This article revisits the development of the field of British queer history to argue that the division that began in the later 1970s—between works focused on the periods before and after the late nineteenth century—has obscured underlying methodological unities that developed within the scholarship since the 1990s. The failure to emphasize common cultural history methodologies that have been the hallmark of the best works analyzing same-sex desire and transing gender for the period from the late seventeenth century onward is due in part to the separating off of histories of same-sex desire between women from those studies focused on men. This article argues that a Foucauldian understanding of power, the liberal public sphere, and liberal political systems, all dating from the late seventeenth century, provide a unified context for the formulating and unraveling of a wide range of self-understandings in relation to gender and sexual desires. What explains the developments of the late nineteenth century stems from the first such self-understandings being formulated for the requirements of a rights-bearing subject within a liberal political system. This approach highlights the ethical component of public political identities, and the consequences of this for British queer history going forward.

In the late 1930s Viscount Lymington—born Gerard Wallop, and from 1943 the 9th Earl of Portsmouth—emerged as a vocal champion of an “authentically English expression of fascism” rooted in the countryside and agriculture. An aristocrat and Conservative member of Parliament (MP; 1929–1934) turned dissident, Lymington railed against the perceived decline of Britain and the empire from an agrarian vantage point. His most famous work, Famine in England, published in 1938, warned that Britain’s overreliance on imported food and its neglect of the land had pushed the nation to the brink of catastrophe. On the surface, this text was a passionate call for agricultural revival in the face of looming war. Yet at its core, Famine in England was far more than a rural policy manifesto. It was a statement of fascist blood and soil philosophy in which race operated as the grammatical structure ordering ideas of food, land, and national renewal. In Lymington’s vision, the health of the soil and the health of the “British race” were inextricably entwined. Saving one meant the salvation of the other. Race, in other words, was the invisible architecture—the grammar—underlying his prescriptions for Britain’s agrarian crisis.

Some studies of the lived experience of religion in early Stuart England have argued for a historiographical overemphasis on doctrinal controversy, suggesting that attention to contemporary works of private devotion can dissolve categories of division in post-Reformation English Protestantism. However, in considering two such devotional texts—Daniel Featley's Ancilla Pietatis (1626) and John Cosin's Hours of Prayer (1627)—this article demonstrates the difficulty in separating devotion from polemic. Indeed, these prayer manuals cannot be understood outside of an extended interconfessional and intra-Protestant polemical exchange—a confessional conflict with powerful women, including Mary Villiers, Countess of Buckingham, and Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland, at the center. Here, attention to practical devotion does not elide categories of division within English Protestantism but rather highlights how such divisions were sharpened through competing devotional efforts aimed at court women in response to the theological uncertainty wrought by the Catholic dynastic matches of the 1620s. Finally, an extended examination of the activities and interests of Elizabeth Cary suggests that our understanding of the lived experience of religion for lay women must be expanded to include participation in theological controversy, offering a version of female religious agency that extends beyond private spaces of devotional practice.

This article argues that women welfare claimants, particularly lone mothers, were disproportionately targeted by invasive and punitive anti-fraud measures in the post-1945 welfare state because they were considered most likely to commit fraud through their perceived sexual immorality and reckless childbearing. Although the issue of welfare fraud has influenced high-profile policy and legislation, existing historical scholarship is scant and we know little about the form, extent, or consequences of welfare fraud. Here, a mix of correspondence, statistics, and reports produced by the National Assistance Board, Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance, and National Assistance Board for Northern Ireland are analyzed alongside memoirs and a sample of offenses dealt with by the police to explore the nature and scale of welfare fraud by women alongside an examination of anti-fraud measures employed by the state in Britain and Northern Ireland. It shows that fraud policies risked bringing women into unwelcome conflict with authorities and pushed women into dropping their claims, out of fear of prosecution. In Britain, this approach became intertwined with an embedded hostility toward migrants, while sectarianism underpinned the delivery of state welfare in Northern Ireland. Consequently, these findings suggest new ways of understanding how the welfare state reshaped the relationship between central government and its most vulnerable citizens.

