This article examines an imperial scandal concerning the treatment of patients in the lunatic asylum of Kingston, Jamaica, that highlighted the inadequacies of the imperial government. A significant moment in the development of colonial public health policy, this scandal also spoke to broader questions of postemancipation imperial governance. At the heart of the scandal was a debate about whether standards of treatment developed in Britain—symbolized by the image of the ideal asylum and the ideology of moral management—could and should be implemented in colonies. This debate was all the more fraught because the designation of moral management as the official protocol was recent, its implementation incomplete, and its underlying ideas contested. Nevertheless, despite the instability of these ideas, during the scandal and its aftermath, actors treated them as a monolithic package of standards before making them the definitive model for all colonial institutions. Indeed, the scandal helped further bolster moral management in Britain.

Throughout the reign of Charles II, a growing number of Catholics entered into the civil and military infrastructure of the overseas colonies. While Maryland was consolidated as a center of settlement, a new crop of English and Irish officeholders shaped the political development of Tangier, New York and the Leeward Islands. Their careers highlighted the opportunities of overseas expansion as a route into the public domain: a chance for Catholics to sidestep the penal restrictions of the three kingdoms and construct an alternative relationship with the crown. This article examines the emergence of Catholic authority within the plantations, and situates the experiment within larger shifts in strategic and ideological debate over English colonization. I suggest that experiences in the colonies invigorated economic and political strategies that became central to the advancement of Catholic interests in the domestic realm. While colonial trade bolstered Catholic estates against penal pressures, the new settlements provided the training ground for attempts to demonstrate the compatibility of confessional pluralism with commercial flourishing and civil allegiance. The effect, however, was to raise conflict in colonial politics and heighten anxieties in the domestic realm over the effects of overseas plantation. I argue that by uncovering a neglected sphere of “recusant history” we gain new insights into the ideological fragilities that disrupted the pursuit of territories overseas. Catholic promotions exposed a growing tension between the “Protestant interest” and the principles and practices that informed the expansion of the Stuart realm.

A striking feature of the history of the Scots burgh in this period, and of bodies within it, was their readiness to resort to legal redress in the Court of Session, Scotland's leading civil court. The law was a regular and often intrusive presence in burgh life, a means by which burghs, guildries and trades incorporations defended their privileges. This article will explore this propensity in relation to what it can tell us both about urban identity and the constitution of urban community in this period, but it will also begin to examine the role which the law may have played in the re-constitution and re-shaping of urban community. In other words, it will consider the law and judgments made in the Court of Session as active forces in a wider process of governance. We know relatively little, in fact, about this dimension of urban governance, but the surviving record is a rich one and demands much more systematic examination.