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Understanding the historical policy pathways that have led to the constellation of policies that both reflect and shape the current gender order can reveal reasons for the persistence of gender inequality in paid work and unpaid family care. Bringing together existing research and policy critique with Carol Bacchi's framework of policy as 'gendering practices', this paper focuses on the role of policy as a process that constructs and upholds an unequal gender order. The discussion traces how UK social policies have since the establishment of the post-war welfare state articulated and positioned gendered possibilities for combining paid work and childrearing, shaping gendered and classed work-family life courses. The analysis illustrates that British social policy has not been consistently committed to a more equal gender regime but instead maintained a heteronormative family ideal and thus, despite various policy changes, the gendering of 'the worker' and 'the parent' as conceptualised in UK policy has persisted over the last several decades. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tracks how a trope of middle-class household thrift, grounded on the autarchic Aristotelian oikos, has long fueled derogatory discourses in Britain aimed at low-income urban residents who practice quite different forms of thrift. Since the 1970s this trope has migrated across scales, proving a potent metaphor for national economic policy and planetary care alike, and morally and economically justifying both neoliberal welfare retraction compounded by austerity policies and national responses to excessive resource extraction and waste production. Both austerity and formal recycling schemes shift responsibility onto consumer citizens, regardless of capacity. Further, this model of thrift eclipses the thriftiness of low-income urban households, which emerges at the nexus of kin and waged labor, sharing, welfare, debt, conserving material resources through remaking and repair and, crucially, the fundamental need for decency expressed through kin care. Through a historicized ethnography of a London social housing estate and its residents, this paper excavates what happens as these different forms and scales of household thrift coexist, change over time, and clash. Ultimately, neoliberal policy centered on an inimical idiom of thrift delegitimizes and disentitles low-income urban households and undermines their ability to enact livelihood practices of sustainability and projects of dignity across generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: It was in twentieth-century Britain that the two distinct surgical disciplines, otology and laryngology, became united under the title oto-laryngology. Aural departments were established in general hospitals in the hands of specialists long before throat departments. The development and politics of the specialty occurred in London, while provincial services commenced in the early eighteenth century, with ophthalmologists, setting up a clinic or dispensary, progressing onto a hospital. Methods: The following resources were used: the Nottinghamshire Archives; Manuscripts and Special Collections at the University of Nottingham Libraries and The Local Studies Library, Nottingham Central Library. Results: The Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Hospital for Diseases of the Throat, Ear and Nose was established in 1886, staffed by part-time general practitioners. The Nottingham Children's Hospital appointed two qualified surgeons in the 1910s and subsequently the General Nottingham Hospital appointed them as honorary assistant surgeons. Both hospitals provided access to beds, not available to the Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Hospital for Diseases of the Throat, Ear and Nose. Following The Education Act of 1907, Nottingham created a School Health Services. By the 1920s, Nottingham had four institutions providing clinical and surgical ENT services. The National Hospitals Survey conducted in 1945 recommended that the Nottingham and Nottinghamshire Hospital for Diseases of the Throat, Ear and Nose be closed and amalgamated with The General Hospital Nottingham. Conclusion: The General Hospital Nottingham was slow to create a service for the diagnosis and treatment of ENT diseases and disorders, but established a Departmental Service by 1927. The surgical staffing was common to all four of the ENT services from mid-1930. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first demonstration of laser action in ruby was made in 1960 by T. H. Maiman of Hughes Research Laboratories, USA. Many laboratories worldwide began the search for lasers using different materials, operating at different wavelengths. In the UK, academia, industry and the central laboratories took up the challenge from the earliest days to develop these systems for a broad range of applications. This historical review looks at the contribution the UK has made to the advancement of the technology, the development of systems and components and their exploitation over the last 60 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay introduces a special issue of the BJHS on communities of natural knowledge and artificial practice in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London. In seeking to understand the rise of a learned and technical culture within a growing and changing city, our approach has been inclusive in terms of the activities, people and places we consider worth exploring but shaped by a sense of the importance of collective activity, training, storage of information and identity. London's knowledge culture was formed by the public, pragmatic and commercial spaces of the city rather than by the academy or the court. In this introduction, we outline the types of group and institution within our view and acknowledge the many locations that might be explored further. Above all, we introduce a particular vision of London's potential as a city of knowledge and practice, arising from its commercial and mercantile activity and fostered within its range of corporations, institutions and associations. This was recognized and promoted by contemporary authors, including natural and experimental philosophers, practical mathematicians, artisans and others, who sought to establish a place for and recognition of their individual and collective skills and knowledge within the metropolis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to think through the logic and distinctiveness of the early Royal Society's position as a metropolitan knowledge community and chartered corporation, and the links between these aspects of its being. Among the knowledge communities of Restoration London it is one of the best known and most studied, but also one of the least typical and in many respects one of the least coherent. It was also quite unlike the chartered corporations of the City of London, exercising almost none of their ordinary functions and being granted very limited power and few responsibilities. I explore the society's imaginative and material engagements with longer-established corporate bodies, institutions and knowledge communities, and show how those encounters repeatedly reshaped the early society's internal organization, outward conduct and self-understanding. Building on fundamental work by Michael Hunter, Adrian Johns, Lisa Jardine and Jim Bennett, and new archival evidence, I examine the importance of the city to