This article examines the brutal massacre of up to six hundred Spanish and Italian papal troops on the order of the English Lord Deputy Arthur Grey, 14th Baron de Wilton (1536–1593), at Dún An Óir (Forto del Oro), Smerwick, County Kerry, on 10 November 1580. The article investigates the relationship between the religious and juridical rationales for the massacre, shedding new light on the broader relationship between the early modern law of nations, Protestantism, and what Brendan Bradshaw has characterized as “catastrophic violence” in the Elizabethan military conquest of Ireland. While Vincent Carey has emphasized the virulently anti-Catholic character of Grey's rationales for the massacre, my argument instead emphasizes the role of the received laws of nations and of war in justifying Grey's actions both to Queen Elizabeth I (1533–1603) and to the English public, from the period immediately following the massacre until the writing of Edmund Spenser's pro-Grey apologetic, A View of the Present State of Ireland (ca. 1596). On this view, the papal troops at Smerwick were considered brigands, pirates, or, in Marcus Tullius Cicero's words, “communis hostis omnium”—a common enemy to all—and enjoyed no standing as lawful enemies under the law of nations. In the sixteenth century, the established law of nations was hardly a seamless web but manifested significant cleavages and fissures allowing for the construction of localized spheres of legal exception in which the ordinary rules of warfare did not apply, thus providing a convenient juridical rationale for atrocity.

This article examines English women who were engaged in wholesale long-distance or international trade in the later Middle Ages. These women made up only a small proportion of English merchants, averaging about 3 to 4 percent of the mercantile population, often working in partnership with their husbands. The article systematically quantifies, for the first time, women's penetration into this male-dominated trade and adds new perspectives to our understanding of women and trade in the Middle Ages by using both debt and customs records. It poses important questions about women's economic roles, the nature or distinctiveness of their businesses, and the ways that their actions fitted within mercantile activity more broadly. It examines the extent to which wives acted as equal economic partners with their husbands and also assesses the extent to which women's economic potential or agency in wholesale trade was shaped, or indeed constrained, by economic and patriarchal forces. It concludes by arguing that patriarchy certainly limited female access to wholesale markets, particularly after 1300, along with other linked features that also shaped women's economic trading endeavors. These features included status, access to capital, and the advantages to working within dynamic, extensive, and busy markets such as those found in later medieval London.

Early in 1761, a land promoter of Ulster origin named Alexander McNutt brought before the British Board of Trade a proposal to settle several thousand Ulster Scots in Nova Scotia. The board enthusiastically approved, but when McNutt returned the following year with promising news, the board forbade him from continuing the scheme, citing fears of losing Protestants in Ireland. This episode has generally been explained as evidence of the British government's ambivalence about Ulster emigration. However, rather than expressing merely a tension between two equally desirable but conflicting goals—peopling the American colonies with Irish Protestants and protecting the Ascendancy by preventing their emigration—the board's change of mind reflected the changing political environment. The board that approved McNutt's scheme strongly favored settling Nova Scotia quickly; the board that shut it down a year later included new members who viewed settling Nova Scotia as a waste of precious funds. The case of Alexander McNutt demonstrates the profound ramifications of party politics for Ulster migration during the imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s. It further affirms that studies of Ulster migration must be imperial in scope.

During the First World War, all of the belligerent powers interned both civilian and military prisoners. In Britain alone, over one hundred thousand people were held behind barbed wire. Despite the scale of this enterprise, interment barely features in Britain's First World War memory culture. By exploring the place of prisoner-of-war camps within the “militarized environment” of the home front, this article demonstrates the centrality of internment to local wartime experiences. Forced to share the same environment, British civilians and German prisoners clashed over access to resources, roads, and the surrounding landscape. As this article contends, it was only when the British started to employ prisoners on environmental-improvement measures, such as land drainage or river clearance projects, that relations gradually improved. With the end of the war and closure of the camps, however, these deep entanglements were quickly forgotten. Instead of commemorating the complexities of the conflict, Britain's memory culture focused on more comfortable narratives; British military “sacrifice” on the Western Front quickly replaced any discussion of the internment of the “enemy” at home.

This article considers the political activism of Canada's Indigenous peoples as a corrective to the prevailing narrative of British decolonization. For several decades, historians have described the end of empire as a series of linear political transitions from colony to nation-state, all ending in the late 1960s. But for many colonized peoples, the path to sovereignty was much less straightforward, especially in contexts where the goal of a discrete nation-state was unattainable. Canada's Indigenous peoples were one such group. In 1980, in the face of separatism in Quebec, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau pledged to renew the Canadian Confederation by bringing home the constitution, which was still retained by the British Parliament. But many Indigenous leaders feared that this final separation of powers would extinguish their historic bilateral treaties with the British crown, including the Royal Proclamation of 1763 that guaranteed Indigenous sovereignty in a trust relationship with Britain. Indigenous activists thus organized lobbying campaigns at Westminster to oppose Trudeau's act of so-called patriation. This article follows the Constitution Express, a campaign organized by the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs in 1981. Maneuvering around the nuances of British political and cultural difference, activists on the Constitution Express articulated and exercised their own vision of decolonization, pursuing continued ties to Britain as their best hope for securing Indigenous sovereignty in a federal Canada.

This one British thing, the baby gas mask, helps us understand the normalization of total war in modern Britain.