In response to Roemer's reformulation of the Marxian concept of exploitation in terms of comparative wealth distributions (1982, 1996), Vrousalis (2013) treats economic exploitation as an explicitly relational phenomenon in which one party takes advantage of the other's economic vulnerability in order to extract a net benefit. This paper offers a critical assessment of Vrousalis's account, prompting a revised formulation that is analysed in the context of a matching and bargaining model. This analysis yields precise representations of Vrousalis's conditions of economic vulnerability and economic exploitation and facilitates comparison to the alternative conceptions of Marx and Roemer.

The following exchange was the result of ongoing informal conversations among thecontributors, who are all, in different ways, interested in the emergent concept of theAnthropocene and the challenges it posed, and the opportunities it provided, forhistorians working on Britain and the world. The conversation began at the end of 2015 andcontinued for about a year.

This article presents the first addition in recent years to the canon of the British eighteenth-century statesman and political thinker Lord Bolingbroke (1678–1751), a manuscript essay “On the Character of a Great Patriot.” For the first time, this article identifies Bolingbroke as the likely author of this unascribed, undated, and untitled essay in the Senate House Library manuscript collection. Using internal and contextual evidence, the article demonstrates that the “Character” is a description of Bolingbroke's opposition colleague William Pulteney, and that it was written in the final months of 1731, most likely for publication in the opposition journal the Craftsman. The “Character” dates from a period in which Bolingbroke wrote very little, and it is thus a crucial addition to his biography as well as an early exposition of his theory of opposition politics. Moreover, study of the essay shows that Bolingbroke drew extensively on the example of Pulteney when formulating his idea about the necessity of a systematic opposition party, not fully formulated until On the Spirit of Patriotism (1736). The “Character” thus sheds further light on the important relationship between political practice and theory in the age of Walpole.

This essay inaugurates a new series in the Journal of British Studies titled “One British Thing.” This short essay uses a bottle of welfare orange juice distributed sometime between 1961 and 1971 to tell a larger story about the relationship between Britain's Welfare State and the colonization and decolonization of the British West Indies. The history of the Welfare State has largely been told as a metropolitan story severed from a wider global history of empire. The empty bottle of concentrated orange juice, however, tells a different story. It exposes Britain's own dependency on its colonial subjects to provide the means of furnishing welfare benefits to its metropolitan citizens. The history of welfare orange juice thus opens up a richer understanding of the politics and economics of the Welfare State and its relationship to colonial development projects on the one hand and the slow processes of decolonization on the other.