The effects of industrialization on British life were the subject of a broad and intelligible set of debates during the early nineteenth century, often described as the “machinery question.” This question, concerning what today is called “technology,” was framed to include its effects on the whole of human life—an approach rarely seen by the late nineteenth century, a period marked instead by disciplinary specialization. An exception to this trend can be found in the work of the social critic and heterodox economist J. A. Hobson (1858–1940), better known for his critique of imperialism. From the 1890s, Hobson reopened the machinery question by offering an ethical analysis of mechanization which was both holistic and sustained. In addition to proposing this new lens for viewing Hobson, this article explores the challenges—as well as the opportunities—facing those returning to the machinery question more generally.

Growing numbers of sailors powered British fleets during the long eighteenth century. By exploring mariners' habits, dress, and material practice when in port, this article uncovers their roles as agents of cultural change. These men complicated material hierarchies, with a broad impact on developing western consumer societies, devising a distinctive material practice. They shaped important systems of transnational exchange and redefined networks of plebeian material culture. Mariners were also endowed with a growing rhetorical authority over the long eighteenth century, embodying new plebeian cosmopolitanism, while expressing facets of a dawning imperial masculinity. Marcus Rediker described eighteenth-century Anglo-American mariners as plain dealers, wageworkers, and pirates, as well as “men of the world.” This international contingent mediated between world communities, while demonstrating new tastes and new fashions. They also personified the manly traits celebrated in Britain's burgeoning imperial age.

This article explores the objects that were left as identifiers for the children abandoned to London's Foundling Hospital in the eighteenth century. Required by the hospital in order to permit a future reclaiming by a parent and to guard against a charge of infanticide, these tokens fulfilled an institutional priority. The token procedure, this article argues, resulted in a class of objects that can be aligned closely with elegy. Occasional objects, the tokens communicate maternal affection and a sense of dislocation. As distillations of grief and imaginative framings of loss, the foundling tokens constitute eighteenth-century artifacts of elegy.

Calls for a renewed sense of “good citizenship” in the early twentieth century were loud and persistent. Especially important in the citizenship quest was the creation of healthy and efficient children, cured of urban maladies and loyal to a wide notion of community. Such attributes were seen as vital in an economically and militarily competitive world. Historians have already examined the sorts of political and bodily education that arose from these concerns. This article instead looks at how the focus on the body and citizenship was realized in the actual processes of school building. From the medical discourses that underpinned the design of heating, lighting, and ventilation systems, to the emerging focus on the sensory environment of the classroom, the materiality of the school was essential to creating the “good citizen”—physically fit, economically productive, and loyal to the nation.