This article locates monarchy in the debates arising out of the anti-animal abuse campaigns of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through a close examination of urban republican criticisms of monarchy, it seeks to question the role of royalty as the custodian of shared national values concerning animal welfare. It demonstrates that hostility to monarchy based on its role in encouraging and patronizing hunting belongs to a long tradition. Much hostility to royalty crystallized around the royal patronage of foxhunting and of pheasant-shooting. The nineteenth-century precedents for recent concerns about the visible presence of royal figures on the hunting-field articulated many of the component elements of a republican position. For many urban radicals the connection of reigning monarchs with the hunt demonstrated the dysfunctional nature of royal existence, the limitations of royalty's attainments, and the perceived need by monarchs to satisfy the baser, more carnal urges arising from a life devoted to indolence and pleasure. This article shows that hunting, as a marker of a robust masculinity and of the opulence of royalty, brought the reform community into collision with supporters of the monarchy, and provided an example of royal ritual that failed to work in the interests of the throne. The article concludes by revealing the connections between the land debate, criticisms of the royal house, and animal welfare politics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Summary: This article places the campaign for rights of public access in London in context. It provides a structural analysis of the importance of public space in metropolitan radicalism, and in so doing explores prevailing assumptions about the different uses of such space in a provincial and metropolitan setting. Its chief focus is upon opposition to restrictions on rights of public meeting in Hyde Park in 1855 and 1866-1867, but it also charts later radical opposition to the enclosures of common-land on the boundaries of London and at Epping Forest in Essex. In particular it engages with recent debates on the demise of Chartism and the political composition of liberalism in an attempt to explain the persistence of an independent tradition of mass participatory political radicalism in the capital. It also seeks explanations for the weakness of conventional liberalism in London in the issues raised by the open spaces movement itself.

This article reassesses the debates around Chinese emigration into the Australian colonies before Federation in 1901. Drawing on the literature relating to the emergence of the Chinese community in Australia, it argues that pressures exerted by anti‐Chinese organisations that thrived following the expansion of representative democracy in the Australian colonies, and the emergence of organised labour parties, were instrumental in the creation of exclusionary campaigns waged against Chinese migrants. By depicting the Chinese as temperamentally unsuited to democracy and through campaigns to highlight the impact of imported, low cost manual workers into the Australian colonies, the new forces of colonial labour led by radical politicians were at the heart of an attempt to erect ‘White Walls’ against migrants from South‐East and East Asia. These campaigns drew on a fund of images and popular fears that cohered around the role of the opium den, and the solitary, itinerant Chinese male.

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