The treason trials after 1945 were shaped by Norway’s particular experience of German occupation. The central importance of Nasjonal Samling to German Nazification efforts in Norway meant that those planning for a post-war reckoning soon focused their attention on how to criminalise the actions of party members. This chapter outlines the course of the Norwegian occupation, including the manifold actions on the part of Norwegian citizens that would later give rise to punishment. It details how the exile government in London and the resistance forces in Norway jointly prepared the legal groundwork for the post-war reckoning. In doing so, this chapter highlights the reasoning behind the introduction of the extraordinary legal provisions that would both determine the course of the trials and cause significant controversy after the war.

That the industrial innovations which ushered in the modern economy made their appearance first in Britain has often been understood in relation to economic “factors” such as wage rates, size of work force, and cost of labor and materials, capable of being compared over a variety of situations. But the historiographical field created by this literature is a jumble of opposing claims. While it may be possible to show that certain of these factors contributed to economic growth in particular situations, the transformation that began in Britain in the 1760s was a unique historical event. Any of these factors that may have contributed to it only did so by operating in that specific time and place. We need therefore an account that focuses on what made Britain a fertile site for such a transformation and then on the actors who effected it. The chapter stresses two such determinants, first the overall economic development that gave Britain an unparalleled national market and connections to international ones, and second, a “culture of science” within which technical innovation was encouraged. Both these domains developed a high degree of autonomy by the eighteenth century, and James Watt emerged at the intersection of them.

Besides mercantile, shipping, legal, insurance and financial services, the capital’s maritime connections extended to large-scale manufacturing like shipbuilding, ship repairing, marine engineering, sail-making and sugar baking. Shipping investors, almost exclusively involved in some aspect of sea trade, varied from those holding a few shares to the relative few reliant on ship owning for their income. The wealthiest shipowners and merchants, as well as the Royal Navy, were among the customers of London’s shipyards, clustered along the waterfront. Subject to severed cyclical swings, shipbuilding was a highly skilled, unionised occupation. Many of those employed in port industries lived in London’s then quite socially mixed waterfront parishes of East London. Seamen ashore in colonial and foreign trades also gathered here in response to a sailor economy serving their need for credit, lodging and entertainment.

Nineteenth-century London was not only the greatest city ever known but it also had an immense port. Sarah Palmer explores how London’s maritime dimension, which included major industries, shaped London physically, economically, socially and profoundly affected the lives and livelihoods of many inhabitants. Until now, the relationship between London and its port has not been sufficiently explored by either the many London historians or by the relatively few historians of the Port of London. Port engineering, architecture, shipbuilding and port labour have received much attention, but are generally considered in isolation from the wider London context. She draws on such existing studies, as well as much new material based on archival research, to provide a wider perspective.

The East India Dock Company followed and by 1810, there were also three on the south bank. Investment came predominantly from the capital’s wealthy mercantile and shipping communities, with slave trade interests strongly represented in both the West India and London companies. Wartime conditions failed to affect investment or impede the capital’s remarkable dock boom. The design for the downriver West and East India systems presented few problems, unlike the constricted setting of the London Docks. Labour shortages, bad weather and material scarcity affected construction by generally experienced contractors, but all docks were operating by 1806. The final costs exceeded estimates but only in the case of the London Docks by a large margin. Clearing housing and industries in Wapping burdened it with long-term debt. All the north bank companies chose a hierarchical employment structure. In contrast to strict supervision in the West India Docks, London replicated the traditional system on the quays, allowing its managers considerable autonomy. In their new regulated workplace, labourers faced restrictions, discipline and the loss of traditional perks.

This chapter focuses on Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World (1762), which brings together the letters from the Chinese philosopher Lien Chi Altangi and his correspondents that were published in the Public Ledger across 1760 and 1761. Referencing many European Enlightenment writers, the chapter discusses Goldsmith’s work as a text which critically reflects on the meaning – and the possibilities and problematics – of the slippery term ‘cosmopolitanism’, considering the way in which it presents as ‘cosmopolitan’ the workings of both global commerce and the elite republic of letters.

This chapter presents an overview of Multicultural London English (MLE), the urban contact vernacular that has emerged in London in recent years. It starts with a discussion of how similar varieties have been reported across other European cities and have become known as multiethnolects, meaning that they are not restricted to any particular ethnic group but are available to anyone, including speakers from non-immigrant backgrounds. The chapter then focuses on the specific social and historical circumstances that have led to the emergence of MLE, from its beginnings in the 1980s to the present day. After presenting the linguistic characteristics of MLE, a discussion follows of the ways in which MLE has been perceived in the media and by users and non-users of MLE, and how attitudes towards the variety may influence its trajectory in the future. While there is some suggestion that the variety (or some variation thereof) may not be restricted to London, it is not clear whether MLE will stabilise to an everyday vernacular spoken in inner-city neighbourhoods and beyond or whether it will divide along social and ethnic lines. The chapter concludes with a discussion of new research being undertaken to answer some of these issues.

