This article explores the historically specific use of cosmetic commodities as evidence in prosecutions for importuning in interwar London. Taking as its point of departure the story of ‘the man with the powder puff’ told in the journal John Bull in 1925, it moves to consider the discrete but intersecting histories within which cosmetics came to function as a material sign of deviant masculinity, illicit sexuality, and de facto criminality. The process through which a powder puff could be deployed as evidence in court depended upon a particular understanding of sexual difference. It was embedded in the emergence of a vibrant consumer beauty culture in the 1920s. It took shape within the operational practices of the Metropolitan Police, particularly the explosive politics of law enforcement after the First World War. It emerged, finally, in response to profound anxieties about the war's disruptive impact on British culture. In understanding the story of ‘the man with the powder puff’, I argue, we might more fully understand the cultural landscape of post-First World War Britain.

This essay deals with the problem of the roots of Ostrogorski's well-known approach to the problem of political parties, showing that: (1) Ostrogorski's approach is highly dependent on the nineteenth-century debate among the English intelligentsia about a supposed ‘American model’; (2) James Bryce was at the centre of an intellectual network assuming that ‘modern politicsxyr could become the subject of a sort of ‘scientific approach to politics’ more up to date than the traditional one depending on Tocqueville's school; (3) Ostrogorski betrayed Bryce's expectation of a balanced research on the transformation of modern politics because of his dependence on an old-fashioned liberal mind (as evident from his correspondence); (4) this cleavage between the two interpretations of political development was perceived and led to a certain discussion among English and American political scholars (and in this framework Lowell's contribution is peculiarly worthy of attention).

This article is an analysis of the hysterical debates in the house of commons over the 1753 Marriage Act, placed in the context of the failure of existing marriage law to prevent clandestine marriage and bigamy, and the crucial importance of the marriage market for the male propertied elite. It shows that the proponents of the act appealed strongly to the patriarchal and material instincts of the majority in the Commons, while its principal opponents, who claimed to stand for affective marriage and championed the interests of women, actually represented the exploitative marital and sexual behaviour typical of many Georgian men. The article concludes that the passage of the Marriage Act in these circumstances absolutely contradicts some historians' theories about the progress of ‘affective individualism’ among the elite, and implies rather the continuance of patriarchy and the use of marriage for economic and political advantage.

On 22 June 1897 the Queen-Empress Victoria drove in splendid, imperial state to St Paul's Cathedral, the ‘parish church of the Empire’ there to give thanks for reaching the sixtieth year of her reign. It was, in life, her supreme moment of apotheosis as the matriarch of Europe and mother-figure of an empire of unprecedented size, power and prosperity. Not only in London, but in towns and villages throughout England and around the world, the celebrations extended. ‘From one end of the land to the other’, recalled one provincial newspaper, ‘and indeed wherever the British flag flies, the day was marked in a special manner.’ ‘Everywhere in the Empire that day’, notes James Morris, ‘statues were being unveiled, garrisons were being inspected, thanksgiving services were being held in thatch-roofed outposts of the Anglican communion.’

Hitler's willing executioners. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. London: Little Brown and Company, 1996. Pp. x+622. £20.

Questions about the motives of the perpetrators and, by implication, the causes of the Holocaust, have long been in the forefront of academic or non-academic discussions of the Nazi period – from the time of contemporary observers to the present day. A wide range of possible responses to these questions has been put forward, drawing on concepts from a variety of disciplines, such as history, psychology, sociology or theology. Daniel Goldhagen's book on the motivation of the perpetrators of the Holocaust claims to be a ‘radical revision of what has until now been written’ (p. 9). This claim is made on the book-jacket and by the author himself. His thesis can be summarized as follows: Germany was permeated by a particularly radical and vicious brand of anti-Semitism whose aim was the elimination of Jews. The author defines this as ‘eliminationist anti-Semitism’. This viral strain of anti-semitism, he states, ‘resided ultimately in the heart of German political culture, in German society itself’ (p. 428). Medieval anti-Semitism, based as it was on the teachings of the Christian religion, was so ‘integral to German culture’ (p. 55) that with the emergence of the modern era it did not disappear but rather took on new forms of expression, in particular, racial aspects. By the end of the nineteenth century ‘eliminationist anti-Semitism’ dominated the German political scene. In the Weimar Republic, it grew more virulent even before Hitler came to power. The Nazi machine merely turned this ideology into a reality. The course of its actualization was not deterred by anything save bare necessity: ‘the road to Auschwitz was not twisted’ (p. 425). When the ‘genocidal program’ was implemented along with the German attack on the Soviet Union, it was supported by the general German population, by the ‘ordinary Germans’ – the key phrase of the book – who became ‘willing executioners’. They had no need of special orders, coercion or pressure because their ‘cognitive model’ showed them that Jews were ‘ultimately fit only to suffer and to die’ (p. 316).

