This essay explores changes in eighteenth-century male clothing in the context of the history of sexual difference, gender roles, and masculinity. The essay contributes to a history of dress by reconstructing a range of meanings and social practices through which men's clothing was understood by its consumers. Furthermore, critically engaging with work on the “great male renunciation,” the essay argues that the public authority that accrued to men through their clothing was based not on a new image of a rational disembodied man but instead on an emphasis on the male anatomy and masculinity as intrinsically embodied. Drawing on findings from the material objects of eighteenth-century clothing, visual representations, and evidence from the archival records of male consumers, the essay adopts an interdisciplinary approach that allows historians to study sex and gender as embodied, rather than simply performed. In so doing, the essay not only treats “embodiment” as an historical category but also responds to recent shifts in the historical discipline and the wider academy towards a more corporealist approach to the body.

The key question posed by this essay is why historians' interest in Britain's imperial past has increased rather than diminished in recent decades. It argues that this interest has been sustained in part by a preoccupation with certain contemporary social and political issues, and differences of opinion about these issues have helped fuel the “imperial history wars.” The nature of the debate has differed for American- and British-based historians. For the former, British imperial history has served as an analogy for thinking about America's racial politics and its role as a global power. For the latter, it has served as a focal point for contending claims about Britain's past and deepening anxieties about its future. The essay concludes by urging historians to be more self-reflexive about their own practices and more rigorous in exposing presentist claims about the past.

This article examines the intersections of religion and national identity among Britons in nineteenth-century colonial India. It argues, contrary to Linda Colley and other scholars who have asserted a pan-Protestant nature of Britishness, that religion frequently was a site of division among Britons in India during the first half of the nineteenth century. Anglicans such as Claudius Buchanan wished to cement an Anglican hegemony within the empire. Presbyterian chaplain Dr. James Bryce, by contrast, advocated for the Churches of Scotland and England to be coestablished. Roman Catholic priests, less successfully, argued for similar rights to be extended to Roman Catholicism, the religion of close to a majority of British troops serving in India. Lastly, Baptist missionaries questioned the East India Company's continued support of Hinduism through its collection of pilgrim taxes, which they labeled as “anti-Christian.” These competing visions of “Greater Britain” in religious terms point to the fragility and divisiveness of national identity in the nineteenth-century British Empire, an institution scholars have generally claimed fostered a sense of Britishness.

This article reopens the vexed question of how many women in early modern England could read by calling attention to the precise ways in which women marked, initialed, and signed legal depositions in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London. It shows that initialing and signing were closely correlated skills, and it argues that women who wrote their initials had begun to learn how to read. Using initials as a proxy for elementary reading literacy, it goes on to map female literacy in early modern London, showing that urban upbringings fostered female literacy and that reading literacy was far more broadly socially diffused than the ability to write. Changes in initialing patterns as women aged suggest that women found reading to be useful and relevant to their lives, and that literacy carried social prestige.

This paper uses two manuscript tracts to reconstruct the vision of the English polity underpinning Lord Burghley's interregnum proposals of 1584–85. These proposals famously prompted Patrick Collinson's work on “the monarchical republic of Elizabeth I,” which in turn became embroiled in subsequent attempts to recuperate distinctively “republican” strands of thought and feeling in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Written by two clients of central figures in the regime, the two texts are replies to a tract by John Leslie outlining Mary Stuart's claim to the English throne. This tract was republished in 1581 in Latin and then in 1584 in English as part of a Catholic propaganda offensive of the summer of 1584 to which, in turn, the Bond of Association and the interregnum scheme itself were responses. By comparing different versions of the two texts with one another and with Thomas Bilson's later printed tract, The true difference between Christian subjection and unchristian rebellion, something like the structuring assumptions, indeed the political thought, underlying the interregnum scheme can be recovered and analyzed and the republican nature of the monarchical republic assessed in detail for the first time.

Beliefs about the Devil informed Scottish piety in a myriad of ways. This article explores, in particular, the experiential relationship between Reformed theology, the practice of introspection, and demonic belief. It locates a process of profound anxiety and self-identification as evil that occurred during inward, personal engagement with Satan. This process, loosely coined here as “internalizing the demonic,” reveals the close and consequential relationship between the clerical promotion of self-surveillance and the widely internalized belief in the Devil's natural affinity with the “evil hearts” of men and women. Through an examination of English texts circulated in Scotland and a brief comparison with Protestant groups abroad, this article suggests that internalizing the demonic was a defining component of experiential piety not just in Scotland, but also throughout the Reformed Anglophone world.