the society's foundational rhetoric and the shifting orientation of its search for patronage, the development of its charter, and how it learned to interpret the limits and possibilities of its privileges through its encounters with other chartered bodies, emphasizing the contingent nature of its early development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her recent book on celebrity pregnancy, legal scholar Renée Ann Cramer writes, "in the years from 1970 to 2000, popular culture became more open to performances of pregnancy; once kept secret and articulated as private, pregnancy became 'public.'" This is not wholly true. In the English-speaking world, "celebrity pregnancy," with its overt performances of femininity and maternity, bodily monitoring, and careful dance between the concealment and revelation of private information, had its first public moment in the long eighteenth century. That century's professional theatre was a site for the intersection of two forms of women's labor: the maternal labor of pregnancy and birth, which affected women of all classes throughout a century with rapidly rising birth rates, and the theatrical labor of professional actresses. Although the latter has been the subject of much-needed study in recent decades, the impact of maternal labor on the professional theatre of the time is only beginning to be explored. Between 1700 and 1800, birth rates for middle- and upper-class British woman rose significantly. Among the aristocracy, rates doubled from four to eight children, and middle-class women averaged seven births by the end of the century. At the same time, women in the professional theatre were inventing and modeling new forms of public womanhood, capitalizing on a burgeoning culture of female celebrity, and, in some cases, wielding exceptional economic and artistic power. Though not all actresses had children, many did, and at rates that were not unlike those of their nontheatrical counterparts. For these women, the successful balancing of maternal and theatrical labor could be vital to their careers and, in many cases, their family's survival. The need to balance personal and professional demands was all the more imperative within the hectic and extremely competitive repertory system. The day-to-day repertory of a London company was of necessity a malleable thing, accommodating short runs of popular pieces, audience requests, illnesses and absences of company members, and the perpetual state of competition between the patent houses of Covent Garden and Drury Lane. To compete profitably, managers needed competent and popular performers (bodies) and performance vehicles (texts) in which to feature them. As the available bodies changed, then, so too did the available plays for performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of excise taxation in contemporary Western societies is marked by the curious coexistence of the state's fiscal objective of raising revenue with often-articulated behavioral objectives relating to lowering or altering public consumption of certain commodities. This article uses findings from the first dedicated empirical study of the long-term development of various alcohol excise duties in England and Wales to explain how and why this contemporary situation, of distinct and potentially inconsistent rationalities, came to exist. Orthodox tax history tends to emphasize the importance of tax for state formation generally and/or the more specific establishment of a fiscal military state in Britain. While important, such accounts relate principally to the fiscal dimensions of taxation and say little about any behavioral aspects. This article draws upon the original analysis of archival government sources dating from 1643 to 1914 that pertain to the excise taxation of various drinks that are today defined as alcoholic. It also involves the innovative application of the Foucauldian concept of governmentality to this history of taxation. The article demonstrates that the historical development of alcohol excise duties in England and Wales has been driven not just by the formation of a fiscal-military state, but also by the emergence of governmentality across the modern period. This original insight into tax history is used to explain the logical inconsistencies within current tax laws. Moreover, by providing the first sustained analysis of its links to taxation, the article advances the developing literature around governmentality within criminology, sociology, and sociolegal studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely recognized that ‘the individual’ was prioritized by the Thatcher governments. However, there has been little analysis by historians of exactly how the Thatcher government conceptualized ‘the individual’. In this article, we attempt to remedy this deficiency by undertaking a case-study of a key Thatcherite social policy reform: the introduction of ‘personal pensions’. This approach allows us to understand the position of ‘the individual’ on the functional level of Thatcherite policy-making. In doing so, we argue that there was no coherent or fixed Thatcherite concept of the individual. Instead, we identify three fundamental tensions: (i) should individuals be capitalists or consumers; (ii) were they rational or irrational; and (iii) should they be risk-taking entrepreneurs or prudent savers? This reflected, in part, conflicts within the diverse tapestry of post-war neoliberal thought. We demonstrate in this article that these tensions undermined the Thatcher governments’ original attempt to create a society of entrepreneurial investor-capitalists, which in turn cemented their preference for simply maximizing individual freedom of choice within a competitive – yet tightly regulated – market environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the role of the English economist Arthur (A. J.) Brown in the 1950s debate surrounding the wage-rate change/unemployment relationship. While the publication of William (Bill) Phillips’s 1958 paper and the subsequent moniker of the “Phillips Curve” attracted a wealth of attention, Brown’s book on the subject, The Great Inflation , and his later work on inflation have received much less. Here, the focus is on redressing this situation somewhat by looking at Brown’s work to see how much it predates Phillips’s paper, and what differences there are to it. We also consider this within the changing institutional structure of English economic networks in the 1950s that led to a relatively rapid acceptance of Phillips’s analysis and, in many cases, to a strong, ordinal interpretation of the Phillips Curve that overshadowed Brown’s work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the hundred years from 1450 to 1550, the great success enjoyed by the English woollen industry in continental markets was a result of clothiers organising the rural cloth industry in the West Country, Suffolk/Essex, the Kentish Weald and Newbury and its surrounds, to produce cloth that London merchants required. To do this they allocated extensive capital to cloth production: buying wools, sorting and dyeing them, organising their carding and spinning, putting the yarn out for weaving, and then in some cases owning the mills that fulled the cloth and finally shearing it in-house. The leading clothiers carried wool and cloth inventories, developed strong buying networks and offered merchants credit. Clothiers' control over production declined after 1550 as the government exercised greater