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.

This article considers the political activism of Canada's Indigenous peoples as a corrective to the prevailing narrative of British decolonization. For several decades, historians have described the end of empire as a series of linear political transitions from colony to nation-state, all ending in the late 1960s. But for many colonized peoples, the path to sovereignty was much less straightforward, especially in contexts where the goal of a discrete nation-state was unattainable. Canada's Indigenous peoples were one such group. In 1980, in the face of separatism in Quebec, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau pledged to renew the Canadian Confederation by bringing home the constitution, which was still retained by the British Parliament. But many Indigenous leaders feared that this final separation of powers would extinguish their historic bilateral treaties with the British crown, including the Royal Proclamation of 1763 that guaranteed Indigenous sovereignty in a trust relationship with Britain. Indigenous activists thus organized lobbying campaigns at Westminster to oppose Trudeau's act of so-called patriation. This article follows the Constitution Express, a campaign organized by the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs in 1981. Maneuvering around the nuances of British political and cultural difference, activists on the Constitution Express articulated and exercised their own vision of decolonization, pursuing continued ties to Britain as their best hope for securing Indigenous sovereignty in a federal Canada.

The rise and fall of the office of sheriff is a frequent theme in English administrative history. In medieval times sheriffs were the principal representatives of the king in the local community and bore the king's authority and acted in his name. Their courts entertained a wide variety of criminal and civil proceedings. By Tudor times such powers and authority were things of the past. Edward IV had effectively ended the sheriff's power by removing all indictments before the sheriff in his tourn to the Court of Quarter Sessions of the Peace for trial. The sheriff's judicial powers passed to the justices of the peace and his military powers to the deputy lieutenants. What powers did remain were exercised under the supervision of the magistrates both in and out of formal sessions. When James I came to the throne in 1603, the once powerful sheriff presided at elections, distrained and sold goods for the payment of fines, summoned juries, hanged criminals, and carried out other miscellaneous tasks. For most gentlemen of England a year's tenure as sheriff was an expensive inconvenience.

By 1640, however, the sheriff was once again a public figure of some consequence. The first two Stuarts, especially Charles I, had turned to the sheriff to execute many of their financial and administrative programs. Three times James I ordered sheriffs to collect extra benevolences. It seemed to many that Charles I had used the office for inappropriate political purposes. A sheriff had to be resident in his county throughout his term of office so he could not serve in parliament. In 1625 Thomas Wentworth was appointed sheriff of Yorkshire, and the even more troublesome Edward Coke was appointed sheriff of Buckinghamshire. Two years later Walter Long, M.P. was appointed sheriff of Wiltshire, an affront to the electors of Bath who had recently returned him to the House of Commons. When the Long Parliament met in 1640, these events were remembered with considerable bitterness; and the Grand Remonstrance noted “the usual course of pricking sheriffs [was] not observed, but many times sheriffs made in an extraordinary way, sometimes as a punishment and a charge unto them, sometimes such were pricked out as would be instruments to execute whatever they would have done.”

Since the horrific bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the declaration of war against terrorism, policy makers have repeatedly urged us to spend. The Federal Reserve cut interest rates to encourage home sales and purchase of “big-ticket” items. New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani suggests that we travel, go shopping, seek entertainment, attend plays, rather than, as in World War II, buy bonds, recycle tin, and ration consumer goods.

Yet the current connection of luxury and war frames a historical paradox. Medieval and early modern prescriptive literatures link luxury not with times of war but with peace leading to decadence. The de-moralization of the idea of luxury, historians of consumption argue, only took place in the later seventeenth century when writers such as Nicholas Barbon and Bernard Mandeville recognized the importance of luxury to the economy. Eighteenth-century luxury consumption, fueled by new wants and new wares purchased by middle-class consumers, it is argued, marked a sharp departure from the court centered consumption of previous centuries.

When the officials at the British Treasury sat down to sketch out their proposals for the 1937 budget, they knew that they had a problem. During the previous year the Government had been forced to embark upon a costly five year rearmament program by the massive growth of the German military establishment, and the bills for that program were beginning to fall due. £180 million had been spent for defence in 1936, £60 million more than during the previous year, but £100 million less than the military services estimated would be necessary in 1937. The Services' estimate was in the words of Edward Bridges, a Treasury under-secretary, “a good deal higher than anything which I anticipated in my gloomier moments.” He knew, however, that there was little chance that it would be reduced. The question immediately at hand was where the funds could be found to pay for the burgeoning cost of defence not only in the coming year, but in the years to follow.