In 1915 and again in 1917 the British government almost decided to buy out the whole of the licensed liquor trade in the United Kingdom. An examination of the circumstances in which this ambitious proposal was contemplated poses serious questions of interpretation for the historian of the first World War. The episode figures in the historiography of temperance as a missed opportunity to use the power of government to solve a longstanding social problem; this, however, was a minor part of the story. In 1915 state purchase was to have helped to reduce industrial absenteeism, and thus to increase munitions production. In 1917 it was to have conserved foodstuffs and saved shipping during the submarine crisis. It can thus be seen as yet another manifestation of ‘war socialism’: but it has two distinctive characteristics. First, the government had little understanding of the economic and social phenomena which it sought to control by assuming ownership of the liquor trade, though much political effort was put into the manoeuvre. Second, the private interests concerned were quite eager, partly because of pre-war conditions, to be expropriated for their own good as much as for the nation's benefit. It is an unexceptionable part of conventional wisdom that the first World War, like the second, was a major catalyst of change, and especially of state intervention in society. The history of state purchase shows how tenuous and haphazard the causal connexion between war and social change could be. The demands of war were (almost) translated into major state intervention, but the process was mediated by the political mythology of drink, by the operation in the political system of a powerful business pressure group, and by the shifting priorities of governments which subordinated all policy to the need to guide a war economy to victory.

In September of the year 29 B.C. the citizens of Rome saw pass before them one of the most splendid triumphs ever celebrated in their city. In it Caius Julius Caesar Octavianus, the heir and successor of Julius Caesar, now sole master of the Mediterranean world, displayed the spoils he had won from his campaigns in Illyria and Dalmatia, at the battle of Actium, and by the conquest of Egypt. The spectacle must have been gratifying to Roman pride and a fair omen for future security: in the young victor were centred the hopes of the Roman people for external conquest and internal peace. Octavian had now reached the summit of his desires, his word and will appeared all-powerful; yet he was already aware that he was bound to a policy imposed upon him by his own success, and as time went on he became conscious that the very completeness of his victory, though it satisfied immediate demands, presented embarrassing problems for the future. In order to defeat Antony and to secure the necessary support for himself he had utilised a sentiment which had recently grown strong in Rome, and he was now to some extent fettered by the feeling he had aroused. This feeling was a profound fear of the Orient and mistrust of all things Oriental, and Octavian had posed as the champion of Roman manners and institutions, and had thus succeeded in concentrating on himself the enthusiasm of all Italy. He was now committed to this policy; in future years there must be no suspicion of Orientalism whether in government or institutions or religion. And even though Octavian might satisfy his countrymen on this score, he himself found it difficult to throw off the anxiety and embarrassment that the possession of Egypt caused him.

For a commission brokers negotiated an exchange between those who had patronage to grant and those in need who were willing to give something in return. They received a fee for their help as intermediaries in the search for patronage. Brokerage differed from patronage in that it was a mercenary service which did not by itself create a personal bond. Noble brokers of royal patronage in the provinces and at court were prevalent during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Provincial brokers included the governors, lieutenants general, intendants, clerics, first presidents of the sovereign courts, military commanders, great nobles, and any resident provincials related to, or well-known by, high-ranking court or government personages. Court brokers included all those regularly at court, and ranged from those immediately surrounding the king, as the fount of royal patronage, downward and outward in layers of influence calculated upon their distance from the king. Brokers in the provinces became less important during Louis XIV's reign because the king himself insisted on supervising the distribution of royal patronage at court. Patronage became more easily obtainable at Versailles than in the provinces, and, increasingly, nobles in need of patronage went to court to find it, aided in their search by courtiers acting as brokers. During Louis XIV's reign, an absolute monarchy sought successfully to centralize the brokerage of royal patronage at court, a hitherto unrecognized aspect of the process of social and political centralization known as early modern statebuilding.

