The volume of publications on social history in the last decade has been enormous. The Royal Historical Society's Annual Bibliography of British History contains hundreds of new items each year, so many that keeping up with the latest research is almost impossible except within limited fields. The very quantity of material is a testament to the success of what has been termed the “new social history.” Taking as its focus the lives of the masses, this approach employs concepts and techniques drawn from cognate disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, and statistics to uncover the rich complexity of everyday life in the past. New interests, new methods, and a fresh look at underused primary sources: these are the hallmarks. This is not to say that it is a homogeneous “movement” since there are vigorous debates about central issues such as the use of theory and about the correct balance between quantification and traditional qualitative, intuitive approaches.

The new social history has had a profound effect on the way in which all historians deal with their subject and even on its critics. That social history has arrived as a leader in historical analysis is amply attested by G. R. Elton's recent call to political historians not to accept reduction to the status of its poor cousins. The subject's position is assured, and its achievements have been substantial. This article deals with the main areas of research in social history: population, social structure, education and literacy, women, religion, and the family.

The Whig educational proposals of 1839 are regarded as an important step in the centralization and growth of state control over the education of English working-class children. Introduced by Lord John Russell on February 12, the plan called for state supervision of education by a committee of the Privy Council, the erection of a nondenominational state normal school and two model schools, state inspection of all schools in receipt of the grants established in 1833, and a new system of allocation of those grants based not on the size of the voluntary contributions raised by the National Society or the British and Foreign School Society (BFSS) but on the local needs as ascertained by any “reputable” school society. Historians have viewed the proposals as the inevitable outcome of popular pressures brought to bear on government. Unable to resist their own Erastian urge to attack the privileged position of the church, and persuaded by Brougham, who figured prominently in the 1833 grant and had unsuccessfully proposed a national system as recently as the autumn of 1837, or alternatively by the Radicals J. A. Roebuck and Thomas Wyse, themselves supporters of the Central Society for Education's plans for a national secular system of education, the Whigs are regarded as having responded to popular, reformist demands. “In 1839,” wrote Halevy, “the cabinet yielded.” England was last among the Protestant countries in the matter of primary education; Roebuck, Wyse, and Brougham had failed in their separate efforts to promote the cause; and the government could do little other than propose a remedy for 3 million uneducated children.

In recent years, historians of the Augustan period have done much to rehabilitate the posthumous reputation of Queen Anne, a monarch traditionally viewed as dull, weak, reactionary, and easily led. Beginning in the 1920s with the work of W. T. Morgan, continuing with that of G. M. Trevelyan and G. S. Holmes, and culminating in the definitive biography by Edward Gregg, Anne has gradually emerged as a figure to be reckoned with. We have come to see her as a tenacious and often skillful navigator, charting a middle course between the opposing shoals of the Whig and Tory parties, in an attempt to preserve freedom of maneuver for the postrevolutionary monarchy.

This article will explore a heretofore neglected aspect of the queen's political helmsmanship: the attempt to make her person and crown a focus for national (i.e., English) unity through the revival and exploitation of royal ritual and symbol. It will be argued below that Anne—alone among the later Stuarts—made extensive use of the arsenal of ceremonial paraphernalia, what David Cannadine has called “the theatre of power,” which is normally associated with her Tudor and early Stuart predecessors. This essay is thus intended not only to contribute to the ongoing reassessment of Anne's political role but also to help fill a gap between the wealth of fine work on pageantry at those earlier courts and the work Linda Colley and others have done on the reign of George III.

Early in the second decade of the nineteenth century, a Unitarian preacher named Joseph Nightingale gained admittance to the judges' room at the Old Bailey. He appears to have thought the room small and unremarkable, save for “a bookcase filled with the volumes of the State Trials, a few other law books of reference, and the yearly volumes of the Sessions Papers, or abstracts of the causes tried at this Court, from the earliest period to the present times.” It was this set of the Old Bailey Sessions Papers, among all the books there, which most fired his imagination: “In casting one's eye over these records of our Fall, it is painful to notice the gradually increasing thickness of the volumes. Those which I have seen thus uniformly bound, lettered, with the date of the year, and the name of the Lord Mayor for the time being, commence with the year 1730, and reach down to 1812: the first volume may contain perhaps 150 pages; the last, five or six hundred: let it not, however, be hence concluded that this circumstance proves only the increase of vice; it indicates also an increased population, and extended commerce, and improved police.”

Nightingale's analysis of the causes for the increased length of the Sessions Paper shows an admirable grasp of both the changes in the character of society and in the means of ordering it to which historians address themselves. But a simpler factor in this change that seems to have eluded his notice was that, beginning in 1778, and especially after 1782, the length of individual trial accounts given in the Sessions Paper increased significantly.

