenant relations in medieval England and how they were negotiated through the manorial court. We examine an institution, which we term the stray system, that facilitated cooperation between lords and tenants to manage stray livestock. Specifically, we argue that the stray system is a clear example of a public good. In this context, the system was a social benefit provided by lords to their tenants as a collective. In a world where most of the population was dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods, any potential damage to a crop would have been of real concern. However, in managing the threat of wandering livestock, the property rights of owners had to be clearly protected to avoid disputes over ownership. The manorial court's management of strays provided an institution to resolve these countervailing pressures. Ultimately, that system helped to protect a community's arable land—the most vital source of income for lords and tenants alike—while simultaneously assuring the property rights of those who had lost important capital assets in the form of livestock.

The impending collapse of Waterloo Bridge (built 1811–1817) in 1923 led to wide-ranging debate among professional and political elites about the need for preserving or replacing the bridge and about London's inadequate river crossings in general. Over a fifteen-year period, cabinet-level discussions on the problem of the Thames bridges occurred every year; the government struck a number of committees and a royal commission on solving cross-river traffic issues. A powerful elite lobby formed to fight for the preservation of old Waterloo Bridge, and the building of a new bridge at Charing Cross, a constitutional squabble arose over the respective authorities of Parliament and of London municipal government over the bridges, and a rancorous debate among politicians, town planners, architects, engineers, and the general public raged over the issue of the existing and proposed new bridges. A number of issues were at play and are discussed, but ultimately this article argues that it was competing, temporally connected conceptions of modernity that divided the two camps into preservationists and rebuilders.

This article takes the opening of the Brook Advisory Centres in London (1964) and Birmingham (1966) as a comparative case study for exploring the public debate on youth sexuality. The two centers were the first in postwar Britain specifically dedicated to the provision of advice on birth control and emotional problems to unmarried and young people. By focusing on an initiative that launched amid rising concerns over illegitimacy and promiscuity, the article engages with the debate over social change in the 1960s and the so-called permissive society. The author argues that the notion of responsibility became a key paradigm for supporters of a new sexual culture. Combining archival material, media analysis, and oral history interviews, the author shows that in constructing the need for a service for unmarried people, the Brook Advisory Centres faced accusations of encouraging promiscuity. Their main line of defense was the production of a narrative that stressed the notion of responsibility and moral guidance for unmarried people in avoiding unwanted babies. And in the debate around youth sexuality, locality mattered. In Birmingham, the prospect of formal contraceptive advice for unmarried girls was violently opposed by church members and family-planning doctors, whereas London witnessed the creation of a viable discourse with an emphasis on sexual responsibility.

Although anti-Catholicism and anti-Jacobinism primed many Britons to fear what one observer called “the hordes of vagabond French” who reached their shores in the fall of 1792, others launched widespread relief efforts. Among the more remarkable was the Wilmot Committee. This subscription charity convened in September 1792, channeling donations from the public to destitute French priests at a time when the British government remained hesitant to directly aid refugees from revolutionary France. This article situates the committee's particular structures in both their eighteenth-century philanthropic contexts and Britain's history of aid to foreign refugees. It then traces interconnections between charitable giving and wartime exigencies, arguing that the Wilmot Committee, which managed relief efforts first to clergy and then also to laity throughout the subsequent war years in an evolving partnership with government, played a crucial role in shaping and shifting attitudes toward foreigners during an era of ideological revolution. Ultimately, the committee worked alongside legislation like the Aliens and Emigrant Corps Acts to underline that foreigners of different religious persuasions—provided their loyalties were confirmed, their principles appropriate, and their backgrounds appealing—might be mobilized to strengthen national interests. By the 1790s, shared opposition to revolutionary republican ideology came to supersede shared Protestantism in predicting foreigners’ utility to Britain.

This article explores one of the strangest and most spectacular urban policies in postwar Britain: national garden festivals. Initiated by Margaret Thatcher's government, the festivals were vast state-sponsored gardening shows held in deindustrializing cities to reclaim derelict land for the property market. A festival was held every other year between 1984 and 1992 in a different city, five in all. The garden festivals showcased a new kind of urbanism, one that would change the ways that British cities related to nature, to capital, and to the wider world. First, they evinced a unique type of environmental politics—an implicit critique of urban industrial landscapes that was distinct from both the emerging critique of climate change and from older ideas about conservation. Second, they emerged at a time when the attraction of private capital was becoming increasingly central to urban regeneration. The festivals were at the forefront of this turn, outsourcing their events to corporate sponsors. Finally, the festivals offered an idiosyncratic, incoherent version of globalization. They courted a global pool of tourists and capital and invited delegations from across the world to plan events while, in many instances, reinforcing a preexisting racialized social hierarchy shaped by imperial legacies.

Using evidence from underused manuscript and archaeological material as well as printed texts, the author demonstrates that the early Virginia plantation was far from a disaster. Focusing on the period 1609–1618, the author situates the colony within the globally connected environments of early modern trade and empire. The author reveals how the expectations of the colony's proponents were met on a variety of levels, and the colony was successfully undertaken through the mediation of global pressures and English corporate culture within the specific local spaces of North America. The Virginia plantation was self-sufficient, economically diverse, and integrated conceptually and practically into the wider activities of its investors and leadership. Through this interpretation, this article contributes to the understanding of practices of colonization in early modern America and the connectedness of English overseas activities and the awareness of the Virginia Company participants’ of the colony's place within wider, global economies.

