No abstract

Transcribe Bentham is testing the feasibility of outsourcing the work of manuscript transcription to members of the public. UCL Library Services holds 60,000 folios of manuscripts of the philosopher and jurist Jeremy Bentham (1748Bentham ( -1832. Transcribe Bentham will digitise 12,500 Bentham folios, and, through a wiki-based interface, allow volunteer transcribers to take temporary ownership of manuscript images and to create TEI-encoded transcription text for final approval by UCL experts. Approved transcripts will be stored and preserved, with the manuscript images, in UCL's public Digital Collections repository.The project makes innovative use of traditional library material. It will stimulate public engagement with UCL's scholarly archive collections and the challenges of palaeography and manuscript transcription; it will raise the profile of the work and thought of Jeremy Bentham; and it will create new digital resources for future use by professional researchers. Towards the end of the project, the transcription tool will be made available to other projects and services.

This paper explores the religious dimension to popular protest in the early eighteenth century, highlighting in particular the continued influence of what has been called the Covenanting tradition – the defence of Presbyterian church government, popular sovereignty and the resistance of Anglican imperialism – in southwest and west central Scotland. Religiously inspired ideas of equality and economic equity in God's world, combined with the desire to resist the encroachment of Anglican hierarchy, drove ordinary Presbyterians to rebel. There is evidence to suggest that the reaction of some protesters to socio-economic conditions was coloured by their theological worldview. The phenomenon at work in southwest Scotland might best be described as ‘Presbyterian moral economy’. The paper suggests that lowland Presbyterian culture coloured popular protest to a degree not hitherto recognised. Presbyterian moral economy was a robust and continuous – but unduly neglected – strand in the history of Scottish radicalism.

The Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series is a collection of studies on empires in world history and on the societies and cultures which emerged from colonialism. It includes both transnational, comparative and connective studies, and studies which address where particular regions or nations participate in global phenomena. While in the past the series focused on the British Empire and Commonwealth, in its current incarnation there is no imperial system, period of human history or part of the world which lies outside of its compass. While we particularly welcome the first monographs of young researchers, we also seek major studies by more senior scholars, and welcome collections of essays with a strong thematic focus. The series includes work on politics, economics, culture, literature, science, art, medicine, and war. Our aim is to collect the most exciting new scholarship on world history with an imperial theme.More information about this series at

No abstract