This article takes issue with the influential recent interpretation of Henry VIII's religious position as consistently ‘Erasmian’. Bringing to the discussion not only a re-evaluation of much familiar evidence but also a considerable quantity of hitherto unknown or little-known material, it proposes instead that Henry's religious position, until the 1530s, sat squarely within the parameters of ‘traditional religion’ and that the subsequent changes in his attitudes to the cult of the saints, monasticism, and papal primacy were so significant as to be understood and described by Henry himself in terms of a veritable religious ‘conversion’. This conversion, which was very much sui generis, is not easily to be fitted within the confessional frameworks of other sixteenth-century religious movements (though it was by no means unaffected by them). It hinged upon Henry's new understanding of kingship as a supreme spiritual responsibility entrusted to kings by the Word of God, but long hidden from them by the machinations of the papacy. His own providential deliverance from blindness was, he believed, but the beginning of a more general spiritual enlightenment.

A variant transcription of one of the Whitehall Debates has been identified among the Clarke papers. Located in volume 16 of the Worcester MSS, it records the latter part of the longest debate, on 14 December 1648, concerning the Second Agreement of the People. The fair copy of this debate by army secretary William Clarke (in volume 65 of the Worcester MSS) was previously believed to be the only surviving record. The new source provides additional text, clarifies obscure passages, and is generally easier to understand. Historians now have the advantage of another account of the meeting, which reveals its importance more fully. Although the Levellers’ Agreement was never to be implemented, the Whitehall Debates took place between Pride's Purge and the trial and execution of Charles I. The variant therefore sheds new light on the thinking of the army command and its advisers both religious and lay at this time of unprecedented constitutional crisis. It also provides the first documentary evidence that the army debates at Putney (1647) and Whitehall (1648–9) were not recorded by Clarke alone, but by a team of at least three secretaries.

The second Ottoman siege of Vienna (1683) generated a higher volume of English writing than any other seventeenth-century event involving the Ottomans. This article focuses upon ballads written in the immediate aftermath of the siege and relates them to the concurrent English political context of the Tory reaction to the exclusion crisis. Situating these ballads within the publication milieu of pamphlet news and political polemic, it examines the figures who produced them and the audiences they were aimed at. Following from this, it shows how the use of commonplace images and associations with the ‘Turk’ as a recurring figure in early modern writing allowed these ballads to find, or depict, synchronicities between the events of the siege of Vienna, and the English political scene.

The occasional conformity controversy during the reign of Queen Anne has traditionally been understood as a straightforward symptom of the early eighteenth-century ‘rage of party’. For all the pious rhetoric concerning toleration and the church in danger, the controversy is considered a partisan squabble for short-term political gain. This traditional interpretation has, however, never been able to account for two features of the controversy: first, the focus on ‘moderation’ as a unique characteristic of post-Revolutionary English society; and second, the prominence of the Anglican nonjurors in the debate. This article revisits the occasional conformity controversy with an eye toward explaining these two related features. In doing so, it will argue that the occasional conformity controversy comprised a referendum on the Revolution settlement in church and state. Nonjurors lit upon the practice of occasional conformity as emblematic of the broader malady of moderation afflicting post-Revolutionary England. From their opposition to occasional conformity, the nonjurors, and soon the broader Anglican high-church movement, developed a comprehensive critique of religious modernity that would inform the entire framework of debate in the early English Enlightenment.

The article examines Scottish discussions surrounding the French revolutionary wars in the early and mid-1790s. It argues that these discussions were not built along the lines of the dispute that set Burke against the English radicals, because arguments about French ‘cosmopolitan’ love for mankind were largely irrelevant in the context of Smithian moral philosophy. The Scottish writers who observed French developments in the period (including the Edinburgh Moderates, James Mackintosh, John Millar, and Lord Lauderdale) were, however, particularly interested in what they interpreted as France's changing notion of patriotism, and built upon the heritage of Smithian moral philosophy in order to offer original and powerful commentaries of French national feeling and warfare. They identified the ‘enthusiastic’ nature of French national sentiment, and the replacement of traditional patriotism with a new form of relationship between the individual and the nation, as the most significant and dangerous element to come out of the French Revolution.

This article analyses the reception and understanding of the Indian village council (panchayat) among East India Company officials, British politicians, and Indian intellectuals during the first third of the nineteenth century. One of the several ways in which the panchayat was imagined was as an institution analogous to the English jury. As such, the panchayat took on significant meaning, especially for those influenced by the Scottish Orientalist tradition and who were serving in India. The issue became especially salient during the 1820s and 1830s as the jury system was debated and reformed in England. In this context, there was a transnational interplay of both ideas and policies that shaped both Company rule in India as well as the first generation of Indian nationalists.

Histories of Chartism have tended to emphasize the hegemony of respectability within the movement, and with histories of the popular press have seen the 1830s as a decisive break with older radical traditions of sexual libertarianism, bawdy political culture, and a satirical, sometimes obscene print culture. However, the basis of this position is a partial reading of the evidence. Work on London Chartists has emphasized their moralistic politics and publications at the expense of their rich populist and satirical press and the clear survival of piracy and romantic literature well into the Chartist period. The neglect of an important early leader, Henry Vincent, has meant the bawdy, sensual, and sometimes scatological letters he sent to his cousin in London have been overlooked as a source on the moral life of the Chartist generation. This article will address this by studying Vincent's letters in the context of London's populist press, particularly the work of his friends John Cleave and Henry Hetherington. Vincent's humour and attitude towards sexuality clearly reflect a broader tendency in London radicalism, while his own efforts as a newspaper editor in Bath indicate that acerbic humour was an important aspect not just of Chartism's political critique, but of its appeal to the provincial working class.

