This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on critical aspects of the British Royal Navy's suppression of the Atlantic slave trade. It presents a new interpretation of the political framework under which slave-trade suppression was executed. The book provides the sustained discussion of the squadron's wider, cultural significance, and its role in the shaping of geographical knowledge of West Africa. It considers the responses of officers serving on the squadron and explores how far faith, profits and honour shaped their responses to the assignment. The book also considers how the nineteenth-century suppression of the slave trade has survived in British public memory, tracing early commemorations through to the museums and political debates of our own times.

Hailing King Alfred as the source of much of Britain's law was a means of giving a reassuring aura of stability and permanence to a fast-changing area of modern life. This chapter recognizes both the dominance of Victorian narratives of social progress. The fact that trial-by-jury was cited in Victorian rhetoric as a beneficial export to the colonies, also no doubt increased concern to establish an early, native origin for the practice. Spelman's The Life of Alfred the Great was the best-known biography of Alfred for the first half of the nineteenth century, and Thomas Hughes's was the most popular in the latter decades of the Victorian period. It was Spelman who first associated Alfred's new ships with the highly successful modern British 'navy'. The druid's prophecy about the union of Great Britain links the alliance intrinsically to the growth and success of the British Empire.

This book is a study of the communist life and the communist experience of membership. The study will also place itself on the interface between the membership and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) by considering the efforts of the latter to give shape to that experience. 'It is the simplest thing so hard to achieve', goes the final line in Bertolt Brecht's famous poem,' Praise of Communism'. Yet many British communists between the Wars felt the striving to realise their communist vision worthwhile, even though 'the patents of their nobility' lay far into the future as Max Eastman put it.

Between 1660 and 1714, Laudians and Latitudinarians had vied for supremacy, with Calvinism increasingly becoming the preserve of Protestant dissenters. During these same years the dream faded of a restored Church of England embracing all manner of Protestants, as the balance of forces shifted in one direction and then another. Exemplifying the shift in the balance of theological forces is the replacement of William Sancroft by John Tillotson as archbishop of Canterbury in 1691. The doctrinal standard of the English church became the Elizabethan Thirty-nine Articles, the ambiguous phrasing of which had in the past allowed Calvinists and Arminians to draw rival conclusions concerning the theology of grace. The 'Catholick faith' of the Church of England was threatened, so Francis Atterbury claimed in 1697, by a welter of 'Deists, Socinians, Latitudinarians, deniers of mysteries and pretended explainers of them'.

This chapter examines series of linguistics-based concepts of literary forms, including the post-structuralist concepts of 'the text' and 'writing'. Roland Barthes has stepped through the graphic surface of the page into the conceptual space within text to examine linguistic signifiers and what they signify. The 'text' of structuralism is idealised text, intertextually limitless, whereas specific actual texts must be created and limited by their readers. Linguistics-based analysis routinely ignores the material aspect of any text, despite the fact that it is this materiality, the process of publication that gives the text its communicative power through distance and time and allows it to be discussed by critics. A positive awareness of the signifying power of writing led Derrida to write about a novel that utilised its graphic surface, Philippe Sollers's Numbers, and to write Glas.

In this chapter, the author juxtaposes three disparate projects to show the levels of work and analysis civil organisation staff regularly confronted. These projects consist of civil movement organisation job titles, a personal project to create Green Life theory, and a large, government-led land reclamation called Saemangeum. In this context, discourse ethnographically emerges as ‘less than theory, smaller than ideology.’

With the exception of the Civil War and the Industrial Revolution, the 1926 General Strike may well be the most written about and reimagined event in British history. Most scholarly studies detail how the strike reified the transition of government, organized labour, and big business from a paternalistic style of obligatory reciprocity to a more modern, rationalist, and reformist model. Unlike its appearances in memoirs and autobiographies, most fictional representations of the General Strike gave a bit more space to the main event. The historical analyses of the strike and the volunteers are one sort of historical reproduction, akin to but somewhat different from fictional portrayals. The contained-conflict model is the one most commonly used for educational purposes, though General Strike exhibitions and educational packets have included more controversial issues than one might expect, especially for products aimed at students.

After the Second World War, George Orwell looked back on the murder cases that had 'given the greatest amount of pleasure' to the British public. The Beatrice Annie Pace case fell just outside Britain's 'great period in murder', and since it ended in an acquittal it should perhaps not even be counted a 'murder' at all. The case's sensational quality in 1928 was a product of two broader factors during the 'great period in murder': an expanding sensationalist press and a declining acceptance of domestic violence. Opinions about accused killers often varied across the press spectrum, and they might, over time, shift as new information came to light. Although clear press preferences often emerged, it is often possible to find quite divergent views running parallel to one another: press unanimity of the sort found in the Pace case has probably been the exception rather than the rule.