In November 1792 John Reeves, with the explicit approval and active sup-port of both the government and the Windhamite Whigs, and with the countenance of the duke of Portland and his friends, instituted a movement of loyalist associations which quickly spread throughout the country. The movement was founded in reaction to an enthusiastic resurgence of British radical activity which followed the defeat of the combined armies under the duke of Brunswick, and it rallied a now militant conservative sentiment in favour of detecting and suppressing by intimidation and public prosecution all allegedly seditious activities. This crisis in public opinion, which was at once the parent and the offspring of the loyalist association movement, was not the first to have occurred in 1792. An earlier crisis occurred in favour of the political left during the late spring of 1792 and was followed by a relatively mild reaction to the right. It seems clear that, during the earlier months of 1792 at least, there were considerable bodies of both conservative and liberal opinion of various shades in the country. But by the beginning of the following year the complexity and ferment of the political scene had become so great that it is not at all clear to what extent or how rapidly liberal opinion had been supplanted in the country by conservative sentiment. The purpose of this paper is to reassess the nature, effect and significance of the loyalist association movement by undertaking a more careful examination of the phraseology of many of its addresses and declarations as well as of the proceedings and circumstances peculiar to the meetings in which they were approved.

This article offers a history of British seventeenth-century coffeehouse licensing which integrates an understanding of the micro-politics of coffeehouse regulation at the local level with an analysis of the high political debates about coffeehouses at the national level. The first section details the norms and practices of coffeehouse licensing and regulation by local magistrates at the county, city, and parish levels of government. The second section provides a detailed narrative of attempts by agents of the Restoration monarchy to regulate or indeed suppress the coffeehouses at the national level. The political survival of the new institution is attributed to the ways in which public house licensing both regulated and also legitimated the coffeehouse. The rise of the coffeehouse should not be understood as a simple triumph of a modern public sphere over absolutist state authority; it offers instead an example of the ways in which the early modern norms and practices of licensed privilege could frustrate the policy goals of the Restored monarchy.

The development of government participation in the support of research is one of the most significant characteristics of nineteenth-century science. As public money became available for science, the social framework of research underwent a profound transformation. This process of transformation is not easy to define, but the response of scientific societies and institutions sometimes provides significant clues.

The two decades of French rule in the German-speaking Rhineland at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the dramatic imposition of the sovereign state on a region previously noted for its absence. The successful integration of the new territories into the Republic and Empire depended upon the response of Rhenish elites to the transformation of local government from an accumulation of historical privileges into the lowest administrative tier of the state. Napoleon, more than his revolutionary predecessors, recognized the importance of ‘rallying’ the ‘notables’ in what was a politically inclusive and socially exclusive process. This policy was successful insofar as elites did, in general, rally. Their motivation varied, and the commitment was rarely unconditional. Rhenish notables, long adept at exploiting Old Regime institutions to preserve particular privileges, abused Napoleonic institutions, in order to protect clients and preserve their social position. This helped widen the gulf between the mainly urban notables and the rest of the predominantly rural population, which had fewer legal and institutionalized opportunities for asserting its interests directly. This system of rule proved suited to Rhenish conditions until the rise of party politics in the second half of the nineteenth century.

In 1929 the historian of European financial control in the Ottoman Empire—that most significant factor in the affairs of the Near East at the turn of the nineteenth century—found ‘the seed of the idea’ of European control in the second Turkish foreign loan, raised in 1855. Nevertheless, he added virtually nothing to the brief and rather inaccurate account of this transaction given in 1903 by that able retired official of the Ottoman Bank, A. du Velay. It may therefore be worth while to discuss, from the profusion of evidence now available, the circumstances in which this loan and its predecessor of the year before were raised, and the extent and significance of the foreign control which these transactions introduced into Turkey.

This article examines the series of legislative measures, beginning in 1776, which culminated in the passage of the Penitentiary Act of 1779. It argues that, although the Penitentiary Act is of considerable long-term significance in the history of English criminal justice and penal practices, the act passed in 1779 was in fact a somewhat modest affair by comparison with the scheme originally envisioned by its principal architects. The act embodied a decisive retreat from an original ambition to replace transportation with imprisonment at hard labour as the principal punishment next to death in late eighteenth-century England. This modification arose from a pragmatic appreciation of the limitations imposed, first, by a persistent preference amongst most legislators for transportation of the worst classes of offenders not actually put to death and, secondly, by the reluctance of local authorities to have such a preference imposed upon them to the detriment of local control of punishment and of the finances which paid for it. Attention is also drawn to how the course of events was shaped by the interaction of the act's main architects, William Eden and Sir William Blackstone, with both government and non-ministerial MPs such as Sir Charles Bunbury.

