{"title":"The Popular Politics of Local Petitioning in Early Modern England","authors":"Brodie Waddell","doi":"10.1017/jbr.2024.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2024.4","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines the rise of a culture of local petitioning, through which growing numbers of ordinary people sought to win the support of state authorities through collective claims to represent the “voice of the people” at the local level. These participatory, subscriptional practices were an essential component in the intensification of popular politics in the seventeenth century. The analysis focuses on over 3,800 manuscript petitions submitted to the magistrates across fifteen jurisdictions with “sessions of the peace” in England, with nearly 1,000 dating from before 1640. Over the course of the early seventeenth century many, if not most, English parishes witnessed attempts to persuade the authorities through collective petitioning. Groups of neighbors across the kingdom formulated their grievances, organized subscription lists, and articulated their own role in the polity as “the inhabitants” or “the parishioners” of a particular community. In so doing, they not only directly shaped their own “little commonwealths” but also unintentionally helped to develop habits of political mobilization in a crucial period of English history.</p>","PeriodicalId":46738,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Studies","volume":"121 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140604149","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: Seeing the Rev. John Clifford Archives and the Gender of Passive Resistance","authors":"Seth Koven","doi":"10.1017/jbr.2024.56","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2024.56","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article discusses the archives of Westbourne Park Baptist Church in London and its world-renowned pastor in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Dr. John Clifford. As leader of the National Passive Resistance League, the fiery Clifford came to be synonymous with the Nonconformist conscience at the height of its political influence in the early twentieth century. The article foregrounds the tension between what I call archival intimacy and archival precarity, while analyzing the power of seeing the diverse photographs in this collection as evidence of the gendered politics of passive resistance in the early twentieth century. Some— though not all—of the collection that I consulted at Westbourne Park Baptist Church in 2016 has now been transferred to the Angus Library, Regent's Park College, Oxford.</p>","PeriodicalId":46738,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Studies","volume":"69 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140604215","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":"Remembering the Dead: Postmortem Guild Membership in Late Medieval England","authors":"Rachael Harkes","doi":"10.1017/jbr.2023.109","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2023.109","url":null,"abstract":"<p>As in many areas of pre-Reformation devotion, the dead were a conspicuous presence in English religious guilds of all sizes. Members joined in the expectation that the guild would say prayers and perform masses for their souls after death, and previous members and benefactors would be commemorated with regularity. This article, however, investigates a new avenue of the fraternal relationship with the dead: the practice of enrolling people <span>after</span> their death. Doing so shifts the paradigm of our understanding of the multidimensional functions of pre-Reformation society, commemoration, and guilds, privileging the experiences of both the dead and living equally, while highlighting the interplay of the spiritual and socioeconomic. Taking the extensive membership records of England's “great” guilds as its basis, this article reveals that postmortem enrollment was a practice both common and widespread, and it addresses questions of practicalities and motivations. As such, the richness of commemoration in late medieval society is demonstrated, and the importance of postmortem membership brought to the fore.</p>","PeriodicalId":46738,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Studies","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140291887","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":"Halls of Power: Changing Political and Administrative Culture at the Palace of Westminster in the Sixteenth Century","authors":"Elizabeth Biggs","doi":"10.1017/jbr.2023.112","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2023.112","url":null,"abstract":"<p>During the sixteenth century, the medieval Palace of Westminster went from being the most-used royal palace, where the king lived and worked alongside his administration, to becoming solely the home of the law-courts, Parliament, and the offices of state. At the same time, the numbers of individuals who came to the palace seeking governance or to take part in the business of the law-courts increased over the course of the century. While Westminster had earlier been a public venue for governance and royal display, the increasing absence of the English monarch from the palace created alternative uses. Political culture came to focus on Westminster as entirely separate from the court. This article explores how these changing uses created new forms of political and administrative culture. It examines how the administrative offices, particularly the Exchequer, were remade to accommodate changing financial demands and the increasing contact between individuals and the Crown. It argues that the repurposing of the Palace of Westminster created a distinctly different set of relationships between the Crown and the public. This gave the institutions that called the palace home the space to develop as bodies that drew their legitimacy from their representation of the community of the realm as a whole.