From the labour dispute in Tonypandy in 1910 through the withdrawal of British forces from the Irish Free State, General Sir Cecil Frederick Nevil ‘Nevil’ Macready served as the British government's trusted agent for using imperial methods to preserve or restore order within the United Kingdom. Macready's commitment to enforce the policies of the Liberal and the Coalition governments before, during, and after the First World War and his application of his experiences as a soldier and an administrator in the British Empire in both war and peace embody the ways that the practices of empire collided with the assumptions of liberalism at home. In the labour disputes in Wales in 1910 and the increasing tension in Ireland over Home Rule in 1914, Macready's personal judgement and tact proved superior in managing the threat of disorder. During the war, both his role in supporting the Government's policy of conscription and his leadership of the London Metropolitan Police after a strike by the rank-and-file Police Constables in 1918 maintained Britain's war effort at home while seeking to improve the lives of those he led. As the last British commander in Ireland before the establishment of the Irish Free State he understood the failures of Britain's forces as an inability to carry out the methods that had worked previously in his career. Analysing Macready's career reveals the contradictions and continuities between liberalism and imperialism at the apogee of both within Britain.

This paper examines open letters written by British and Indian intellectuals during the Second World War. Supporters and apologists of the British Empire often trumpeted its liberal foundations. Grounded in a philosophical tradition of individual expression and representative institutions, liberal-imperialism ‘emancipated’ individuals and nations across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In practice, however, emancipation often took the form of violent exploitation. During the Second World War, the dichotomy between liberalism in Europe and liberal-imperialism outside of Europe produced radically different understandings of the British war effort. In England, liberalism was worth defending against Nazi barbarism, while in India it was an iniquitous justification for continued exploitation. This paper explores these fragmented realities by analyzing open letters written by Eleanor Rathbone, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sir Hari Singh Gour, H.G. Wells, and Mohandas Gandhi.

This article relates how tropical disease ravaged the British army in the late-eighteenth-century Caribbean, using the San Juan expedition of 1780 as a case study. Based on eighteenth-century European understandings of epidemiology, martial and medicinal officials of the San Juan expedition believed that the outbreak of pestilence within the British army reflected a failure in discipline, properly provisioning troops, as well as overall leadership and planning. Thus, despite natural agents playing a significant role in stalling Britain's advance in Nicaragua, eighteenth-century military and medical authorities dictated that difficulties caused by disease and the environment could be overcome by human might. While the British ultimately could not overcome the devastating effects that tropical diseases had on the army, human agency also led to the expedition's failure. The British did not maintain good relations with their Indigenous allies, the Miskito, which resulted in their abandonment of the campaign. Consequently, they were left without crucial soldiers, guides, and labourers who were necessary to continue the invasion of Central America. Moreover, the Spaniards’ stout defence of their territory also hindered the British expeditionary force, stalling their advance at the Castillo de la Inmaculada Concepción. As a result, both natural and human agency dictated the outcome of the San Juan expedition.

Marie Hiroüin, a nun at the Hôtel-Dieu in Québec, was identified as a Scottish noblewoman in the margin of one of her community’s records. An examination of how she came to be in New France, then an analysis of why the nuns at the hospital chose to emphasise her Scottishness and her nobility, offer new insights into migration, national identity, and religion in the seventeenth century. Hiroüin’s family, the Irvines of Hilton, remained Catholic through Scotland’s Protestant Reformation. Some family members stayed in Scotland, while others went to France, Italy, and North America. In New France, nuns commemorated the commitment of Hiroüin’s family to Catholicism and alliance to Mary, Queen of Scots. This commemoration shows the long reach over both space and time of early modern British politics and religion. At a hospital in a small settlement on the banks of the Saint Lawrence River, far from the centres of power in either Britain or France, nuns were using the Scottishness and nobility of Marie Hiroüin to demonstrate to themselves and their successors the virtues of their religious vocation in colonial North America.

This article offers a view of the as yet unexplored aspect of British-Czechoslovak relations in the interwar period. It focuses on the way in which the land reform was carried out on the estates of British subjects located in Czechoslovakia. Attention is paid both to the diplomatic aspect of the problem as well as the analysis of the way the reform was applied. The author poses the question to what degree did the reform impact the bilateral relations of both countries. Meanwhile, he builds on the fact that the United Kingdom, a key ally of Czechoslovakia in the Great War, had an adequately strong position in Prague in order to request an accommodating course of the reform for its citizens. The author answers the question whether this was actually the case. He finally comes to the conclusion that Czechoslovak authorities had an interest in carrying out the reform as amicably as possible; however, they were not willing to completely leave British subjects out of it.

During the Second World War, the rebuilding of Europe was envisioned not only in terms of bricks and mortar, but also books. Between November 1942 and December 1945, the Conference of Allied Ministers of Education repeatedly met in London to discuss the role of culture and education in postwar reconstruction. One of the projects it led to was The European Inheritance (1954), a multi-authored publication that was meant to communicate as impartially as possible the history of Europe and its influence on the world. The CAME meetings have so far rarely been studied and are usually perceived as having laid the groundwork for the creation of the far more influential United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (November 1945). This paper instead argues that CAME and the activities that ensued from it deserve to be studied in their own right. The European Inheritance, in particular, provides a prism through which to analyse the slow transition from the ‘imperial internationalism’ of the early twentieth century to a burgeoning postcolonial world order, alongside which new forms of European intergovernmental cooperation emerged. Furthermore, the vicissitudes of this history book provide insights into the cultural ambitions and the international position Britain was seeking for itself during and shortly after the Second World War. As chairman of the commission in charge of this project, the classicist and political theorist Ernest Barker reveals the moral, intellectual and pragmatic motivations and negotiations that steered the production of this book through the push and pull of national and internationalist interests.

This article examines the participation of white women in whipping enslaved individuals in the West Indies throughout the eighteenth century in both fiction and historical examples. While sensibility and sentimentality were growing in popularity in metropolitan England, white women in the West Indies encountered and participated in scenes of violence that shocked many metropolitan viewers. During the last decade of the eighteenth century, images appeared that seem to condemn the African Slave Trade and promote abolitionist rhetoric. While these scenes of suffering do portray the brutal reality of whipping in the West Indies, these depictions also emerge at a period in which flogging became more overtly sexualized. Examining the 1792 print ‘A Forcible Appeal for the Abolition of the Slave Trade’ by Richard Newton, this article contextualizes the flagellation and sexual undertones of the white woman in the print. Comparing this print to the flagellation erotica, often sold in the same establishments as prints like Newton's, the sexual undertones in the print are complicated. Through the fetishization of the pain of enslaved women, metropolitan inhabitants of England could voyeuristically indulge in these scenes of misery without explicitly seeking out flagellation or pornographical works.