This article argues that in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, changes in the perceived value of children, both materially and emotionally, put them in a new position of possible danger. The valorization of childhood brought new risks to children. Children were thought to be vulnerable to child abduction, or “child stealing,” as contemporaries termed it. Between 1790 and 1849, 108 cases of child abduction were tried at the Old Bailey and then recorded in its Proceedings or heard before magistrates in London's police courts and at county sessions courts and subsequently reported in newspapers. These cases, along with fictional accounts of child abduction, give insights into what were considered the most common motives for this crime. While some child abductors were motivated by poverty and saw children's clothes as economic assets that could be sold, others were driven by a desire to assume a mother role and represented stolen children as their own. Popular interest in abduction stories was sustained while contemporaries shared common fears about the loss of children and the limitations of adults to protect children from harm.

This essay introduces and defends a new analysis of prudential value. According to this analysis, what it is for something to be good for you is for that thing to contribute to the appeal or desirability of being in your position. I argue that this proposal fits well with our ways of talking about prudential value and well-being; enables promising analyses of luck, selfishness, self-sacrifice and paternalism; preserves the relationship between prudential value and the attitudes of concern, love, pity and envy; and satisfies various other desiderata. I also highlight two ways in which the analysis is informative and can lead to progress in our substantive theorizing about the good life.

The regal union (and James VI and I's desire that it be perfected) produced varied responses to Scotland, not just hostile reactions. Plays, pamphlets, treatises, and manuscripts accompanied parliamentary debate in England and queried the precedents for, as well as the future potential of, something called Britain. They also engaged with the nature of sovereignty. Authors thus deployed both negative and positive descriptions of the Scots, and they were unified less by Scotophobia and more by a tendency to privilege a distinctly English narrative despite a specifically British problem. Such Anglocentric narratives circumvented the issue of the Anglo-Scottish relationship, postponing English engagement with the realities of their new context. This was possible only because the Scots occupied a position somewhere between sameness and difference in the English imagination.

The aftermath of the Second World War saw massive efforts to promote morale management across British industry. While these new discourses and industrial practices have often been explained in terms of the development of expert knowledge, this article places them at the center of the politics of social reconstruction. While the proper management of morale was linked to greater productivity, this article argues that it was often their assumed benefits regarding social cohesion and harmony that mattered most. It shows the ways in which government officials, management experts, and social scientists mobilized the perceived links that the war had forged among morale, collective sacrifice, and democratic citizenship and thus turned the workplace into a privileged site for the manufacture of consensus.