Search

The biography of the Anglo-Saxon bishop Wilfrid (d. 710) has always been prized as a rare window onto the 'real world' of the seventh- and eighth-century Church. It offers us stories of bishops arranging bribes in monastic treasuries, describes factional infighting among churchmen, and imagines ecclesiastical leaders as rulers of 'kingdoms of churches'. Its tone is so unlike that of other contemporary writings that its testimony, partisan though it may be, has always seemed a valuable corrective to the more idealised character of our other major sources. This article argues that in our enthusiasm to use the Life of St Wilfrid in this way, we have misunderstood the uses for which the text was originally written. Through a re-examination of the Life's account of Wilfrid's final years, it reconsiders the motives of the text's patrons: Tatberht, abbot of Ripon, and Acca, bishop of Hexham. The two men played an active role in the text's creation, and a great deal of the Life rests on the acceptance of secretive events to which only they could testify. Those events, in turn, underpinned their own claims to be the designated heirs of the recently deceased Bishop Wilfrid. The Life's defensively partisan tone has typically been understood as the product of a beleaguered 'Wilfridian' faction anticipating criticism from outside opponents. This article argues instead that it reflects a moment of profound disunity within the 'Wilfridians' themselves, and reveals the strategies by which ambitious ecclesiastics might sometimes seek to gain and secure their positions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines memories of the births of feudal heirs to consider both what witnesses remembered from their past and how they remembered it. It argues that in the early sixteenth century jurors' memories revolved around the life-course markers of birth, marriage, and death, and were recalled in parallel with the same events in the lives of their neighbors. By the later sixteenth century written records came to play a greater role in the process of proving age, as witnesses were increasingly likely to present and witness a father's record of his son's birth rather than recall their own involvement in the event. This shift reflects the ways in which both literacy and family records were rooted within the household, and allows us to see the ways in which the bureaucratic process of proving age changed in response to the changed literacies of English jurors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a magistrate who dealt with the problem of crime in Europe's largest metropolis, Henry Fielding was keenly aware that violence and its destructive effects pervaded life in eighteenth-century Britain, and that much of this violence originated from conflicts centered on male honor. This essay explores the link between public violence and honor-based notions of masculinity and argues that Fielding addresses the issue in Tom Jones by presenting Tom as the exemplar of a new model of masculinity, one not tethered to the code of honor and placed in direct opposition to men of honor, whom Fielding saw as a threat to civil society. A crucial dimension of Fielding's critique of the culture of honor and his construction of a new paradigm of manhood stems from his decision to cast Tom as a modern Odysseus. While it is well known that Fielding alludes to Homer's epic in Tom Jones, why he did so and the effects generated by this intertextual dynamic have not been fully explored. Nor has scholarship on Tom Jones fully appreciated that Fielding, in casting his hero as a modern Odysseus, was making use of a venerable idiom in European literary history for rethinking ideals of human character. Comparing Fielding's Odysseus to Homer's reveals how Fielding reimagined one of the most compelling models of manhood in Western civilization, made him less prone to violent impulses, and adapted him to function in a post-honor-based society—a kind of society that would be less violent, and one that Fielding wanted Britain to become. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

W. M. Thackeray's Vanity Fair can be read as a competition between two conflicting attitudes toward time: one of distraction and spontaneity, the other of attentiveness and patience. For Thackeray, who struggled with the exacting schedules of serialization, this competition reflects a larger ideological tension between nineteenth-century England's increasingly time-bound culture and earlier notions of temporality prior to the introduction of standardized time. Instead of coming down on one side or the other, however, Thackeray portrays the risks and rewards of each, using narrative techniques that ultimately insist on the importance of preserving temporal variety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses new archaeological discoveries at a royal palace site close to Sutton Hoo, England, that can change the people's understanding of early English history. The discoveries have raised questions about the nature of the early Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. The archaeological investigations used different methods, including magnetometry, aerial surveys and targeted excavation. The investigations have produced data about the origins of Rendlesham's importance.