The Suez crisis is widely believed to have contributed significantly to Britain's decline as a world power. Eden's miscalculation of American reaction to the attack on Egypt was damaging to Britain's reputation and fatal to his career. However, his actions were contrary to received wisdom in Whitehall. The crisis merely confirmed Britain's dependence on the United States and had no lasting impact on Anglo-American relations. Britain's relationship with its informal and formal empire was already changing before 1956, and the turn from the commonwealth to Europe owed little to Suez. Examination of policy reviews in Whitehall before and after the Suez crisis shows that the Foreign Office, Commonwealth Relations Office, and Colonial Office were slow to accept the need for change in Britain's world role. Insofar as they did from 1959 it was because of Treasury arguments about the effect of high defence expenditure on the economy, and slow growth of the United Kingdom's population compared with the United States, the European Economic Community, and the Soviet Union.

In a recent contribution to the debate over the operational significance of the Old Poor Law, Peter Solar has argued that ‘the local financing of poor relief gave English property owners, individually and collectively, a direct pecuniary interest in ensuring that the parish's demographic and economic development was balanced’. His survey of the implications of the attempt to maintain this equilibrium, however, fails to take account of the social and political relationships between rate-payers, rate-receivers, and parish officers. In seeking to integrate considerations of power into the analysis of the relief of the poor, by contrast, this paper locates social welfare provision in the context of the authority structures of several parishes in Holland Fen (Lincolnshire) over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It emphasizes the role of the parish vestry in regulating and relieving the poor; demonstrates the extraordinary scale of poor relief in the local context; and argues that even in the open parishes of the Lincolnshire fenland, hostility to poor migrants could be marked, resulting even in the prohibition of the marriages of the poor. The politics of the poor rate implied the exclusion of poor strangers in the interests of relieving the ancient settled poor.

The article examines the use of seditious libel and blasphemy as instruments of control during the era of Tory hegemony. It argues that the law of libel was a formidable instrument of repression, but one which was all but abandoned by the legal authorities because it proved to be too unreliable. On the one hand, it placed the writers and vendors of radical literature under the constant threat of prosecution. They could be perpetually threatened by ex-officio informations; they paid all legal costs accruing from their cases; and, if put to trial, they often faced a hostile judge and a packed jury. On the other hand, a great deal of arguably seditious literature circulated freely because the Home Office lacked the institutional means to embark on a policy of wholesale prosecution; enforcement of the libel laws was scattershot at best; and defendants ultimately managed to undermine the government's prosecutorial strategy by exploiting the flexibility of language to win acquittal in some well-publicized cases. Thus the profound uncertainty of libel proceedings made them double-edged weapons which often damaged the government and the accused at the same time.

The history of fascism in Italy has been extensively covered while fascist Italy's role in colonies before the war, and occupied areas during it, have only been touched upon. There has been little or no coming to terms with fascist crimes comparable to the French concern with Vichy or even the Japanese recognition of its wartime and pre-war responsibilities. This article uses Italy's internment policy in Africa before the war and in the Balkans and Italy during the war to illustrate the repression of historical memory. On the one hand, foreign Jews were interned to protect them from deportation by German, Croatian or Vichy French forces. The reasons were political and humanitarian. On the other, Balkan civilians were interned in conditions that led to the death of thousands. Similar and worse policies had been carried out in Africa before the war. There is some excellent specialist work on Africa which is not part of general knowledge; the Balkans have not even been covered by specialists. This article puts forward some explanations for the repression of the recent past.

This article examines the relationship between religious debate and constitutional conflict in the 1590s, focusing on the status of ecclesiastical law and the right of the church courts to impose ex officio oaths upon English subjects. It argues that Richard Cosin, a client of Archbishop Whitgift and the leading apologist for the government's use of ex officio oaths, used the issue to make a series of aggressive and controversial assertions of state power. These theoretical claims did not involve sovereignty or the powers of the monarch – the issues usually addressed by historians of political thought – but rather the much more theologically charged question of the line between public authority and private conscience. As such, Cosin and his supporters transformed the raw materials of conformity and anti-puritanism into a view of the state and its coercive powers that seemed to threaten both the common law and the Elizabethan regime's own claims that it did not make ‘windows into men's souls’.