Over the past decade, historians, journals, conferences, and even job advertisements have devoted attention to a new field of inquiry, “Britain and the world.” This emergent category is far from coherent but, despite a variety of approaches, shares a common assumption that Britain's interactions with the world beyond its shores enable us to better understand the histories of both Britain and the globe. Writing the history of Britain from a comparative, imperial, or transnational perspective is not wholly new. British historians have long worked comparatively in a predominantly European frame, while historians of empire and internationalism have also highlighted the importance of transnational and global frameworks. What, then, is signified by the articulation of “Britain and the world” as a new field? What do historians of Britain, and indeed historians of its empire and the world, stand to gain or lose from the promotion of Britain and the world as a field? What new skills, methodologies, and archives are required to become a historian of Britain and the world? We invited historians from different generations and national academies as well as with different ways of approaching the history of Britain in an extranational frame. Our hope is that these essays will open up debate and stimulate broader discussions about the changing nature of the field and our work as historians of Britain.

Immigration and its consequences is one of the most contentious issues in the contemporary world, and historians are engaged in this debate by offering a longer-term perspective. In recent years, research on the United Kingdom's population has placed greater emphasis on population movement in shaping Britain's story, identifying waves of migrants from elsewhere alongside migration within Britain. One neglected aspect of this narrative, however, is the migration of Scots to England, particularly in the age of the regal and parliamentary union, when the changing political relationship between the two kingdoms had an impact on the scale, geographic spread, and opportunities and obstacles of that migration. While a minority of Scottish migrants were unwelcome, or chose to return home, the overwhelming weight of evidence is for those migrants who remained in England. The focus in this article is on that majority group for whom migration was a positive experience, thus raising questions about why these Scots were so successful and why they faced so little native opposition. That process of segmented assimilation offers an insight into the formation of Britain and the shifting ground of national identity associated with the emerging British state. The Scots, moreover, provide a model for “successful” migration, suggesting that a range of factors—principally, an educated, culturally malleable, and economically responsive migrant population, alongside an institutionally and attitudinally flexible host community—need to be in place in order to optimize the chances of migrant assimilation.

Charles I's Star Chamber prosecution of the lawyer William Prynne, the minister Henry Burton, and the physician John Bastwick generated both contemporary and historiographical controversy, mostly concerned with their writings, their trial, and their punishment in London. This article turns attention to their unusual offshore incarceration on the islands of Jersey, Guernsey, and the Scillies between 1637 and 1640. It examines the material, social, and spiritual circumstances of island detention, and shows how the “puritan martyrs”1 coped with separation from the world. Though the discourse of martyrdom invited a compilation of miseries, invoking scriptural comparisons, this triumvirate experienced isolation that did not necessarily incapacitate them. Prynne savored the hospitality of his jailers, Burton smuggled out polemical tracts, and all three found inspiration in the book of Revelation, written by St. John while a prisoner on the island of Patmos. Each returned to the fray in the 1640s, writing works of witness and justification. Their experience of island imprisonment provided a model and an inspiration for dozens more who were similarly confined during the Protectorate and the Restoration.

The clay tobacco pipe is a “British thing” distinct to its time, but that is a partial provenance. Although many thousands have been unearthed in Britain or described in British archival records, the pipe is also evidence of early globalized trade, imperial ventures, and material translation across cultures. Its Britishness is contingent. This small relic accompanied complex enterprises where a new-style masculinity arose, new racial categories were framed, and a new sociability took root.

Sir John Gladstone made a fortune as a Demerara sugar-planter and a key supporter of the British policy of amelioration in which slavery would be “improved” by making it more “humane.” Unlike resident planters in the British West Indies, who were firmly opposed to any alteration to the conditions of enslavement, and unlike abolitionists, who saw amelioration as a step toward abolition, Gladstone was a rare but influential metropolitan-based planter with an expansive imperial vision, prepared to work with British politicians to guarantee his investments in slavery through progressive slave reforms. This article intersects with recent historiography highlighting connections between metropole and colony but also insists on the influence of Demerara, including the effects of a large slave rebellion centered on Gladstone's estates (which illustrated that enslaved people were not happy with Gladstone's supposedly enlightened attitudes) on metropolitan sensibilities in the 1820s. Gladstone's strategies for an improved slavery, despite the contradictions inherent in championing such a policy while maintaining a fierce drive for profits, were a powerful counter to a renewed abolitionist thrust against slavery in the mid to late 1820s. Gladstone showed that that the logic of gradual emancipation still had force in imperial thinking in this decade.

The study of the Northern Irish Troubles is dominated by ethnic readings of conflict and violence. Drawing on new scholarship from a range of different disciplines and on fresh archival sources, this article questions these explanations. General theories that tie together ethnicity with conflict and violence are shown to be based on definitions that fail to distinguish ethnic identities from other ones. Their claims cannot be taken as being uniquely or even disproportionately associated with ethnicity. Explanatory models specifically developed for the case of modern Ireland do address that weakness. Yet, this article contends, they rest upon the fallacy that the Catholic and Protestant peoples are transhistorical entities. Political ideas, organizations, and actions cannot be reduced to fixed group identities. This article argues instead that the Troubles centered on a political conflict—one over rival visions of modern democracy. The pursuit of equality, the core value of democracy, led not only to conflicts but also to some of those conflicts becoming violent. Focusing on Belfast in the summer and autumn of 1969, this article sets out how the main political actors asserted competing claims to popular sovereignty and traces how multiple dynamic and intersecting conflicts became arrayed around the central one.

This article explores the cultural dynamics of branding and mass consumption in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. It focuses on Penguin Books’ cartoon mascot, which appeared on all of the firm's paperback covers and in-store promotional material from 1935. A familiar but critically ignored cultural icon, Penguin's mascot followed a wave of prominent advertising characters that energetically burst onto Britain's commercial scene in the early 1920s. Highly visible on packaging, poster hoardings, and advertisements within the press, brand mascots became popular media stars in the 1920s, seeming to herald a dawning age of material parity and collective consumer sovereignty. A decade later, Penguin's mascot used this utopianism around branded mass consumption to forge a leftist vision of social-democratic progress. Augmented by certain in-store display techniques and modes of purchase, Penguin Books appeared to constitute an enlightened public sphere. The cartoon bird became a lucrative mechanism through which browsers were invited to contribute to this progressive cultural project.