This article explores the nature and limitations of humanitarian political economy by discussing metropolitan British responses to a major famine that took place in the Agra region of north-central India in 1837–38. This disaster played a significant role in catalyzing wider debates about the impact of East India Company governance and the place of the subcontinent within the post-emancipation British Empire. By comparing the responses of organization such as the Aborigines Protection Society and British India Society to that of proponents of the newly emergent indenture system, the paper seeks to contextualize responses to the famine in terms both of longer histories of famine in South Asia and of the specific imperial circumstances of the late 1830s. In doing so, it explores how ideas of agricultural distress in India fed into competing strategies to utilize Indian labor in the service of colonial commodity production both within India and around the empire.

This article, a revised and annotated version of a plenary lecture given at the North American Conference on British Studies meeting in October 2018, considers the place and significance of aliens in England's history between the expulsion of the Jews in 1290 and the arrival of the French and Dutch Protestants from the 1540s onward. It draws extensively on a new database of immigrants to England between 1330 and 1550, which itself relies principally on the remarkable records generated by a tax on aliens resident in England, collected at various points between 1440 and 1487. Aliens emerge as a significant element in English society—sometimes chastised, sometimes subject to violence and other abuse, but also recognized clearly for their contribution to the economy. If immigrants were sometimes seen as a potentially disruptive presence, they were also understood to be a natural and permanent part of the social order.

This article examines the role of documents, their circulation, and their archivization in the enactment of the imperial constitution of the British Empire in the Atlantic world during the long eighteenth century. It focuses on the Board of Trade's dispatch of “Instructions” and “Queries” to governors in the American colonies, arguing that it was through the circulation of these documents and the use of archives that the board sought to enforce constitutional norms of bureaucratic conduct and the authority of central institutions of imperial administration. In the absence of a singular, codified written constitution, the British state relied upon a variety of different kinds of documents to forge the imperial Atlantic into a governed space. The article concludes by pointing to the continuing centrality of documents and archives to the bureaucratic manifestation of the imperial constitution in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution.

Over the course of the German occupation of the British Channel Islands from 1940 to 1945, a number of letters of denunciation were sent by islanders to the German authorities, accusing fellow islanders of violations of occupation law or of anti-German activity of one sort or another. The German occupiers were ambivalent toward the denunciations. While recognizing their usefulness in maintaining order and the respect for German rule, they found both the letters and their writers distasteful. The local British authorities in Jersey and Guernsey also found the letters problematic; the consequences for the individuals targeted in the letters could be dire, and the impact on island society as a whole was significant, both during the occupation and beyond liberation in May 1945. The extent and nature of resistance and collaboration have been contentious issues in the historiography of the occupation of the Channel Islands, and these letters have been cited as evidence that islanders were unduly cooperative with the Nazis. This article examines the surviving letters of denunciation, and by placing them into the wider contexts of Nazi Europe and the historiography of denunciation in totalitarian states, argues that denunciation in the Channel Islands, far from being exceptional, was quite typical of the practice throughout the Nazi empire.

The Second World War and the rise of social medicine in 1940s Britain reframed population health as a social problem in need of state investigation. The resulting government inquiry, the Survey of Sickness, sampled the whole adult population of England and Wales, engaging a broad and diverse cross-section in public health research for the first time. Complaints made against the Survey of Sickness reveal a complex set of relationships between different sections of the public and the British state. This article situates complaints about privacy, liberty, and wasted resources, as well as challenges to the authority of survey fieldworkers, in the context of wider resistance to postwar controls. By viewing these protests and criticisms in light of the material circumstances of the people who made them, this article argues that, for those with social, economic, and political capital, the role of the public in public health was up for negotiation in postwar Britain. The everyday politics of the survey's doorstep encounters were heavily influenced by gendered notions of home and citizenship. This exploration of how different sections of the public were constructed by public health and how they responded to that construction describes the hierarchies of expertise under formation while illuminating how class and gender informed contemporary understandings of citizenship in the emerging postwar British state.

What is a British colony for, and who is it for? These were the questions at the crux of a public debate in 1933 in Hong Kong sparked by a British resident claiming to have formed an organization for the “protection and advancement” of the “British white race.” This article explores how anxieties about fascism, white privilege, and “others” in the empire allowed the very idea of such a political movement to be elevated to the subject of heated debate. The discussion on British unemployment, poor whites, and European “intruders” in the colony tells us less about the actual socioeconomic conditions that Hong Kong Britons faced than about their subjective experience of being “British” in an imperial context. The articulation of imperial anxiety also shows us how the fluid, ambiguous borders of whiteness and Britishness were negotiated at the intersections of nationalism, ethnicity, class, and race. Highlighting the global perspectives demonstrated in the debate and the various transnational networks across Hong Kong, this article argues that the debate was as much about global sociopolitical circumstances as about what was happening in Hong Kong. It therefore offers a timely opportunity to rethink how the local, “national,” regional, and global were interwoven in the “global 1930s,” even among the English reading public in the British colony of Hong Kong.

Using neglected evidence of organized, state-like, internecine violence among English settlers in New England during the 1620s and 1630s, this essay engages with recent archipelagic approaches to the early modern English public sphere and with studies of the English state and political culture in order to argue for the existence of an important, semipublic Atlantic political discourse during the decades preceding the civil wars in the British Isles. It focuses on the distinctive political dynamics of Atlantic fishing stages during the early seventeenth century and on the violent confrontation between the Dorchester and Plymouth companies in 1625 over the control of the Cape Ann stage on Massachusetts Bay. The rumors, news, and formal reports that flowed from such incidents show how diffuse English ideologies assumed the form of opposed groups, armed and mobilized in the manner of free states, and confirmed fears of such violent episodes as threats to orderly governance in a political society conceived in Atlantic imperial terms. By examining the communication of and responses to this perceived threat during the late 1620s and 1630s, the essay reveals how an Atlantic discourse of “liberty,” “orderly commonweal,” and “popularity” influenced English political culture and policy and the institutions of Atlantic governance before the English Civil War.

A single eighteenth-century British manuscript recipe book, bound in parchment decorated with gold tooling, can tell us an enormous amount about Britain's gastronomic and imperial ambitions. That is because this book, now known by its call number, V.a.680, and held by the Folger Shakespeare Library, contains recipes like “Indian Pickle,” which included ginger, garlic, cauliflower, mustard, turmeric, and long pepper. How did this distinctly South Asian recipe find its way into a London recipe book? In this essay, we explore how British households engaged with and circulated new ideas about food during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We analyze two remarkable recipes, one for mutton kebabs and another for sago pudding, both brought to Britain through emerging imperial projects. Although one recipe originated in the eastern Mediterranean and the other in Southeast Asia, both were changed and altered to suit British metropolitan tastes. We then examine the book itself as a material object created and altered over time, offering evidence of the ways that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century manuscripts were amended, torn apart, repaired, organized, and ultimately professionalized over multiple generations. As physical testaments to the social alliances and networks of knowledge of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britons, manuscript recipe books were tools of empire, used to appropriate, translate, and transmit the global foodways that permeated Britain's earliest colonial schemes.