</p>","PeriodicalId":46738,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Studies","volume":"55 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140104923","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":"Instructing the Young and Comforting the Aged in the Norwich and Norfolk Institution for the Indigent Blind, ca. 1805–55","authors":"Susannah Ottaway, Adam Smart, Michael Schultz","doi":"10.1017/jbr.2023.139","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2023.139","url":null,"abstract":"This article considers the ways that Enlightenment ideas and practices shaped the founding of the Norwich and Norfolk Institution for the Indigent Blind, and then analyzes the disparate approaches to the aged versus the working-age blind in its first half-century (<jats:italic>ca.</jats:italic> 1805–55). While we see change over time, we also find distinctive continuity in the ongoing close connections inmates kept with Norwich civic life and family and friends; this was emphatically not a closed asylum. The institution demonstrated consistent commitment to helping its pupils towards self-sufficiency, with optimism about what the blind could (literally) turn their hands to. Nonetheless, the Norwich Institution was disciplinary, actively seeking to produce docile, productive bodies among its blind pupils, both through education and through work habits. Time, labor, and moral discipline increased for pupils over the course of its first half-century, and girls and women were pushed into less economically rewarding work practices. Equally important, while it had an unwavering, humanitarian commitment to providing for the aged blind, its insistent characterization of these inmates as helpless and pitiable limited the potential of the institution to facilitate the well-being of its older residents.","PeriodicalId":46738,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Studies","volume":"388 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140015623","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 Ceremony of National and Representative Character”: The Four-Nations Politics of Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee","authors":"Alison Hight","doi":"10.1017/jbr.2023.111","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2023.111","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In June 1887, Britons crowded the streets of London to celebrate Queen Victoria's fiftieth year on the throne. It was an opportunity to publicly revel in the social, political, economic, and imperial progress Britain had made during her historic reign. The Lord Chamberlain was tasked with organizing a formal jubilee ceremony at Westminster Abbey representative of the queen's diverse subjects. But this proved a difficult undertaking for a multinational kingdom with a vast overseas empire. Grievances over seating in Westminster Abbey, jubilee honors, and an absent royal family fostered varying degrees of solidarity and rivalry among the United Kingdom's four constituent nations. The Irish Question and imperial expansion—matters in which Victoria was personally invested—heightened four-nations sensibilities and influenced participation in the festivities. The queen's Golden Jubilee both reflected and inspired four-nations thinking, and it revealed public concerns that the British union might exist as a hierarchy of nations rather than as a collaborative venture among equal members. As the institutional embodiment of tiered society, the Crown became an outlet for subjects to explore questions and modes of belonging within the global British world. A four-nations analysis of Victoria's 1887 jubilee shows that despite its unifying function, the modern British monarchy has struggled to harmonize the United Kingdom's multinational perspectives.</p>","PeriodicalId":46738,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Studies","volume":"34 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139967309","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":"An African American Anthropologist in Wales: St. Clair Drake and the Transatlantic Ecologies of Race Relations","authors":"Kieran Connell","doi":"10.1017/jbr.2023.113","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2023.113","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In summer 1947, African American anthropologist John Gibbs St. Clair Drake arrived in Tiger Bay, the port neighborhood of Cardiff in South Wales, to begin field work for his doctoral thesis, “Race Relations in the British Isles.” Drake's academic reputation had already been established by the publication of <span>Black Metropolis</span> (1945), a seminal study of Chicago's so-called Black Belt that Drake co-authored with researcher Horace Cayton. What attracted him to Tiger Bay for his next project was a scandal that erupted on both sides of the Atlantic around Britain's growing population of what were referred to as <span>brown babies</span>. These children were the product of sexual encounters that sometimes took place between local white women and some of the 200,000 African American GIs who were at different points stationed across the United Kingdom during the later part of the Second World War. Using the extensive field notes Drake kept during his sojourn in Cardiff, this article reconstructs the nature and feel of a neighborhood where, by the 1940s, half of all residents were from ethnic minority backgrounds. Drake's work serves as a window onto the nature of racism and ideas about race in late-imperial Britain, alongside the parallel presence of metropolitan community life in Tiger Bay, one of Britain's oldest multicultural communities.