control over cloth quality and clothiers' freedoms, and as price competition intensified from coarser cloths and new draperies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Restoration London saw a wave of publications by physicians advocating that the 'compleat physician' should be one who experimented and produced his own medicines. Only thus, they argued, could the medical hierarchy be restored and medical authority re-established on a defensible basis. This article seeks to explain the context for this unusual approach, and why it failed to attract mainstream physicians by the end of the century, by considering the sixty-year career of one of its leading advocates, Everard Maynwaring (c.1629-1713), a prolific medical author and what his own failure to enter the medical establishment may show about the problems inherent in this model for the physician. A university-trained gentleman physician who converted to chymical medicine c.1660, Maynwaring published learned and relatively unpolemical texts to persuade both medical and lay audiences of the superiority of experimental medicine as a mode of learned practice, yet could not easily reconcile this with the advocacy and sale of his own chymical medicines (especially as he focused increasingly on a small group of 'universal medicines') without being branded an 'empirick'. Fragmentary evidence regarding his career suggests he became increasingly marginalised and as an old man was reduced to advertising his cures like the 'empiricks' from whom he had sought to distance both himself and physicians in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reconstructing Britain's cities to accommodate the ‘motor revolution’ was an integral part of urban renewal in the post-war decades. This article shows how opposition to urban motorways had a pivotal role in the retreat from urban modernism in the 1970s. It takes as its case-study Birmingham, Britain's premier motor city, headquarters of the motor industry, and with heavy investment in roads, including the Inner Ring, Britain's first urban motorway completed in 1971. The article traces the collapse of the motor city ideal in Birmingham sparked by controversy over car pollution at Spaghetti Junction, the growth of roads protest, and the implication of the Inner Ring in municipal corruption. In so doing, it identifies the intersection of environmental, political, and economic factors that lay behind the volte-face in urban policy and compares Birmingham with other cities which witnessed similar revolts. It argues that the 1970s in Britain saw the end of a specific engineering vision of the post-war city, centred on the car and the ‘citizen-driver’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Beyond charters, printed propaganda, and cosmographies, aspiring statesmen in Jacobean England engaged with Native Americans in commonplace books, poetry, court masques, and political debate. Rather than representing a remote ‘other’, this article contends that barristers and students of the law were fascinated by the perceived savagery of indigenous peoples because it allowed them to explore, interrogate, and define their own civility. The result was a cross-over between developing English articulations of their own behaviour and political responsibilities, and a rising enthusiasm for colonizing America. With their Whitehall masques and passionate pleas in parliament on behalf of Virginia and Virginian tobacco, members of the Inns engaged in a subversive wit culture that reconciled the exotic with the language of duty and good conduct, and helped turn colonization into a recognizable – and, for the first time, fashionable – element of early seventeenth-century political culture. By considering written discourse alongside tobacco smoking and court masques, this article contends that a broad approach to the socio-cultural world of Jacobean politics reveals some ways through which gentlemen consciously projected their civil state as one that might be strengthened, rather than weakened, by turning to America as a viable theatre for political involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the locally specific (re)construction of a biblical figure, the Apostle St Paul, in India, to unravel the entanglement of religion with British imperial ideology on the one hand, and to understand the dynamics of colonial conversion on the other. Over the nineteenth century, evangelical pamphlets and periodicals heralded St Paul as the ideal missionary, who championed conversion to Christianity but within an imperial context: that of the first-century Roman Mediterranean. Through an examination of missionary discourses, along with a study of Indian (Hindu and Islamic) intellectual engagement with Christianity including Bengali convert narratives, this article studies St Paul as a reference point for understanding the contours of ‘vernacular Christianity’ in nineteenth-century India. Drawing upon colonial Christian publications mainly from Bengal, the article focuses on the multiple reconfigurations of Paul: as a crucial mascot of Anglican Protestantism, as a justification of British imperialism, as an ideological resource for anti-imperial sentiments, and as a theological inspiration for Hindu reform and revivalist organization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Based on fieldwork in Bibiyana, northeast Bangladesh, this article compares the transnational charity offered to known individuals by migrant, UK-based families with the philanthropic efforts of the multinational company Chevron, which operate a large gas field in the neighbourhood. Applying Fassin's notion of the ‘politics of suffering’ to both types of exchange, the article argues that the two types of giving are underlain by incommensurate moral economies. While in instances of transnational charity, social inequality and the compassion felt towards the suffering of known people, or ‘our own poor’, underscore the exchanges, in the philanthropic efforts of &#x2018.community engagement’ the inequality of giver and receiver is repressed and the exchange is animated by a moral economy. The latter is rooted in Christianity, in which compassion guides actions towards the suffering of unknown, anonymous strangers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What was the source of authority in the Church in Tudor England? This article traces the use of an ancient symbol of the power of metropolitan archbishops, the woollen pallium, between 1553 and 1603. The later Henrician Church saw this garment as a sign of royal supremacy. Under Mary, however, Archbishop Pole made extravagant claims which led the Elizabethan Church to reject earlier Tudor notions of this symbol. Set against the backdrop of the source of episcopal jurisdiction, this article traces the use of the pallium in England in a Church moving from Roman obedience to a Protestant settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a new reading of Lord Durham's recommendations concerning municipal institutions, included in the last section of his famous report. By placing the document in the context of the debates raised by the constitutional and administrative reforms conducted in Britain during the 1830s, it shows that its author understood autonomous municipalities as essential components of a modern mixed government. Such language was then employed by reformist Whigs in order to justify the policies which they thought were necessary to strengthen the country's political institutions by