If clothing can be said to have political and cultural meaning, then the same must surely be true of its absence. In the British Empire, where the calibration of difference was paramount, nakedness acquired hierarchical significance. The sensibilities of the Victorians clashed with those of their colonial subjects on this topic over and over again, and nakedness came to define savagery and subjecthood. Through the optics of scientific literature, popular photography, and art, this essay examines the colonial politics of nakedness, its gendered dynamics, and the tensions between the erotic and the scientific.

This article sets the wide-ranging controversy over the doctrine of the Trinity that erupted in late seventeenth-century England firmly within the political context of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689. Against a voluminous historiography that confines the trinitarian controversy within the apolitical narrative of an incipient English enlightenment, this article considers the controversy as part of the broader political crisis that befell church and state in the final years of the century. The trinitarian controversy must be understood not simply as a doctrinal dispute but as a disciplinary crisis: a far-reaching debate over not only the content of orthodoxy but also the constitutional apportionment of responsibilities for its enforcement. As such, the controversy featured interventions from an unprecedented array of public authorities—Crown, Parliament, university, episcopate, and convocation—all claiming the preeminent custody of orthodoxy in an institutional landscape profoundly unsettled by revolutionary upheaval. This institutional dimension, long ignored by historians and theologians, placed the trinitarian controversy at the heart of civil and ecclesiastical politics during the reign of William and Mary. Indeed, the trinitarian controversy may be considered the defining event in church politics in the postrevolutionary era, exercising a prevailing influence on the content of Anglican ecclesiastical partisanship for much of the early eighteenth century. While recognizing the importance of these disputes to the emergence of an English enlightenment, this article insists that the trinitarian controversy is equally indispensable for understanding the rage of political parties in postrevolutionary England.

Recent scholarship has suggested that frequent receipt of news, especially in new media such as newspapers, altered conceptions of time in the early modern period. In particular, a new and modern “present” was born. This occupied a half-known and semifluid point between the fixity of the past and the unpredictability of the future. It created an imagined contemporaneous moment that linked geographically dispersed events. It was progressive, appearing to move the world ever forward into a novel state. However, close examination of English newspapers in the period 1695–1713, the first era of sustained news periodicals, calls these suggestions into question. Certainly the press of this era provided a constant and corrective update of information from all over Europe. This might have encouraged a sense of a fluid, contemporaneous, and progressive present. However, newspapers also tended to catalog information like a chronicle, which had the potential to fix contents as established history rather than fluid news. Delays in communication from distant places and journalistic practices of holding back stories for later publication ensured that information of different ages was presented on the same page. This destroyed any clear sense of a contemporaneous moment. The requirement to print the next issue even when there was no new information drew explicit attention to the lack of progressive development in some stories. This article posits a highly fractured presentation of time in later Stuart newspapers. It suggests that this is perhaps best analyzed by concepts drawn from “postmodern” theory rather than a hunt for emerging features of “modernity.”

In 1778, in response to news of the American alliance with France, the British government proposed a series of Catholic relief bills aimed at tolerating Catholicism in England, Scotland, and Ireland. Officials saw the legislation as a pragmatic response to a dramatically expanded war, but ordinary Britons were far less tolerant. They argued that the relief acts threatened to undermine a widely shared Protestant British patriotism that defined itself against Catholicism and France. Through an elaborate and well-connected popular print culture, Britons living in distant Atlantic communities, such as Kingston (Jamaica), Glasgow, Dublin, and New York City, publicly engaged in a radical brand of Protestant patriotism that began to question the very legitimacy of their own government. Events culminated in June 1780, with five days of violent, deadly rioting in the nation's capitol. Yet the Gordon Riots represent only the most famous example of this new, more zealous defense of Protestant Whig Britishness. In the British Caribbean and North America, unrelenting fears of French invasions and the perceived incompetence of the government mixed with an increasingly confrontational Protestant political culture to expose the fragile nature of British patriotism. In Scotland, anti-Catholic riots drove the country to near rebellion in early 1779, while in Ireland, Protestants and Catholics took advantage of this political instability to make demands for economic and political independence, culminating in the country's legislative autonomy in 1782. Ultimately, Catholic relief and the American alliance with France fundamentally altered how ordinary Britons viewed their government and, perhaps, laid the foundations for the far more radical political culture of the 1790s.