Few would argue against the intimate relationship between citizenship and speech in early modern England. Historians of political thought and literary scholars have explored the cultural and political impact of the English Renaissance, which turned subjects into citizens and which produced a learned, humanist, and oratorical model of citizenship, centred upon the virtues of the ‘articulate citizen’. But the English Renaissance did not give birth to citizenship. There was an older, vernacular, urban-based concept of citizenship, which was grounded in social practice rather than in intellectual tradition. This citizenship was shaped by multiple, competing, and conflicting impulses: inclusive, yet exclusive; participatory, yet discriminatory; a mixture of rights and duties. Speech both exposed and amplified these different senses of citizenship: who could speak and act against authority, and were there limits on what citizens could say and do? The tensions between urban citizenship and speech persisted throughout the late middle ages and into the early modern period. Local power struggles about the nature of civic authority helped to define ideas of citizenship and of free speech. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism considers creation in the epic poem "Paradise Lost" by John Milton and the play "Adam in Ballingschap" [ Adam in Exile] by Joost van de Vondel. It considers Dutch and British relations, Latin literature, and translations of Dutch literature into English in the seventeenth century.

Commemoration is rarely linked to invention in studies of funerary monuments; the value of artistic conservatism in expressing ideas of continuity and lineage is emphasized instead. While this may be the case for many medieval tombs, a unique monument in the collegiate church of St. Martin at Lowthorpe challenges this notion. The tomb depicts a tree growing from the recumbent effigies of a man and a woman, each of its thirteen branches sprouting a miniature, individualized human head. This article confronts the novelty and inventiveness of the memorial, considering what it might reveal about the mechanisms and purposes of artistic invention in fourteenth-century England. Examining ideas of influence, models, agency, and patronage, I argue that the innovative design at Lowthorpe should be understood as the product of collaboration among lay patrons, sculptors, and ecclesiastics in founding an ambitious ecclesiastical institution. Turning from the processes to the purposes of invention, I propose that the strangeness of the tomb enhanced its function as a focal point for remembrance, its polyvalent arboreal imagery representing and reinforcing the complex web of familial, institutional, and liturgical relationships within the college. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that a structural weakness of transboundary integration within MERCOSUR can be found in problems related to social construction and citizenry's sense of belonging to internal regions. It focuses on the Regional Commission for Foreign Trade of Northeastern Argentina (CRECENEA) and its transboundary actions with the Development Council for Southern Brazil (CODESUL). In particular, the survey analizes the institutional dimension of CRECENEA by analyzing the constitutions, laws, and bills of the respective provinces. It argues that in spite of the current immobility, CRECENEA as a transboundary region with CODESUL still remains as a strategic axis in the Argentine–Brazilian relations, MERCOSUR, the South American integration process and their financing policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the condition of American communities in Great Britain, particulary in London and Liverpool, England, to recast U.S. foreign relations as expatriate foreign relations during the Civil War in 1861-1865 and to extend historians' knowledge of the war's transnational dimensions. It examines the transnational origins of Civil War diplomacy through a case study of the U.S. Sanitary Commission's (USSC) London branch. It also exlores how these communities maintained the networks of trade, migration and investment that structured U.S. foreign relations.

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]

A table of contents for the issue is presented.

Over 500 references survive to payment in return for control over land in Anglo-Saxon England. This article considers these documents as a source for social developments. Issues which are explored include the identities of buyers and sellers, changes in the roles of these groups over the period, and the likely aims and concerns of different individuals and institutions who paid for land. A chronology is developed for the participation of various groups in land payments. Payments emerge as a significant component in definitions of status and strategies of land management, albeit closely interwoven with other forms of transaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales is the property of Cambridge University Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

