The regal union (and James VI and I's desire that it be perfected) produced varied responses to Scotland, not just hostile reactions. Plays, pamphlets, treatises, and manuscripts accompanied parliamentary debate in England and queried the precedents for, as well as the future potential of, something called Britain. They also engaged with the nature of sovereignty. Authors thus deployed both negative and positive descriptions of the Scots, and they were unified less by Scotophobia and more by a tendency to privilege a distinctly English narrative despite a specifically British problem. Such Anglocentric narratives circumvented the issue of the Anglo-Scottish relationship, postponing English engagement with the realities of their new context. This was possible only because the Scots occupied a position somewhere between sameness and difference in the English imagination.

Despite a recent expansion of interest in the history of Restoration Scotland, historiographical engagement with the place of the Highlands in the Restoration state continues to be relatively limited. Building upon recent research into the political culture of the later seventeenth century, this article offers a new conceptualization of the relationship between the center and the Highland periphery. It argues that the region was heavily integrated into wider political circumstances, while recognizing that contemporary statesmen remained concerned about its perceived wildness. From this basis, the article moves on to consider the nature of Highland policy, suggesting that tactical shifts spoke of deeper strategic uncertainty as to whether the Highlands were best controlled through the direct imposition of government power or by close cooperation with local elites.

This article explores the formation of British imperial identity through a focus on the career of Sir James Mackintosh (1765–1832), a well-known Whig intellectual and imperial careerist who originally hailed from the Highlands of Scotland. Using Mackintosh's unpublished letters and autobiography, the article shows how he imagined and narrated his relationship to the Scottish Highlands from the vantage points of Bombay and London. In contrast to recent historiography that has focused on the translation of Scottish society, culture, and identity in British imperial spaces, this article argues that disidentification from the Highlands of Scotland and the erasure of different peoples, cultures, and textures of life was integral to Mackintosh's configuration of a British imperial identity.

“Finding the money”—whether money lost, hidden, or needed—became a defining practical and epistemological problem in the decade after the 1688 Revolution. It was a problem that linked together actors in fiscal administration, parliamentary politics, and economic theory, and drove innovative new applications of numerical calculation to political reasoning. In the debates on monarchical revenues that arose in 1689, a crisis of knowledge engulfed Parliament as MPs discovered how few among them had any insight into the nation's fiscal well-being. A parliamentary Commission of Public Accounts, formed in 1690, learned that even a basic financial assessment was extraordinarily difficult. Yet the commission's travails also revealed numerical calculations to be a potent political tool, which empowered relative outsiders to make incisive criticisms without complete information. Such combative political computation was systematized in the “political arithmetick” of Charles Davenant, who provided a novel political rationale for the value of “probable” knowledge.

This article argues that in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, changes in the perceived value of children, both materially and emotionally, put them in a new position of possible danger. The valorization of childhood brought new risks to children. Children were thought to be vulnerable to child abduction, or “child stealing,” as contemporaries termed it. Between 1790 and 1849, 108 cases of child abduction were tried at the Old Bailey and then recorded in its Proceedings or heard before magistrates in London's police courts and at county sessions courts and subsequently reported in newspapers. These cases, along with fictional accounts of child abduction, give insights into what were considered the most common motives for this crime. While some child abductors were motivated by poverty and saw children's clothes as economic assets that could be sold, others were driven by a desire to assume a mother role and represented stolen children as their own. Popular interest in abduction stories was sustained while contemporaries shared common fears about the loss of children and the limitations of adults to protect children from harm.

The story of the lorry girl and the lorry driver, the roads they traveled on, and the responses toward them allows for some telling insights into a strange kind of “immoral traffic” in 1930s and 1950s Britain. Whether seeking employment or adventure, leaving the “distressed areas” or absconding from an approved school, the lorry girl was linked to anxieties about women's mobility, unemployment, venereal disease, and delinquency. At the same time, the figure of the lorry driver, both romanticized and marginalized, showed that deviant and commercialized sexuality could be linked to the economic and social inequality of both men and women. Concerns about lorry jumping and hitchhiking in this period also reveal a different kind of narrative in the development of British roadways, which not only were tied to both the health and efficiency of the nation but also were spaces of sexual danger and sites of social delinquency.

The aftermath of the Second World War saw massive efforts to promote morale management across British industry. While these new discourses and industrial practices have often been explained in terms of the development of expert knowledge, this article places them at the center of the politics of social reconstruction. While the proper management of morale was linked to greater productivity, this article argues that it was often their assumed benefits regarding social cohesion and harmony that mattered most. It shows the ways in which government officials, management experts, and social scientists mobilized the perceived links that the war had forged among morale, collective sacrifice, and democratic citizenship and thus turned the workplace into a privileged site for the manufacture of consensus.