Early in 1761, a land promoter of Ulster origin named Alexander McNutt brought before the British Board of Trade a proposal to settle several thousand Ulster Scots in Nova Scotia. The board enthusiastically approved, but when McNutt returned the following year with promising news, the board forbade him from continuing the scheme, citing fears of losing Protestants in Ireland. This episode has generally been explained as evidence of the British government's ambivalence about Ulster emigration. However, rather than expressing merely a tension between two equally desirable but conflicting goals—peopling the American colonies with Irish Protestants and protecting the Ascendancy by preventing their emigration—the board's change of mind reflected the changing political environment. The board that approved McNutt's scheme strongly favored settling Nova Scotia quickly; the board that shut it down a year later included new members who viewed settling Nova Scotia as a waste of precious funds. The case of Alexander McNutt demonstrates the profound ramifications of party politics for Ulster migration during the imperial crisis of the 1760s and 1770s. It further affirms that studies of Ulster migration must be imperial in scope.

James Mill's History of British India (1817) made a rather strange claim: first-hand experience of India was not vital in writing a history – potentially, it led to false ideas about its subject-matter: eyewitnesses are susceptible to bias. The historian was thus to perform his task as a judge: sifting through various testimonies to obtain a ‘more perfect’ conception of the whole than those who witnessed its various parts. Although strange, Mill's claim does not bewilder his readers: after all, Mill was a ‘militant’ exponent of theorizing utilitarianism. I argue that such a reading of Mill's method is injudiciously restrictive. Not only did Mill draw on well-known methodological concerns in contemporary historiographical practice, not necessarily linked with Jeremy Bentham or the Scottish theoretical historiography, but he also seemed to adopt the vocabulary of forensic rhetoric, making his claim that his was a ‘judging’ history more literal than it has been supposed.

This article considers the political activism of Canada's Indigenous peoples as a corrective to the prevailing narrative of British decolonization. For several decades, historians have described the end of empire as a series of linear political transitions from colony to nation-state, all ending in the late 1960s. But for many colonized peoples, the path to sovereignty was much less straightforward, especially in contexts where the goal of a discrete nation-state was unattainable. Canada's Indigenous peoples were one such group. In 1980, in the face of separatism in Quebec, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau pledged to renew the Canadian Confederation by bringing home the constitution, which was still retained by the British Parliament. But many Indigenous leaders feared that this final separation of powers would extinguish their historic bilateral treaties with the British crown, including the Royal Proclamation of 1763 that guaranteed Indigenous sovereignty in a trust relationship with Britain. Indigenous activists thus organized lobbying campaigns at Westminster to oppose Trudeau's act of so-called patriation. This article follows the Constitution Express, a campaign organized by the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs in 1981. Maneuvering around the nuances of British political and cultural difference, activists on the Constitution Express articulated and exercised their own vision of decolonization, pursuing continued ties to Britain as their best hope for securing Indigenous sovereignty in a federal Canada.

This one British thing, the baby gas mask, helps us understand the normalization of total war in modern Britain.

Napoleon's most famous innovation in his legendary military career was the use of the daunting Grande Armée with an emphasis on speed, maneuverability, and maintaining the offensive. Yet Napoleon understood that while skirmishes were won or lost on the battlefield, the real war lay in public perception. To that end, Napoleon used art and cultural treasures as part of his arsenal in order to create the perception of victory, regardless of the outcome of any particular campaign. Examining contemporary French artistic representations of Napoleon granting freedom of worship to religious groups, this article analyzes artwork as a tool for fashioning and communicating legal narrative. Popular visual arts are mined for meaning, painting a portrait of the legal and cultural setting of these creative works. The partisan artwork demonstrates how Napoleon's artists depicted freedom of worship as the freedom—granted to all faiths—to worship Napoleon. It is noted that Jews feature disproportionately in the Empire period's depictions of freedom of worship. This is surprising, as the Jewish community was numerically insignificant and hardly influential in Napoleon's realm. This article argues that in addition to broadcasting religious tolerance, Napoleonic artwork used Jews and symbols like Moses and tablets of law to fashion a narrative of law that foregrounded the legal legitimacy of Napoleon's rule: Napoleon's regime is legally just; the enlightened ruler affords rights and liberties to all his subjects; divine Napoleon is the new lawgiver.