An explanation of witch hunting in seventeenth-century England must explain two principle facts: the rise in frequency of witch persecution during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, and the gender and socioeconomic distribution of those tried for witchcraft. Few arguments have managed to address the true complexity of English witch trials. While most tried witches were poor women, some were wealthy, active members of the community, and a significant minority of tried witches was male. I found current historiographical arguments about seventeenth-century England witch hunting only partially sufficient and not fully comprehensive. The Thomas/Macfarlane model presents too rigid a binary and doesn't explain the variation of accused witches, the religious model relies too heavily on a rigid distinction between popular and elite culture, and the psychological model does not manage to cover the full diversity of tried witches or the motives of the accuser. Only by considering elements of each theory can one reach a comprehensive picture of witch hunting that addresses all the evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper re-evaluates certain core understandings of Hindu nationalism in Britain through the analysis of a disputed 2006 art exhibition in London. It considers the two main protagonists objecting to the M. F. Husain show: the representative umbrella organisation, the Hindu Forum of Britain, and the web- and protest-based group, Hindu Human Rights. In particular, the paper considers the relationship between these groups, the government, and the Hindu nationalist movement in India. The central role played by performative tropes of outrage and offence in the public representation of Hinduism is explored. It is argued that a reconceptualisation of diasporic Hindutva is required. Firstly, whilst still connected to India in various ways, Hindu nationalism in Britain has outgrown the institutional and ideological boundaries of the Sangh Parivar. It is proposed that these idiosyncratic inflections of transnational Hindutva might be termed ‘neo-Hindutva’. Secondly, it is suggested that the M. F. Husain protests, and subsequent activities of the Hindu Forum, indicate that Hindutva has become mainstreamed and normalised in the UK. Whilst elements of this narrative are distinctly domestic, we must also understand the transnational context which is intrinsically linked, discursively and practically, to India. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the intersection between polite manners and company in eighteenth-century England. Through the laughter of gentlemen, it makes a case for a concept of occasional politeness, which is intended to emphasize that polite comportment was only necessary on certain occasions. In particular, it was the level of familiarity shared by a company that determined what was considered appropriate. There was unease with laughter in polite sociability, yet contemporaries understood that polite prudence could be waived when men met together in friendly homosocial encounters. In these circumstances, there existed a tacit acceptance of looser manners that might be called ‘intimate bawdiness’, which had its origins in a renaissance humanist train of thought that valorized wit as the centrepiece of male sociability. This argument tempers the importance of politeness by stressing the social contexts for which it was – and was not – a guiding principle. Ultimately, it suggests that the category of company might be one way of rethinking eighteenth-century sociability in a more pluralistic fashion, which allows for contradictory practices to co-exist. As such, it moves towards breaking down the binary oppositions of polite and impolite, elite and popular, and theory and practice that have been imposed on the period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In northern regions of the UK, ‘ruins’ tend to be valued and understood according to romantic tropes and/or industrial aesthetics. In southern regions, however, they have increasingly been examined using expanded understandings of materiality and temporality, including the use of speculative approaches from across the arts and humanities to explore how they are visually and materially entangled in contemporary global human and non-human relations. Using anthropological approaches and analogies from film and ‘contemporary archaeology’, this article considers two ‘ruins’ sites in Scotland in relation to current discourses and conditions, including futurity, value, ethics and neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores, in the context of prevailing discourses around the value of the arts and culture, the reasons why the UK's Arts & Humanities Research Council launched a research project on cultural value and sets out the character of that project. It is concerned with arts and cultural engagement across the commercial, subsidised, amateur, and participatory sectors; embraces the full range of arts and cultural forms; and seeks to reach beyond dichotomies such as intrinsic and instrumental, high and low art, quantitative and qualitative evaluation, and public and private experiences. The article explains the project's thinking around the components of cultural value and the methodologies for evidencing them, and highlights some of the key research being funded. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an overview of the contribution of Professor Geoffrey Sherington to the study of the history of Australian education and immigration. His academic and leadership roles are summarised and the main themes of his work are briefly discussed. These themes comprise: Australia as an immigrant nation, British colonial values and meritocracy, public, private, and corporate schooling, and the interconnectedness of educational institutions. These themes recur in the discussion below and are aimed at providing a context for the analyses and assessments of his major scholarly projects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores two series of girls' annuals: the Empire Annual for Australian Girls (1909–30), published by the Religious Tract Society, and the Australian Girl's Annual (1910–3?), published by Cassell. Although both series were seemingly targeted at Australian girls, they were published in Britain before being given a new title and sent to the colonies. This article examines the implications of these British models of girlhood for their explicitly colonial girl readers. The British publishers of these annuals addressed an apparently homogenous readership comprised of girls from white settler colonies and Britain without attempting to customize the contents of their books for different audiences. In both fiction and illustrations, the annuals simultaneously employed and produced a British model of girlhood that was attractive to Australian girl readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of a weekend with a central focus on Saturday and Sunday, punctuating the working week, was a key element in the rise of British industrial society, with repercussions across the developed and developing worlds. It became a distinguishing feature of the balance between work and leisure which underpinned the mature British industrial economy between the 1880s and the 1960s, giving a distinctive shape and structure to the working week and reinforcing the disciplined apportionment of industrial time. This article charts the trajectory of this neglected phenomenon in British popular culture from the early decades of the Industrial Revolution to its apogee in the 1960s. It examines the changing roles of Friday, Saturday, Sunday and Monday in the making of the weekend, and concludes with some tentative suggestions about post-industrial fragmentation and decline. The article is primarily an exercise in historiography, and its originality lies in the construction of a new synthesis from a distinctive angle of vision, making use of, extending, contextualising and building on existing research findings. As well as providing a reliable historical context for researchers in contemporary leisure studies, one of its key aims is the provision of a framework for the encouragement of further historical research in this and related fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay is presented that reviews the book "Islands and Britishness: A Global Perspective," edited by Jodie Matthews and Daniel Travers, and the article "The New Pitcairn Islands Constitution: Strong, Empty Words for Britain's Smallest Colony" by Michael O. Eshleman in volume 24, issue 1 of the journal "Pace International Law Review." The influence of British civilization on former colonies and current overseas dependencies of Great Britain, such as Malta, Cyprus, and Bermuda, is noted.

