This chapter discusses Henry dresser's involvement in bird conservation and bird collection, and his involvement in the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary meeting of the British Ornithologists' Union (BOU) and the Darwin anniversary. It also discusses Dresser and Alfred Wallace's visit to the British Museum (National History) (BM(NH)). Dresser maintained a steady involvement in bird conservation, complaining in the Ibis about excessive collecting of eggs of the Great Skua in Iceland, for example. Obituaries to Dresser appeared in numerous bird journals in the UK and abroad, including the United States, Russia, Hungary and Australia. Most of these drew attention to his great publications, to his travelling life, his collecting and involvement in bird conservation. His old-fashioned views about scientific naming practices were also singled out in a number of his obituaries. The chapter describes some of them.

This chapter tells the story of how Terence Conran’s Habitat shops promoted a range of goods that were eclectic in style but were all part of a taste for informal living and often included rustic furnishings and utensils. Starting in 1964 Habitat quickly moved from being a boutique furnishing shop to being a mainstay of the British high street, taking a role equivalent in furniture and domestic goods to that represented by Sainsbury’s in groceries. The chapter looks at the importance of the merger with Lupton Morton and the use of catalogues to promote a lifestyle of Habitat living. The chapter details the kinds of displays that the shop became famous for and how Terence Conran described the role of the shop in promoting what he called ‘solid citizen’ furniture. The chapter ends by looking at the way the novelist Angela Carter described the shop in New Society.

This chapter explores the various sources, and tactics, that Henry Dresser and other ornithologist-collectors used to take their collection to new heights. Through the 1860s, Dresser placed himself at the centre of a rapidly growing network of collectors (field and cabinet collectors) in America, Europe and Russia, established through face-to-face contact and correspondence. Dresser's own collection developed rapidly and productively due to his development of his exchanging network, which he carefully built up over many years by cultivating relationships with other collectors and sources of specimens. Fortunately for Dresser, he was collecting at a time when increasing numbers of Europeans travelled abroad, whether for business or pleasure. Many private travellers acquired specimens that were made available to cabinet collectors when they returned to Britain.

This chapter investigates the role of women in anti-racist campaigns against policing in twenty-first-century Britain. It argues that imperial discourses about gender norms and respectability have helped to shape how race and crime are constituted in the contemporary period. The chapter argues that the colonial roots of race and gender norms are fundamental to conceptualising one of the key findings of the field research which informs this chapter – that women lead almost every campaign against a black death in police custody in post-2011 England. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with activists, ethnographic observations at protests and scholar-activist participation in campaigns against black deaths in custody, this chapter demonstrates how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century imperial discourses on respectability and nation do not simply contextualise racialised policing in the contemporary period, but expose the racialised and gendered norms that legitimise racist policing in modern Britain.

Defence has always been a primary element in home design; this chapter traces the ebbs and flows of fortification over time, tracing back the contemporary alternative features of withdrawal and aggressive defence to their origins. These responses, mirroring the well-known 'flight or fight' reactions, are illustrated through reference to celebrity homes and incidents of crimes against them. Here we address the technologies and architectural features which are designed to counter the risks that assail the home as haven and the fears passed on from parents which inform our internalised expectations as adults. Diverse forms of home protection and insurance have become the central and non-negotiable demands of increasingly affluent western societies, and meeting these demands has boosted the profits of security companies. We argue that the recent increase in defensive technologies has turned homes into the architectural representation of our fears, from which we can never be truly free. We now fear to stop fearing, with the contemporary homeowner forever in a state of heightened anxiety.

Exchange is a process, and it is two buildings in Manchester. These are the Cotton Exchange building, now the Royal Exchange Theatre, and the Corn Exchange. As well as being monuments to capitalism, the Cotton Exchange was tied up with overseas slavery, particularly in the American South. The Corn Exchange is associated with more localised struggles for living standards. ‘Exchange’ was a general term before Manchester capitalism, but it emerges from the other side of nineteenth-century industrialism – which Manchester drove – as a markedly different thing. Global, globalising and highly divisive, this entry explores the tensions within the term ‘exchange’ in the city of Manchester.

Tudor and Stuart officials in Ireland formulated a number of strategies for ordering, settling, and civilising Ireland. At the heart of nearly each one was the assumption that introducing agriculture and a cultivated landscape was the essential first step towards achieving their goal. Amidst the confiscations and Plantations there was a consistent effort made to transform the landscape and to create a contrived environment that emphasised human control over nature. The alteration of Irish land and the built environment in this period reveals an ideology of colonialism that can be read in the landscape and also the material culture that resulted. The need to replace one culture with another, to supplant a natural environment with an engineered one, an uncultivated landscape with a civilised, rational one, was to provide a focus, a battleground, even a language for the conflict associated with the policy of Plantation. Indeed, land was often at the centre of the violence in Ireland. This chapter will consider the constructed environment from fences, bridges, barns, houses, and forts as both signifiers of civility and as targeted markers of a colonial strategy characterised by dispossession and alterations to the land and material culture of Ireland.

This chapter begins with short histories of the London bullion market, including the development of the Gold and Silver Fixes. After the breaking of the LIBOR and foreign exchange scandals, suspicions soon emerged that the gold and silver markets were also being rigged. Initial investigations by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission found no evidence of this, but orders would later be issued against a number of figures, notably trader David Liew, and steps would be taken to protect the system from manipulation.

From toxic wallpaper and beer, to poisonous sweets and the ‘cake of death’, Manchester has a rich cultural history pertaining to arsenic. This chapter explores this history across the city from banal to fantastical instances of poisoning. We now know that in 1857 each sumptuous sample of Manchester’s Heywood, Higginbottom, Smith & Co wallpaper contained arsenic. This beautiful dye also snuck into the food chain, with several children poisoned in Manchester by eating sweets coloured with copper arsenite during the 1840s. This banal yet lethal element imprinted itself on Manchester, not just through the famed penny dreadful poisonings of disgruntled partners, but also through the lackadaisical attitudes of the city’s manufacturers. Arsenic is no longer a commonplace product in Manchester. Rather than toxic beer, research at the University of Manchester now investigates the complexities of arsenic contamination through rice-based diets, in the city and worldwide.