This chapter analyses the consequences of techno-biopolitics for the possibility of politics proper. The main argument is that in such a regime, the possibility for political action and contestation is narrowed through mandates that oppose key aspects of politics, such as plurality, speech, and a tolerance of uncertainty. I also highlight how such impediments to politics proper promote the emergence of political violence as a means of producing predictable outcomes.

The focus here is on the visual and written records of three professional groups – upholsterers, cabinet-makers, and architects – that each made claims to the art and business of interior decorating. After a brief history of these groups in the pre-revolutionary era, the chapter examines their new status quo and quest for legitimacy in the nineteenth century and in the aftermath of the abolition of guilds and trades. To secure clients, they emphasized artistic skill over practical requirements or commercial interests. Dramatically different images and writings about the professions developed as a result. If the trade literature was filled with practical advice specific to each profession - including educational opportunities, union requirements, and claims to the status of rightful interior decorators over other professional groups - the more widely-circulating pattern books or illustrations in popular journals included a portfolio of images with minimal information. The latter favored creativity over practical considerations, blurring boundaries between professions and proposing unified, themed interiors where every element occupied a unique and pre-established position within a larger whole. Going beyond the requirements and expectations of their own trade organizations, together, upholsterers, cabinet-makers, and architects helped define the new profession of the proto-interior designer.

This chapter presents a fresh analysis of the nature of the Association Movement in interregnum England and Ireland. It surveys the various local associations, using their constitutions and position statements to modify the long-held view that the association movement was an outgrowth of Richard Baxter’s drive for Christian unity. The chapter argues that the associations in general had a presbyterian basis, looking back to the Westminster assembly’s project as the foundation of local unity. The chapter then focuses on the political status of the associations in the interregnum, arguing that in the later years of the 1650s, the associations were eclipsed by a renewal of the struggle between congregationalists and presbyterians for control of religious policy in government.

The novel The Remains of the Day is far more subversive than the film, and also indicates a change in the national mood. Ishiguro was eager to escape from the stereotyping of his first two books as Japanese. The Remains of the Day moved far beyond these superficial similarities, however. Its representation of Englishness in the impeccable Stevens was widely construed as a shock tactic. The imagery of clothing is profuse in The Remains of the Day. Stevens compares inhabiting his role as a butler with wearing a suit. Whatever the verdict on Stevens and his gentlemanly impersonations, there is no doubting the bravura of the ventriloquism in The Remains of the Day as a whole. In the Prologue of The Remains of the Day, the butler's kerfuffle about the inadequate staff-plan is a smoke-screen.

Sam George’s Afterword indulges in a spot of Gothic tourism and investigates John William Polidori’s links to St Pancras Old Church, the site of his burial, together with its associations with the group of visionary writers, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Mary and Percy Shelley.

The introduction sketches out the existing historiography of the nineteenth-century animal protection movement, which evinces many conflicting approaches and shortcomings. In particular, historians have generally failed to appraise women’s key contributions to the movement, and, more generally, to analyse gendered differences in attitudes to animals. Traditions of thought on man’s responsibility to the ‘lower’ species were religiously inspired, but also strongly influenced by social and political factors, and by assumptions about the priority of human interests. They came under scrutiny for the first time when legislation was proposed in the early 1800s to make cruelty to animals, especially bull-baiting, a criminal offence. The resulting debates in the British parliament, dominated by William Windham’s speeches, threw up philosophical difficulties which would haunt animal protectionists for the rest of the century. They also revealed disproportionate female support for protection, and the ridicule that this already attracted.

The historiography might suggest that female servants were the typical mistresses of the elite. Such relationships are explored in this section, but it is also evident that many of the mistresses of the elite were either non-elite women who had come into contact with their eventual lovers through other routes than service, or themselves came from the elite. These might be the daughters and wives of gentry families, and not always from families of lower status (although this was a notable pattern among the mistresses of the peerage); an important group was drawn from the illegitimate offspring of the elite themselves, suggesting in some cases a parallel kinship and relationship structure. While some of these mistresses were undoubtedly badly treated (and may be little more than shadowy victims in our records), many were able to access considerable material wealth and influence through their relationships. The chapter will explore how this was accumulated, the forms that it took, and the power that these mistresses were able to wield. Further, the implications of these relationships for interactions between individuals and families in county, regional and national society and politics will be considered: sometimes disruptive, sometimes forging new connections and alliances.