Copyright of Studia Historyczne is the property of Polska Akademia Nauk, Warszawska Drudkarnia Naukowa and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The article explores how British popular culture adopted and adapted ideas associated with thermodynamics for public discourses on social problems and philosophical discussions on work and progress. The first laws of dynamics regarding the state of energy and entropy were developed by scientists including James Prescott Joule, Hermann von Helmholtz, Michael Faraday, and Sadi Carnot. These ideas gained popular recognition through the writings of scientists such as John Tyndall; William Thomson, Lord Kelvin; and James Clerk Maxwell. Other topics include the theme of residuum, or the underclass, in the books "L’Assommoir" by Emile Zola and "A Child of the Jago" Arthur Morrison.

The article discusses the history of fundraising events in New Zealand, focusing on four particular types: charity bazaars, floral fetes, queen carnivals, and telethons. The adoption of British cultural practices by New Zealand settlers, who kept abreast of shifts in popular culture and social and cultural developments abroad through the reading of foreign newspapers and magazines, is detailed. Reasons for the lack of social obligation to bestow bequests and prompt charitable giving in the nineteenth century are considered. Other topics include social responsibility, individualism, and social classes.

For Argentina; and particularly Buenos Aires, no economic relations were more intense in the 19th century than those it maintained with Great Britain. Its whole industrial, trade, and financial structure depended on Britain, despite the fact that Argentina was not a colony, nor was there a British military force or a centralized institutional system to defend investments. The origins of this relationship can be traced to the events of the late 18th century, when consumer goods from Great Britain achieved absolute supremacy in Buenos Aires due to certain peculiarities in the city's history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers global perspectives on 20th century British history from Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, and South Africa. In Australia, the author discusses migrants from Britain, the British influences within Australian media, and how British history is taught at universities. In South Africa, the author discusses British identity, culture, and politics in relation to South African historical work. In Japan, the author discusses how the economic and social history of Britain has served as model for modernization. In Hong Kong, the author discusses how British colonial influences have led to internationalization.

