This chapter focuses on the multiple mobilities of prisoners of war captured by the British in the years 1793–1815. It refers to prisoners being held at contested imperial sites across a vast panorama of warfare, from the Cape of Good Hope to Jamaica, Ceylon, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, alongside detention centers, including prisons, prison ships, and parole towns in Britain. A combined analysis of these sites makes visible the scope and scale of war captivity and prisoner movements across the British imperial world. The chapter investigates how British administrators coped with influxes of prisoners, asks questions about legal status, subjecthood, and liberty during this revolutionary period, and argues for the inclusion of the experiences of non-combatants and civilians – groups ranging from whalers and free and enslaved people of color, to lascar seamen, independent travelers, women, and children – within theaters of war and histories of forced migration more broadly.

Why are the nine years of destructive invasion and attempted conquest of Scotland unknown to English literary criticism? This chapter shows why we have forgotten this unusually brutal invasive war of 1542–1550 and why it matters to remember it. It introduces the ‘British history’ of Geoffrey of Monmouth, through which English kings claimed feudal overlordship of Scotland. It shows how Henry VIII deployed Geoffrey’s history in his Declaration of 1542 to justify invasion, but also how Henry’s rhetoric and strategy disavowed any desire to conquer in the pretence that he was reluctantly forced into reminding the Scots of English overlordship. Such rhetoric, subsequently repeated and reprinted, helped both justify English claims and trivialise the war to the point of oblivion in modern English historiography. The chapter reads a neglected Scottish text by William Lamb which, opposing Henry’s claims by appealing to the law of nations, exposes the precarious fictionality of English claims to overlordship and its lack of credibility in a broader European context.

Ireland’s history within the United Kingdom is, not to put too fine a point upon it, complicated. The question of the shared constitutional history of Ireland and Great Britain is more complicated again by the uncodified nature of the constitution of the United Kingdom. This chapter explores the constitutional links between Ireland and the United Kingdom after 1800. It does so by examining both the experience of constitutionalism in Ireland, and the manner in which this experience was understood and how it influenced constitutional development in the United Kingdom.

All constitutions rely on history. Without constitutional history the political affairs of the United Kingdom would be unintelligible. As J. R. Seeley aphorised in his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1885: ‘History without Political Science has no fruit; Political Science without History has no root.’