The key question posed by this essay is why historians' interest in Britain's imperial past has increased rather than diminished in recent decades. It argues that this interest has been sustained in part by a preoccupation with certain contemporary social and political issues, and differences of opinion about these issues have helped fuel the “imperial history wars.” The nature of the debate has differed for American- and British-based historians. For the former, British imperial history has served as an analogy for thinking about America's racial politics and its role as a global power. For the latter, it has served as a focal point for contending claims about Britain's past and deepening anxieties about its future. The essay concludes by urging historians to be more self-reflexive about their own practices and more rigorous in exposing presentist claims about the past.

Beliefs about the Devil informed Scottish piety in a myriad of ways. This article explores, in particular, the experiential relationship between Reformed theology, the practice of introspection, and demonic belief. It locates a process of profound anxiety and self-identification as evil that occurred during inward, personal engagement with Satan. This process, loosely coined here as “internalizing the demonic,” reveals the close and consequential relationship between the clerical promotion of self-surveillance and the widely internalized belief in the Devil's natural affinity with the “evil hearts” of men and women. Through an examination of English texts circulated in Scotland and a brief comparison with Protestant groups abroad, this article suggests that internalizing the demonic was a defining component of experiential piety not just in Scotland, but also throughout the Reformed Anglophone world.

It is often claimed that John Milton grew politically disaffected under the Protectorate government, which he served as Latin secretary. This article reviews the evidence for said disaffection. It finds that the passages in Milton's writings that have been taken to show disaffection with Protectorate or Protector, most of which postdate Cromwell's death, have little to do with Cromwell and mainly to do with the rapidly shifting political conditions of 1659–60. While the Cromwellian religious settlement fell short of the disestablishment Milton wanted, Cromwell favored religious toleration more strongly than his parliaments did, and Milton supported him in foreign affairs. Most likely Milton had no such thing as a single view of the Protectorate regime; his views of its various actors and interest groups, its successes and failures, would have been detailed and complex.

In the later eighteenth century, two schemes were introduced in Parliament for extending the practice of handing over the bodies of executed offenders to anatomists for dissection. Both measures were motivated by the needs of the field of anatomy, including the improvement of surgical skill, the development of medical teaching in the provinces, and public anatomical demonstrations. Yet both failed to pass into law due to concerns about the possibly damaging effects in terms of criminal justice. Through a detailed analysis of the origins and progress of these two parliamentary measures—a moment when the competing claims of anatomy and criminal justice vied for supremacy over the criminal corpse—the article sheds light on judicial attitudes to dissection as a method of punishment and adds to our understanding of the reasons why, in the nineteenth century, the dread of dissection would come to fall upon the dead poor rather than executed offenders.

This article provides the first major analysis of the impact of Joseph Chamberlain's “Unauthorized Programme” on the General Election of 1885 in sixty-five years. Instead of focusing on high politics, it investigates the constituencies. Using quantitative analysis of linguistic data, it contends that historians have underestimated the program's impact on the speaking campaign, especially in the countryside, where its proposals of land reform, church disestablishment, and free education emerged as the dominant issues. That the “Unauthorized Programme” became so important so quickly in rural regions such as East Anglia, where radicalism had historically been weak, owed much to the underestimated importance of the enfranchisement of the agricultural laborer in 1884. Chamberlain's remarkable success in immediately setting the post-reform political agenda and in being seen as the chief threat by Conservative opponents fearful of the recently expanded democracy, arguably placed him in a significantly stronger position in the immediate aftermath of the 1885 election than historians—and perhaps he himself—imagined.

This essay sheds new light on the supposedly familiar world of Victorian philanthropy by considering charity in relation to market regulation. Focusing on the “charity fraud,” we suggest that in the shaping of this exclusive and paradoxical marketplace, charities eagerly seized fraud denunciations to advertise and authenticate their legitimacy. This reflected the massive changes in the charitable world since the days of paternalist social relations and, paradoxically, illustrates the extremity of the problem facing the donating public: if one could not be entirely certain of a local charity, how could he or she discern between the national organizations that undertook fund-raising for international disasters? This contest for legitimacy and the exposure of fraud shaped a contested but oddly virtuous exchange market: by the turn of the twentieth century, charities not only published account sheets but debated them publicly, too.

This article examines the growth of interest in diary keeping in twentieth-century Britain. It explores how diary keeping by private citizens was encouraged in the first part of the century by mass-circulation newspapers, diary manufacturers, diary anthologists like Arthur Ponsonby, and the social research organization Mass Observation in response to changing notions of the self, privacy, and daily life. It discusses the ways in which, in the context of a growing interest in public archives, these private diaries have more recently been imagined as compelling forms of historical evidence, as well as some of the problems of organization and interpretation that these kinds of texts present. I argue that the inherently opaque and incomplete nature of private diaries means that they can add nuance to our understanding of the recent past and offer insight into the randomness and singularity of everyday experience as it is being lived.

This article discusses the impact of declining British power and increasing Commonwealth immigration on religion in England after the Second World War. It argues that a diminishing sense of Britain's greatness undermined the belief that England was a Christian nation, a belief common among Britain's elites, especially members of the Conservative party, and one that had long undergirded Christian faith and practice in the country. The language of Christian nationhood became toxic as it became associated with unpopular white settler governments in southern Africa. Moreover, the debates over the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act show how the migration of non-Christian religious groups to England had created a situation in which those who wished to continue to speak of the country as Christian would be accused of racism, a charge with fresh bite at that time. The article argues that international contexts deserve greater attention in the study of religious change.