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On December 18, 1707, in the first session of the newly created British Parliament, a customs bill received royal assent. Innocuously entitled an ‘Act for better Securing the Duties of East India Goods’, the legislation has never once merited attention in any of the major historical works on the Anglo-Scottish Union. It should do. For this act ensured that the monopoly of the English East India Company was extended across Scotland to encompass the whole of the new United Kingdom. In this way a corporation of the City of London was confirmed in a set of privileges which enabled it, rather than private British subjects, to dominate trade in half of the emerging British empire. This act, and the neglect of the East Indies in the historiography of the union that it symbolises, is a useful starting point for a reevaluation of the relationship between the British Union and British empire. The structural and ideological diversity of England's pre-union imperialism raise serious questions about what kind of empire Scotland joined in 1707.

The third chapter analyses the relationship between sport and British anti-Semitism. It illustrates how physical recreation acted both as an arena for discrimination and racism to develop and an environment in which a response to anti-Semitism could be formulated and delivered. Through an investigation of the ‘sporting’ anti-Semitism of British Union of Fascist propaganda during the 1930s, it shows how sport became intertwined with long-standing ideological and stereotypical notions of Jewish difference – mainly in an attempt to use Jewish sporting ‘otherness’ as a means of highlighting the ‘Britishness’ of right-wing ideology and political organisations. A case study of discrimination against Jews in the world of golf illustrates how social anti-Semitism directed towards the growing Jewish ‘middle-classes’ extended into this often socially ‘exclusive’ British sport. Finally, this chapter highlights that sport has acted as a milieu in which Jews could pro-actively respond, in a generally ‘assertive’ fashion, to the exclusion and stereotyping of Jews. In this sense, sport reflects trends amongst the wider Jewish working-class for a more self-assured attitude towards self-defence. In many ways, sport strengthened, demonstrated and undermined notions and expressions of anti-Semitic stereotypes and discrimination.

Why did the British Union (BU) seem so threatening that it was singled out for suppression in May 1940? Any answer requires some explanation of the history of fascism in Britain, more particularly because the terms ‘fascist’ and ‘fascism’ are so commonly used today as mere terms of abuse. If we identify fascists as people committed to certain political programmes, one such programme was the creation of a corporate state. This was central to Italian fascism; in Britain a principal exponent was Alexander Raven-Thomson. Sir Oswald Mosley adopted the idea, though he later partly repudiated it. Corporatism appeared in the party constitution of 1938: ‘The name of the Movement is the British Union and the faith of the Movement is the National Socialist and Fascist creed. The object of the British Union is to win power by votes and thereby to establish in Great Britain the Corporate State’. But John Keegan argues that Adolf Hitler, to many a paradigm case of a fascist, had little interest in the matter.

This chapter discusses the rise of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) and the crisis of disorder that the movement's style of political campaigning provoked. The discussion begins by tracing the origin and growth of British fascism. It then turns to a detailed discussion of the political and civil libertarian context of one of the most dramatic events of the inter-war period: the June 1934 BUF meeting in Olympia. The chapter ends with a look at the political and extra-parliamentary pressure for legislation against the fascists, which culminated in the ‘Battle of Cable Street’.

On May 22, Parliament passed the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act, which formally conferred on the executive the powers appropriate to a totalitarian state at war; it could now, by regulation, ‘make provision for requiring persons to place themselves, their services, and their property at the disposal of His Majesty as appears to him to be necessary or expedient’. That evening, the Privy Council passed the new Regulation 18B (1A), to be enforced on May 23 as a secret law, for it had not then been published. Its text formed a concise ‘Statement of the Case’ against the British Union (BU); though Sir John Anderson in the House of Commons on May 23 referred to organisations in the plural, the party was to be its only victim; it was not used against the Right Club, the Communist Party of Great Britain, or any other group. Many members of the BU thought that it was the peace campaign which led to their executive detention. Sir Oswald Mosley himself was arrested on May 23, followed by more arrests.

Support for a negotiated peace with Germany was widespread in late 1939 and early 1940; the most vocal groups campaigning for peace were the fascists, the communists, and the Peace Pledge Union (PPU). The Communist Party of Great Britain was considerably larger than Sir Oswald Mosley's British Union (BU); in 1940 it had roughly 20,000 members. In wartime, propaganda for peace can easily be interpreted as treachery, and the PPU, like the BU, feared government action, and took steps to protect itself by going ‘underground’. In September, action against Mosley in particular was considered in the Home Office. Realistically, worries about fringe political peace groups deflected attention from many in mainstream public life who also favoured a settlement, no doubt on condition that the terms furthered their view of British interests. Sir John Anderson's views on peace negotiations are unknown, but under him the Home Office resisted pressure for more repressive action against peace propagandists and aliens. During this period, the government introduced a new Treachery Bill.

On May 20, a group led by Charles Maxwell-Knight raided the flat of Tyler G. Kent, a code and cipher clerk in the United States Embassy. Herschel V. Johnson, the Counsellor, agreed to the waiving of Kent's diplomatic immunity, being assured that any proceedings would be in camera. Waiver was confirmed by Ambassador Joseph Kennedy and, after the arrest, by the State Department. Since his arrival on October 5, 1939, Kent had been strongly suspected of espionage; the Stockholm police had reported to Military Intelligence Section 5 on Ludwig Mathias, a naturalised Swede of German extraction thought to be a Gestapo agent. This chapter focuses on the trial of Kent and the existence of a Fifth Column, that is, a number of individuals who were, with some element of organisation, clandestinely assisting the enemy, in Britain. So far as the British Union was concerned, the number of their members involved in this Fifth Column was tiny.

