This article opens up a new perspective on market liberalism's triumph in the late twentieth century through an examination of the political battles that were fought in Britain over the regulation of homework. Ubiquitous in the late Victorian era, this form of waged labor was curtailed by Edwardian wage regulations but resurged in the 1970s as a result of competition from low-wage economies abroad and fast-changing consumer tastes. Alongside growing use of homeworkers in consumer industries, new information technologies made it increasingly possible for some forms of professional work to move into the home. This article explores the debates that swirled around these different forms of homework, pitting antipoverty campaigners, feminists, and activists against ministers, employers, and civil servants. It shows how Conservative and New Labour governments failed to recognize the structural similarities between Victorian-style “sweated” labor and the emerging world of telework, freelancing, and self-employment, and how the intellectual excitement generated by Britain's transition toward a postindustrial future dovetailed with the New Right commitment to deregulation and the creation of “flexible” labor markets. A brief comparison with homework in the United States underlines the value of local, particular histories to our larger understanding of ideological change in modern societies.

It is now nearly forty years since John Burnett, David Vincent, and David Mayall compiled their invaluable and much-used three-volume finding aid, The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated, Critical Bibliography (1984–1989), and established working-class autobiography as an important documentary source for exploring the lives of the working poor. Life writing now forms the basis of historical research into areas such as the emotions and domestic life that had hardly been imagined at the time that the annotated bibliography was produced. Yet as research into working-class autobiography has extended into new domains of enquiry, there has been less innovation in methodology. Historians typically use autobiographical material to pursue deep-reading strategies and unpack the meaning, experience, and identity of individual writers rather than generalize about working-class life more broadly. In this article I offer an alternative strategy: to take the autobiographical corpus and read it at scale in order to better understand fatherhood in Victorian Britain. Through a combination of intensive and extensive reading, I demonstrate that many working-class men failed to live up to expectations as breadwinners, and I explore the ramifications of that failure for the women and children with whom they lived.

This article provides new insights into long-standing debates on lord-tenant relations in medieval England and how they were negotiated through the manorial court. We examine an institution, which we term the stray system, that facilitated cooperation between lords and tenants to manage stray livestock. Specifically, we argue that the stray system is a clear example of a public good. In this context, the system was a social benefit provided by lords to their tenants as a collective. In a world where most of the population was dependent on agriculture for their livelihoods, any potential damage to a crop would have been of real concern. However, in managing the threat of wandering livestock, the property rights of owners had to be clearly protected to avoid disputes over ownership. The manorial court's management of strays provided an institution to resolve these countervailing pressures. Ultimately, that system helped to protect a community's arable land—the most vital source of income for lords and tenants alike—while simultaneously assuring the property rights of those who had lost important capital assets in the form of livestock.

This article explores one of the strangest and most spectacular urban policies in postwar Britain: national garden festivals. Initiated by Margaret Thatcher's government, the festivals were vast state-sponsored gardening shows held in deindustrializing cities to reclaim derelict land for the property market. A festival was held every other year between 1984 and 1992 in a different city, five in all. The garden festivals showcased a new kind of urbanism, one that would change the ways that British cities related to nature, to capital, and to the wider world. First, they evinced a unique type of environmental politics—an implicit critique of urban industrial landscapes that was distinct from both the emerging critique of climate change and from older ideas about conservation. Second, they emerged at a time when the attraction of private capital was becoming increasingly central to urban regeneration. The festivals were at the forefront of this turn, outsourcing their events to corporate sponsors. Finally, the festivals offered an idiosyncratic, incoherent version of globalization. They courted a global pool of tourists and capital and invited delegations from across the world to plan events while, in many instances, reinforcing a preexisting racialized social hierarchy shaped by imperial legacies.

Between the founding of Jamestown in 1606 and the conclusion of the Seven Years’ War, images of Indigenous men and women rose and fell on the great seals of the British Atlantic colonies. At the peak of this process, “the Indian” was the most persistent seal icon save for that of the arms and image of the monarch himself. This essay traces the sigillary Indian's illustrious career, as evolving imperial structures and legal debates about the nature of empire positioned and repositioned him (and her) in relation to just claims of authority. Early depictions reflected the settler colony concerns of private charter companies, justifying claims to land, not the rule over people. Royal colonies, by contrast, imagined Indians as a form of vassal, essential aids in the procurement of raw materials from the land. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, the image of the Indian had yielded to classical motifs and representations of the land through maps, mirroring the increasing centrality of territoriality to British imperial thought. Taken together, seal images of Indians in the British Atlantic present the rise and fall of a visual paradox: depicting Indigenous people as symbols of authority over white settler colonies.

Over three decades, the Provisional Irish Republican Army waged a campaign of violence that claimed the lives of some two thousand people. This article explores the moral framework by which the IRA sought to legitimate its campaign—how it was derived and how it functioned. On the one hand, the IRA relied on a legalist set of political principles, grounded in a particular reading of Irish history. An interlinked, yet discrete strand of legitimation stressed the iniquities of the Northern Irish state as experienced by Catholic nationalists, especially in the period 1968–1972. These parallel threads were interwoven to build a powerful argument that justified a resort to what the IRA termed its “armed struggle.” Yet the IRA recognized that the parameters for war were set not simply by reference to ideology but also by a reading of what might be acceptable to those identified as “the people” or “the community.” Violence was subject to an undeclared process of negotiation with multiple audiences, which served to constitute the boundaries of the permissible. Often, these red lines were revealed only at the point of transgression, but they were no less important for being intangible. An examination of the moral parameters for IRA violence provides a new perspective on the group, helping to explain IRA resilience but also its ultimate weakness and decline.

This article presents a significant reinterpretation of an essential text in Scottish (and British) political thought, Samuel Rutherford's Lex, Rex, by analyzing its relationship with Catholic scholasticism. While scholars have observed Rutherford's use of Catholic authors, there has been no sustained analysis of how Rutherford strategically applied this intellectual tradition to the religious and political context of the British civil wars. Ideas about human liberty, the law of nations, and popular sovereignty that were developed by Catholic scholastics in the School of Salamanca allowed Rutherford to defend limited monarchy and fulfill an ecclesiological purpose in seventeenth-century Britain. He, and the majority of his Covenanter contemporaries, believed in jure divino presbyterianism: scripture mandated that elders and synods, not bishops, should rule the church. To ensure a presbyterian settlement, Rutherford needed to disprove royalist absolutists who claimed that presbyterianism threatened absolute monarchy (the divinely ordained form of civil government) by limiting royal supremacy over the church. By building on Catholic scholastic political ideas, Rutherford was able to argue that human beings could change the form of civil government and that absolute monarchy was not required by God. Ironically, to make a civil state safe for presbyterianism, Rutherford resorted to Catholic scholastics rather than those of his own confessional tradition. This analysis urges reconsideration of not only the porosity of traditional confessional boundaries in early modern political thought but the respective positions of both Calvinism and Catholicism in shaping the political ideas underlying the British revolutions of the mid-seventeenth century.