Another Treasury under-secretary, Fredrick Phillips, estimated that they could not realistically expect to raise more than £180 million of the £280 million they required from existing taxation. Although the canons of orthodox finance, to which the Treasury usually adhered, dictated that taxes should be increased to meet the deficit, everyone at the Treasury realized that such a measure would extinguish the growing prosperity which the Government had so laboriously and successfully nurtured since the economic collapse of 1931. Reluctantly they decided to resort to the fiscal device which Neville Chamberlain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, had once disparaged as “the broad road that leads to destruction”: borrowing.

By the late twelfth century, the principle that hereditary succession guaranteed title had triumphed in English feudal land law, and this threatened lords' rights to choose their tenants freely. Henry II's assizes were providing mesne tenants with security of tenure. They separated title to a tenement from lordly acceptance of the tenant when the the tenant was a direct descendant of the previous landholder. An undoubted male heir could take possession at once, not waiting for his lord to put him into possession, denying the lord his right to take the land into his hand and hold it until relief was paid.

The new actions available to mesne tenants did not apply to direct tenants of the Crown, however. The Angevin monarchs resisted following rules that their courts were enforcing against other feudal lords in their treatment of their own tenants-in-chief. The king held to the old view that an heir does not succeed to his ancestor's property automatically, but only has a customary claim to be accepted as tenant. As Glanvill noted, the king claimed primer seizin, his right to take possession of a barony and to place the heir in possession only once the heir had done homage to him and made arrangements to pay relief.

Lollardy, the native English heresy vigorously suppressed since the early fifteenth-century, did not die with its suppression in the wake of the rebellion of Sir John Oldcastle in 1414. A century later Lollard beliefs remained current, albeit in varied forms. The most consistent features in this eclectic religious system were the possession and reading of English translations of the Scriptures, a sacramentarian view of the Eucharist, and an often vehement anticlericalism. With few exceptions Lollardy was the preserve of the unlearned; based on the religious fringes of towns and the greater cities, rather than in the learned centers of the universities or the Court.

This article investigates the influence of the Maynooth and Repeal crises on Conservative politicians after 1846 and the putative maintenance of their identity as defenders of the Church after the Disruption of the party. Historians of the Conservative party have long realized that it suffered from a crisis of identity for a long time after 1846. Some of the leading Peelites were heading more and more towards the Liberal party, and most backbench Peelites gradually joined the Protectionist party; but the Protectionists did not have enough experienced leaders to qualify for the inheritance. Norman Gash has argued that “the Protectionists were not a political party in the sense of one able to provide and sustain a Government in the circumstances of the mid-nineteenth century…. The weakness of the Protectionists was not merely that after 1846 they represented the Conservative party with most of the brains knocked out, but that until they could shake off the monolithic character implied by their title, they could scarcely hope to become a national party or form a viable Government.” Likewise Robert Stewart and John Ramsden consider that the Protectionists were unable to take the place of the Conservative party, given their lack of effective and experienced leaders. It is undeniable that the Protectionist party was not as strong as the Conservative party had been in terms of executive capacity or party organization. But to say also that it was unable to inherit the mantle of Conservatism is to fall into the same trap as Gash and to exaggerate the importance of Peelite executive ability. More significant is the fact that the party of Stanley and Disraeli maintained fidelity to the core principles of the Conservative party—i. e. the constitution of Church and State, and the principle of protectionism. In this sense, the Protectionist party did become the sole inheritor of the Conservative party during the later 1840s.

Over the past fifteen years historians of Britain have debated the degree to which the nation's aristocracy was open to newcomers. First, W. D. Rubinstein suggested that the new rich of the nineteenth century broke with the pattern of centuries and refrained from large-scale land purchases, in part because the established aristocracy had assumed a more “caste-like” mentality that held outsiders at bay. Then in 1984 two important works extended the challenge to earlier centuries. John Cannon demonstrated that throughout the eighteenth century recruits to the peerage were chosen from among the upper reaches of the landed aristocracy, a fact that suggested to him that the British nobility was a closed group, more closed than its continental counterparts. More significantly, Lawrence and Jeanne Stone completed an immense study of the elite of three counties over a 340-year period; they concluded that the proportion of newcomers was small and that new recruits were drawn mainly from groups already affiliated with the aristocracy. It was not businessmen but small gentry, office holders, and members of the professions who dominated the ranks of newcomers to their county elites.

Other leading students of the British aristocracy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have taken exception to the claims of these iconoclasts. Sir John Habakkuk concluded in his Ford Lectures that “there was no weakening among new men in the eighteenth century of the desire to acquire landed estates. Almost all the wealthiest (or their descendants in the next generation) joined the landed elite….” In greater detail F. M. L. Thompson called into question Rubinstein's findings by challenging the usefulness of his probate data and by showing that millionaire Victorian businessmen or their direct heirs made substantial land purchases.