adapting them to changing social circumstances. The analysis presented here challenges the interpretation provided by most contemporary commentators on the report. Many of them have concluded that Lord Durham's understanding of local institutions is based on a liberal conception of political life, found in the writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. These studies tend to reduce early British liberalism to philosophical radicalism. They seek to demonstrate that liberals wish to deprive local communities of their political autonomy by integrating their institutions into the juridical structure of a highly centralized State. By focusing on the rhetoric used by Lord Durham to write his report, this article allows us to appreciate the heterogeneity of the definition of the municipality developed by liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The literature of recent UK policy toward Syria focuses on the 2013 chemical weapons crisis. We examine policy discourses leading up to that. The government supported the removal of Assad but faced the challenge of explaining how that would be realised. Given its unwillingness and inability to mobilise support for military intervention, or to tailor policy goals to match available means, government strategy arguably lacked credibility. Our purpose is to examine how the government tried to close this ends means gap and how, having failed to do that, its ‘discursive strategy’ legitimised its approach. We argue the resources for the government’s discursive strategy on Syria can be found in the earlier articulation of ‘liberal conservatism’. A policy that from an ideal-liberal or ideal-conservative position might have been criticised as half-baked was maintained by a strategy that gave consideration to, but did not completely follow through on, either archetype. Drawing on an analysis of 2,152 sources and supplemented by elite interviews, we illustrate how this strategy managed the interplay of two basic discourses: a liberal insistence that the UK should support ‘the Arab Spring’ and a conservative insistence that military intervention was imprudent because ‘Syria was not Libya’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 ended the prohibition on female jurors. This did not mean that English and Welsh juries became representative institutions overnight, however: the property qualifications ensured that juries were still drawn from the top few per cent of the local population; and the 1919 Act expressly permitted trial judges to order single-sex juries where the nature of the evidence required it. The continued existence of peremptory challenges allowed defendants in felony trials to exclude women from their juries whenever they preferred to be tried only by men. Finally, some judges permitted female jurors to excuse themselves from particular trials if they so desired. This paper explores the effects these factors had on the practical enjoyment of the female jury franchise after the passing of the 1919 Act. It finds that the picture is remarkably localised: rates of women serving on juries were very different for the five assize circuits for which adequate records exist (Midland, Oxford, South Eastern, South Wales and Western). By exploring these issues, this paper reveals how flexible the female jury franchise was in its early years, and shows how important local differences were in keeping women off the jury. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Christopher Duggan made extensive use of the correspondence of the American Times journalist William James Stillman in writing his important biography of Francesco Crispi. This article focuses on Stillman’s published works that deal with the Italian statesman, principally his 1898 history of Italy since 1815, the first and only English-language biography of Crispi until Duggan’s, and the journalist’s own autobiography. It argues that, despite Stillman’s much vaunted love for Italy, he in fact despised most Italians, and saw in Crispi’s virtues a rejection of typical Italian conduct. While Stillman was extreme but not altogether unusual among British and American commentators on Italy in his passionate support for Crispi, his contempt for Italians was surprisingly widespread among late Victorian observers of the new nation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article challenges readings of seventeenth-century English ‘improvement’ that are confined to a literate, elite sphere and thereby take printed claims of ‘economic betterment’ at face value, bestowing brief mention on ‘losers’ as a regrettable, but necessary, consequence of progress. Through examining Charles I's ‘disafforestation’ of the western royal forests of Gillingham, in Dorset, and Braydon, in Wiltshire, this article contends that improvement was not simply a triumphal narrative of material advancement articulated in print, but rather was forged in active conflicts situated within the landscape. Disafforestation was one of the Stuart crown's first major forays into enclosure and ‘improvement’, facilitated by surveyors applying newly geometric techniques to inscribe exclusive ownership so that each might ‘know and have their own’. Resulting riots reveal the contestation of empirical perspectives, improving ideals, and exclusive boundaries by commoners defending customary ways of seeing and using the forest commons rooted in collective memory, practice, and the landscape itself. Via the framing concept of ‘epistemologies’, improvement is examined as a spatial process in which different ways of knowing and using the landscape became pivotal to the production, contestation, and reconfiguration of social relations mapped across royal forests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A previously unknown pricing anomaly existed for a few years in the late 1840s in the British government bond market, in which the larger and more liquid of two very large bonds was underpriced. None of the published mechanisms explains this phenomenon. It may be related to another pricing anomaly that existed for much of the nineteenth century in which terminable annuities were significantly underpriced relative to so-called ‘perpetual’ annuities that dominated the government bond market. The reasons for these mispricings seem to lie in the early Victorian culture, since the basic economic incentives as well as laws and institutions were essentially the familiar modern ones. This provides new perspectives on the origins and nature of modern corporate capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In modern populations, inequalities in oral health have been observed between urban and rural communities, but to date the impact of the place of residence on oral health in archaeological populations has received only limited attention. This meta-study analyses dental palaeopathological data to examine the relationship between place of residence and oral health in Roman, early medieval, and late medieval Britain. Published data on ante-mortem tooth loss, calculus, caries, dental abscesses, and periodontal disease were analysed from cemeteries in urban and rural locations from each period. The results indicate that the place of residence influenced oral health in Roman and late medieval times, with urban populations enjoying better oral health than rural populations in Roman Britain, but poorer oral health in the late Middle Ages. These findings may reflect changes in the nature of urban settlements and in their relationship with their rural hinterlands over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines two opposing views on the role and presence of painters in post-Reformation rural England. The art historian William Gaunt concluded that painters simply ‘vanished’ from the local scene in their flight to London; the historical geographer John Patten saw non-agricultural workers in general flocking to the rural scene in the same era. Drawing on a database of over 2,600 working painters, the article explores the presence and role of the painters’ occupation in rural England between 1500 and 1640. It emphasises the painters’ accommodation to changing consumer demands; it offers a revised view of their geographic distribution over time; it shows that painters continued to serve the rural scene, albeit in somewhat different ways and from different locales than before. