This article reviews the career of William Paterson, a Scottish colonial administrator in the mid-eighteenth century. Using several understudied manuscript sources, it reconstructs his conflicts with local colonial institutions, his conception of Britain's imperial political economy, and his idea of the British Empire as an Atlantic polity. Though recent scholarship has argued for a patriot movement in the 1720s and 1730s and a conservative-reactionary response to radical Whiggism in the 1750s and 1760s, this article argues that Paterson represented a Scoto-British tradition and view of Britain's empire that had taken shape during the first half of the eighteenth century. It demonstrates links between his manuscript materials and the writings of Sir William Keith, a colonial official and imperial theorist, and James Thomson, a close friend of Paterson's. It suggests that their worldview, though grounded in the celebration of the Glorious Revolution, the 1707 Union between England and Scotland, the Hanoverian succession, and an imperial polity that was commercial and maritime, had become conservative by the second quarter of the eighteenth century. After 1763, Paterson's Atlantic vision of the British Empire became increasingly untenable with Britain's growing global empire, and ultimately unrealizable after American independence in 1776.

The British Empire intervened on the princely state of Jammu & Kashmir in 1885, imposing a Resident on the state's ruler for the first time. While one of their primary intentions was to build a railroad connection between the state and British India, the project failed. This episode has largely been set within the context of Britain's strategic rivalry with Russia over Central Asia, the so-called Great Game. However, focusing on the example of the failed railroad casts the episode in new light. The story of the failed railroad reveals that the intervention was less a product of strategic rivalry with Russia, wherein Jammu & Kashmir was considered at most a sideshow, and instead was driven by motivators such as the civilizing mission, imperial romanticism, and tourism.

This article explores early modern English and Scottish visits to libraries in Continental Europe through the prism of tourism history to argue that the period was crucial for the early development of bibliotourism. Travellers experienced libraries as holistic spaces, paying attention to the appearance of the buildings, decorations inside the libraries they visited, and the materiality of the objects they encountered. Their experience of libraries was curated by librarians and library-keepers, who created tourist trails consisting of a limited number of star exhibits in their collections. Visitors often experienced libraries in conjunction with other similar institutions, especially cabinets of curiosities. Libraries were a place for in-depth scholarship for some, but they were sightseeing tourist destinations for most visitors.

The Imperial Federation movement aimed to unite the empire in a federal form and to counteract tendencies towards separation. Many historians have commented on the movement, but have tended to do so in broad-brush terms and do not explain the relationship between Imperial Federation and the British Commonwealth. The period from 1910 to 1921 witnessed a sharp decline in the discussion of Imperial Federation. The decline was paralleled by a rise in the use of the term ‘British Commonwealth’ as an alternative locus for discussion of the theme of imperial unity. This article will explain how the conceptual shift from ‘Imperial Federation’ to ‘British Commonwealth’ happened and what caused the transition by using the British newspapers in the Gale Primary Sources database. Dominions’ requirement for more autonomy, Irish independence and WWI might have altogether contributed to the transition by opposing the design of establishing a representative Imperial Parliament.

The Bright Young People, a loose association of upper-class individuals active during the 1920s and 1930s, are most commonly associated – by historians and contemporaries alike – with Mayfair in London's West End. However, their social world reached far beyond a single neighborhood in the capital. Indeed, it would extend to greater London, the British countryside, and, as demonstrated in this article, the European continent. This travel across the Channel would also reaffirm the importance of European culture linkages with Britain during a period of the ‘Americanization’ of British culture. While this Continental travel was evocative of earlier forms of aristocratic and upper-class travel, the Bright Young People would refashion these journeys abroad to reflect metropolitan modes of socializing. In transposing their Mayfair behavior to foreign locales, the Bright Young People, as the example of Diana Cooper in Venice demonstrates, would open themselves up to critiques from the British press and members of their own class. Cooper would lead a misguided treasure hunt across Venice in September 1926, drawing a degree of ire from Venetians, but more forceful condemnations from the British press. These reports would call into question perceived upper-class misbehavior, particularly that perpetrated by aristocratic women. While such behavior was tolerated at home, doing so abroad ran the risk of damaging British prestige and the status of women within British society.

After 20 years of British rule, Florida reverted to a Spanish colony after the America Revolution. This political change opened an opportunity for the enslaved population to challenge the authority of their enslavers as British colonists fled the now Spanish colony in order to live in the British Empire. This article demonstrates how the transition gave enslaved people leverage to negotiate for better living conditions by using time as a tool of resistance.