{"title":"“Paper Oathes”: Trust, Treaty, and the Road to Regicide in England, 1642–49","authors":"William White","doi":"10.1017/jbr.2025.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2025.7","url":null,"abstract":"This article revisits and attempts to explain the failure of settlement in England between the outbreak of civil war in late 1642 and the execution of Charles I in January 1649. It argues that doubts about the process—and not just the proposed terms—of settlement worked against the possibility of an accommodation in the 1640s. An influential parliamentarian faction regarded negotiated treaties as inherently problematic instruments of peacemaking, which were unable to provide adequate security against the possibility of future abrogation and vengeance on the part of the king. While widespread anxieties about royal dissimulation were partly a product of the “statist” paradigms of political analysis that had become firmly established across Europe by the mid-seventeenth century, specific events in England during the 1640s served to reinforce and accentuate them. Moreover, as the decade progressed there was an increasing tendency to see duplicity, dissimulation, and vengefulness as inseparable features of monarchy, and thus a negotiated peace between prince and people after civil war as an impossibility. Ultimately, these concerns formed an integral, if often overlooked, justification for the regicide.","PeriodicalId":46738,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Studies","volume":"74 1","pages":"1-21"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143818957","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Death of Colin Roach and the Politics of Grief and Anger in Late Twentieth-Century Britain","authors":"Stephen Brooke","doi":"10.1017/jbr.2025.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2025.5","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the death of Colin Roach in Stoke Newington Police Station, Hackney, in 1983, and explores the emotional politics of the campaigns that followed his death. These campaigns were focused on both determining the circumstances of Roach's death and highlighting tensions between the police and the Black community of Hackney. Using hitherto unpublished archival sources, local newspapers, and visual sources, the article documents racial politics in Hackney in the early 1980s and examines the relationship between race and policing at that time. The article argues that the experience and expression of grief and anger were critical to understanding the political problem of race and policing in London in the 1980s, to forming and mobilizing political communities, and to interrogating the power of the state. The article also argues that a critical element of the emotional economy around race in Hackney in 1983 was the indifference and lack of empathy of the police in Stoke Newington to ethnic minority communities. This lack of empathy not only illustrated the problem of race within the police force at this time but further fueled local campaigns to make the police accountable. This links the Roach case to a later turning point—the 1999 Macpherson inquiry into the murder of Stephen Lawrence, which characterized the Metropolitan Police as institutionally racist.","PeriodicalId":46738,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Studies","volume":"38 1","pages":"1-20"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143757896","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“A Lazy Mistress Makes a Lazy Servant”: Domestic Labor and White Creole Womanhood in Jamaica, ca.1865–1938","authors":"Liz Egan","doi":"10.1017/jbr.2024.184","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2024.184","url":null,"abstract":"This article traces the reproduction of whiteness in Jamaica during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through the lens of domestic labor. Articulated in dialogue—and at times in tension—with Britain, what it meant to be white was forged through representations and practices of domestic service and household management, shaped by the legacies of slavery and the shifting colonial relationship. Anxieties about a declining white population and attempts to rejuvenate the island's image contributed to prescriptions of domestic labor management that positioned the white creole mistress as a model of respectability and colonial modernity. Black domestic servants were repeatedly presented as the mirror through which white creole womanhood was constructed, and this article argues that these representations served to consolidate class/color hierarchies that privileged whiteness into the twentieth century. Yet mapping these discourses onto the daily interactions between mistress and maid also exposes the persistent work required to secure racialized hierarchies. Through photographs, diaries, and correspondence read alongside published oral histories, the article argues that domestic servants persistently exercised agency that disrupted and spoke back to popular depictions, demonstrating the fraught reproduction of creole whiteness at the intersections of race, class, color, gender, and colonial identity.","PeriodicalId":46738,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Studies","volume":"23 1","pages":"1-21"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-04-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143757991","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Pregnant with the Interests of Life and Death”: Family Correspondence and the British Imperial News Sphere during the 1857 Indian Rebellion","authors":"Ellen Smith","doi":"10.1017/jbr.2025.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2025.1","url":null,"abstract":"In September 1857, extracts from letters written in Gwalior and Agra, India, by an elite British “lady,” Wilhelmina “Minnie” Murray (1834–1912), were published as part of the “correspondence” sections of <jats:italic>The Times</jats:italic>'s coverage of the 1857–58 Indian Rebellion. Through the letters she documented her escape from Gwalior to Agra. She described encounters with the maharajah and “fanatic” “ghazis,” and her experience navigating inversions of racial and class hierarchies at the Agra and Gwalior forts, as a displaced fugitive. Someone (unknown) designated these letters as “publishable,” and they became part of early interpretations of the “mutiny” in the imperial news sphere. Comparing the original copies with their various printed copies, and with texts written by the rest of her Gwalior-Agra cohort, indicates how knowledge of the uprisings was disseminated through the ways in which letters were circulated, repurposed, edited, and sometimes censored. As this article maps, the letters shaped British understandings and public imagination of India, the East India Company's response to the “imperial crisis,” and the events of the Rebellion itself. It contends that reconstructing deeper genealogies of intertextual narratives about empire in this way renders personal correspondents, and often, imperializing women, formative to the early discursive terrain and meaning/memory-making surrounding mid-century colonial conflict.","PeriodicalId":46738,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-03-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143723120","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"One British Archive: Creating an Edible Archive","authors":"Ella Hawkins","doi":"10.1017/jbr.2024.188","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2024.188","url":null,"abstract":"Edible goods are not usually considered suitable for archiving. This short article introduces an unconventional archive of images relating to design, book, costume, and performance history. Each image in this archive depicts an intricately decorated biscuit (cookie) set inspired by historical artifacts or styles. I began making these biscuits during the pandemic as a way of engaging with material culture while traditional archives and museums were closed, and I now perform this work as a form of close reading. I also