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In recent years there has been growing acknowledgement of the place of workhouses within the range of institutional provision for mentally disordered people in nineteenth-century England. This article explores the situation in Bristol, where an entrenched workhouse-based model was retained for an extended period in the face of mounting external ideological and political pressures to provide a proper lunatic asylum. It signified a contest between the modernising, reformist inclinations of central state agencies and local bodies seeking to retain their freedom of action. The conflict exposed contrasting conceptions regarding the nature of services to which the insane poor were entitled.Bristol pioneered establishment of a central workhouse under the old Poor Law; ‘St Peter’s Hospital’ was opened in 1698. As a multi-purpose welfare institution its clientele included ‘lunatics’ and ‘idiots’, for whom there was specific accommodation from before the 1760s. Despite an unhealthy city centre location and crowded, dilapidated buildings, the enterprising Bristol authorities secured St Peter’s Hospital’s designation as a county lunatic asylum in 1823. Its many deficiencies brought condemnation in the national survey of provision for the insane in 1844. In the period following the key lunacy legislation of 1845, the Home Office and Commissioners in Lunacy demanded the replacement of the putative lunatic asylum within Bristol’s workhouse by a new borough asylum outside the city. The Bristol authorities resisted stoutly for several years, but were eventually forced to succumb and adopt the prescribed model of institutional care for the pauper insane. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We use annual information on apprenticeships in England between 1710–1805 to estimate the dynamic supply-responsiveness in this market in the presence of the increasingly powerful technological shocks as the Industrial Revolution proceeded apace. Using both an Instrumental Variable method and a dynamic Vector Autoregression framework (VAR) system to identify the long-run response functions, we find evidence of an elastic supply, sufficiently high as to allow quantities to rise considerably in response to demand shocks. This finding lends support to the view that Britain's apprenticeship institution was the source of its advantage in skilled mechanical labor, so critical to its economic success. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A renewed interest in aspects of high politics among historians who subscribe to the ‘new political history’ has coincided with the embrace by some political scientists of interpretivism as a method for understanding how beliefs and traditions impact on British political life. In order to examine the potential synergies between these two developments, this article utilizes a form of ‘historical interpretivism’ to study the beliefs and actions of senior civil servants. In 1980, the British government released a Memorandum of Guidance for Officials Appearing before Select Committees – known ever since as the ‘Osmotherly’ rules – to help civil servants navigate the stresses of appearing before parliamentary committees. This article analyses the civil service files in the decade leading up to the publication of the Osmotherly rules to reveal how senior civil servants sought to reconcile their interpretations of Westminster tradition with the need to respond to the demands of the ‘open government’ agenda. The article argues that studying the narratives which guide the beliefs of individual civil servants and their political masters can help political historians and political scientists alike analyse the power of tradition in shaping political action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For almost 25 years between 1797 and 1821, the gold standard in Britain was suspended in order to finance the Napoleonic Wars, creating a paper pound or a fiat currency. Suspension was accompanied by substantial inflation and the accumulation of public debt. By identifying shifts in the spot exchange rate of paper pounds for gold, I document how contemporaries' expectations of how debt would be stabilized in the future shaped the pound's internal value. Thus, it is argued that during the “paper pound” period, fiscal prospects provided a third mechanism, beyond monetary and real factors, affecting the price level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizenship has been widely debated in post-war British history, yet historians discuss the concept in very different, and potentially contradictory, ways. In doing so, historians are largely following in the footsteps of post-war politicians, thinkers, and ordinary people, who showed that citizenship could – and did – mean very different things. The alternative ways of framing the concept can be usefully described as the three registers of citizenship. First, there are the political and legal definitions of what makes any individual a citizen. Secondly, there is the notion of belonging to a national community, an understanding of citizenship which highlights that legal status alone cannot guarantee an individual's ability to practise citizenship rights. Thirdly, there is the idea of citizenship as divided between ‘good’ or ‘active’ citizens, and ‘bad’ or ‘passive’ ones, a differential understanding of citizenship which has proved very influential in debates about British society. This article reviews these registers, and concludes by arguing that all three must be taken into account if we are to comprehend properly the nature and citizenship as both status and practice in post-war Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the last instance of mass public oath-taking in England, the tendering of the oaths of allegiance, supremacy, and abjuration in the aftermath of the Jacobite Atterbury Plot of 1722. The records of this exercise, surviving in local record offices, have been little examined by historians. The returns are, however, unusual not only in the level of detail they occasionally provide concerning subscribers (place of abode, occupation, and social status) but also in the consistently high numbers of women who can be found taking the oaths. Prior to 1723, the appearance of female subscribers on oath returns was exceptional and usually assumed to be accidental. As this article seeks to demonstrate, the targeting of women in 1723 was intentional and represented a recognition of women's economic and political influence in early Hanoverian England. Even so, the presence of women on these oath returns represented a breach in the