In 1943, with finance from the Duke of Bedford, G. A. Aldred, a Glasgow anarchist, published a pamphlet attacking Regulation 18B; it records the experience of detainees, and was mainly compiled by John Wynn, himself detained under 18B (1A) from June 1940 to January 1943. One documentable case illustrates both the fear caused by the initial detentions and the witch-hunting atmosphere of the times. John Ellis was a considerable businessman in Leeds. He had joined the British Union (BU) as a non-active member in 1935 or 1936, and had entertained Sir Oswald Mosley during a speaking tour. Another documentable case involved a medical student, Henry A. Steidelman, detained in late July not so much as a BU supporter but as a pro-Nazi and potential spy. As well as mistakes, some revealed in litigation, there were some quite absurd arrests. Winston Churchill took a lively interest in the great incarceration and received weekly lists of ‘Prominent Persons’ detained until September 14, 1940.

Although most orders were made in 1940, quite a few were made in later years. A few names are discoverable, such as Thomas Hubert Beckett. Some suspended orders were reactivated, and a number who escaped were recaptured. But after 1940, the main task was suspending or revoking orders already made. Once the Home Office won the dispute with Military Intelligence Section 5 over British Union (BU) detainees about 450 could be released. By the end of 1941, only 200 BU detainees were still in executive detention. There never developed widespread sympathy or support in Britain for Regulation 18B detainees as people; in so far as there was a popular view it is that they were a crowd of traitors who richly deserved all that happened to them. More surprisingly perhaps, there never developed a strong principled objection to the regulation as a gross invasion of civil liberty; no doubt the explanation lies in the desperate conditions in which it was principally employed. Once World War II ended and the detainees were all released, the subject died.

The threat to the integrity of Norman Birkett's committee stemmed from the War Cabinet decision of May 22. Until then the committee evaluated the threat to security posed by individuals; there had to be a case against each person, and each recommendation was independent of what was recommended for other detainees. After May 22 all this changed; the War Cabinet had decided that the fascists were potentially dangerous, and the British Union (BU) was to be crippled. There could be no question of the advisory committee going against this and recommending the release of Sir Oswald Mosley and his principal followers, quite irrespective of what emerged in hearings. Nor was the release of Capt. Maule Ramsay conceivable. The executive detention of the lesser BU activists also implemented a general policy decision, as did the arrest of the Anglo-Italian members of the Fascio. Where, after May, individuals were detained simply on the basis of their own actions or sympathies, the committee could proceed much as before; such cases, however, now formed a minority.

In 1941, a number of detainees had recourse to the courts, including Captain Charles H. Bentinck Budd, Arthur C. H. Campbell, Ben Greene, John Mason, and Captain George H. L.-F. Pitt-Rivers. There were possibly others; some actions were formally begun, as by Oswald Mosley and Maule Ramsay, but were never actually pursued. In addition, J. R. Smeaton-Stuart after his release tried to collect damages for false imprisonment. Of these litigants, Greene and Liversidge went to the House of Lords. Mason's arrest was of some political significance since he was a communist shop steward. He was detained as being ‘involved in attempts to slow down war production’ and therefore guilty of ‘acts prejudicial’. The officials also knew that a further embarrassing case was in the pipeline, that of Campbell. He had been in the British Union until 1937.

This chapter explores how Henry established himself into natural history society in London. It explores his participation in the fortnightly meetings of the Zoological Society of London and attendance at natural history auctions in London. It also explores the importance of correspondence networks among ornithologists. The British Ornithologists’ Union, the leading grouping of ornithologists in Britain, is explored in terms of its establishment, aims and its key members. Dresser was elected as a Member of the British Ornithologists’ Union in 1865. Dresser’s early publications are explored, notably his article on the birds of Southern Texas, based on his experiences there in 1863–64. Dresser became involved in the early bird conservation movement, and played a leading role in a committee to establish a close season for British seabirds.

“By the summer of 1934,” Hermione Lee writes, Hitler's “ambitions and his methods were fully apparent.” In the mid-1930s, Nazis issue regulations to eliminate women doctors and lawyers in Germany. German universities reduce the female quota of students to just ten percent. On October 28, 1934, Oswald Mosley stages a vicious attack on Jews during a British Union of Fascists rally at the Royal Albert Hall. Beyond these alarming national and international threats, Woolf faces inner personal (and artistic) loss and outer public attack, as she writes in her diary. She starts to speak of “warnings” in this journal. However, André Gide’s Pages de Journal, 1929–32 give her new direction in August 1934. In September, Guy de Maupassant's travel diary Sur l’eau (Afloat) particularly helps her to navigate through Roger Fry's unexpected death. She both enters its words in her diary and uses Afloat for a key moment in her novel The Years. In October, Alice James's Journal helps Woolf calibrate British women's social and sexual lives in the first decades of The Years and shows her—as do Gide's and Maupassant's diaries—a fierce fight, both without and within, between constraint and freedom.