This article reopens the vexed question of how many women in early modern England could read by calling attention to the precise ways in which women marked, initialed, and signed legal depositions in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London. It shows that initialing and signing were closely correlated skills, and it argues that women who wrote their initials had begun to learn how to read. Using initials as a proxy for elementary reading literacy, it goes on to map female literacy in early modern London, showing that urban upbringings fostered female literacy and that reading literacy was far more broadly socially diffused than the ability to write. Changes in initialing patterns as women aged suggest that women found reading to be useful and relevant to their lives, and that literacy carried social prestige.

Following the loss of Surinam to the Netherlands in 1667, the English Crown attempted to evacuate those of its subjects living in the colony under Dutch rule. In doing so, its representatives laid claim to members of the Jewish population, who Surinam's English governors had previously declared to be “considered as English-born.” In the resulting dispute between the English and Dutch over who could be removed, Crown officials embraced articulations of subjecthood forged in the colony that differed from metropolitan norms. In asserting that Surinam's Jews remained subjects of the king, and by implying that they would continue to do so once evacuated, the English delegation departed from the Crown's frequent rejection of the wider efficacy of colonial naturalization. Surinam's Dutch governor, meanwhile, dismissed the assertion that members of the “Hebrew nation” could be subjects of an English king, arguing that subjecthood and nationality were identical and that only those of the English nation could be removed. The dispute between the English and the Dutch over the status of Surinam's Jews reminds us that English subjecthood was shaped by colonial settings and by the contested status of groups who found themselves transferred between imperial powers.

Between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the security of British navigation in and around the corsair-infested waters of the Mediterranean depended on indented parchment passports—Mediterranean passes. This article recovers the history of the Mediterranean pass and traces the development of the Mediterranean pass system from its origins in England's mid-seventeenth-century treaties with the North African regencies to its role in the emergence of Britain's Mediterranean empire over the course of the long eighteenth century. At its inception, the Mediterranean pass system formed an interstate regulatory regime that mediated between North African and British naval power by providing a means to identify British vessels at sea and to limit the protection of Britain's treaties to them. During the eighteenth century, however, foreign merchants and shipowners, especially from Genoa, sought out the security of British passes by moving to Britain's colonies at Gibraltar and Minorca. The resulting incorporation of foreigners into the British pass system fundamentally altered the nature and significance of the pass and contributed to the development of Britain's imperial presence in the Mediterranean. This article reveals how the growth of British power and the interactions of British consuls and imperial officials with mariners and merchants from around the Mediterranean transformed the pass from a document of identification into an instrument of imperial protection that helped sustain Britain's Mediterranean outposts in the eighteenth century and make possible the dramatic expansion of the British Empire further into that sea at the start of the nineteenth.

This essay explores the attitudes of the British middle classes towards witchcraft, ghosts, and other so-called superstitions from the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. Conventional historiographical wisdom maintains that belief in magic among middle-class Britons declined gradually between the early modern and modern eras. Grounded in the study of newspapers, antiquarianism, public lectures, and literary fiction, this essay proposes a more precise chronology for the decline and subsequent resurgence of magic. It argues that it was only from the 1820s that the middle classes, the media that served them, the police, and certain politicians put popular superstitions under significant duress, and examines the agendas and anxieties underlying this temporary cultural shift away from magic. The later Victorian period saw the emergence of greater tolerance towards witchcraft and ghost beliefs, allowing them to be reinterpreted as picturesque folklore or fitting subjects for the enquiries of psychical science.

This article examines the place of the literary lower-middle-class clerk in the English landscape between ca. 1900 and 1940. It draws attention to “clerical literature”—as typified in works by Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells, and Shan Bullock—and, more specifically, a subgenre that signposts the emergent interest in getting “back to the land.” At the heart of this subgenre of “rambling fiction,” the male clerical protagonist not only engages with the natural landscape on a journey through rural England but also explores notions of masculinity, heritage, and national identity. By focusing on middlebrow works, largely those written by former clerks themselves, this article argues that clerks were pioneers in drawing connections between a re-masculating exposure to the great outdoors—necessary for suburban, domesticated, office workers—and an appreciation of a particular palimpsest of England's history. In doing so, the clerk helped to popularize the continued association of medievalism, the South of England, and the rural “idyll.”

Between 1945 and 1967, England's town and city centers were reconstructed. This article argues that this process of civic redevelopment transformed working-class people's experience of urban life. Frequently represented as a social problem or simply ignored by prewar planning and political rhetoric on civic participation, working-class people were treated as vital to civic life in postwar England. This change had profound implications for people's experience of civic life and for class identity. However, historians of urban change have focused on planners and politicians, while the few histories of postwar working-class life that exist concentrate on selfhood, home, and neighborhood life. Drawing on personal testimonies, press reports, and planning documents this paper argues that working-class people were active agents of change in England's civic centers. Moreover, the experience of civic reconstruction encouraged the development of a sense of entitlement for a more secure and fuller life than earlier generations had experienced. The rebuilding of the civic centers was widely recognized as an achievement of ordinary working-class people, and the rebuilt centers were understood as places that should and could provide for their needs.

This article examines the relationship between politically motivated murder, martyrdom, and the death penalty in Britain and Ireland in the period from 1939 to 1990. First, it investigates the nexus between historical experience and memory, political martyrdom, and capital punishment as it applied to Irish Republicans in Britain during the Second World War. Secondly, it examines the use of extraordinary legal powers to impose the death penalty in the Irish state during the “Emergency,” and charts the processes through which the threat of capital punishment continued to be perceived as an essential instrument of security in both Irish jurisdictions in the postwar period. Thirdly, it evaluates the effectiveness of the death penalty in deterring politically motivated murder and explores the anomalous, paradoxical decision to abolish capital punishment at the height of subversive killing in Northern Ireland. The essay concludes that the national security issue and the potential martyrdom of Irish Republicans were pivotal factors in dissuading successive British governments from reintroducing the death penalty for politically motivated offenses in Britain and Northern Ireland.