The Yorkshire Association of the early 1780's marked the first effective extension of modern political radicalism in Great Britain from the metropolitan region into the provinces. During what may for convenience be described as the first—the Wilkite—phase of British radicalism, in the early 1770's, the focus of the radical movement had lain in and around London. Attempts to stir up the country provoked only a brief response in a very few constituencies. There was little trace anywhere of sustained radical activity. Provincial apathy at the general election of 1774 caused acute disappointment to the metropolitan radicals. Six years later the situation had changed remarkably, and from 1780 till 1784 politics in Yorkshire were dominated, and in the rest of England considerably affected, by that remarkable political phenomenon, the Yorkshire Association. Starting in December 1779, an extraordinary, widespread upsurge of discontent among the members of the ‘upper class’ in the county, provoked by the North ministry's inept handling of the American crisis, first produced the well-supported petition of 1780 for economical reform, and was then channelled and organized into an instrument of agitation for reform of the parliamentary system. The association proper came into being between its adoption at a county meeting on 28 March 1780 and the middle of the following August, when the parchment copies which had been circulated for signature were gathered in and the roll of some 5800 names was compiled from them.

Several British statesmen have also been historians: Clarendon, Russell, Rosebery, Churchill—and Charles James Fox, although he produced only one volume. His History of the early part of the Reign of James II is a fragment of what might have been a much larger work; it was published posthumously, with a preface by his nephew Lord Holland, in 1808. Although it was given a mixed reception by the critics, it was regarded for several decades as something of a classic. It was translated into French, German, and Dutch; and was republished several times in England during the nineteenth century (most recently as a threepenny paperback in Cassell's National Library in 1888).

In an article published in this journal several years ago Professor Vincent advanced the view that the Tories' triumph in Lancashire in 1868, when they won 22 out of 33 seats as against 12 out of 27 in 1865, was attributable less to the new franchise than to other changes in electoral arrangements, namely, boundary alterations and the creation of new seats.

In Second Class, there was only my valet and two Italians on their way to Valona to buy from a Greek a wood, which, as far as they knew, did not belong to him. A frequent matter in the East

So sardonically wrote in his diary a second-rank Italian politician, the only passenger in first class, voyaging in 1902 across the Adriatic to Albania. The politician was Antonino di San Giuliano. His diary had a purpose, as it was destined to be published in Giornale d'Italia, Rome's new conservative daily. This paper had been founded only a year before by Alberto Bergamini and Sidney Sonnino in an effort to regroup those anti-Giolittian politicians scattered by the failure of the second, authoritarian, Pelloux ministry.

Reflecting on the development of industrial capitalism in Europe, Antonio Gramsci wrote:

It is worth drawing attention to the way in which industrialists…have been concerned with the sexual affairs of their employees and with their family arrangements in general. One should not be misled…by the ‘puritanical’ appearance assumed by this concern. The truth is that the new type of man demanded by the rationalization of production and work cannot be developed until the sexual instinct has been suitably regulated and until it too has been rationalized.

Improved Franco-German relations are rarely associated with the years preceding the Great War or with the policies of Raymond Poincaré. Yet from 1907 to 1914 a persistent attempt was made to bring about détente between Paris and Berlin, which eventually led to the French president adopting a conciliatory attitude towards Germany, occasionally at the expense of relations with Russia. The instigator of this policy was the French ambassador in Berlin, Jules Cambon. He believed that Franco-German détente could best serve the two axioms of French diplomacy since 1870: continental security and overseas expansion. Cambon considered the growth of German power in Europe and abroad to be both natural and inevitable and that France must come to terms with it.1 His policy involved ending the intransigence which he saw as having characterized French diplomacy, often with disastrous results, since 1870. He confessed in May 1908 that his ideas were fairly summarized in Clemenceau's remark to him: ‘On dit que vous avez dit que vous ne voulez aller ni à Ems ni à Faschoda.’2 These two incidents, the ‘Ems telegram’ and the Fashoda crisis, symbolized for him the recklessness and inflexibility of France's past diplomacy.

It is nearly twenty years since the seminal discussions of the English crowd by Hobsbawm, Rose, Rudé and Thompson, and almost forty years since Wear mouth's extraordinary catalogue of eighteenth-century disturbances.1 These studies established that if we examined the composition, organization, objectives and beliefs of eighteenth-century crowds, then we would find them to have been informed, disciplined, and in possession of broad notions of the necessity and legitimacy of their actions. Crowds were not ‘rabble’, or criminal, or ‘society's dregs’. Such conclusions were based upon the examination of the crowd in its most visible and vocal form: the riot.

The most important elements of Vichy industrial organization were the comités d'organisation (CO). The procedure for the establishment of these bodies was laid down by decree on 16 August 1940. In practice the functions assumed by them varied considerably. But broadly a CO was to oversee one particular industry and to liaise between that industry and the authorities (both German and French). One of the first of these bodies to be established (on 9 November 1940) was the comité d'organisation de l'industrie des combustibles minéraux solides (COH).

It is the purpose of this essay to explain the background and nature of proctorial representation and plural voting in the early Tudor period; to deter-mine the extent of absenteeism and proctorial representation in the House of Lords during the reign of Henry VIII; to single out and briefly discuss the principal procurators in the upper house; and to demonstrate how the Crown utilized and perfected the proxy system to manage the House of Lords. Just as an earlier essay dealt with the origin and evolution of proctorial representation in pre-Tudor times, so subsequent articles covering the late Tudor and Stuart periods will follow in due time.