Following the loss of Surinam to the Netherlands in 1667, the English Crown attempted to evacuate those of its subjects living in the colony under Dutch rule. In doing so, its representatives laid claim to members of the Jewish population, who Surinam's English governors had previously declared to be “considered as English-born.” In the resulting dispute between the English and Dutch over who could be removed, Crown officials embraced articulations of subjecthood forged in the colony that differed from metropolitan norms. In asserting that Surinam's Jews remained subjects of the king, and by implying that they would continue to do so once evacuated, the English delegation departed from the Crown's frequent rejection of the wider efficacy of colonial naturalization. Surinam's Dutch governor, meanwhile, dismissed the assertion that members of the “Hebrew nation” could be subjects of an English king, arguing that subjecthood and nationality were identical and that only those of the English nation could be removed. The dispute between the English and the Dutch over the status of Surinam's Jews reminds us that English subjecthood was shaped by colonial settings and by the contested status of groups who found themselves transferred between imperial powers.

Growing numbers of sailors powered British fleets during the long eighteenth century. By exploring mariners' habits, dress, and material practice when in port, this article uncovers their roles as agents of cultural change. These men complicated material hierarchies, with a broad impact on developing western consumer societies, devising a distinctive material practice. They shaped important systems of transnational exchange and redefined networks of plebeian material culture. Mariners were also endowed with a growing rhetorical authority over the long eighteenth century, embodying new plebeian cosmopolitanism, while expressing facets of a dawning imperial masculinity. Marcus Rediker described eighteenth-century Anglo-American mariners as plain dealers, wageworkers, and pirates, as well as “men of the world.” This international contingent mediated between world communities, while demonstrating new tastes and new fashions. They also personified the manly traits celebrated in Britain's burgeoning imperial age.

Scholars have attributed a steep decline in violent crime in nineteenth-century England to a “civilizing offensive” launched to discipline violent masculinities. In East London, however, a significant minority of those brought before summary courts on charges of violent offenses were women. Newspaper accounts of these cases show that some women committed assaults that resembled the violent actions of men. The courts and newspapers evaluated defendants against standards of femininity. Those women who successfully performed dominant versions of femininity received lenient treatment in the courts and approval in the newspapers. The courts harshly punished those who did not conform. These accounts reveal a campaign against disorderly femininities that paralleled the civilizing offensive directed against unruly masculinities.

This article revisits the idea of “cotton imperialism” in Britain, showing that metropolitan support for cotton projects in the British Empire was uneven. Using the records of the British Cotton Growing Association's (BCGA) fund-raising campaign of 1902–1914, the article shows that “empire cotton” did not receive widespread support in Britain. In Lancashire, some cotton capitalists financed the movement for empire cotton, but many others refused to participate. Investors were uninterested in the BCGA's business model despite their interest in other cotton projects. To make matters worse, the BCGA became a tool for politicians on both sides of the Tariff Reform controversy. Textile workers were the only major segment of the British population to accept the BCGA's claims about the value of empire-grown cotton for Britain. Their support for imperial development was, however, limited and pragmatic. The BCGA's struggle to raise money for empire cotton shows the importance of grounding the rhetoric of empire in empirical findings: in the face of the Lancashire lobby's vocal campaign for empire cotton, Britons in general were reluctant to pay for it themselves.

Between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, the security of British navigation in and around the corsair-infested waters of the Mediterranean depended on indented parchment passports—Mediterranean passes. This article recovers the history of the Mediterranean pass and traces the development of the Mediterranean pass system from its origins in England's mid-seventeenth-century treaties with the North African regencies to its role in the emergence of Britain's Mediterranean empire over the course of the long eighteenth century. At its inception, the Mediterranean pass system formed an interstate regulatory regime that mediated between North African and British naval power by providing a means to identify British vessels at sea and to limit the protection of Britain's treaties to them. During the eighteenth century, however, foreign merchants and shipowners, especially from Genoa, sought out the security of British passes by moving to Britain's colonies at Gibraltar and Minorca. The resulting incorporation of foreigners into the British pass system fundamentally altered the nature and significance of the pass and contributed to the development of Britain's imperial presence in the Mediterranean. This article reveals how the growth of British power and the interactions of British consuls and imperial officials with mariners and merchants from around the Mediterranean transformed the pass from a document of identification into an instrument of imperial protection that helped sustain Britain's Mediterranean outposts in the eighteenth century and make possible the dramatic expansion of the British Empire further into that sea at the start of the nineteenth.

