As the first official English ambassador to the Mughal court, Sir Thomas Roe found himself at the outer reaches of English knowledge, experience, and influence in the early seventeenth century. This article examines the difficult position Roe felt himself to occupy, triangulating between the different interests he represented—his own interests, those of the East India Company that employed him, and those of the Crown that accredited him. Roe's letters revealed his difficulties in conducting what he saw as the essential tasks of the ambassador, and his limited success in establishing his status and authority both at the Mughal court and over the Company factors in India. As someone at the forefront of English overseas activities in the early seventeenth century, Roe's experiences shed light on the lived experience of English expansion. His case demonstrates the difficulties of adapting the tools of Tudor-Stuart statecraft to England's widening global reach.

In the 1760s and 1770s, rancorous struggles over the rights of French Catholic subjects threatened the political and economic stability of Grenada and Quebec, both formerly French colonies ceded to Britain at the close of the Seven Years' War (1756–63). This article analyzes claims of subject status made during those decades, focusing on petitions in which numerous inhabitants made demands for privileges they believed to be their due. These memorials reveal the fundamental role that “new” and “adopted” subjects played in shaping the boundaries of “British” subjecthood, as well as highlight key characteristics that made subjecthood an organizing principle of the mid-eighteenth-century British Empire. Indeed, the bonds between subject and sovereign, the ones articulated and performed each time subjects approached their monarch or his representatives, operated at a symbolic and functional level to integrate an empire that had become increasingly diverse by the 1760s.

In 1772, entrepreneur George Cartwright brought five Inuit people to England from Nunatsiavut (Labrador). Most of their time was spent in London, where they encountered many of the city's sights and experienced its social divisions and environmental conditions. This article explores their voyage, challenging the notion that “primitives” such as the Inuit visitors were necessarily awed into submission by the urban landscape. Rather, they understood it according to their own cultural logics and even articulated critiques of the city. Illustrating the entanglement of urban and Inuit spaces and places across the Atlantic, and ending by telling the story of the death of four of the five visitors from smallpox in 1773, the article argues for a new kind of scholarship that shows connections between Indigenous and urban histories at the transoceanic and imperial levels.

This article makes three points about the death throes of convict transportation. First, the quarrel over transportation shows the double-edged nature of the moral critique of empire in the early Victorian era. Metropolitan criticism of transportation had its roots in the same effort to moralize the empire that was seen in the almost contemporaneous assault on slavery. But transportation was deemed too convenient a means of getting rid of criminals for Britons safely to do without it. Second, the Whig government of 1846–52 sought to save transportation by moralizing the convict before shipping him off. By this point, however, the moral objections to transportation in eastern Australia had become so strong as to make the plan untenable. Third, colonial opposition to transportation ultimately left the British government with no choice but to replace it with penal servitude at home, and the debate over crime and punishment that played out over the next decade revealed a waning of faith in convict rehabilitation that manifested itself in a harsher prison regime. In necessitating the rise of penal servitude, the end of transportation makes it clear that the empire mattered very much indeed to the reshaping of British penal policy in the mid-Victorian era.

The New Zealand Wars of the 1860s have traditionally been associated with the popularity of antagonistic racial discourses and the growing influence of scientific racism. Building upon recent research into the resonance of humanitarian racial discourses in this period, this article reconsiders the experience of Governor Thomas Gore Browne during the Taranaki War, 1860–61. The Taranaki War was a global news event that precipitated fierce debates within both New Zealand and Great Britain over the war's origins and the rights of indigenous Maori. This article reveals how both Browne and his wartime critics defined themselves as the true defenders of Maori rights. This general usage of humanitarian racial discourses was encouraged by perceptions of metropolitan surveillance, New Zealand's prominence within networks of imperial communication, and an onus to administrate Maori with justice.

This article analyzes the literary, theatrical, and film versions of E. W. Hornung's fictional “gentleman” burglar Raffles produced between 1898 and 1939. It argues that the character functioned as a nexus for the articulation of a pleasure culture surrounding burglary, highlighting how approbatory and sexualized versions of burglars pervaded popular and official discourse in Britain and, through the character's commercial success, throughout Europe and America. Depictions of Raffles's triumphs over law and order invited successive audiences to vicariously test, and transgress, the legal, social, cultural, political, gendered, and economic constraints of everyday life. As newspapers labelled real-life burglars “Raffles,” both criminologists and criminals around the globe appropriated this title to refashion burglars as glamorous celebrity personae through academic texts and autobiographies. This article thus demonstrates how notions of respectable masculinity were challenged by sympathetic portrayals of burglars fostered under the “new” journalism, human interest journalism, and the true-crime genre of entertainment.

This essay explores debates over political membership and rights within empire from the interwar British Caribbean. Although no formal status of imperial, British, or colonial citizenship existed in this era, British Caribbeans routinely hailed each other as meritorious local “citizens,” demanded political rights due them as “British citizens,” and decried rulers' failure to treat colored colonials equally with other “citizens” of the empire. In the same years, the hundreds of thousands of British West Indians who labored in circum-Caribbean republics like the United States, Panama, Cuba, Venezuela, and Costa Rica experienced firsthand the international consolidation of formal citizenship as a state-issued credential ensuring mobility and abode. This convergence pushed British Caribbeans at home and abroad to question the costs of political disfranchisement and the place of race within empire. The vernacular political philosophy they developed in response importantly complements the influential theories of citizenship and rights developed by European thinkers of the same generation, such as T. H. Marshall and Hannah Arendt.