</p>","PeriodicalId":46738,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Studies","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139917410","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 Anarchist and the Technocrat: Herbert Read, C. P. Snow, and the Future of Britain","authors":"Matthew S. Adams","doi":"10.1017/jbr.2023.110","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2023.110","url":null,"abstract":"<p>A conceptual revision occurred at the heart of anarchist theory between the end of the nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. As anarchist thinkers grappled with a state transformed beyond recognition by technological change, they reassessed their critique of state power and the rhetorical methods used to expose its inherent violence. Where nineteenth-century anarchists favored organic metaphors to emphasize the monstrosity of the state, twentieth-century anarchists tended to adopt a set of mechanical metaphors. This change focused attention on the idea of technocracy, and informed a more comprehensive assessment of the state's activities. This article analyses this innovation in anarchist political thought, before tracing it through to Herbert Read's critical appraisal of C. P. Snow's influential lecture “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” and Snow's response to Read. Their debate, in which Read challenged Snow's argument that the pursuit of technological and political modernization was essential to maintain the nation's international role and address the social and economic challenges of the mid-century, was a contest for Britain's future. Drawing on his anarchism, Read saw such ideas as an existential threat, with the unthinking promotion of a technological “revolution” imperiling “the tender shoots of all that is human.” Contextualizing Read in his anarchist intellectual milieu, this article recovers a neglected voice in British intellectual and cultural history, the complexities of an overlooked political tradition, and a radical vision of Britain's future that questioned the dominant assumptions of the age.</p>","PeriodicalId":46738,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Studies","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139916058","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":"Calico Madams and South Sea Cheats: Global Trade, Finance, and Popular Protest in Early Hanoverian England","authors":"Abigail L. Swingen","doi":"10.1017/jbr.2023.74","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2023.74","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In the summer of 1719, woolen and silk weavers took to the streets in cities and towns across England to protest the East India Company's importation of cotton calicoes from South Asia. English weavers viewed these popular imports as hurting their economic livelihoods. During the protests, they violently turned their anger against women wearing calico, tearing off their clothes and even throwing acid on some victims. Their actions spurred widespread condemnation, but the weavers got what they wanted in the end. In March 1721, an act banning the importation and use of all calico cloth in Britain received royal assent. On that same day, an act arranging the first in a series of financial rescues of the South Sea Company in the wake of the South Sea Bubble became law. Drawing from a range of archival and printed sources, the author explores the political and cultural connections between the calico crisis and the South Sea Bubble and investigates how reactions to both episodes intersected ideologically with fears of Jacobitism and foreign invasion and with broader anxieties about gender, the social order, and the political influence of financial corporations.</p>","PeriodicalId":46738,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Studies","volume":"230 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139745413","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":"“Free Passage” for the “King's True Liegemen”: The Meaning of Free Trade in a Corporate Age, 1555–1624","authors":"David Pennington","doi":"10.1017/jbr.2023.114","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2023.114","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Scholars of late have come to reevaluate and appreciate the achievements of merchant companies that fostered commercial networks and established new global trade routes. This research would seem to lend support to historians who have characterized early seventeenth-century calls for “free trade” as mere sloganeering driven by provincial merchants suspicious of the London-dominated corporations. This article challenges this view and argues that free trade ideas had deep roots in early modern political culture. It traces the origins of these ideas to protests in the sixteenth century and shows how a broad coalition of interests drew upon ideas of property rights and the ancient constitution to challenge the new companies. So compelling were free trade arguments that they became a commonplace in the economic debates of an emerging public sphere. A reconsideration of the free trade campaign that is attentive to interactions and negotiations between the Privy Council, Parliament, and the public highlights the ability of the early modern state before the 1630s to readjust the political economy of the commonwealth.</p>","PeriodicalId":46738,"journal":{"name":"Journal of British Studies","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139745410","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}