During the ‘long eighteenth century’, several thousands of sailors born outside British territories served in the Royal Navy. This phenomenon, and the peculiarities of their employment compared to that of British seamen, remain largely unstudied. This paper aims to show that, as far as disabilities or privileges were concerned, official legislation only played a very small part in making alien seamen's experiences in the navy distinct from those of their British colleagues. More broadly, this article argues that, whilst transnationalism can be overemphasized, there are specific contexts and groups of people for which the power of the state falters when it comes to obstructing movement, and indeed it is forced, for its very survival, to act strategically against the barrier to circulation that frontiers normally constitute. In similar circumstances, the origins of the individuals concerned, intended as official labels that states normally use to classify them, control them, and claim or disclaim ownership over them, can become all but meaningless. Thus, naval sailors, as useful state servants, can be an excellent case-study to understand the category of legal ‘foreignness’ as it developed in modern nation-states, and the tensions inherent to it.

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.

The three imperial durbars held in Delhi for the coronation of British monarchs as the rulers of India were gatherings of royalty, administration, and the military, organized in the years 1877, 1903, and 1911. As impressively invented, improvised, and self-styled orientalist representations of the late Victorian tradition, these durbars were pageants of power, prestige, and authority, creations of their organizing viceroys: Robert Lytton (1877), George Curzon (1903), and Charles Hardinge (1911). But, as this article shows, they were also commemorative exhibitions of the triumphant memory of the event of 1857 (variously called the Indian Mutiny, Sepoy war, War of Independence), especially in Delhi which had to be emphasized regularly for perpetuating myths about British superiority and invincibility. Spread over a period of thirty-five years, these rituals of commemoration were performed through four illustrative choices. These were the selection of site, selection of mutiny veterans as participants, the construction of mutiny memorials, and contribution to the growth of mutiny pilgrimage tours. Drawing attention to the successive formation of 1857 as a seminal ‘cultural moment’ through its periodic commemoration, the present article brings to focus the enduring significance of the event for the British empire in India, which had to be re-visited time and again for purposes of legitimation and cultural appropriation.

The Fischer controversy of the 1960s was a major landmark in post-war West German historiography. Surprisingly few historians to date have devoted their attention to the East German reception of Fischer's work, however. This article seeks to fill this gap by looking at some of the critical reviews published in East German academic journals and also at internal records from the Socialist Unity Party archive. Particular emphasis is placed on the period after 1965 when East German scholars began to explore the historiographical and national implications of the Fischer controversy with a greater degree of sensitivity but also with a greater degree of caution (for strategic political reasons). A mutually beneficial exchange of ideas between Fischer and German Democratic Republic scholars working on the First World War continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s, although ironically this was at a time when both sides were moving ever further away from the idea of a possible reunification of the two Germanies in the future.

Some years ago my attention was drawn by Professors Paul Kristeller and William Nelson of Columbia University to two manuscripts – one in the Bibliothèque Publique de Besançon and the other in the Escorial – of a text that appeared to be the last work of Stephen Gardiner, a leading conservative churchman, diplomat and publicist in the Henrician period, and, from 1553 until his death in 1555, Mary Tudor's chancellor. The text is in Italian, and is titled Ragionamento dell’advenimento delli inglesi et normanni in Britannia – ‘ A discourse on the coming of the English and Normans to Britain’. The translator, George Rainsford, worked from an English original now lost, and appended to the Gardiner text his own Ritratto d'Ingliterra or ‘Description of England’; he dedicated the composite volume to Philip II, among whose books the Escorial manuscript had been. The dedication is dated 16 March 1556, some four months after Gardiner's death. Both the Gardiner text and the Rainsford appendix have now been published.

This historiographical review surveys studies by cultural historians of images of monarchs, including Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scots, Charles I, and Victoria. These are not biographies, but analyses of the diverse and often contradictory representations of monarchs in their own times and afterwards. The review considers the variety of approaches in the field, from iconographical decoding to political history to the application of psychoanalysis to a national culture. It discusses the extent to which queens tend to be conflated to an enduring model of idealized femininity; how seriously we should take representations of monarchs as sacred; and the incorporation of sexuality in the royal image. It considers resistance as well as assent to the royal image, and how far the royal image as art object can become detached from the ideology which produced it. It concludes by observing our mixed motivations for interest in past ‘cults’ of monarchs, seeking in them at once the exotic difference of the past and comparisons with public figures of our own time.

In July 1971, one of the most non-conformist and Western-oriented leaders in the Soviet bloc, made what appeared to many as a radical turn of his domestic policy: liberalization of arts, culture, and social life were drastically limited and the communist party engaged on a course which was strongly inspired by Stalinism. Since then, questions had been raised as to the reasons and the timing of the change. This article explores various hypotheses in light of newly available archival documents in order to assess the role of the external factors in precipitating or determining the change. Soviet pressures are considered as well as the Chinese source of inspiration, as the change had been initiated shortly after Nicolae Ceauşescu's visit to China, demonstrating that the change was the product of interfering factors. What appeared at the time to be a sudden and unexpected change had in fact been prepared years before, under various forms. Romania was at the time dealing with growing social expectations due to liberalization measures, just as most other East European societies, but Ceauşescu chose to react differently, in the Chinese-style of mass mobilization, aiming to consolidate his party's grip on society and avert risks of Soviet intervention.