This article argues that the radical religious movements emerging during the English Revolution were indebted to a wider range of influences than is commonly assumed. This overarching argument is advanced through a close examination of a specific religious rite practiced by English General Baptists during the 1640s and 1650s: during this period, many General Baptists began to lay hands upon newly baptized converts as an initiatory liturgical rite. While this phenomenon has been widely noted, the full significance of the practice has not been fully appreciated due to both a failure of scholars to adequately locate the rite within a broader historical and theological context and a cluster of interpretive errors that have persisted throughout the literature. Though commonly interpreted as an example of radical puritanism, the Baptist imposition of hands is better understood as a radical reappropriation of confirmation as practiced in the Church of England, and more specifically, a reinterpretation of confirmation as it was pioneered by Laudian divines during the 1630s. By illuminating ways in which the General Baptist practice of laying on of hands echoed a High Church Laudian sacramentalism typically not associated with religious radicalism, this article broadens understanding of the provenance of radical religious ideology during the mid-seventeenth century and further evidences the dizzying theological eclecticism of the period.

In the past two decades, the decline of the British aristocracy and its apotheosis, the hereditary peerage, have received scant scholarly attention. Major historical works in the 1960s to the 1990s laid much responsibility for the decline on features of the British aristocracy that are anachronistic in modern capitalist societies, such as their landed, rentier status, conspicuously sumptuous lifestyles, and disdain for commerce, helped on by reductions in the value of agricultural land from the 1870s. This article reappraises these arguments by examining the decline of the hereditary peerage's wealth using a newly created data set that includes all available probate grants for peers from 1858 to 2018. The article challenges established research by finding that peers’ absolute wealth but also relative mean wealth did not decline during the agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century, and that serious decline only began and accelerated from World War II. Signs of resurgence appeared in the 1980s, with the value of peers’ grants reaching Victorian levels in real but not relative terms. The comprehensive character of the data and the distinction between real and relative wealth allow for multiple conceptual and analytic additions to the existing debates. We find that new peerages created for businessmen who were much wealthier than the older, landed peers masked decline in the interwar years. Significantly, however, the differences in wealth between old and new peerages disappeared over time, suggesting that the wider aristocracy's decline was due less to characteristics particular to it than to external forces allied to the broader postwar political and fiscal environment.

Early nineteenth-century Bengal is frequently used as a case study to demonstrate how debates over press liberties acquired additional stakes in colonial settings. Yet existing scholarship overlooks how the expansion of Britain's military presence overseas during and after the Napoleonic Wars complicated reformist ambitions for a free press. In India, army officers formed a significant proportion of the European population and were both enthusiastic readers of and contributors to the fledgling colonial press. Using the example of the Calcutta Journal, one of India's first daily newspapers, the author shows how the boundaries of what officers could and could not publicize in the press were negotiated through legal proceedings and disciplinary action and through debate within the newspaper itself. The preservation of military discipline was the primary motivation for press regulation during this period, and the military continued to be viewed as an exception to the rule even as commitment to government intervention began to wane. Yet within the military itself, officers strenuously debated their right to speak out and claim their place within the public sphere. These disputes reflect wider divisions within the army and reveal the ambiguous position of Britain's military at a time when the relationship between state and civil society was being reconfigured.

This article examines the Lady Kennaway assisted emigration scheme, designed to send women from Ireland's workhouses to the eastern frontier of the Cape Colony in Southern Africa. First proposed by Colonial Secretary Henry Labouchere in 1857, the scheme's purpose was to provide wives for the British German Legion, which had been resettled to British Kaffraria the previous year. Initially, the plan appeared to be of benefit for both Ireland and the Cape Colony. According to colonial officials and emigration commissioners, Ireland would be rid of a superfluous population, the Irish women would attain social and economic advancement, and the Eastern Cape would gain much-needed female settlers. Emigration authorities quickly found their optimism tempered by realities, however, as many Irish Poor Law guardians and workhouse women refused to participate. The Lady Kennaway scheme—so named after the ship that carried the emigrants—demonstrates the ways in which local interests could, and often did, shape imperial practices. Moreover, in tracking the decisions of emigration commissioners in London, colonial officials in Southern Africa, Poor Law guardians in Ireland, and potential female emigrants, this analysis reveals the multitude of individuals who molded Britain's mid-nineteenth-century imperial project.

Between the founding of Jamestown in 1606 and the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, images of Indigenous men and women rose and fell on the great seals of the British Atlantic colonies. At the peak of this process, “the Indian” was the most persistent seal icon save for that of the arms and image of the monarch himself. This essay traces the sigillary Indian's illustrious career, as evolving imperial structures and legal debates about the nature of empire positioned and repositioned him (and her) in relation to just claims of authority. Early depictions reflected the settler colony concerns of private charter companies, justifying claims to land, not the rule over people. Royal colonies, by contrast, imagined Indians as a form of vassal, essential aids in the procurement of raw materials from the land. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, the image of the Indian had yielded to classical motifs and representations of the land through maps, mirroring the increasing centrality of territoriality to British imperial thought. Taken together, seal images of Indians in the British Atlantic present the rise and fall of a visual paradox: depicting Indigenous people as symbols of authority over white settler colonies.