The troubles of Thomas Pestell came to a head at Lambeth on 21 November 1633. He was the victim of an improbable alliance between a godly nobleman, a Laudian judge, three alehouse keepers, a few tithe resisters, some Ashby nonconformists, “mad Stacey,” and a determined troublemaker. This ambitious Leicestershire parson, already embittered by failure, was humiliated by the Court of High Commission. Led by Archbishop Laud, the court declared that Pestell “had to the scandal and reproach of his ministerial function many ways demeaned himself”: he was ordered to grovel before his critics and pay his enemies' expenses. It could have been very much worse. The offenses of contempt of ecclesiastical authority, admitting excommunicates to communion, and performing clandestine marriages, “although they were in themselves no way justifiable but worthy of severe punishment,” were set aside for the moment and never resurfaced. An allegation of vexatious litigation had already been dropped, a charge of seditious preaching was “not sufficiently proved,” and “for his quarrelling and fighting, and giving cause to have him bound to the peace before the temporal judges, this the court much misliked though they would not censure him for it.” Formally, Pestell was only punished for jeering at the earl of Huntingdon, mocking Sir John Lambe, and sending two of his parishioners on a wild-goose chase—but his once-promising career was in ruins.

Thomas Pestell was born in 1585, the son of a Leicester tailor. He went to Cambridge as a sizar, took his M.A. in 1609, and was presented to the Leicestershire rectory of Coleorton by Sir Thomas Beaumont in 1611.

We need not wonder at Aerial Knights, At elemental combats, and strange fights, when earthly monarchs thus renew their jars, and even all Europe is involv'd in wars. (William Lux, Poems on Several Occasions)

On 6 March 1716, the Historical Register featured a description of an extravagant “display” of sky lights above London. The newspaper reported that during the evening, a number of Londoners noticed something that at first appeared like a huge and motionless body of light that in a curtain-like shape hung over the sky. They then saw it starting to move in a random fashion and dissolve into parts, spreading toward the west and changing into gigantic “pillars of flame.” From the west horizon and with an incredible velocity the lights continued to dart southeastward. After a series of undulatory motions and vibrations, they turned into a “continual fulguration, interspersed with green, red, blue, and yellow.” What were they? The celebrated astronomer Edmund Halley wrote that he was afraid that in delivering the “Etiology of a Matter so uncommon, never before seen by myself, nor fully described by any of the Ancient and Moderns, I fail to answer [philosophers'] Expectation or my own Desires.” But the less scholarly sources had less trouble. In Oxford, people saw swords and cavalries in the sky. In Upton upon Severn, Worcestershire, two heavenly armies waged a war that was so close that the air smelled of gunpowder.

Race—as a category—has commonly been understood as a response to difference. In the first instance, race offered a means of ordering unfamiliar peoples, whether encountered in the empire or at home. In the European historiography, the notion of “biological” race, defined by an inherited set of characteristics passed through the blood, possesses a particular genealogy: its roots can be found in the eighteenth century, its fullest articulation came in the late nineteenth century, and its twentieth-century decline was hastened by the Holocaust.

This article sets out a different, if not completely incompatible, thesis. It takes the case of British Jews to argue that racial categories could arise as a response to the apparent similarities, as well as the perceived differences, between Jews and other Britons. Put differently, in the late nineteenth century, Jews came increasingly to be identified as a race precisely because they were difficult to differentiate from their fellow citizens. Class proved a critical determinant. Jews became ever more invisible as they scaled the social ladder. “East End” Jews—poor and newly immigrated—might be readily detectable, but their middle- and upper-middle-class “West End” counterparts confounded observers. Notions of race, I will argue, emerged in part as a consequence of assimilation, delimiting difference in a nation where formal legal barriers to Jewish integration had been eliminated and social obstacles largely overcome.

Race was a staple term of the late nineteenth century. It proliferated throughout the language of the time.

When the Imperial War Museum was founded in early 1917, the subcommittee in charge of collections related to “Women's Work” solicited contributions from Dr. Flora Murray of the Military Hospital at Endell Street in London. Murray and Dr. Louisa Garrett Anderson had formed the Women's Hospital Corps and, with the French Red Cross, opened hospitals in Paris and Wimereux in the early stages of the war. After successful cooperation with British military and medical authorities overseas, they were asked to open the Endell Street facility, the only hospital operating under the auspices of the War Office to be staffed entirely by women. Murray refused to cooperate with the museum committee “because she wished her hospital to be considered purely professionally as a military hospital and not as women's war work.”

This was not just rhetoric of women's equality from someone who described herself as “one of Mrs. Pankhurst's lot,” but reflected the new emphasis on professionalism that had developed in the preceding fifty years. The First World War provided new opportunities for work in a variety of fields more or less closely related to the perpetuation and advancement of the armed conflict; scholars have recently focused in particular on working-class women in industry and paramilitary organizations. Though opportunities for educated women increased throughout civil society, my focus here is on work that was perceived as explicitly on behalf of the war effort, with a special concentration on three populations of women working in hospitals: doctors, trained nurses, and volunteers.