normal exclusion of women from formal political participation. The article suggests that other means of presenting public loyalty, namely the loyal address, were subsequently preferred which both seemed more the product of popular enthusiasm rather than state direction and which could informally represent women without conferring a public political identity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Studies of poaching in the nineteenth century have tended to understate the involvement of women in this archetypal rural crime. This article will suggest that female offending was both more significant and more widespread than previously assumed, but it will also highlight how in a variety of complex ways dominant conceptions of gender shaped perceptions of female poachers and often influenced their treatment before the courts. It will argue that alongside more widely effectual assumptions about appropriate male and female spheres and behaviours, the response of the authorities to female poachers was also shaped by powerful and increasingly culturally embedded notions about the sexually exclusive nature of hunting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the impact of immigration on the social history of Derby, England, after the Second World War. In particular, it studies the changes in the city's religious culture associated with the decline of Christianity as the city's civil religion and the increased religious pluralism due to immigration. This local study challenges assumptions about the nature and timing of secularization, and the characterization of religion in late twentieth-century Britain as militant. As new communities from South Asia and the West Indies settled in Derby, their politicization resulted in a growing emphasis on their religious identity that countered interethnic conflict and fostered civil society. The Christian churches are an important part of this story as they found new ways of remaining relevant, sometimes in concert with members of other faith traditions. Between 1930 and 2000, Derby experienced a shift from a civil religion to an array of religions that were civil to each other and concerned for the good of society. Religion continued to play a constructive role in English society at the end of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that political considerations, economic theory, attitudes toward public finance, and concerns about regional development all influenced contemporary responses to the Galway packet-boat contract of 1859-64. Though historians have conventionally depicted the dispute over the contract as an episode in Victorian high politics, it maintains that the controversy surrounding the agreement between the Galway Company and the state cannot be understood solely in terms of party manoeuvre at Westminster. In the context of the Union between Britain and Ireland, the Galway contract raised important questions about the role of the British government in fostering Irish economic development through public expenditure. Politicians and opinion-makers adopted a variety of ideologically informed positions when addressing this issue, resulting in diverse approaches to state intervention, often across party lines. While political calculation and pressure from interest groups certainly affected policy, the substantive debate on the contract helped to shape the late Victorian Irish policy of both British parties by clarifying contemporary ideas about the economic functions appropriate to the Union state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the introduction of central-government inspectors for prisons in a British act of 1835 has been seen as a key Whig achievement of the 1830s, the Irish precedent enacted by Charles Grant, a liberal Tory chief secretary, in the early 1820s, has gone unnoticed by scholars. The article sets out to trace the Irish prefiguring of this measure and, in the process, to consider prison reform in the United Kingdom in the early nineteenth century in a more transnational manner. A new analysis of the critical years between 1823 and 1835 in both Britain and Ireland based on a detailed examination of parliamentary inquiries and legislation shows how developments in the two countries overlapped and how reforms in one jurisdiction affected the other. This article explores the channels through which this exchange of knowledge and ideas occurred - both in parliament and through interlinked penal-reform philanthropic societies in both countries. This article also highlights inadequacies with the theory supported by some scholars that Ireland functioned as a laboratory for British social reform at this time, and instead suggests a more fluid exchange of ideas in both directions at different times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how three central figures in the field of British prehistory – Sir Arthur Keith, Sir Grafton Elliot Smith and Louis Leakey – deployed different disciplinary practices and narrative devices in the popular accounts of human bio-cultural evolution that they produced during the early decades of the twentieth century. It shows how they used a variety of strategies, ranging from virtual witness through personal testimony to tactile demonstration, to ground their authority to interpret the increasingly wide range of fossil material available and to answer the bewildering variety of questions that could be asked about them. It investigates the way in which they positioned their own professional expertise in relation to fossil interpretation, particularly with regard to the – sometimes controversial – use they made of concepts, evidence and practices drawn from other disciplines. In doing so, they made claims that went beyond their original disciplinary boundaries. The paper argues that while none of these writers were able, ultimately, to support the wider claims they made regarding human prehistory, the nature of these claims deserves much closer attention, particularly with respect to the public role that historians of science can and should play in relation to present-day calls for greater interdisciplinarity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the historical development of a characteristic crucial for the functioning and normative appeal of Westminster systems, cohesive legislative parties. It gathers the universe of the 20,000 parliamentary divisions that took place between 1836 and 1910 in the British House of Commons, construct a voting record for every Member of Parliament (MP) serving during this time, and conducts analysis that aims to both describe and explain the development of cohesive party voting. In line with previous work, it shows that - with the exception of a chaotic period in the 1840s and 1850s - median discipline was always high and increased throughout the century. The study uses novel methods to demonstrate that much of the rise in cohesion results from the elimination of a rebellious 'left tail' from the 1860s onwards, rather than central tendency shifts. In explaining the aggregate trends, the article uses panel data techniques and notes that there is scant evidence for 'replacement' explanations that involve new members behaving in more disciplined ways than those leaving the chamber. It offers evidence that more loyal MPs were more likely to obtain ministerial posts, and speculates that this and other 'inducement'-based accounts offer more promising explanations of increasingly cohesive parties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores domestic artifacts that testify to the afterlife of the European Reformation in the British Isles. Focusing especially on decorated and commemorative delftware, it investigates how the memory of the Protestant past was appropriated and altered in the English context and how it infiltrated the household in the guise of consumer goods in which taste, piety, politics, and private sentiment were intertwined. It analyzes their changing meanings as they moved in space and time, examines their role in cementing and complicating senses of confessional identity, and probes the process of selective remembering and forgetting by which the Reformation acquired the status of a momentous event. