Rich, detailed case studies span the Atlantic, Africa, the Indian Ocean and polar regions to reveal that the British Empire was shaped not only by complex entanglements of people, policies and power, but also by things: objects made, exchanged, collected, displayed, treasured, and sometimes forgotten. The chapters examine diverse, fascinating artefacts to unlock histories of encounter, trade, violence, knowledge production, identity and resistance. Some are extraordinary, the ceremonial letters carried on the first East India Company voyages, for instance, and flags hauled across polar landscapes; others are everyday tools used by enslaved and indentured workers to finely crafted objects circulating in British homes. Together, these narratives highlight the power of material culture to illuminate lives absent or marginal in the written archives of empire, while scrutinising the motives and mechanisms of imperial collecting. They encourage readers to rethink the history of empire through the tangible things that shaped it, and that continue to shape debates about its memory and legacies today.

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Placing an emphasis on trade policy, the book covers Britain’s transition from a free-trade ‘workshop of the world’ during the first era of globalisation to a highly protected, empire-orientated economy in the 1930s. It examines the many influences on British trade and, in turn, how international trade influenced the pace of growth in the British economy. Visiting more than a dozen debates in economic history, some of them quite lively, this book offers a rounded understanding of what determined not only the levels of Britain’s exports and imports, but also their geographic and industrial composition – in a period marked by intensifying competition between the first industrial nation and a new generation of industrial nations. Taking a gentle and engaging approach to both economics and history, this book will be accessible and enjoyable for a diverse readership interested in its subject matter.

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Constructions of Progressive Learning tells the story of the institution through its architecture – a perspective largely overlooked in histories of progressive education. The book demonstrates how Dartington’s learning environments both shaped and reflected changing ideas about the body, gender, democracy, pedagogy and class. It argues that the architecture of progressive education was not fixed, but evolved in response to shifts in leadership, policy and educational philosophy. Drawing on Dartington’s innovations in performance writing, the book weaves archival research, oral history and site writing practices into a richly layered narrative. The method brings marginalised voices of forgotten staff and students into dialogue with more dominant accounts of headmasters and architects. In doing so, the book offers a timely reflection on how educational environments might centre wellbeing, relationships and lived experience, rather than performance metrics alone.

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This is the first major study of Irish marble. It uncovers the largely unheard-of marble industry by tracing stone from quarry source to marble works to building. The book’s interdisciplinary approach identifies key marble deposits and their distinctive characteristics, outlines workshop and quarry practices, reconstructs trade paths and reveals connections between communities. It enables a holistic and contextual attribution of architectural marble and broadens the understanding of nineteenth-century Irish Gothic Revival architecture. Moreover, this research repositions Irish marble within an international framework, highlighting its contribution to transnational material culture and geological heritage.

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The book presents a diverse range of critical and creative approaches to the archive on local, global, communal and activist-artistic fronts, and it is informed by archival methods that emerge from workshops, translation practice, medieval-modern poetic practice, creative writing, publishing history, as well as those of the exhibition and the installation. By placing creative practice and critical medievalist research about the archive into conversation, the book rethinks the boundaries of the medieval archive (both temporal and institutional) and argues for an expanded understanding of new scholarship with creative practice at its core.

Collected in this volume are essays by world-leading scholars, prize-winning poets and writers, as well as previously unpublished work by artists, which all examine archives as caches of knowledge. There are collaborative dialogues that approach bodies, bones and landscapes as domains that form new archives over time. The book also includes engagements in archival acts that revive or incite new exchanges with the materials of the medieval past – whether from the perspective of class, Queer Studies or Indigenous history – and challenge the ongoing and urgent issue of archival access.

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The Known Soldier brings this remarkable endeavour to life through interviews with relatives of soldiers who died at Fromelles and undertakes a critical assessment of how genetic testing intersects with memory and mourning. Relatives reflect on the temporal, affective, political and ethical dimensions of DNA-testing war dead, as scientific advances allow these investigations to reach further back in time. This book examines the state’s use of scientific methods in its official commemoration of war, and considers how relatives navigate, and sometimes resist, scientific methods and official narratives. The stories of individual soldiers that emerge shape the historical and political representation of the battle at key moments such as its centenary.

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Critical Thinking for the Arts and Humanities avoids promoting a view of critical thinking as a set of generic skills that apply across academia. Instead, it encourages students to understand the skills they will be expected to demonstrate in their own study of the arts and humanities. Approaches to knowledge vary across academic disciplines – and this book equips students with the ability to think critically in their own work.

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Please Sir! featured the lives of young working-class people in a distinctive manner that blended realism and romanticism. In an engaging narrative, Gillian Mitchell explores the programme’s background, its comedic style, cast of characters and depictions of contemporary issues, from educational matters to questions of gender, generation, race and ethnicity. She explores the positive contribution of LWT’s early ambitions to the success of Please Sir!, then turns to the impact on the programme’s immediate and long-term reputation of crises that afflicted LWT as it failed in its audacious bid to alter the ‘popular’ image of ITV with its highbrow programming. Ultimately, the book argues that Please Sir! reveals much about the social, cultural and televisual era in which it was produced.

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