This paper uses two manuscript tracts to reconstruct the vision of the English polity underpinning Lord Burghley's interregnum proposals of 1584–85. These proposals famously prompted Patrick Collinson's work on “the monarchical republic of Elizabeth I,” which in turn became embroiled in subsequent attempts to recuperate distinctively “republican” strands of thought and feeling in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Written by two clients of central figures in the regime, the two texts are replies to a tract by John Leslie outlining Mary Stuart's claim to the English throne. This tract was republished in 1581 in Latin and then in 1584 in English as part of a Catholic propaganda offensive of the summer of 1584 to which, in turn, the Bond of Association and the interregnum scheme itself were responses. By comparing different versions of the two texts with one another and with Thomas Bilson's later printed tract, The true difference between Christian subjection and unchristian rebellion, something like the structuring assumptions, indeed the political thought, underlying the interregnum scheme can be recovered and analyzed and the republican nature of the monarchical republic assessed in detail for the first time.

Growing numbers of sailors powered British fleets during the long eighteenth century. By exploring mariners' habits, dress, and material practice when in port, this article uncovers their roles as agents of cultural change. These men complicated material hierarchies, with a broad impact on developing western consumer societies, devising a distinctive material practice. They shaped important systems of transnational exchange and redefined networks of plebeian material culture. Mariners were also endowed with a growing rhetorical authority over the long eighteenth century, embodying new plebeian cosmopolitanism, while expressing facets of a dawning imperial masculinity. Marcus Rediker described eighteenth-century Anglo-American mariners as plain dealers, wageworkers, and pirates, as well as “men of the world.” This international contingent mediated between world communities, while demonstrating new tastes and new fashions. They also personified the manly traits celebrated in Britain's burgeoning imperial age.

This article explores the objects that were left as identifiers for the children abandoned to London's Foundling Hospital in the eighteenth century. Required by the hospital in order to permit a future reclaiming by a parent and to guard against a charge of infanticide, these tokens fulfilled an institutional priority. The token procedure, this article argues, resulted in a class of objects that can be aligned closely with elegy. Occasional objects, the tokens communicate maternal affection and a sense of dislocation. As distillations of grief and imaginative framings of loss, the foundling tokens constitute eighteenth-century artifacts of elegy.

This article examines the relationship between shame and police court media trial reports. It explores the social and cultural mores that underpinned the construction of shaming practices in trial coverage and assesses the ways in which the media functioned as a judicial and extrajudicial shaming resource. Far from disappearing with changing sensibilities, as has been argued elsewhere, premodern religious and judicial shaming methods shifted into areas of modernity, being relayed, supported, and influenced by new forms of modern print culture. The media, this article contends, served as an extension of the disciplinary apparatus, with editors applying their own assumptions about the guilt of the accused regardless of judicial verdicts and in line with their own notion of “common-sense” lay justice. The use of shame, though, was discriminatory—mirroring, and even helping to define, middle-class notions of shameful behavior and masculine and feminine conduct—which would, crucially, expose the social and cultural confines of media censure.

The effects of industrialization on British life were the subject of a broad and intelligible set of debates during the early nineteenth century, often described as the “machinery question.” This question, concerning what today is called “technology,” was framed to include its effects on the whole of human life—an approach rarely seen by the late nineteenth century, a period marked instead by disciplinary specialization. An exception to this trend can be found in the work of the social critic and heterodox economist J. A. Hobson (1858–1940), better known for his critique of imperialism. From the 1890s, Hobson reopened the machinery question by offering an ethical analysis of mechanization which was both holistic and sustained. In addition to proposing this new lens for viewing Hobson, this article explores the challenges—as well as the opportunities—facing those returning to the machinery question more generally.

Calls for a renewed sense of “good citizenship” in the early twentieth century were loud and persistent. Especially important in the citizenship quest was the creation of healthy and efficient children, cured of urban maladies and loyal to a wide notion of community. Such attributes were seen as vital in an economically and militarily competitive world. Historians have already examined the sorts of political and bodily education that arose from these concerns. This article instead looks at how the focus on the body and citizenship was realized in the actual processes of school building. From the medical discourses that underpinned the design of heating, lighting, and ventilation systems, to the emerging focus on the sensory environment of the classroom, the materiality of the school was essential to creating the “good citizen”—physically fit, economically productive, and loyal to the nation.

This article examines the politics of colonial voluntary work as an aspect of settler society and in relation to broader networks of imperial activism and reform. The East Africa Women's League, a predominant white women's organization in colonial Kenya, participated in settler politics during debates in 1930 concerning a Closer Union of British territories in East Africa. This involvement established connections between the voluntary welfare activities of settler women in Kenya and contemporary transimperial activist networks. Drawing on the private archives of the League, this article argues that the public lives of white women in colonial Kenya were entwined in the tensions of welfare in the twentieth-century British imperial project.

This article explores how photographs were used as evidence during the early Northern Ireland Troubles. In particular, it focuses on the collection and use of images at the Scarman Tribunal, which investigated the disturbances of the summer of 1969, and the Widgery Tribunal, which sought to ascertain the sequence of events surrounding Bloody Sunday. Through close readings of how photographs were used at these two tribunals, the article shows how the existence of certain photographs served to anchor discussions of trajectories of violence around certain places and moments, illustrates how photographs taken for publication in newspapers were reread as evidential documents, and indicates the range of plausible truths each photograph was understood to provide. The study shows the importance of exploring the processes and mechanisms through which the state made sense of Northern Ireland to understand how causal accounts of conflict were produced and authenticated—and how, in turn, those explanatory regimes shaped the policies of the British state and the responses of local communities, and became embedded in historical writing on the Troubles.