Based on the findings of a major oral history study, this article uses the personal narratives of Ulster Protestant migrants to illuminate some of the understudied cultural and human impacts of the Northern Ireland Troubles for postwar British society. Situating these impacts within the history of “internal decolonization” and the postwar implosion of “Greater Britain,” it shows how the Troubles fueled popular perceptions of Northern Ireland as an “imperial liability,” creating distinctive dilemmas of belonging for Ulster Britons settling in England during the period. Drawing on cultural and psychoanalytic approaches to oral history analysis, the article demonstrates how the “composure” of Ulster Protestant subjectivities in Troubles-era England involved attempts to narratively integrate the destabilizing impacts of cultural encounter with memories, emotions, and identifications extending from migrants’ formative experiences of growing up in the polarized sociopolitical world of Northern Ireland. In analyzing the interplay between these contexts and dynamics, the article sheds new light on the cultural legacies of the Troubles for British society, suggesting new ways of situating the conflict within the historiography of postwar Britain and presenting some alternative interpretive possibilities for writing the human history of the Troubles beyond the “flattening rubric of identity.”

The commander in chief of the British forces in North America functioned as a linchpin for many of the colonial reforms that British ministries implemented after 1763. The office’s existence outside the authority of any single colony made the commander in chief a critical instrument for metropolitan reformers seeking to systematize and subordinate colonial governance. Aside from enforcing the Proclamation Line, regulating Indigenous trade, implementing the American Mutiny Act, ensuring peace in the west, and overseeing the expanded American establishment, the commander in chief also policed colonial resistance in the emerging imperial crisis. Yet the advent of a peacetime commander in chief in America is often overlooked as a reform in and of itself. While questions of sovereignty during this period often focus on the place of colonial assemblies, the creation of this new military commander in the colonies produced its own contests for authority from 1763 to 1774. Particularly for officials such as colonial governors, the division in authority between civil and military power represented a contradiction in sovereignty—an imperium in imperio. Men skeptical of this centralized power, as well as many who were merely self-interested, challenged the authority of the commander in chief and revealed the contradictions in British approaches to the structure of North American governance.

This article examines how efforts to improve maternal and perinatal health among Britain’s South Asian population served to uphold medical hierarchies and construct post-imperial racial formations. It uses the “Asian Mother and Baby Campaign” (AMBC) to assess state responses to health inequity. The AMBC was set up in 1984 by the Department of Health and Social Security (DHSS) in conjunction with the Save the Children Fund (SCF). By using the Department of Health and SCF archives, as well as original oral history interviews, this article shows that while the AMBC was designed to make healthcare more accessible, its attempt to “medically integrate” South Asian women helped to pathologize them and place them under medical surveillance. As the testimonies of healthcare professionals, users of the campaign, and women’s health activists show, the AMBC’s vision for healthcare reform was tied to racialized and class-based discourses around citizenship and belonging. This article thus interrogates what campaigns like the AMBC tell us about healthcare spaces and how they recalibrated imperial racial formations in order to manage and maintain racial difference in Britain. It argues that the AMBC created knowledge systems that were oftentimes at odds with community-based expertise. The campaign ultimately shaped South Asian women’s experiences of maternity care, as well as the national dialogue on race and notions of welfare state inclusivity. By focusing on British South Asian women’s healthcare in this way, this article makes a critical contribution to scholarship on race, health citizenship, and the limitations of multicultural ideals in late twentieth-century Britain.

War was an important, and underappreciated, force circulating global goods into and around early modern Britain. Capture at sea brought millions of pounds of merchandise into the British Isles, offering new groups of consumers new ways of participating in the expanding world of things. By tracing the presence in early modern Britain of paintings from colonial Spanish America, we better appreciate the economic, social, and cultural significance of maritime predation. We also identify new sources to explore the early modern world of goods, from the Admiralty records that document these captures, to literary celebrations of patriotic sea-dogs seizing Spanish treasure galleons, and family legends attributing a pirate provenance to Spanish American artworks. We should, in short, pay more attention to the role of war and violence in setting early modern goods in motion.

Focusing on case studies of Shrewsbury, Chester, York, Coventry, and Bristol, this article analyzes how the concept of the “historic town” emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century. Traditionally a town’s historic identity had been understood in a legal and institutional sense. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, the use of the term “ancient” or “historic” to describe a town had become less a claim to long-standing privileges and traditional importance than an indication of a particular appearance and atmosphere, redolent of an era that was increasingly referred to as “the olden time.” A historic town offered the promise of a certain kind of historical experience and ambience that could be strategically exploited in order to attract visitors, and their custom, in greater numbers. The “invention” of the historic town was most obviously a response to the rapid changes consequent upon urbanization. But we need also to consider other factors, including changing attitudes toward the past and the broader consumption of history; developments in architectural history, particularly a new appreciation for the vernacular domestic architecture of the early modern period; and the rise of domestic tourism, facilitated by the advent of railway travel. Finally, the invention of the historic town is also a story about the early origins of heritage and the emergence of a preservationist ethos.