Why did British politicians on both sides of the Atlantic propose a confederal rather than incorporating union in 1754? This question has been difficult to answer because most scholars have focused on the Albany Plan of Union outside of its imperial context, seeing in the plan either evidence of nascent American nationalism, a point of divergence between American and British conceptions of empire, or a missed moment to establish parliamentary supremacy over America. I show instead that the British and American plans for confederal union in 1754 formed part of an intensely partisan and pan-imperial debate about the nature of the British imperial constitution. The failure to adopt a confederal imperial constitution in 1754 had more to do with the contingency of the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War than with diverging British and American visions of empire or nascent American nationalism.

In this article, I defend the view that the Northern Ireland Troubles can usefully be described as an ethnic conflict. I critically examine two manifestos on this subject, those by Richard Bourke and Simon Prince respectively, which rest on misrepresentations of the scholarship on Northern Ireland. The issues raised by these historians are relevant to the historiography of nationalism and the study of civil war. I focus on the coincidence of religious affiliation and political allegiance in Ulster and the mechanisms by which patterns of conflict have been reproduced over time, suggesting several reasons why historians and political scientists have turned to the notion of ethnicity to describe the persistence of antagonism in the North of Ireland. In the final section, focusing on the loyalist agitator John McKeague, I argue that the literature on ethnicity helps historians to understand the outbreak of the Northern Ireland conflict better than does the singular concentration on democratic ideas recommended by Bourke and Prince.

This article explores the shifting relationship between Scottish Travellers, voluntary and mission action, and the state. Examining missionary and state attempts to settle, assimilate, and turn Scots Travellers into so-called good citizens in the first decades of the twentieth century—initially during the First World War and later in a designated camping scheme in Perthshire—reveals three things. First, many of the techniques used to manage Travellers’ behavior were not exceptional but rather can be seen as part of the wider armory deployed by welfare workers and reformers in this period. Often they used the particular sites of the mission hall, schoolroom, and camping ground to inculcate good citizenship. Second, the boundary between state and voluntary action was never fixed. And third, exploring how this boundary shifted over time can lead to a better understand of how Travellers were positioned as citizens at a time when both who was considered a citizen and what that might mean were profoundly changing. In this way, this article not only extends our understanding of Gypsy and Traveller history but also contributes to histories of the state, citizenship, and voluntary action.

Many writers of political economy in the 1660s and 1670s agreed that there were too many clergy and divinity students in England. This surplus of ministers and aspiring clerics, they argued, would better contribute to the public if they worked as productive laborers in agriculture and manufacturing. The question of whether preaching constituted labor had been a contentious theological debate in the late years of the Interregnum, and the proposals advanced by commentators like William Petty and Edward Chamberlayne to put ministers to other work assumed that clergy were comparable to profane professionals who labored for their keep. This article traces how this fraught question continued to confront schemes of political economy that otherwise sought to avoid religious controversy. In the 1670s, Christopher Wase responded to calls to limit clergy and free schools with an innovative survey and arguments drawn from empirical evidence, scriptural exegesis, and economic principles. Wase was one among other contemporaries who assigned a productive place for learning despite its irreducibility to a form of labor. His efforts thereby elevated the status of the clergy on a foundation of economic premises arrived at through engagement in theological debate.

This article begins the work of recovering and understanding children's unique experiences during the Irish Revolution by exploring the history of a diverse group of children and young people bound together by their fathers’ politics during and after the 1916 Easter Rising. In tracing the children of the executed and martyred rebel leaders of the Easter Rising, I seek to challenge and extend the way trauma has been conceptualized and applied by historians of Ireland's revolution, instead arguing that the methodologies of the history of emotions and experience offer more fruitful terrain to explore. In this way, trauma is not an essentializing state of being but instead is navigated, renegotiated, and resurfaced throughout one's life, frequently into old age. Leaning into the inherent uncertainty that writing about children's emotional experiences entails, I read into, across, and against fragmentary and diverse sources to recover the stories of these children who were plunged into national prominence by their fathers’ executions. I also acknowledge my own emotional response to these children's stories and seek to explore the methodological value of this affect in the archive for historians of the Irish Revolution.

This article offers a microhistory of a forgotten panic that engulfed the north Indian city of Allahabad in 1870, when the city's European residents began to anticipate a revolt by the native infantry. Rumors of this looming event, I argue, confirmed suspicions that ill-advised income tax legislation and military retrenchment had created a combustible situation. The apparent threat of insurrection was therefore symptomatic of a more systemic ailment: burgeoning distrust between the government of India, local officials, and British civilians. Rather than undertaking counterinsurgent action against dissident Indians or so-called Wahhabi agitators, the central administration attempted to tamp down European critique of its policies. I thereby foreground the government's confrontational relationship with the Anglo-Indian press and analyze its legalistic efforts to police the new telegraph lines that brought the false news of this fictitious mutiny to metropolitan notice.

The spectacular collapse of the Liberal Party in Britain has often been regarded as the result of a crisis in Liberal values, supposedly provoked by the unprecedented militarization of British society during the Great War. However, this interpretation typically fails to recognize the extent to which the most important and visible legacies of that process of militarization were accommodated within the Liberal Party itself. Between 1918 and 1929, more than a hundred ex-servicemen were elected to Parliament as Liberal MPs, and scores more stood as Liberal candidates. This article examines how these men negotiated, presented, and performed their military identities within the framework of postwar electoral politics; analyzes how they operated in Parliament; and traces the longer-term trajectories of their political careers. It challenges the assumption that Liberals were temperamentally or ideologically incapable of engaging with the war's legacies, demonstrating the ability of Liberal candidates to exploit the iconography and rhetorical tropes of military service when appealing to an electorate that had been profoundly shaped by the experience of war and military mobilization. Liberals sought to contest Conservative Party attempts to monopolize the politics of patriotism after 1918 by constructing gendered electoral appeals that acknowledged the unstable meanings of the Great War and the ambiguous status of the men who had fought in it. However, the inability of Liberal politicians to unite around a shared understanding of what the war had meant ultimately prevented them from exploiting the memory of the conflict as effectively as their Conservative and Labour rivals.