Throughout the first year of the French Revolution The Times newspaper could not decide who was the madder, Lord George Gordon or Edmund Burke. The former as a violent incendiary and convicted libeler had fortunately been safely locked in Newgate the previous year, but Burke was still loose. The newspaper had no doubt that he belonged in Bedlam; there could be no other explanation for his obsessive campaign to impeach Warren Hastings long after everyone else had lost interest in the case. A stream of reports suggested variously that he had checked himself into a lunatic asylum, been forcibly confined in a straitjacket, or become temporarily deranged through physical and mental exhaustion. On first reading The Reflections on the Revolution in France published in November the following year, many of his friends, as well as his foes, felt forced to agree.

Even those who found things to like in the book were puzzled that Burke should have produced such a work. In the first place, how did one explain what Thomas Jefferson called “the revolution of Mr. Burke,” an abrupt political tack from advocating parliamentary reform, religious toleration, and American liberty to denouncing France's fledgling efforts at liberty. Why had he turned so violently against the Dissenters and radicals with whom he had often cooperated in the past? Why did he believe that the apparently innocuous revolution in France was unlike anything that had gone before? And even when events in that country began to move more in line with his predictions, there remained something embarrassing about the tone of the book.

The Oxford and Cambridge man has long inspired fascination both in Great Britain and abroad. Many have, in fact, acquired an illusory understanding of these enigmatic university students through various caricatures and representations created in literature and film. Yet, despite an apparent level of popular interest, relatively few attempts have been made to understand the culture of male undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge in a systematic and scholarly way. With the exception of Sheldon Rothblatt's work on student life in the early nineteenth century, J. A. Mangan's skillful exploration of the cult of athleticism's impact on the ancient universities, and some select studies of individual student societies and organizations, we know very little about the ways in which undergraduates lived their lives, saw their worlds, and viewed those who were traditionally excluded from these milieus. We know even less perhaps, despite the existence of Richard Symonds's examination of the relationship between Oxford and empire, about the ways “Oxbridge” undergraduates saw themselves as Britons and leaders of an imperial and “superior” English race. The conflation of English and British is intentional here. Applying English attributes to Britons did not generally present many problems for university men, even those from Scottish, Welsh, and Anglo-Irish backgrounds. “Britishness” and “Englishness” were often applied interchangeably by Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates although, as others have observed, uses of the term “English” tended most often to refer to the admired attributes or “personal” and “communal” traits of Britons, particularly those among the elite.

In the course of the past several decades, scholars have exposed Black people's long history of life and work in Britain, but their approaches to racial conflict have slighted the historical contingency of racial difference itself. Black workers have been presented as logical, visible scapegoats in an otherwise homogeneous working class, and interracial hostility as an ineluctable product of economic or sexual competition between two mutually exclusive and naturally antagonistic groups of working men. Scholars examining Black people's experience in Britain under the rubric “immigrants and minorities” have placed particular emphasis on racial conflicts, xenophobia, and prejudice, which they see as evidence of “traditions of intolerance” widespread in British society. Such interpretations leave unchallenged the assumption that racial or ethnic hostility is latent in social relations, resurfacing in any crisis. Whatever the intentions of their authors, such assumptions can all too easily be used to justify rather than to combat conflict and exclusion.

Intolerance, bigotry, prejudice, moreover, are not explanations for racial or ethnic conflict: in themselves they require explanation. In focusing on “attitudes,” and behaviors, these works neglect to examine the structural underpinnings of popular racism and xenophobia—in particular the ways that Black and white working people were positioned in relation to each other within a system also riven by class, gender, skill, and other power dynamics. What many scholars have taken for granted, indeed, is the objective or fixed quality of racial difference itself and its inexorably divisive effects.

Popular history often credits Lord Mansfield with freeing the slaves in England by his decision in the Somerset case. That he did not do so is by now agreed and is a point featured in modern scholarship on slavery. This is the main burden, for example, of F. O. Shyllon's Black Slaves in Britain (1974). How extensively the popular history should be revised has not been settled. Newly discovered sources now permit a reassessment of this question.

When the Somerset case arose in 1772, it was brimming with portent. The largest specter was the supposed mercantile dislocation that would follow abolition. Additional questions seemed unavoidable, such as the legality of a contract between a slave and his master, and the implications for other contracts if the slave contract were invalidated. The protracted case was an occasion of high drama in which early abolitionist efforts (especially those of Granville Sharp) were pitted against vested trading interests.

Mansfield was caught in the middle. He was genuinely ambivalent about the subject of slavery. He accepted and endorsed the widely assumed mercantile importance of the slave trade, yet he doubted the validity of theoretical justifications of slavery, and he sought to redress instances of individual cruelty to slaves. By drawing on previously unexamined manuscript reports of the Somerset case, Lord Mansfield's trial notes, and newspaper accounts of the Court of King's Bench activity, this article will demonstrate the extreme delicacy of Mansfield's position and will establish more fully than has before been possible the ways in which Mansfield accommodated the various competing interests. In the process, the question of exactly what Mansfield said in his Somerset opinion should be put to rest.