Based on the findings of a major oral history study, this article uses the personal narratives of Ulster Protestant migrants to illuminate some of the understudied cultural and human impacts of the Northern Ireland Troubles for postwar British society. Situating these impacts within the history of “internal decolonization” and the postwar implosion of “Greater Britain,” it shows how the Troubles fueled popular perceptions of Northern Ireland as an “imperial liability,” creating distinctive dilemmas of belonging for Ulster Britons settling in England during the period. Drawing on cultural and psychoanalytic approaches to oral history analysis, the article demonstrates how the “composure” of Ulster Protestant subjectivities in Troubles-era England involved attempts to narratively integrate the destabilizing impacts of cultural encounter with memories, emotions, and identifications extending from migrants’ formative experiences of growing up in the polarized sociopolitical world of Northern Ireland. In analyzing the interplay between these contexts and dynamics, the article sheds new light on the cultural legacies of the Troubles for British society, suggesting new ways of situating the conflict within the historiography of postwar Britain and presenting some alternative interpretive possibilities for writing the human history of the Troubles beyond the “flattening rubric of identity.”

This article argues that women welfare claimants, particularly lone mothers, were disproportionately targeted by invasive and punitive anti-fraud measures in the post-1945 welfare state because they were considered most likely to commit fraud through their perceived sexual immorality and reckless childbearing. Although the issue of welfare fraud has influenced high-profile policy and legislation, existing historical scholarship is scant and we know little about the form, extent, or consequences of welfare fraud. Here, a mix of correspondence, statistics, and reports produced by the National Assistance Board, Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance, and National Assistance Board for Northern Ireland are analyzed alongside memoirs and a sample of offenses dealt with by the police to explore the nature and scale of welfare fraud by women alongside an examination of anti-fraud measures employed by the state in Britain and Northern Ireland. It shows that fraud policies risked bringing women into unwelcome conflict with authorities and pushed women into dropping their claims, out of fear of prosecution. In Britain, this approach became intertwined with an embedded hostility toward migrants, while sectarianism underpinned the delivery of state welfare in Northern Ireland. Consequently, these findings suggest new ways of understanding how the welfare state reshaped the relationship between central government and its most vulnerable citizens.

Some studies of the lived experience of religion in early Stuart England have argued for a historiographical overemphasis on doctrinal controversy, suggesting that attention to contemporary works of private devotion can dissolve categories of division in post-Reformation English Protestantism. However, in considering two such devotional texts—Daniel Featley's Ancilla Pietatis (1626) and John Cosin's Hours of Prayer (1627)—this article demonstrates the difficulty in separating devotion from polemic. Indeed, these prayer manuals cannot be understood outside of an extended interconfessional and intra-Protestant polemical exchange—a confessional conflict with powerful women, including Mary Villiers, Countess of Buckingham, and Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland, at the center. Here, attention to practical devotion does not elide categories of division within English Protestantism but rather highlights how such divisions were sharpened through competing devotional efforts aimed at court women in response to the theological uncertainty wrought by the Catholic dynastic matches of the 1620s. Finally, an extended examination of the activities and interests of Elizabeth Cary suggests that our understanding of the lived experience of religion for lay women must be expanded to include participation in theological controversy, offering a version of female religious agency that extends beyond private spaces of devotional practice.

In the late 1930s Viscount Lymington—born Gerard Wallop, and from 1943 the 9th Earl of Portsmouth—emerged as a vocal champion of an “authentically English expression of fascism” rooted in the countryside and agriculture. An aristocrat and Conservative member of Parliament (MP; 1929–1934) turned dissident, Lymington railed against the perceived decline of Britain and the empire from an agrarian vantage point. His most famous work, Famine in England, published in 1938, warned that Britain’s overreliance on imported food and its neglect of the land had pushed the nation to the brink of catastrophe. On the surface, this text was a passionate call for agricultural revival in the face of looming war. Yet at its core, Famine in England was far more than a rural policy manifesto. It was a statement of fascist blood and soil philosophy in which race operated as the grammatical structure ordering ideas of food, land, and national renewal. In Lymington’s vision, the health of the soil and the health of the “British race” were inextricably entwined. Saving one meant the salvation of the other. Race, in other words, was the invisible architecture—the grammar—underlying his prescriptions for Britain’s agrarian crisis.

This article revisits the development of the field of British queer history to argue that the division that began in the later 1970s—between works focused on the periods before and after the late nineteenth century—has obscured underlying methodological unities that developed within the scholarship since the 1990s. The failure to emphasize common cultural history methodologies that have been the hallmark of the best works analyzing same-sex desire and transing gender for the period from the late seventeenth century onward is due in part to the separating off of histories of same-sex desire between women from those studies focused on men. This article argues that a Foucauldian understanding of power, the liberal public sphere, and liberal political systems, all dating from the late seventeenth century, provide a unified context for the formulating and unraveling of a wide range of self-understandings in relation to gender and sexual desires. What explains the developments of the late nineteenth century stems from the first such self-understandings being formulated for the requirements of a rights-bearing subject within a liberal political system. This approach highlights the ethical component of public political identities, and the consequences of this for British queer history going forward.