An important object of study in the historiography of early modern England, popularity has been examined in relation to figures such as the Earl of Essex and the Duke of Buckingham. It has been equally accounted for as the activity of MPs who fostered the cause of patriotic and freeborn Englishmen during the absolutist reigns of the early Stuarts. Popularity has also been dealt with when addressing resistance theory and people's power in pre-societal arrangements (“popular power”) and with regard to the popular component within a mixed government (“popular sovereignty”). Far less studied is another meaning of popularity, identified with direct democracy and its practices (“popular government”). This article shows how a large portion of public debate between the 1580s and 1642 focused on what were perceived as the threats of democratic strategies pursued by various (subversive) actors in England. Besides setting forth a revised understanding of the pejorative “popular” that distinguishes it from constitutional (republican) meanings on the one hand and from elite or royal popularity seeking on the other, this article unearths usages that presented it as an anarchic empowerment of the meanest of people—neither a mere theoretical sovereignty nor a mere right to be represented by one body in a mixed regime. Considering a composite range of sources and analyzing political, social, and, above all, ecclesiastical controversies, the article explains what democratic popularity was thought to stand for, who its exponents were, and how it was attacked from a wide spectrum of perspectives.

In 1732, the London Society of Apothecaries joined the Trustees for Establishing the Colony of Georgia in America in a scheme to establish an experimental garden in the nascent colony. This garden was designed to benefit the trustees’ bottom line, as well as to provide much-needed drugs to British apothecaries at a time of increasing overseas warfare and the mortality it entailed. The effort to grow medicinal plants in Georgia drew together a group of partners who began to recognize the economic potential of botany, and of medicinal plants specifically, in calculations of political economy. The plan depended on the knowledge production occurring at the apothecaries’ Chelsea Physic Garden and their efforts to adapt to a changing medicine trade by finding customers among state-sponsored institutions. Taken together, the histories of the gardens at Chelsea and Savannah illustrate that a perceived need for medicines brought plants into expressions of state power long before the network of botanical stations emblematic of the nineteenth-century empire. This earlier transatlantic story pairs the commercialization of health-care provision with shifts in imperial policy in the long eighteenth century.

Much is known about the negotiation of personal credit relationships during the eighteenth century. It has been noted how direct contact and observation allowed individuals to assess the creditworthiness of those with whom they had financial connections and to whom they might lend money. Much less is known about one of the most important credit relationships of the long eighteenth century: that between the state and its creditors. This article shows that investors could experience the performance of public credit at the Bank of England. By 1760 the Bank was the manager of nearly three-quarters of the state's debt and housed the main secondary market in that debt. Thus, it provided a place for public creditors, both current and potential, to attend and scrutinize the performance of the state's promises. The article demonstrates how the Bank acted to embody public credit through its architecture, internal structures, and imagery and through the very visible actions of its clerks and the technologies that they used to record ownership and transfer of the national debt. The Bank of England, by those means, allowed creditors to interrogate the financial stability and reputation of the state in the same ways that they could interrogate the integrity of a private debtor.

During the nineteenth century, British public schools became increasingly important, turning out thousands of elite young men. Historians have long recognized the centrality of these institutions to modern British history and to understandings of masculinity in this era. While studies of universities and clubs have revealed how fundamental the rituals and everyday life of institutions were to the creation of masculinity, public schools have not been subjected to the same scrutiny. Approaches to date have emphasized the schools’ roles in distancing boys from the world of the home, domesticity, femininity, and women. Focusing on three case-study schools, Winchester College, Charterhouse, and Lancing College, this article offers a reassessment of the relationship between home and school in the Victorian and Edwardian period and contributes to the growing literature on forms of masculine domesticity in the second half of the nineteenth century. In the reformed public schools, the ideal of the patriarchal household was often essential, and in producing it, the presence of significant women—the wives of headmasters and housemasters—could be vital. The schools also worked to create a specifically masculine form of domesticity through boys’ performance of mundane domestic tasks in the “fagging” system, which was often imagined in terms of the chivalric service ideal. Letters from the period show how the everyday worlds of school and home remained enmeshed, revealing the distinctive nature of family relationships forged by the routine of presence and absence that public schools created.

How did the British monarchy respond to the multiple challenges of early twentieth-century mass democracy? Historians have separated the growth of constitutional sovereignty from the practice of a welfare monarchy, or from royalty as decorative and media friendly. This article argues that the political transformation of the modern monarchy was inseparable from innovations to its style and presentation. Opening with the dramatic constitutional crisis that confronted George V and his advisors in 1910, I show how the monarchy's entanglement in high politics forced the crown to assume an increasingly neutral, arbitrarial stance on industrial disputes and on the Irish question, despite the king's own conservatism. Simultaneously, George V invested in styles of royal accessibility and informality that contrasted sharply with other major European dynasties, in a series of royal tours across the industrial heartlands of England and Wales in 1912 and 1913. Extensively covered by the national and imperial press and by the newsreels, these visits to the strongholds of laborism promoted a vision of patrician democracy that drew heavily on traditions of organic, one-nation conservatism. But they also positioned royalty and the people in a new imaginary relationship that was more personal and intimate. Both versions had long-term consequences for the British monarchy across the twentieth century.

The impact of the 1958 Notting Hill riots tends to figure in histories of the political right, as a galvanizing force for anti-immigrant sentiment—or as radical catalyst in the transnational history of the Black Atlantic. Meanwhile, the generation of black and white social workers and activists who flocked to Notting Hill after the riots have largely been left out of the history of the British left. This article treats Notting Hill after 1958 as an important locale of new progressive thinking and action. It seeks to consider the political work that the idea of “community” did in Notting Hill, allowing us consider how the politics of antiracism relates in complex ways to the reformulation of progressive politics in postwar Britain. It reveals how black activists came to reappropriate the language of “community” to critique the ameliorative, welfarist approach to antiracism. It also unearths the forgotten eclectic beginnings of Britain's New Left. By excavating the history of community work and New Left activism “from below,” this article traces the ways in which a motley group of Methodist ministers, Christian Workers, students, social workers, and community leaders tested the limits of the liberal paternalism and “universalism” of the postwar social democratic state.

A post-Roman folded beaker allows us to see traditional Romano-British material culture and material practices continuing into the fifth century and helps us understand the problem of the blanket labeling of all objects made after ca. 400 as “Anglo-Saxon.”