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The long history of suicide as a criminal offence still has a significant contemporary effect on how it is perceived, conceptualised and adjudged. This is particularly the case within countries where suicide is largely determined within a coronial system, such as Australia, the UK and the US. This paper details the outcomes of a study involving semi-structured interviews with coroners both in England and Australia, as well as observations at inquests. It focuses around the widely held contention that the suicide rates produced within these coronial systems are underestimations of anywhere between 15 to 50 per cent. The results of these interviews suggest that there are three main reasons for this systemic underestimation. The first reflects the legacy of suicide as a criminal offence, resulting in the highest standard of proof for findings of suicide in the UK, and a continuing stigma attached to families of the deceased. The second is the considerable pressure brought to bear upon coroners by the family of the deceased, who, because of that stigma, commonly agitate for any finding other than that of suicide. The third involves the rise of 'therapeutic jurisprudence', wherein coroners take on the responsibility of the emotional well-being of the grieving families, which in turn affects the likelihood of reaching a finding of suicide. The conclusions drawn by the paper are also twofold: first - with respect to the stigma of suicide - it will take a lot more than simple decriminalisation to change deeply held social perceptions within the community. Second, given that suicide prevention programmes and policies are based on such deeply questionable statistics, targeted changes to coronial legislation and practice would appear to be required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Science writer, historian and administrator J.G. Crowther (1899–1983) had an uneasy relationship with the BBC during the 1920s and 1930s, and was regarded with suspicion by the British security services because of his left politics. Nevertheless the Second World War saw him working for ‘establishment’ institutions. He was closely associated with the BBC's Overseas Service and employed by the British Council's Science Committee. Both organizations found Crowther useful because of his wide, international knowledge of science and scientists. Crowther's political views, and his international aspirations for the British Council's Science Committee, increasingly embroiled him in an institutional conflict with the Royal Society and with its president, Sir Henry Dale, who was also chairman of the British Council's Science Committee. The conflict centred on the management of international scientific relations, a matter close Crowther's heart, and to Dale's. Dale considered that the formal conduct of international scientific relations was the Royal Society's business rather than the British Council's. Crowther disagreed, and eventually resigned from the British Council Science Committee in 1946. The article expands knowledge of Crowther by drawing on archival documents to elucidate a side of his career that is only lightly touched on in his memoirs. It shows that ‘Crowther's war’ was also an institutional war between the Science Committee of the British Council and the Royal Society. Crowther's unhappy experience of interference by the Royal Society plausibly accounts for a retreat from his pre-war view that institutional science should plan and manage BBC science broadcasts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the British financial system in the era prior to World War I provides modern policymakers with a successful model of how to stabilize the banking system. This model had two components: incentives were structured to ensure that all banks that originated or traded assets on the money market sought only to trade in high-quality assets; and macro-prudential regulation promoted the segregation of money markets from capital markets, monitored the growth of money market credit, and restricted trade on the money market in assets issued by entities and sectors whose money market liabilities were growing so fast that the most reasonable explanation was that the money market was being used to finance longer-term investment. These facts indicate that policymakers can successfully stabilize the banking system through a combination of structural reform and regulation of the growth of credit. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The British monetary authorities tried to encourage lower long-term interest rates through their government debt management operations between 1962 and 1964, following the Radcliffe report's recommendation that they should have an objective for long-term rates, and with the intention of supporting the government's pursuit of faster economic growth. The implementation of the policy was complicated by the Bank of England's role as a market maker in the government securities market, and beset by misunderstandings among the monetary authorities. The policy was abandoned when the conditions of strong market demand for bonds on which it depended changed. The article describes how the policy was developed and implemented, and the impact of political preferences on it. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars have long debated whether ownership matters for firm performance. The standard view regarding Victorian Britain is that family-controlled companies had a detrimental effect on performance. In this article, we examine this view using a hand-collected corporate ownership dataset. Our main finding is that it was not necessarily the broad structure of corporate ownership that mattered for performance, but whether family blockholders had a governance role. Large active blockholders tended to increase operating performance, implying that they reduced managerial expropriation. Contrastingly, we find that directors who were independent of large owners were more likely to increase shareholder value. