This chapter examines one year, 1938, in the history of the British Red Cross (BRCS): a year that was not one of its most obviously eventful. Indeed, with devastating conflict raging in Europe, the BRCS, like the British Government, was notable for its non-intervention in Spain. Yet it did play a part in the high drama of European politics, advocating for international protocols on civilian protection in war, and acting as broker and facilitator between movements for civil defence and (territorial) military planning and Government departments at a time when the shadow of European war loomed large. Using the case study of the Red Cross International Conference held in London in June 1938, the local and national history of the BRCS is explored better to understand its relative state of non-intervention in the Spanish war, and how this related to the discourse on civilian protection and civil defence at home. How much the BRCS focused on these national priorities at a time of international crisis is a focal point of this chapter, which explores the broader question of how the Movement as a whole operated and avoided segmentation at this critical political juncture in the final years of peace.

Through an exploration of the contents of specific cases, this chapter assesses how claimants, defendants and lawyers in lunacy trials, and Lord Chancellors, occasionally challenged the definitions of insanity embodied in lunacy investigation law. The highlighted cases deal with individuals who, during the course of the trial, were considered to be on the borderlands of madness – that is, they were considered mentally ‘weak’ and/or ‘incapable’, but not necessarily non compos mentis enough to fit neatly into the laws related to commissions of lunacy. The chapter shows how legal struggles around these more ambiguous cases further shaped the definition of madness both inside and outside the courts. The decisions of judicial authority, along with other peculiarities of the chancery court, allowed Lord Chancellors greater latitude for settling cases in lunacy that were at the boundaries of madness. The chapter also emphasises that the commission of lunacy could be a very imprecise instrument that did not always accord with the expectations of judicial authority.

This chapter gives details of how the project reported in the book was conducted, the techniques of data collection and the analytic procedures employed. It describes the methods of the first study in 1995 (Warde and Martens, Eating Out), giving details of both the survey and interviews conducted in 2015. It discusses the use of mixed methods. The logic of a re-visit to a fieldwork site is discussed in relation to analysing social change. Its second main section briefly sketches some features of the market provision of eating services in the UK to give context to the ensuing account of consumption.

Confino (internal exile) has a history that pre-dates Fascism. While utilised in ancient times, it has its immediate antecedents in Liberal Italy. Fascism expanded the scope of practice to consolidate its political power and to exert social control. Drawing on legislation, the penal codes, and archival materials, this chapter examines the legal, political and philosophical foundations of internal exile and the factors that permitted its rapid implementation as an effective means for addressing internal political opposition to the Regime. The so-called ‘exceptional laws’ presented the rationale for internal exile, but the punishment extended beyond the purely political. Anyone considered ‘different’ could be exiled: e.g., Jehovah’s Witnesses, Pentecostals, Freemasons, defeatists, sex workers, abortion providers, gender nonconformists, Roma, mafiosi, Slovenians, Croatians. The chapter also considers the role of Chief of Police Arturo Bocchini and the evolution of the practice of confino after 1943.

This chapter moves from legal to economic informality, analysing the things bought and sold in the London street markets, and examining their role in feeding and supplying the growing city from the middle of the nineteenth century until the outbreak of the Second World War. It investigates the mechanisms by which a substantial proportion of the food brought to the city found its way to consumers via the informal economy of street selling, and it examines how non-food goods sold in the London street markets were sourced within London’s producer economy. It argues that the informality of the street markets was closely aligned with London’s complex and dynamic networks of small-scale, workshop-based manufacture, characterised by economic historians as ‘flexible specialisation’. Price and quality are key themes that run through the chapter.

Although early accounts imply that African, American, and Asian indigenes recognised the skins of English men and women as ‘white’, historiography suggests that a monochromatic racial binary came into use only from about the mid-seventeenth century in the Anglo-Atlantic colonies. Resort to humoralism slowed acceptance of an abiding whiteness common to all English folk, even as the same paradigm variously coloured perceptions of foreigners. As a survey of travel literature shows, observers typically estimated people’s nationality as well as their social status. If, for much of our period, we cannot say that the process of discerning bodily difference was exclusively and definitively coloured, it was certainly and variously humoured, in a way that made such differences seem part of nature’s course. When meeting with darker skin-tones, the English were prone to think these indicative of humbler constitutions inherently suited to some degree of laboured subordination. English society learned to perceive fair skin as a signifier of elite identity before it identified itself as universally white. Slowly, however, ordinary people began thinking of themselves as ‘white’ too. Fair skin was recoded, helping to achieve a solidarity among Britons and with other Europeans.

This chapter explores the way in which the British Red Cross Society responded to the crisis that affected the flow of relief parcels to British prisoners of war in Germany after the summer of 1940. It argues that the Society was slow to adjust to total war conditions. It was ill equipped to deal with the intensity of public criticism, and found itself outmanoeuvred by a Government that was intent on evading its responsibility for the crisis. It was also slow in identifying ways out of the crisis, or in forging close working relations with the non-anglophone elements of the Red Cross Movement, notably the International Committee of the Red Cross and neutral national Red Cross societies.

The foundation myths of late medieval cities and states were never simply about origins: they were above all about destiny. In the fifteenth century, the combination of humanist methods and models, newly available source materials, and changing domestic and international political circumstances provided the impetus for the continued development of these myths as well as the creation of new ones. Yet even in Italy, not all eyes looked to Rome. The Carolingian foundation myth of Florence, in which Charlemagne’s supposed rebuilding of the city was used to explain the pro-French orientation of the commune and its Guelph elite, is perhaps the best-known of these myths, but it is also an example of an Italian city defining itself in relation to a foreign power. This essay focuses on another element of Quattrocento myth-making culture: the treatment of northern Italy’s Gaulish past in the writings of some of the region’s humanists (e.g. Antonio Cornazzano and Alberto Cattaneo), and the role of these writings in Franco-Milanese relations before and during the outbreak of the Italian Wars and the French domination of Milan.

In 1943 the Macau delegation of the Portuguese Red Cross was established in the South China enclave at the height of the Second World War. Two years later its president was assassinated in the streets of Macau and the following year the delegation ended its activities. It was not the first time a Macau delegation had existed, nor would it be the last, but the brief period (1943–6) during which this Red Cross delegation operated reveals many important features of wartime Macau, the activities of a small Red Cross delegation under extreme circumstances and the challenges of neutrality during the same period. Surrounded by Japanese conquests, wartime Macau became a haven of neutrality and sanctuary, with a population swollen by refugees from across Asia. This chapter explores a range of issues and shows how the Red Cross in Macau was, simultaneously, a local creation, a delegation integrated into a national/colonial context, an inter-imperial structure and part of a transnational institution with global reach.