This article examines how The wealth of nations (1776) was transformed into an amorphous text regarding the imperial question throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Adam Smith had left behind an ambiguous legacy on the subject of empire: a legacy that left long-term effects upon subsequent British imperial debates. In his chapter on colonies, Smith had proposed both a scheme for the gradual devolution of the British empire and a theoretical scheme for imperial federation. In response to the growing global popularity of protectionism and imperial expansionism, the rapid development of new tools of globalization, and the frequent onset of economic downturns throughout the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, turn-of-the-century proponents of British imperial federation formed into a formidable opposition to England's prevailing free trade orthodoxy – Cobdenism – a free trade ideology which famously expanded upon the anti-imperial dimensions of The wealth of nations. Ironically, at the turn of the century many advocates for imperial federation also turned to Smith for their intellectual inspiration. Adam Smith thus became an advocate of empire, and his advocacy left an indelible intellectual mark upon the burgeoning British imperial crisis.

The late Habsburg Monarchy produced two of the most renowned peace activists of their day: Bertha von Suttner and Alfred Fried. In comparison to these two Nobel Peace laureates, the main association of Austro-pacifism – the Österreichische Friedensgesellschaft (ÖFG) – is less well known. The article concentrates on this organization, which had been founded in 1891, and it draws attention to the political and intellectual environment in which it operated. The ÖFG originated in the milieu of Austro-German liberalism, but had an ambivalent rapport with liberal politics. The Austro-pacifists’ focus on supranational principles and dynastic loyalty sat uneasily with the national dimensions of Cisleithanian politics. The obstacles encountered by the ÖFG illustrate wider aspects of the political culture of fin-de-siècle Austria, ranging from the question of militarism in Austrian society to the challenges created by socialist and nationalist movements. As a whole, the article highlights the inherent limitations of Austro-pacifism, as reflected in its quest for respectability and its acceptance of the social and political order.

Economic globalization has been a key force shaping British society since the mid nineteenth-century. This article uses a case-study of Dundee and its jute industry to examine the major issues that have arisen as the effects of those global forces have been responded to. Dundee was especially prone to detrimental effects from globalization because of its character as ‘juteopolis’, a one industry town with that industry subject to powerful competitive pressures from Calcutta producers from the 1880s onwards. In the 1930s these pressures became overwhelming, as cheap jute goods from India undercut the Dundee industry's home as well as export markets, and mass unemployment ensued. The local responses to this pressure were sharply divergent. There was both a ‘United Front’ between many elements in the local labour movement, mirroring the much-contested national calls for joint Labour and Communist party efforts, and a quite different ‘front’ bringing together jute employers, jute unions, local MPs, and the city council to call for protection for the industry. It is argued that this divergence can be used to explore key issues in the nature of the forces, national as well as local, operating on industrial cities and their populations.

‘What do the masses read?’ After popular literacy and an urban market for mass culture became conspicuous in Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century, dozens of literary figures and social researchers took it upon themselves to answer this question. Middle-class inquirers sought in newsagents' wares a vicarious connection with the culture and values of the readers of popular fiction. Many of these investigators, from Wilkie Collins in the 1850s to George Orwell in the 1930s, practised a form of literary criticism that doubled as social criticism. Other students of popular reading – Florence Bell in her study of early twentieth-century Middlesbrough and Mass-Observation in its surveys of reading during the Second World War – worked at the margins of British traditions of social research. Critics working from the texts of popular fiction tended to concentrate on questions of style and ideology; those doing fieldwork focused on reading as a social practice. Examining the corpus of studies of popular literacy from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century opens up the question of the scope of literary criticism and social research in modern Britain.

This article considers the use of the UK Freedom of Information (FOI) Act in order to explore the history of British intelligence. While the intelligence and security agencies are themselves exempt from the Act, releasing only such archival material into the public domain as they see fit, the article will argue that this does not mean that FOI cannot be used productively in this area. Rather, by adopting a wider definition of ‘intelligence’, as advocated by Wesley K. Wark in this journal in 1992, FOI can be used as part of a broader research strategy to secure the release of information that allows the archival study of intelligence to move beyond the material released by the agencies themselves. The article will illustrate this point by drawing on relevant examples of successful FOI requests, while also highlighting some of the related practical challenges and limitations that its use has revealed.

Both empirically and interpretively, extant histories of psychiatry reveal a vastly greater degree of difference among themselves than historical accounts of any other field. Scholarship focuses on the period after 1800 and the same is true of historiographical reviews; those of early modern British psychiatry are often brief literature studies. This article sets out in depth the development of this rich and varied branch of history since the 1950s, exploring the many different approaches that have contributed to understanding the mad and how they were treated. Social, cultural, philosophical, religious, and intellectual historians have contributed as much as historians of science and medicine to understanding an enduring topic of fascination: ‘disorders of consciousness and conduct’ and their context. Appreciating the sometimes unacknowledged lineages of the subject and the personal histories of scholars (roots and routes) makes it easier to understand the past, present, and future of the history of psychiatry. The article explores European and North American influences as well as British traditions, looking at both the main currents of historiographical change and developments particular to the history of psychiatry.