This chapter explores the imperial careers of the literary and cultural criticism of F. R. Leavis and his collaborators on the Cambridge journal Scrutiny (1932-1953). For the Scrutiny group, a training in close reading promised a way of resisting the seductions of contemporary culture and a means of engaging with what was authentic and sustaining in the European tradition. The active commitment of “Leavisite” school teachers and adult education tutors turned a Cambridge school into a broader-based and self-described “movement”. The Scrutiny tradition held in tension a variety of ideas and practices that could serve different intellectual and political ends, underwriting both conservative and “left-Leavisite” cultural criticism and educational initiatives. The Scrutiny project was also appropriated in unexpected ways in colonial settings, not only buttressing the claims of metropolitan culture, but also offering models for interpreting indigenous and settler-colonial literatures. This chapter begins with a survey of the intellectual and institutional networks linking “Cambridge English” to the empire, and then examines the ways in which the Scrutiny group’s early work, especially Q. D. Leavis’s path-breaking study of bestsellers, Fiction and the Reading Public (1932), provided models for the study of “colonial” or “national” literatures as cultural formations—in the cases of India, Australia, New Zealand, and Scotland.

This chapter examines the conditions and experiences of service in the context of naval officers' understanding of their work on the West African coast. It explores the motivations that served to balance their emotional and physical distress: the financial incentives of prize money and belief in the virtues of the anti-slavery cause. Service on the West African coast presented abundant risks, arising from tropical heat and heavy rain, threats of disease and violence, all of which gave rise to the view of West Africa as a 'horrid hole'. Francis Meynell's letters exemplify the variety of emotions experienced by officers on anti-slave-trade patrols, but imply that prize money was one of the few advantages of the service. For many naval men, their allegiance to the anti-slavery cause was fuelled by pride in Britain as an abolitionist beacon for the rest of the world.

The great drama of the clearances had been played out between the landowners and the people with occasional interventions from external forces of law and order. With the passage of the Crofters' Act in 1886, however, social and economic conditions and relations in the western Highlands and islands could never be the same again. The immediate aftermath of the passage of the Crofters' Act therefore saw several episodes of significant unrest in 1886 and 1887 and the return of military and naval forces to the Highlands in support of the civil power. The passing of the Crofters' Act produced a good deal of bitterness and disillusion and a subsequent return to violence and confrontation in some parts of the Hebrides. Popular agitation in the years after the passage of the Crofters' Act began to become more common in the districts and the centre of discontent switched to Lewis from Skye.

The Church of England c.1689-c.1833: from toleration to Tractarianism is widely regarded as one of the best general surveys of the national Church in the long eighteenth century. This chapter aims to fill the historiographical lacuna by examining the parish of St James', Bury St Edmunds between 1692 and 1720, when Francis Hutchinson was perpetual curate. It suggests that, largely through his reforming efforts, the established Church in Bury St Edmunds was well run in terms of pastoral administration. The chapter illustrates the way the directives of the national Church, formulated at the centre by national bodies such as the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (S.P.C.K.), were interpreted by reforming ministers such as Hutchinson. Hutchinson's election broke the monopoly which the High Churchmen of the archdeaconry of Suffolk and Sudbury had enjoyed in electing diocesan proctors since the beginning of the eighteenth century.

Francis Hutchinson had aligned politically with the Whig party, an allegiance shared by members of his immediate family and which proved an invaluable asset during his slow ascent up the clerical ladder. From 1689 to 1714, Tory and Whig was the standing political division in Parliament and in the political identities assumed by most MPs. Hutchinson's overtly political sermons, along with his voting behaviour, gives us a relatively rare insight into the political views of a parish minister in the reign of Queen Anne. Hutchinson used these sermons to voice support for the Whig party's stance on some of the great issues of the day: the 1707 Union with Scotland, the conduct of the War of the Spanish Succession and the toleration of Protestant Dissent. Unlike the majority of Church of England lower clergy, Hutchinson voted consistently for the Whig party in parliamentary elections.

The lay Church of England was at its most obvious as the local community at worship in the parish church. The religious behaviour of lay conformists has been uncovered by the meticulous work of Judith Maltby and Christopher Haigh on the pre-1650 period, Donald Spaeth on the late Stuart diocese of Salisbury, and William Jacob on the eighteenth century. This chapter looks at the reigns of Charles II and James II. The sacralised image of Charles the Martyr was created and maintained by the potent volume, but it was inflated to a cult by a stream of hagiographies, the annual commemoration of the martyrdom in services and sermons each 30 January. The sermons of Lancelot Andrewes nestled alongside the poems of Abraham Cowley; geographies, herbals, and histories were shelved with Augustine, à Kempis, and Taylor's 'life' of Christ, The Great Exemplar.

The rapid expansion of illicit whisky production in the Highlands is a telling illustration of the capacity of peasant society to respond to market opportunity, when it possessed a real if ephemeral competitive advantage over the Lowland economy. The manufacture of illicit whisky took place at a time when demand for the spirit in Scotland was on the increase. The most common form of illicit distillation was household manufacture for family and local consumption, a continuation of a tradition long established before the days of costly licences and heavy duties. Some landed gentlemen invested in the peasant enterprises and so had an obvious economic interest incurtailing the activities of illicit rivals. Both legal and illegal manufacturers were able to exploit the growing demand, but the illicit advantage was dependent ultimately on the development of government revenue legislation.

To the rest of the world in the late twentieth century Scotland seems a Highland country. The roots of Highlandism can be traced back to the '45 and before, but an important institutional step in its development was first taken in 1778 with the foundation of the Highland Society in London. The Highland regiments were therefore crucial to the development of Highlandism. They added to the glamour of the Highlands, perpetuating the association with Jacobitism and clanship which were also being idealized. They also enhanced the contemporary image of a 'noble peasantry' uncontaminated by urban vice and displaying all the virtues of loyalty, courage and endurance to heroic effect. Much of the new awareness of the Highlands in the eighteenth century throughout Britain can be traced to Jacobitism in general and the '45 in particular.

The Anglo-Boer War was a complex tangle of conflicting interests in which Britain pursued economic and geopolitical benefits opposed by determined republican farmers. This chapter considers Cecil Y. Lang's terms 'cosmopolitan' and 'republican' in the light of recent critical theories of 'rooted cosmopolitanism' while revisiting the poet's change in perspective during the late years of his career. Songs of the Springtides, reasserts Algernon Charles Swinburne's treatment of the sea as origin and endpoint of life, an 'elemental voice' with 'elemental rhythms'. Peace conveyed by the sea's calm gives the amphibious singer-swimmer and his listeners access to a strange underwater seascape inaccessible in the storms of revolution. Swinburne was nonetheless capable of sustaining a negotiative ethics when meditating on radical philosophical and ontological difference. This capability is borne out by one of his last swimming poems, 'The Lake of Gaube', published only days before the outbreak of the South African war.

Paul Cohen-Portheim claimed that 'religion played an astonishingly small part in the men's life' although he did point to the availability of services. Within the concentration camps the most obvious manifestation of religion, apart from the holding of services, consisted of the celebrations of the major religious festivals which remained the most important day in the calendar. Despite the development of barbed wire disease and the feelings of isolation which some internees felt, the vast majority participated in the educational, social and cultural activity which developed in the camps. This took a variety of forms, including religion; reading, writing and learning; high culture; and sport. In some camps the majority of prisoners found little useful employment, which meant that they had to develop other ways of passing their time. This led to the evolution of 'prison camp societies', to use John Davidson Ketchum's phrase.