Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.

As American Patriots declared their independence from Great Britain, there was one British politician whom they continued to celebrate as a hero: William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. In 1776, Chatham’s face adorned statues, portraits, swords, and even waxworks throughout the new American states. By Chatham’s death in 1778, however, Americans had cooled appreciably on the British “Patriot” leader. Why did William Pitt remain an American hero for so long? And why, after 1776, did his reputation fall so quickly? This article argues that the issue of American independence caused a political split in a once-powerful transatlantic Patriot alliance. While American Patriots viewed independence as their paramount goal, British Patriots such as Chatham could not conceive of a British Empire that did not include North America. The British Patriots’ attempts to balance imperial sovereignty and civil liberty proved unworkable, and ultimately, they chose empire. The death of William Pitt represented the end of British Patriotism’s core political ideal: to create a British Empire that was both expansive and free.

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.

On 28 July 1776, the German-born Philadelphia merchant Jonas Phillips enclosed a printed copy of the Declaration of Independence with a letter written in Yiddish to another Jewish merchant, Gumpel Sampson, in Europe. The letter was intercepted and today sits on display in the Museum of the American Revolution in Philadelphia, with a curatorial note that it was the first copy of the Declaration known to have been sent out of the country. Within a transatlantic economic framework, the outbreak of a war that presented new business opportunities became a field for self-making to a degree that would not have been possible for Phillips within Britain itself. This article traces Phillips’s involvement in the Revolution, his growing confidence that he and other Jews belonged in the new polity, and the assertion of his political voice to rid his state of religious tests for office.

In Britain in the 1970s and 1980s public perception of the dangers of asbestos changed dramatically as asbestos came to be understood as an environmental and public health risk, rather than one limited to those who worked in the industry. The invisible presence of asbestos in the everyday spaces of life caused widespread anxiety and prompted community action in towns and cities across the UK. This article examines how, in the 1980s, asbestos in schools became the focus for public concern. It tracks how different levels of government responded to these concerns and how different conceptualizations of risk were used to push for action or reject it. The focus for this study is London, where, in 1983, the left-wing Greater London Council (GLC) committed to removing all asbestos from schools in the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA). While local governments attempted to remove asbestos, national government resisted calls for new policy and financial assistance and instead cited government-commissioned research by consultant scientists to dismiss concerns. The government response was contested by activists, including Nancy Tait and Alan Dalton, and fueled a growing distrust among concerned parents. Drawing on archival sources from unions, campaigners, and national and local government and media, this article demonstrates how asbestos was caught up in wider questions about regulation and the state’s role in negotiating risk in everyday life.

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.

This article considers the significance of the US Declaration of Independence in the western hemisphere. It argues first that the influence of the Declaration was limited in an era we call “the age of imperial fracture.” Second, it contends that the former colonies that achieved independence, including the United States, did not experience a sharp break with the past. Instead, they grappled with the legacies of colonialism and imperial ambitions. Throughout the western hemisphere, independence triggered new waves of contestation and conflict and gave rise to new forms of imperialism.

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.

This article reinterprets 1776 not as an American event alone but as an imperial crisis that reshaped the terms of sovereignty across the British world. Focusing on Malta, Mysore, and Kedah-Penang, it argues that subordinate polities facing strategic vulnerability responded to the loss of North America by bargaining for recognized status within an unequal imperial order, converting material dependence into acknowledged standing through treaties, charters, and ceremonies. The concept of “subordinate sovereignty” is developed to capture arrangements in which rulers retained meaningful internal authority while accepting externally managed external relations. In so doing, the argument shows how practices later associated with nineteenth‑century protectorates and indirect rule were already being improvised at the empire’s margins in the decades around 1776, not as a designed policy from London but as an emergent outcome of peripheral agency and imperial necessity.

The mass unemployment attendant upon deindustrialization has generally been implicitly understood as a male phenomenon, both at the time and later. But by the early 1980s, the unemployed woman had become a subject of concern for feminist activists and academics, who were concerned to make visible the plight of unemployed women, and to illuminate the centrality of work to women’s sense of self and women’s earnings to the family economy. Even more fundamentally, they questioned why women without paid work were not always understood as unemployed, instead seen as being absorbed back into domesticity. This article therefore examines the concerted contemporaneous feminist response to this moment by examining the archives of organizations belonging to the Women’s Employment Projects Group, a nationwide network of feminist activists who campaigned between the late 1970s and late 1980s to improve women’s position in the labor force. Offering us a portal into understanding how issues surrounding women’s unemployment were conceptualized by feminists during a period of unprecedented shifts in women’s working lives, this article argues that these groups have much to offer scholars of deindustrialization, both in terms of the attention they drew to the sheer scale of female joblessness, and their radical reconceptualization of women’s unemployment.

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.