Chapter 7 looks at the place of the final remaining West India Regiment within the mass militarised culture of late nineteenth-century Britain. The first book-length regimental histories date from this period. Written by men who had served in the 1873-74 Anglo-Asante War as junior officers, these histories offered more celebratory accounts of the West India Regiments and represented an effort to secure the status and historical legacy of the units. A particular focus of the chapter is the Diamond Jubilee of 1897 when representatives of the regiment were present in London. The coverage they received, as well as their depiction in popular cultural forms, serves to reveal their exclusion from a British Army that was rendered White and metropolitan at this apogee of a racially inflected imperial culture. As such, the partial equality that had been granted to their Black soldiers when they were created a century earlier was symbolically undone.

Chapter 6 further examines the Jenkinson map, remarkable far more for its voluminous illustration than its cartography, which adds little that is new and renders Jenkinson’s route into Central Asia inaccurately. The map includes dozens of small illustrations, explained by almost thirty captions in cartouches, producing a map that informed Muscovy Company merchants of societies they would encounter on the route. The chapter concludes with three images of Central Asian exotica, added to the map for no more obvious purpose than entertainment.

Chapter 5 introduces the reader to the map of 1562 and 1566 attributed to Anthony Jenkinson, a merchant and envoy of the joint stock Muscovy Company. The Company had been founded in 1555 in London to capitalize on the unexpected landing of a British explorers in Muscovy’s hinterlands and quickly won trade monopolies with Russia; the chapter introduces the cast of characters (cartographer, engraver, publisher) in the Muscovy Company who collaborated in producing a map based on Jenkinson’s report of his travels through Russia to Persia in 1557 and 1561.

This chapter makes a case for the importance of the 1830s in the history of the British novel. Although unmarked by the publication of novels that enjoyed the longevity of fiction published in the decades before and after, this decade produced a conjunction that was to have a major impact on the future development of the novel form: the emergence, on the one hand, of the young Charles Dickens as a talented new writer and, on the other, of London as a major subject of (predominantly visual) representation. This conjunction, the chapter argues, was to produce a new branch, in Franco Moretti’s sense, on the tree of the British novel. Specifically, the chapter shows how Dickens’s earliest work, Sketches by Boz, already fabricates, in terms of characterisation and its organisation of the social spaces that could potentially underlie plot relations, a London-driven urban aesthetic that would differ from the principles of what, by the 1860s, became consecrated as the canonical British novel.

This chapter explores London as a site of sexual pleasure and danger in the nineteenth century, a period during which as an imperial centre it became the world’s largest city. Focused on the complex sexual landscape of this urban environment, it examines sexual activity in both private and public spaces including homes, theatres, public houses, pleasure gardens, royal parks, and toilets, paying particularly attention to the ways in which social class determined the personal experiences of sexuality in the Victorian era. Many of these acts were frequently monitored and policed and could result not only in moral censure but also in arrest, imprisonment, or public humiliation in places such as divorce courts. Most likely to run afoul of the law were those in the British metropolis who transgressed gender and sexual boundaries by working as prostitutes, cross-dressing, or engaging in intimate acts with members of their own sex. The sexual history of nineteenth-century London also involved the proliferation of a thriving and diversified trade in pornographic texts and images, ranging from erotic novels to photographic postcards. Central to this chapter are considerations of the ways in which sex and sexuality figured in economic life, urban geographic configurations, and various forms of self-fashioning.

Although Swift was not a Londoner by origin or in spirit, references to diverse quarters of the town and many facets of life in the capital turn up in several of Swift’s creative works. This chapter illustrates this pervasive presence in some key writings. First is the milieu evoked by the narrator of the Tale, lodged amid the landmarks that inscribed the cultural semiology of London on its streets and buildings. Poems follow from Swift’s most influential phase in London, such as the ‘Description of a City Shower’. Finally come a set of works that were composed long after the time when, however reluctantly, the author had shaken the dust of England off his heels.

This book considers professional culture in relation to place and affect. All law students from across Britain and its empire had to train in London at four legal societies known as the Inns of Court. Unlike other professions that underwent systematic reforms, the Inns of Court remained guild-like associations that offered no systematic training. Instead of inculcating legal knowledge, the societies relied on affective rituals to create a sense of belonging among members—or, conversely, to marginalize those who did not fit the profession’s ideals. This book examines the societies’ active efforts to maintain an exclusive and masculine culture in the face of sweeping social, political, and demographic changes across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.