William Pitt's 1785 proposal for a free trade area between Britain and Ireland attempted to use free trade as a mechanism of imperial integration. It was a response to the agitation for political reform in Ireland and followed the attainment of legislative independence in 1782. The proposal aimed at coordinating economic and fiscal policy between the kingdoms without imposing explicit political controls. This article establishes that the measure failed because of the lack of consensus around the idea of free trade. Three contrasting ideas of free trade became apparent in the debates around the propositions of 1785: imperial or neomercantilist free trade, Smithean free trade, and national or neo-Machiavellian free trade. Imperial free trade was critical of monopolies but sought to organize trade to the benefit of the imperial metropole; Smithean free trade saw open markets as a discipline that assured efficiency but required imperial institutional frameworks, legally secured, to function. Neo-Machiavellian free trade asserted the right of every political community to organize its trade according to its interests. The article establishes the genealogy of these three positions in pamphlet debates and political correspondence in Britain and Ireland from 1689 to 1785. It argues that majority political opinion in Ireland, with exceptions, understood free trade in a neo-Machiavellian sense, while Pitt was committed to a Smithean ideal. The propositions collapsed because these internal tensions became more evident under the pressure of criticism. Liberal political economy did not of itself offer a route to a British exceptionality that finessed the tensions inherent in empire.

Did late Victorian strikers have a right to poor relief? Historians have suggested they did not. Scholars point out that nineteenth-century strikers rarely turned to the Poor Law for assistance, and when they did, during a colliers' strike in South Wales in 1898, Poor Law officials were taken to court by disgruntled coal companies. In the subsequent High Court ruling known as the Merthyr Tydfil judgment of 1900, the Master of the Rolls decided that the policy of relieving the strikers had indeed been unlawful. However, it is argued in this article that the judgment has not been properly understood by historians. Contemporaries did not think it obvious that the giving of poor relief to strikers was illegal. On the contrary, in 1898, there was widespread agreement that Poor Law officials had no choice but to support destitute strikers; the Poor Law demanded they relieve the men and their families, a point confirmed in an earlier High Court ruling in 1899. Thus, Poor Law scholars should view the Merthyr judgment as a notable innovation in Poor Law policy. Labor historians should see the ruling as part of the employers' counteroffensive against the labor movement of the 1890s and 1900s. Merthyr came out of the same febrile atmosphere that produced the Taff Vale judgment. That its true significance has been forgotten can largely be explained by the labor movement's unease at having a striker's right to poor relief confirmed in 1899. Respectable workers, union leaders averred, should not be supported out of the poor rates.

This article explores the relationship between religion, sexuality, and modernity through a study of the important yet neglected text Sex and Common-Sense (1921) by the celebrated Anglican feminist preacher, pacifist, and campaigner for women's ordination, Maude Royden (1876–1956). It argues for the ongoing vitality of religious constructions of sexual identity in interwar Britain and the deeply symbiotic rather than oppositional relationship between Christian and secular (scientific) discourses during this period. Royden's engagement with the new sexological and psychological approaches to the self and sexuality is examined, as are her efforts to modernize religious understandings of sexuality through a more compassionate, progressive reading of women's capacity for sexual pleasure, marriage reform, divorce, birth control, and homosexuality. The centrality of her High Church incarnational theology to an understanding of sex as sacramental is also assessed. The article proposes that histories of sexuality and histories of religion have hitherto worked with differing chronologies of secularization that have had interesting implications not only for the recognition of religion's continued influence in shaping mainstream British sexual morality but also for the uneven and multifarious readings of modernity itself.

The Anglo-Irish War of 1919–21 spurred organized political activity among women in Britain, including former suffragists who campaigned against coercion in Ireland and members of the Irish minority in Britain who supported more radical republican efforts to achieve Irish independence. Their efforts are particularly significant because they occurred immediately after the granting of partial suffrage to women in 1918. This article argues that the advent of female suffrage changed the landscape of women's political mobilization in distinct ways that were made visible by advocacy on Ireland, including the regendering of the discourse of citizenship and the creation of new opportunities beyond the vote for women to exercise political power. At the same time, the use of women's auxiliary organizations and special meetings and the strategic blurring of the public and private spheres through the political use of domestic spaces all indicate the strength of continuities with nineteenth-century antecedents. The article further situates women's political advocacy on Ireland in an imperial and transnational context, arguing that it was part of the process of reconceptualizing Britain's postwar global role whether through outright anti-imperialism, in the case of Irish republicans, or through humanitarianism and the new internationalism, in the case of most former suffragists. Finally, the article examines the failure of these two groups of women to forge alliances with each other, underscoring the ways in which both class and nationality challenged a notional common interest based on sex.