This article links political struggle within the Church of Scotland, itself rooted in the economic dislocations brought about by British Empire from 1707, to a wider transatlantic dissenting tradition that was closely engaged with the cause of the American colonies, as well as with the radical reform of Britain's parliamentary government. Scottish dissenters both inside and outside Scotland itself helped to forge the intellectual and political conditions for the American Revolution, a revolution they did not seek to confine to the North American colonies alone.

This article traces the creation of the Queen’s Colleges, and the degree-granting Queen’s University, in Ireland, the British government’s aspiration in their establishment, and their relationship to the British Empire. It argues that obscured in the existing literature about the aspiration to create a Catholic university in Ireland—the so-called “Irish University Question”—is a story about the way the Queen’s Colleges embodied a desire for a post-sectarian future that trained Irish men for imperial careers. The article traces the development of the competitive examinations in changing the selection process for members of the Indian Civil Service, and it looks at the ways that the Queen’s Colleges used students’ successes in competitive examinations to defend their institutions from the onslaught of criticism by the Irish Catholic Church. The article concludes by exploring the demise of the Queen’s University, and its replacement by the Royal Irish University, and how even by the 1880s imperial service still formed a central pillar in the identity, ethos, and purpose of the Queen’s Colleges.

This article examines fraudulent homicide accusations against clergymen and their associates from thirteenth-century England, revealing a sophisticated form of lay resistance long before the Reformation. Analysis of inquests de odio et atia (of hate and spite) demonstrates that parishioners creatively exploited the criminal justice system to communicate their discontent with the clergy, resist ecclesiastical discipline, or find a way out of paying tithes. While previous scholarship focuses on raptus claims from the fifteenth century, this research identifies similar agency two centuries earlier. By manipulating legal processes—for example, by inventing murders where natural deaths occurred—the laity challenged church interference, suggesting that medieval lay-clerical relations were defined by a complex, long-term pattern of strategic legal subversion.

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.

North America and India have often appeared as distinct, sequential chapters in the history of the British Empire. This article builds on the scholarship of P. J. Marshall and others to demonstrate the myriad ways in which these two far-flung places were bound together in British imperial plans and projects during the years leading up to the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Importantly, even before the American Revolutionary War broke out, the possible loss of North America had already begun to inform how some Britons argued about the importance of the British presence in India. In thinking of North America and India together before 1776, such Britons regularly undermined the frameworks of the Atlantic and Indian oceans and the “First” and “Second British Empires” that have either implicitly or explicitly shaped so much twentieth- and twenty-first century scholarship.

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.

This article examines how the American Revolution fundamentally reshaped the British press and information networks. Public hunger for news about the American crisis and conflict accelerated newspaper circulation, profitability, and competition, with metropolitan and provincial newspapers increasingly bypassing government channels to report events more quickly. The results were more robust and intricate national and global information networks, as well as a press that was more commercially driven and independent—ultimately enabling British readers to scrutinize the empire's actions with the same rigor they applied to domestic politics.

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, Justice Samuel Alito cites the Ellenborough Act of 1803, the first statutory prohibition of abortion in the Anglo-American common law system, and endorses one interpretation of the bill as an effort to protect fetal rights. However, the reasons behind Lord Ellenborough’s decision to criminalize abortion have been unclear to historians, especially given the common law’s historical indifference to abortion and the absence of general outcry over the practice at the time the bill was passed. This article argues the Act’s origins instead lay in Ellenborough’s professional history as counsel for the Merchants of Liverpool in their opposition to various abolitionist bills before Parliament between 1792 and 1799. The article incorporates data collected from the first comprehensive review of nineteenth-century abortion trials held in England and Wales, whose statistics on domestic, birth-related prosecutions illustrate that abortion was not a crime the criminal justice system was interested in punishing. Instead, using Ellenborough’s personal and professional papers, the article argues that the 1803 statute should be interpreted through Ellenborough’s sustained commitment to the protection of private property and the defense of the institution of slavery.

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.

This article examines the controversy surrounding the lightning strike at the Royal Gunpowder Magazine at Purfleet-on-Thames in 1777 to explore how political conflict shaped scientific authority during the American Revolution. Although Benjamin Franklin’s theory of electricity and pointed lightning conductors had achieved broad acceptance within the Royal Society, the Purfleet incident enabled his long-standing rival, Benjamin Wilson, to revive discredited criticisms by appealing to patriotic sentiment and royal patronage rather than experimental evidence. Drawing on correspondence, Royal Society records, published pamphlets, and committee reports, this article demonstrates that the scientific consensus remained firmly in Franklin’s favor even as political opposition to the American cause reshaped public perceptions and institutional priorities. The Purfleet controversy reveals how political allegiance could influence scientific institutions, redirect research agendas, and transform the public presentation of science without overturning established scientific knowledge.