collaborate with heritage organizations to make biscuit sets that share collection items with online audiences. This work has contributed to my own research process while celebrating the collections of a broad range of British archives.","PeriodicalId":46738,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Studies","volume":"61 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143712919","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Radical Vic: Politics and Performance on the Popular London Stage, ca. 1820–50","authors":"Stephen Ridgwell","doi":"10.1017/jbr.2024.182","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2024.182","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In nineteenth-century London, theater-going was a genuinely mass activity. Within a rapidly expanding entertainment industry, working-class playgoers abounded. Opened to the public in 1818, the Coburg Theatre, later renamed the Victoria and known as the Vic, developed an especially strong association with popular drama. Although much has been written on the kind of work that places like the Vic presented, much less has been said about their operation as plebeian public spheres, or what I term here “radical half-spaces.” Active in the campaign for political reform in the early 1830s, and the site of numerous socially critical melodramas, under the joint managerial team of David Osbaldiston and Eliza Vincent, the Coburg/Victoria would later align itself to Chartism. All the while, the theater continued to function as a profitable commercial enterprise. By showing how audiences at the Vic sought (and found) knowledge and cultural capital, as much as entertainment and spectacle, the article suggests that when considering the period's alternative radical spaces, account should be made of such avowedly populist establishments as London's minor theaters, and the complex assemblages of time, place, and people they represented.</p>","PeriodicalId":46738,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Studies","volume":"32 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143538382","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nadja Durbach, Tammy Proctor, James G. Clark, Verônica Calsoni Lima, Ramesh Mallipeddi, Cynthia Richards, Richard Menke, Mar Hicks
{"title":"The End of Print: A Roundtable","authors":"Nadja Durbach, Tammy Proctor, James G. Clark, Verônica Calsoni Lima, Ramesh Mallipeddi, Cynthia Richards, Richard Menke, Mar Hicks","doi":"10.1017/jbr.2024.187","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2024.187","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This Roundtable marks the beginning of a new era for the <span>Journal of British Studies</span> (<span>JBS</span>). Volume 63, issue 4, October 2024, was the last traditional issue printed on paper. No longer will members of the North American Conference on British Studies receive a bound volume quarterly in the mail. We fully understand that for many of our readers the end of print is emotionally wrought, and it constitutes a loss that is tangible and personal. We know that many people enjoy reading the journal from cover to cover, or dipping in and out, and then archiving it on their bookshelves for future use. In using the journal in this way, our readers have cherished <span>JBS</span> as a material object. As scholars born into an age of mass communication, cheap print, long distance shipping, and widespread literacy, we have taken the format of the academic journal for granted. But as historians we know better than anyone that the only thing constant is change. This Roundtable demonstrates that print—what it is, what it enables, what it means—has always been both capacious and contentious. As editors, we hope these essays spark a critical consideration of the age of print and encourage us to move forward into the new era together, innovating in the ways we produce, disseminate, and consume knowledge.</p>","PeriodicalId":46738,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Studies","volume":"14 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143538381","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Feeling Old in Eighteenth-Century Britain","authors":"Karen Harvey, Sarah Fox","doi":"10.1017/jbr.2024.181","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2024.181","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines the lived experiences of the older body—the embodiment of old age—from the perspective of older people. It uses letters written from 1680 to 1820 by twenty-two women and men aged between sixty and eighty-nine, selected from a corpus of over 391 letter writers. We begin by exploring the embodied experiences discussed by older people, as well as their understanding of the relationship between these experiences and their later years. The article finds that old age was experienced as highly variable and was subject to an ongoing process of recalibration. Central to that process was the corporeality of the aging body as experienced in the context of a range of social factors. The corporeality of the body was a factor for all but was not always framed negatively or even situated in the context of aging. The article then turns to the responses of older people to the life-stage of old age. The article finds them self-directed and proactive in continuing to live well. This is significant evidence for a self-consciously active, engaged, and embodied old age in early modernity. These older letter writers tended not to disavow old age but to accommodate and even embrace it.</p>","PeriodicalId":46738,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Studies","volume":"17 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143539203","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Cruelty's Sisters”: Buying Seamen's Wages in Late Stuart England","authors":"Barbara Todd","doi":"10.1017/jbr.2024.183","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2024.183","url":null,"abstract":"<p>To delay paying wages to seamen, the late Stuart Navy issued them instead with “tickets” to be redeemed for cash after months or years of delay. Seamen often sold the tickets at deep discounts to ticket buyers, who became government creditors for unpaid wages, one of the largest items in the national debt. Ticket buyers were savagely attacked in pamphlets. This article is a preliminary exploration of ticket buying, focusing on the large minority of buyers who were women. It shows that many of them were in fact the wives and widows of the seamen, working in the crowded streets around the Navy Office and in the cottages of the maritime communities nearby. Navy pay books are introduced as a key source; the business of one trader is evaluated using her financial papers, and the work of others assessed from probate records. Ticket buying opened up related opportunities for women as brokers of deals and as professional receivers of wages. But while pawning could be used as protection against the growing hazard of unpaid tickets, even with deep discounts it was difficult to make even a moderate return in the trade. Ticket buying was not a route to fortunes.</p>","PeriodicalId":46738,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Studies","volume":"19 2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-03-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143538383","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Presidential Address. Revise that Syllabus: Malthus and the Historical Imagination","authors":"Deborah Valenze","doi":"10.1017/jbr.2024.180","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2024.180","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article was presented as the Presidential Address at the North American Conference on British Studies in Baltimore in November 2023.</p>","PeriodicalId":46738,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Studies","volume":"33 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2025-02-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"143435246","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}