This paper proposes the importance of television, the televisation of US and British race politics, and the framing of “Black Power” in this television coverage, for race politics in Britain in the late 1960s and early 1970s. British politics and culture was “re-racialized” in the postwar era, and television, for white and black Britons, became a site of racial knowledge, racial identification, and racial dislocation. The rise of television as a central medium of everyday life saw it emerge, too, as a central site for the imagination of community. As critics have long noted, the community imagined in British television programming of this era was overwhelmingly white, and black people were featured most often only as a marker of social difference or social “problems.” Many black Britons, excluded from the national “everyday” as it was constituted on television, and facing increasing institutional and interpersonal racism in daily life, found in coverage of the burgeoning black liberation movements of the United States a useable politics through which to articulate new sites of identification, community, and solidarity. For others, though, coverage of race politics in the United States could be a source of anxiety and alarm. The televisation of US race politics was central to the growth of cultures and politics of radical blackness in Britain, but it also reconstituted the politics of white racism, recasting blackness in Britain as a sign of violence and impending social disorder.

This article proposes an Arctic Ocean Coordinating Agreement (AOCA) as a framework for more effective coordination and sharing of practices regarding national conservation and management policies in the marine Arctic. It envisions a nimble, versatile body that operates without creating new institutions and focuses instead on convening and coordinating existing individuals and institutions whose expertise can assist the Arctic states with questions that the Arctic states define. The AOCA could incorporate aspects of regional seas agreements (RSAs) into a less formal regional arrangement that would differ significantly from traditional RSAs. Identifying the Arctic Council as the right entity to launch AOCA discussions, the article proposes that an AOCA should draw on entities already engaged in work relevant to the emerging challenges in the Arctic Ocean: the Helsinki and OSPAR Commissions, the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES), the North Pacific Marine Science Organization (PICES), and other institutions that have successfully convened appropriate sets of actors for targeted responses to shared marine management concerns around the world.

Scholars have attributed a steep decline in violent crime in nineteenth-century England to a “civilizing offensive” launched to discipline violent masculinities. In East London, however, a significant minority of those brought before summary courts on charges of violent offenses were women. Newspaper accounts of these cases show that some women committed assaults that resembled the violent actions of men. The courts and newspapers evaluated defendants against standards of femininity. Those women who successfully performed dominant versions of femininity received lenient treatment in the courts and approval in the newspapers. The courts harshly punished those who did not conform. These accounts reveal a campaign against disorderly femininities that paralleled the civilizing offensive directed against unruly masculinities.

This article examines the intersections of religion and national identity among Britons in nineteenth-century colonial India. It argues, contrary to Linda Colley and other scholars who have asserted a pan-Protestant nature of Britishness, that religion frequently was a site of division among Britons in India during the first half of the nineteenth century. Anglicans such as Claudius Buchanan wished to cement an Anglican hegemony within the empire. Presbyterian chaplain Dr. James Bryce, by contrast, advocated for the Churches of Scotland and England to be coestablished. Roman Catholic priests, less successfully, argued for similar rights to be extended to Roman Catholicism, the religion of close to a majority of British troops serving in India. Lastly, Baptist missionaries questioned the East India Company's continued support of Hinduism through its collection of pilgrim taxes, which they labeled as “anti-Christian.” These competing visions of “Greater Britain” in religious terms point to the fragility and divisiveness of national identity in the nineteenth-century British Empire, an institution scholars have generally claimed fostered a sense of Britishness.

In an age when both the traditional book form and the world that the British Empire made are arguably in crisis, it is remarkable that big books on British imperialism abound. Contributors to this roundtable assess scale and genre as well as content in their discussion of the claims and impact of John Darwin's tome, The Empire Project. John Darwin's response is also included.

This essay explores changes in eighteenth-century male clothing in the context of the history of sexual difference, gender roles, and masculinity. The essay contributes to a history of dress by reconstructing a range of meanings and social practices through which men's clothing was understood by its consumers. Furthermore, critically engaging with work on the “great male renunciation,” the essay argues that the public authority that accrued to men through their clothing was based not on a new image of a rational disembodied man but instead on an emphasis on the male anatomy and masculinity as intrinsically embodied. Drawing on findings from the material objects of eighteenth-century clothing, visual representations, and evidence from the archival records of male consumers, the essay adopts an interdisciplinary approach that allows historians to study sex and gender as embodied, rather than simply performed. In so doing, the essay not only treats “embodiment” as an historical category but also responds to recent shifts in the historical discipline and the wider academy towards a more corporealist approach to the body.

The prevalence and persistence of labor contractors in China’s mining industry during the first half of the twentieth century is frequently attributed to foreign management’s avoidance of directly managing Chinese laborers. However, in Japanese-controlled Fushun Coalmine, Japanese management’s reliance on labor contractors over four decades (1907−1945) represented an expansion in management’s reach in labor management. In this article, I examine the period of Japanese control (1907−1932), during which Japanese mine managers resorted to bureaucratic means to control labor contractors. Using labor process theorists, particularly Richard Edwards, to read company archival documents, I argue that salient features of the Chinese labor market, namely Chinese migrant labor’s mobility and international competition for Chinese labor, compelled Japanese managers to extend control over labor contractors.