Since the publication in the 1980s of now-canonical texts on British evangelicalism, historians have largely been in agreement that religion, and evangelicalism in particular, played an important role in shaping modern British history. Since then, there has been much work focused on the origins of evangelicalism and exploring its characteristics, spirituality, and religious essence. Another significant trend has been literature that has set the British movement within a wider international context. This article identifies several areas of growth in recent studies of evangelicalism in Britain: network analysis grounded in manuscript as well as printed sources; emphasis on the connection between evangelicalism and Dissent; and the integration of religious history into social history. Recent works under review include two monographs on the formative “Clapham Sect” period, a collection of essays exploring the relationship between evangelicalism and Dissent, an overview of evangelical social action, and the first volume of the edited diaries of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, later seventh Earl of Shaftesbury. Areas for further scholarly exploration include a four-nations perspective that integrates the study of evangelicalism in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales; the role of women in British evangelicalism; and the role of evangelicalism in shaping Britain in the twentieth century.

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.

This article considers the challenge of staging an exhibition to mark the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in a gallery with a strong English regional identity. After setting out the context for the exhibition, the article goes on to highlight the connections between Nottinghamshire and the United States, particularly the polarizing effect of the campaign for independence on Nottingham politics. The article highlights several examples that illustrate the intersection between regional and global events, demonstrating how this material was used to engage local audiences in relevant and interesting ways.

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context. This article outlines the methodologies informing and content of my current book project, “Called it Macaroni”: A British Queer History of the American Revolution, as I presented them in public-facing lectures for Tallahassee Pridefest in 2025 and 2026. This project examines a range of individuals, from the lowest to the highest social ranks on both sides of the American Revolution, who expressed feelings of same-sex desire or trans gender. Also, more importantly, it explores the ideologies that underpinned the American Revolution, and highlights the ways in which they contain the basis for queer and trans inclusion, as well as supporting critiques of injustice around race, class, gender, and citizenship more broadly. I argue for the value of starting the story of the American Revolution in Britain in the seventeenth century and ask whether doing so, and placing aspirational ideals at the heart of the narrative, can provide a framework for a simultaneously optimistic, historically accurate, and broadly inclusive narrative that does not misrepresent any group's struggle for the sake of forging a consensus.

Existing accounts of policy change in 1990s Britain focus primarily on New Labour. Tony Blair’s 1994 election as Labour leader signaled a period of growing elite convergence around a post-industrial economic model, rule-based economic management, and the use of market mechanisms to achieve social objectives. For all Blair’s claims to novelty, however, his “third way” chimed closely with the policy agenda that Paddy Ashdown had developed as Liberal Democrat leader during the early 1990s. This article provides the first detailed analysis of Liberal Democrat policymaking under Ashdown’s leadership (1988–99) and seeks to clarify the party’s intellectual relationship with New Labour. It argues that the Liberal Democrats’ embrace of market economics between 1988 and 1992 marked an important step in the diffusion and entrenchment of neoliberal ideas across the UK political spectrum, and that Ashdown’s efforts to synthesize market liberalism with plans for constitutional reform, social investment, and decarbonization anticipated New Labour in important respects. By taking Ashdown’s policy work seriously, the article shows that his pursuit of a coalition with Blair was not merely a product of tactical considerations. Rather, Ashdown hoped that the two men could realign British politics around a shared vision of economic and political “modernization.”

Timed to coincide with the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence that launched a revolution that created the United States of America, this series of articles complicates traditional narratives of this transformative event by situating it in a larger British world context.

This article examines 1776 through the eyes of tribal and forest-based societies in the Bengal Presidency, including the Chuar, Paharia, Santhal, Ho, and Bhumij. It argues that the North American imperial crisis of 1762–83 drove increased fiscal reliance on Asian revenues and a renewed East India Company incursion into Bengal’s forested and tribal areas. Intensified revenue extraction and infiltration into self-governing tribal areas restructured traditional subsistence systems and fell disproportionately on women, whose forest-based labor was rendered invisible in colonial revenue accounting.

Employing a combination of new manuscript materials and familiar printed sources, this article traces a series of anti-puritan libels deployed by royalist polemicists against puritan parliamentarians during England’s mid-seventeenth-century civil wars. The chief target of those accusations was the returned New England minister Hugh Peter, whose charitable efforts to transport young, orphaned Londoners to Massachusetts Bay during the early months of 1643 were recast by Charles I’s royalist writers into a conspiracy theory that centered on the threat to king, church, and state of godly miseducation in faraway New England. The article thus unpacks this royalist fixation on malevolent godly spiritual instruction for the first time, both as it percolated in loyalist print throughout the 1640s and into the Restoration, while also contributing to existing scholarship on the histories of childhood, labor, and the British Atlantic world.