Three decades after the Good Friday Agreement, repositories such as the Linen Hall Library in Belfast have built collections that explore the impact of sectarian violence and the path to peace. While the Northern Ireland Political Collection is a must for any scholar of The Troubles, the library is also filled with resources for British scholars in a number of areas. One such innovative resource – the ExtraORDINARY Women collection – helps scholars answer questions of how gender history interacts with contemporary and local political history. The collection documents the history of a range of women's political and civil rights in holdings that range from 1965 to the present.

This article introduces the scope, content, and capabilities of a new born-digital archive. The Medieval Londoners Database (MLD) uses an online platform to collect from and connect to both documents (printed and archival) and digitized resources (such as British History Online and the History of Parliament Online). As a digital prosopography, MLD is a freely available resource that offers sophisticated search options to discover more about the lives of both the civic elite and ordinary individuals who resided in the city of London or its suburbs of Southwark and Westminster between ca. 1100 and 1520. MLD exemplifies how digitization and the semantic web enhance historical research by creating super-powered archival collections that are ever-expanding, accessible via multiple entry points, and able to facilitate highly analytical research.

In 1805, during a lull in hostilities between England and France, minor Warwickshire landowner and slaveholder Bertie Greatheed was on a European tour with his family when his son died, leaving behind an illegitimate child. Greatheed acquired his granddaughter from her Dresden-based mother and brought the child up as his own. This article revisits Steedman's earlier scholarship on Greatheed, which focused on questions of domestic service, through the lens of slavery. It uses the seventeen volumes of his diary-writing compiled between 1805 and 1825 to explore the connections between Greatheed's ownership of enslaved people on his St. Kitts estate and his possession and nurturing of his grandchild. It considers the contradiction between Greatheed's position as an abolitionist and his profit from slavery and slave ownership, which he used not only to sustain a way of life, but also to develop Leamington, Warwickshire, into a spa town and pleasure resort.

This article takes a micro-history approach, focusing on the life of a man identified only in the British records as “Ned” in order to illuminate the complexity and slipperiness of categories of “race.” Ned had lived in the Zulu Kingdom and, after fleeing a civil war there, became employed in Natal by an English colonist-settler, Thomas Handley. Ned traveled with the Handley family to England in 1859, and during this time, unexpectedly “disappeared” from the Handley's residence near Sheffield. A manhunt ensued and, as locals ruminated on Ned's possible status as a “slave,” the case attracted the interest of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Ned was eventually taken to London and housed in the Strangers’ Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders before his tragic death a few months later. His repeated escapes transfixed the public and resulted in detailed press coverage. Numerous parties became interested in his case, and complex and changing processes of racialization were key to the shifting ways in which he was represented. In this article, we both search for Ned's agency and volition, and demonstrate how the case also speaks to major issues in British history, including race, humanitarianism, and enslavement.

Historians of colonial and postcolonial attempts to deal with undernutrition in Africa have generally argued that, after the Second World War, scientists and doctors “medicalized” hunger by emphasizing specific deficiencies that could be medically “cured” or alleviated through dietary supplements, thereby covering up the economic, social, and political causes of (post)colonial hunger. This article argues that this explanation obscures the persistence of a more holistic approach immediately after the Second World War, which rejected this narrow vision of hunger and, on the contrary, framed it as a very broad problem requiring interdisciplinary research and ambitious economic and social solutions. It focuses in particular on the work of British nutrition specialist B. S. Platt and his “experiment” in The Gambia that was meant to devise a replicable recipe to cure colonial malnutrition through mechanization and agricultural development. Like many other such colonial projects, the project ended in dismal failure, but it illustrates how malnutrition was understood at the end of the war as a broad economic and social problem. It also shows how this more holistic approach was tightly associated with the postwar project of colonial “development” and was predicated on an ambition to thoroughly re-engineer colonial landscapes and subjects.

Coventry Cathedral and the Dresden Frauenkirche, both destroyed in the Second World War, are often mentioned in the same breath, treated as architectural, commemorative, and religious equivalents. Nothing could be further from the truth. While the ruins of Coventry Cathedral were transformed into a site of—and memorial to—postwar reconciliation, the Frauenkirche was neither a revered shrine nor an unintentional monument, but simply a gutted structure suspended in limbo for some forty years. It was only in the course of the 1980s, and especially in the aftermath of German reunification, that the Frauenkirche ruins became invested with specific meaning. Support from Britain and, above all, Coventry, was crucial in this process. Methodologically, the article fuses memory studies with church/architectural history and comparative/transnational research.

Historians of capitalism have put monopoly corporations and slavery at the heart of the history of a political-economic system long mythologized as founded on free markets. Liberal political economic theory, presupposing and demanding a private economic realm free from state intervention that would drive world-historical progress, was partly a reaction to the long sway of corporations that collapsed distinctions between private and public. The categories of liberal social-scientific thought have now come to so thoroughly structure historical writing aimed at wider audiences that scholarly review isn't sufficient guard against its accidental and artificial separation of public and private in a manner reinforcing liberal myths about historical evolution. This essay shows how writerly habits that posit untenable distinctions between state and private actors, that invoke models of development invented in the colonial era, and that neglect critiques by minoritized scholars, extend myths about British imperialism and industrialism's fundamentally developmental (rather than exploitative and extractive) role and imperialism's economic benefit to only a narrow sector of British society. These theoretical and historiographical assumptions expand the space for politically motivated challenges to well-established knowledge that Britain prospered economically from empire and slavery. This essay places Philip Stern's Empire, Incorporated and Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson's Slavery, Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution in conversation with work by scholars (often from formerly colonized regions) who have more decisively diagnosed Britain's debts to the imperial past, to illustrate how the framing of these books eases the downplaying of the economic effects of imperialism and slavery in debates about Britain's past.1