This article considers the cultural work of commoditization through the example of the London Auction Mart and the market for real estate in early nineteenth-century England. The auctioneers who founded this exchange sought to reconfigure the organization of property sales in an institution that would bring order and transparency to a world of informal institutions, local markets, and private exchange. The Auction Mart made visible the idea of a universal, abstract property market. At the same time, it offered a new social and cultural space in which to negotiate the often contradictory meanings of marketable property. This work of making the property market meaningful is told through institutional archives, published accounts, diaries, and estate correspondence.

As part of protectionist policy in eighteenth-century Britain, imported silks were banned from being sold. Although it is known that bans on imported textiles were widely broken, there have been few systematic studies of the contraband trade in silks. Using customs' records, this article shows how smuggling supplied the demand for imported consumer goods. The illegal trade in silk was diverse, bringing in a variety of products from Asia and Europe. The evidence supports a market segmentation analysis of the different products and their consumers. The trade with Asia supplied “populuxe goods” in the form of handkerchiefs that appealed to a broad, middling customer base. These were brought into the country by the East India Company's trading network. By contrast, continental Europe provided contraband for the high-fashion market. These silks were distributed in more informal and personal ways—travelers and diplomats being the main offenders. The official response to these black markets differed, with silks from Europe posing particular problems for enforcement. Finally, this article provides a reassessment of the transnational influences—specifically the relative importance of Asia and Europe—on production and consumption of consumer goods in Britain.

This article reexamines the parliamentary impeachment of the Duke of Buckingham, the royal favorite of King Charles I, by placing this event in the broader contexts of political culture and social change in early Stuart England. Buckingham's enemies based the impeachment on “common fame,” claiming that his faults were a matter of public knowledge. Charles, however, believed that the charges were based on seditious rumors. The impeachment undercut an important element of elite rhetoric that associated rumor with the rebellious multitude, revealing ideological divisions over the nature of grievances and the legitimacy of popular speech. The article contextualizes the impeachment within 1620s underground literature that purported to present the views of the common people, arguing that there was a wider tendency to ventriloquize public opinion. When Buckingham's allies produced their own tracts featuring the persona of the “honest ploughman,” appeals to the authority of public opinion were clearly gaining in strength. By explaining this development in political culture with reference to the growth of a more politically reliable “middling sort,” the article contributes to debates about the relationship between social change and political conflict in early Stuart England.

Between the First and Second World Wars, two retired British military officers, Francis Yeats-Brown and J. F. C. Fuller, embraced fascism and yoga. In their publications and lecture tours, they used their past experiences as soldiers in India to encourage strength, discipline, and virility. While Fuller believed that yoga could teach men to be strong and powerful leaders, Yeats-Brown celebrated yoga as a part of “Aryan” racial inheritance. This article examines both Fuller's and Yeats-Brown's published accounts and archival trails in order to understand the development of global masculinities within individual British lives. It reveals that their engagement with yoga was a defensive effort to appropriate the “regeneration” of martial masculinity encouraged by Indian nationalists. Claiming yoga for “great men” and “Aryan” audiences became a way to rewrite their own histories of service to the British Empire. They erased the weakness and fragility of imperial life, and replaced it with idealized bodies that were strong, disciplined, and virile. In so doing, they attempted to save imperial soldiers from political and cultural irrelevance. This reimagining used imperial hierarchies of gender and racial difference to encourage a “universal” model of martial masculinity that could restore the power of the British Empire.