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article uses the debate over environmental and human health effects of nuclear testing to shed light on the ambivalent relationship between scientists, the public, and the state in Britain during the crucial, but often overlooked, period leading up to the first cycle of anti-nuclear weapons mass protests. In this, it examines how members of Britain's main organization of nuclear scientists – the Atomic Scientists’ Association (ASA) – used their expertise in their engagement with both the public and the state to assess these effects of fallout from nuclear testing. What made the ASA stand out from other groups of the atomic scientists’ movement was its ambivalent relationship with the government. This was, by and large, the result of several ASA members’ occupational backgrounds in government employment and the association's self-imposed adherence to an ambiguous principle of scientific ‘objectivity’ in political matters. The ASA's role in the debate over fallout thus exemplifies a basic dilemma that many scientists in Britain and other Western liberal democracies faced between their roles as ‘objective’ and ‘unpolitical’ scientific experts, on the one hand, and socially responsible scientists, on the other, illustrating the ambivalent position of experts and uses of their knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Honour was a gendered phenomenon for the eighteenth-century English social elite; scholars have argued that for women, honour was mainly equated with chastity. By problematizing the concept of chastity as well as chastity's relation with women's social reputation, this article questions the widely adopted view of the crucial importance of female chastity for maintaining honour and social status. A critical examination of eighteenth-century discourses of feminine propriety shows that even though chastity was presented as an internal feminine feature, it was evaluated by external signs, making it less dependent on physical continence than on public display of purity. Chastity should thus be seen as a negotiable performative identity rather than a stable state of sexual virtue. Moreover, the relation between chastity and social reputation is more complex than hitherto supposed; even a public loss of chaste reputation did not necessarily lead to the social disgrace threatened by eighteenth-century writers, but could often be compensated through other performative means. The article concludes that not only was chastity's role in the construction of female honour ambiguous, female and male honour also resembled each other more than has been assumed, since they were both based on an external spectacle of proper honourable appearance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article re-examines the nature and extent of conformity to the Religious Settlement amongst the parish clergy in the first decades of Elizabeth I's reign. The estimate of Henry Gee, made over a century ago, that only around 300 clergymen were deprived for non-conformity to the Settlement has been remarkably influential and durable, and it continues to shape broader assessments of the ways in which religio-political change was implemented and received in this period. Using digital resources such as the Clergy of the Church of England Database, in conjunction with hitherto neglected biographical compilations, the article argues for a significant revision of Gee's figures. More broadly, it reflects on the complex meanings of ‘conformity’ in a period of perplexing change and dramatic institutional disruption, disputing any suggestion that apparent acquiescence signalled pervasive ‘acceptance’ of the alteration in religion among the clergy. In the process, it draws attention to the pitfalls of uncritical deployment of numbers and statistics, and of using them as explanatory short-cuts in understanding the dynamics of Reformation change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the extent of local government support for the elderly, in the form of poor relief, in Victorian England. It presents newly constructed estimates of old age pauperism rates for each of England's ten registration divisions from 1861 to 1908, the year the Old Age Pension Act was adopted. My estimates show that the share of persons aged 65 and older receiving government assistance in the nineteenth century was far larger than most contemporaries, and many historians, believe. The share receiving poor relief declined after 1871, largely as a result of changes in relief administration, but on the eve of the adoption of the Old Age Pension Act more than one in five persons over 65 was in receipt of public assistance. In sum, government support for the elderly is not a post-welfare state phenomenon. Old age pauperism rates differed substantially across registration divisions and in general were higher in southern than in northern England. I present evidence that much of the north-south differential was due to differences in wage rates and employment opportunities and differences in the administration of poor relief, although differences in welfare customs might have played a role. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While historians are familiar with the destruction wrought on the nation's cathedrals during the Civil War, the rather different fate experienced by Westminster Abbey – an important symbolic building that tied together royal and religious authority – has been strangely neglected. This article argues that the Abbey played an important and distinctive role in the religious and cultural politics of the nation during the 1640s and 1650s. It uncovers the Abbey's role in helping to legitimise successive non-monarchical regimes and ultimately explains how efforts to ‘reclaim’ the Abbey at the Restoration formed part of broader efforts to renegotiate and reinterpret the nation's past. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The entrance of women into the male-dominated spheres of the professions and the arts has been a major theme of women's and gender history in nineteenth-century Britain. In general, historians have located this development primarily in the second half of the century and depicted it as an important corollary to the political aims of the wider women's movement. In contrast, this article contends that an overlooked earlier context for the formation and emergence of ideas of female professionalism and artistry were the debates surrounding female singers in the press between c. 1820 and 1850. In this era, writers in newly emerging specialist music periodicals increasingly advocated a view of female singers as both professionals and artists. Such views did not dominate discourse, however. There remained a great deal of ambivalence even in specialist publications about just how far female singers should pursue the lifestyle of the professional artist, while in the mainstream press very different attitudes towards female singers prevailed. Although female musical professionalism and artistry therefore remained contested concepts, this article highlights the significance of these debates about female singers as an important source for the new ideas about women's professional and artistic work emerging in nineteenth-century British society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the medicinal remedies consumed at the court of the Yorkist kings of England in the light of a lawsuit in the court of common pleas (edited in an appendix) between John Clerk, king’s apothecary to Edward IV, and Katherine Neville, Duchess of Norfolk, over the partial non-payment of the apothecary’s bills. It argues that the consumption of apothecaries’ wares in large quantities was not merely a direct result of the excessive diet of the late medieval aristocracy, but in itself represented a facet of the conspicuous consumption inherent in the lifestyle of this particular social class. The remedies supplied by Clerk over a period of several years and listed in the legal record are set in the context of contemporary collections of medical recipes, particularly a ‘dispensary’ in the British Library’s Harleian collection generally attributed to the king’s apothecary. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]