It is often claimed that John Milton grew politically disaffected under the Protectorate government, which he served as Latin secretary. This article reviews the evidence for said disaffection. It finds that the passages in Milton's writings that have been taken to show disaffection with Protectorate or Protector, most of which postdate Cromwell's death, have little to do with Cromwell and mainly to do with the rapidly shifting political conditions of 1659–60. While the Cromwellian religious settlement fell short of the disestablishment Milton wanted, Cromwell favored religious toleration more strongly than his parliaments did, and Milton supported him in foreign affairs. Most likely Milton had no such thing as a single view of the Protectorate regime; his views of its various actors and interest groups, its successes and failures, would have been detailed and complex.

This article explores the objects that were left as identifiers for the children abandoned to London's Foundling Hospital in the eighteenth century. Required by the hospital in order to permit a future reclaiming by a parent and to guard against a charge of infanticide, these tokens fulfilled an institutional priority. The token procedure, this article argues, resulted in a class of objects that can be aligned closely with elegy. Occasional objects, the tokens communicate maternal affection and a sense of dislocation. As distillations of grief and imaginative framings of loss, the foundling tokens constitute eighteenth-century artifacts of elegy.

This article examines the relationship between shame and police court media trial reports. It explores the social and cultural mores that underpinned the construction of shaming practices in trial coverage and assesses the ways in which the media functioned as a judicial and extrajudicial shaming resource. Far from disappearing with changing sensibilities, as has been argued elsewhere, premodern religious and judicial shaming methods shifted into areas of modernity, being relayed, supported, and influenced by new forms of modern print culture. The media, this article contends, served as an extension of the disciplinary apparatus, with editors applying their own assumptions about the guilt of the accused regardless of judicial verdicts and in line with their own notion of “common-sense” lay justice. The use of shame, though, was discriminatory—mirroring, and even helping to define, middle-class notions of shameful behavior and masculine and feminine conduct—which would, crucially, expose the social and cultural confines of media censure.

This article examines the 1961 diary of a new left young activist to explore his fractured sense of personal and political self. At the height of the Cold War, John Hoyland was an undergraduate at London's University College, living with his Communist Party family and active in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). His intensely political world notwithstanding, Hoyland's diary reveals that interior life troubled his every day and shaped much of his thinking. Hoyland's self-conscious narrative illuminates self-making, male heterosexuality, generation, and relationships and cultures in the early 1960s British Left. He experienced himself as fragmented and struggled to negotiate his conflicting identities. He felt torn between older models of socialist identity and morality, his hedonism associated with the beatnik metropolitan scene, and his project of personal self-improvement. His diary offers rare insight into the intimate thoughts and feelings of one New Left young man at a time when political, social, and sexual codes and cultures were in transition before the emergence of feminist sexual politics. The article examines the identities Hoyland held as a socialist, sexual, and domestic male subject; it considers how his emotional world and relationships were shaped by his metropolitan landscapes, consisting of CND marches, Communist Party meetings, urban youth spaces, and the parental home; and it discusses Hoyland as a writer and the sense of selfhood the diary helped to make possible.

This essay explores the attitudes of the British middle classes towards witchcraft, ghosts, and other so-called superstitions from the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. Conventional historiographical wisdom maintains that belief in magic among middle-class Britons declined gradually between the early modern and modern eras. Grounded in the study of newspapers, antiquarianism, public lectures, and literary fiction, this essay proposes a more precise chronology for the decline and subsequent resurgence of magic. It argues that it was only from the 1820s that the middle classes, the media that served them, the police, and certain politicians put popular superstitions under significant duress, and examines the agendas and anxieties underlying this temporary cultural shift away from magic. The later Victorian period saw the emergence of greater tolerance towards witchcraft and ghost beliefs, allowing them to be reinterpreted as picturesque folklore or fitting subjects for the enquiries of psychical science.

In the later eighteenth century, two schemes were introduced in Parliament for extending the practice of handing over the bodies of executed offenders to anatomists for dissection. Both measures were motivated by the needs of the field of anatomy, including the improvement of surgical skill, the development of medical teaching in the provinces, and public anatomical demonstrations. Yet both failed to pass into law due to concerns about the possibly damaging effects in terms of criminal justice. Through a detailed analysis of the origins and progress of these two parliamentary measures—a moment when the competing claims of anatomy and criminal justice vied for supremacy over the criminal corpse—the article sheds light on judicial attitudes to dissection as a method of punishment and adds to our understanding of the reasons why, in the nineteenth century, the dread of dissection would come to fall upon the dead poor rather than executed offenders.