Spicer provides an overview of the contribution of Jewish entrepreneurs to the British film industry from its beginnings through to the present. He argues that film was an open and rapidly expanding industry that offered exciting opportunities in production, distribution and exhibition for individuals regardless of class, background or ethnicity; it thus provided an arena in which Jewish traditions of risk taking, independence and ambition could thrive, though not without courting anti-Semitic prejudice. As the industry contracted from the 1950s onwards there were less opportunities, but nevertheless the Jewish presence remained strongly represented. Overall, he argues, the shape and contours of British cinema as it evolved are inconceivable without acknowledging the Jewish influence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Victorian cookbook authors employed a variety of strategies to sell foreign foods and foreign recipes to their middle class English readers. Some authors added exotic ingredients to familiar recipes in order to increase the variety and healthfulness of their readers' diet, while others relied on supposedly authentic foreign recipes that readers could use as a means to social distinction. Two conflicting forces shaped reactions to foreign cuisine. Victorian cookbook readers might wish to experience travel vicariously or to relive travel through the taste and smell of foods from distant lands that they perceived as authentic. The opposing cultural response was the desire to domesticate or master the world by adopting new ingredients into more traditional foodways, or transforming foreign cuisine by incorporating familiar ingredients into exotic recipes. Although both responses can be found throughout the century, the use of foreign cuisine as a means of social distinction increased in the 1890s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The television systems of Canada and Australia are often assumed to be similar if not synonymous. Both are dominated by American imports; rely on a networking of stations; and trace their media systems to a combination of American and British influence. Moreover, in the past decade, both have implemented tremendous changes to their broadcast policies, particularly with regard to local television. Yet despite these similarities, scholars have never critically reflected on the evolution of these countries’ local television policies. As such, this article concentrates on how Canada and Australia have historically framed, defined, and implemented the concept of localism in broadcast policy. Through an analysis of policy documents from 1950 to 1963, the argument is made that when compared with Australia, localism was not an immediate priority, but rather a taken-for-granted assumption by Canadian policy-makers. Thus, the nationalism debate in Canadian television was fought at the expense of the local. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers British agitation against East India Company rule in India via an examination of the Aborigines Protection Society and the British India Society. Founded by humanitarians and moral reformers in the 1830s, these organisations placed India within a wide transnational context, which stretched from Britain's settler and plantation colonies to Liberia and the United States. However, in the wake of slave emancipation, British campaigners struggled to reconcile their universal understanding of humanity with their equally strong confidence in the benefits of ‘British civilisation’. Their nebulous and changeable programmes for reform failed to convince Britain's politicians and public that the challenges of free trade could be met by the exclusive use of free labour, or that all imperial subjects possessed equal rights. A fuller appreciation of these campaigns reveals the contradictions and occlusions inherent in mid-nineteenth century humanitarianism, and underscores the importance of a more geographically integrated approach to the history of opposition to Britain's empire. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Venus represents all that is complex and contradictory in the early modern period's perception of love. Unsurpassed as she is, the goddess remains enigmatic, partly concealed behind a series of surrogates, by the veils that draw attention to the beauty they mask, or by the mystery of her own desire for successive objects. The fact that, as the origin of love, she intervenes only to lead more often to sorrow than to happiness indicates an anxiety about the sexual pleasure the period at once relishes and reprehends. Love conducted under the aegis of Venus commonly suffers from misalignment. But while the goddess so frequently withholds gratification, what she offers instead is pleasure at the level of the signifier, as she takes part in the stories, plays, and poems which enable the period to find ways of defining a passion that generates both civilization and its discontents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I investigate how musical concepts were transmitted in the manuscript culture of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century lute music in England. Using material from the Mynshall and ML Lute Books I will suggest that a mental map of music theory is built through physical process in a way that might help to explain - at least in England - the gap between the theory books and the working methods of players and composers. Exploring the physical imprint which a piece of lute tablature represents, I will demonstrate that archaeological concepts such as the relationship between materiality and memory are potentially more useful than more textually based historical ones in exploring much of the instrumental music of the past. The books document a process of tailoring musical ideas to an individual's physical strengths and weaknesses, which has priority over transmitting a 'good' version of a musical text. The processes behind different kinds of left and right hand ornamentation demonstrate not only the individual player's skills but are related to the meaning of the different sides of the body in a wider cultural context. This has performance practice implications: should a player transmit or embody a musical idea? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Elizabethan Reformation of 1559 marked not only a religious, but also a socio-cultural watershed, yielding processes of transformation and redefinition of existing tropes and symbols, as reflected in a variety of aesthetic expressions engendered in England during the last third of the sixteenth century. English keyboard music, hitherto largely composed for the organ and conceived in terms of the Catholic rite, now lost its liturgical function and composers, notably William Byrd, organist of the Chapel Royal and England's foremost musician, began exploring new compositional avenues of non-ecclesiastical keyboard music. The first known collection of the new repertoire is My Ladye Nevells Booke (1591), an ornately designed manuscript of Byrd's secular keyboard music dedicated to Lady Elizabeth Neville. Exploring the volume both as a musical text and as an artefact in the context of post-Reformation English culture, this article seeks to explicate the aesthetic and communicatory value of Byrd's keyboard idiom in the specific material form in which it was dedicated to a patroness, demonstrating how the novelty and sophistication of his keyboard compositions were embedded in Renaissance intellectual traditions that shaped similarly innovative and genuinely English creative achievements in literature, visual art and indeed music. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The treatment of fractures is a relatively simple and logical procedure mastered by many cultures worldwide, so it seems likely prima facie that the Anglo-Saxons would have had some means for treating such injuries as well. To investigate this matter, we shall first describe the modern standards of fracture treatment. Fractures can occur in any type or size of bone, but this paper will focus on long bone fractures, i.e., fractures of the arms and legs, since these were the most likely to be diagnosed correctly by Anglo-Saxon physicians, and hence most likely to received successful treatment. Then, after we describe common methods for treating these injuries in modern medicine, we will next turn to Anglo-Saxon medical literature and its classical sources. Finally, we shall analyse archaeological evidence of fractures in order to gauge the practice of treatment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Lion and the Eunuch challenges the failures of British politicians to adequately understand the complexities, and the subtleties, of British national identity, and goes on to define it for them. It also explains reasons for our current confusions over who we are in the world. In 1940 Orwell wrote The Lion and the Unicorn as a rallying cry for a richly identifying country that was still able to imagine itself, and re-imagine itself, as the need arose. This essay suggests that without a radical change of government policy and thought, that power will continue to decline with far reaching consequences for the peoples of these islands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern Britishness is widely seen to be based on shared values like 'fair play', 'tolerance', and respect for 'diversity'. Can such a 'values-based Britishness' be effective as a national binding agent in an era of devolution and globalisation? The idea that a uniquely 'British' character is based on shared values of some kind is not new. The contemporary debate is framed by decisions made over a century ago in the Victorian era-when the decisive shift occurred from a British identity based on religious difference to one based on shared moral values. Through political rhetoric, legislation, and the courts, Victorian governments shaped and changed the character of Britishness. The same tools remain available to contemporary lawmakers in shaping a twenty-first century Britishness that embraces modern universal values, but also defines some more uniquely British emotional connection points around which national identity can be built. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the development of television in Hong Kong should be viewed as a part of British media history. Yet within this context, it is striking that the Hong Kong Government did not follow the public ownership model of the BBC (even though it had followed a similar model with radio broadcasting), nor did the Government make significant efforts to use television as a vehicle for promoting British culture within Hong Kong. Instead, Hong Kong television was commercial from the beginning, with Government regulation and Government-produced content emerging only in response to political crisis in the late 1960s-and even then, only to a very limited extent. I argue that this early television history reflects both the increasing autonomy of the Hong Kong Government from London in the post-war period, and the development of a distinct Hong Kong Britishness that favoured minimal regulation of oligopolistic commercial interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]