The article reconstructs the seventeenth-century Dutch debate about the proper method to reconstruct the biblical temples of Jerusalem. It examines the involvement of Willem Goeree (1635–1711), an expert in architectural theory, in this debate which was dominated by philologically trained scholars. The article suggests that the clash between professional exegetes and a lay theologian like Goeree allows us to see hermeneutical debates of the early Enlightenment in a new light. While the skilled professional aspired to make arcane Temple scholarship accessible to a wider lay audience, theologians denied him the competence to do so, insisting on the primacy of sacred philology in interpreting the Bible. This case thus moves outside of the dogma vs reason dichotomy which dominates historiography concerning early modern biblical interpretation.

The 1890s can easily be portrayed as the era of missed opportunities in Anglo-German relations. Before the Kruger telegram, the Boer War, the Boxer rebellion and the Berlin to Bagdad railway, and most particularly before the naval race, it seems possible that Britain and Germany might have drawn closer together and that areas of mutual interest might have led to co-operation rather than antagonism. The failure to draw together in the 1890s, it can be argued, precipitated the series of disputes that progressively embittered Anglo-German relations. If only an understanding had been reached before each side became convinced of the other's enmity, if only men on both sides had been more reasonable, more judicious, more temperate, perhaps Europe could have avoided the division into armed camps, and perhaps the cataclysm of 1914 could have been averted.

During the nineteenth century, the Muslim Mediterranean became a locus of competing imperial projects led by the Ottomans and European powers. This article examines how the migration of people and ideas across North Africa and Asia complicated processes of imperial consolidation and exposed the ways in which North Africa, Europe, and Asia were connected through trans-imperial influences that often undermined the jurisdictional sovereignty of imperial states. It demonstrates that cross-border migrations and cultural transfers both frustrated and abetted imperial projects while allowing for the imagining of new types of solidarities that transcended national and imperial categorizations. In analysing these factors, this article argues for a rethinking of the metropole–periphery relationship by highlighting the important role print and trans-imperial networks played in shaping the Mediterranean region.

Recent studies of ‘total war’ depict a process of inexorable expansion leading to an often nebulous linkage of everything to war. This article takes the study of ‘total war’ in the opposite direction by studying a specific example of strategic restraint. It examines how the French bombing strategy that was developed over the course of the First World War went to considerable lengths to maintain a distinction between the civilian and the military. The article studies France's restraint by highlighting the strategic, geographical, institutional, and economic factors upon which it was built. It then goes on to examine the political pressures for an expansion of bombing which proved incapable of overturning this policy. Finally, it contrasts French restraint with that of its key ally, Great Britain. There, bombing developed into a strategic weapon designed to destroy the ‘home front’. This study of restraint underscores the importance of limits, and the attendant choices government has to make, in understanding the course and intensity of a country's mobilization for modern war.

Recently several works have illuminated the important role played by diplomats in the course of the religious wars of the latter half of the sixteenth century. We propose to shed some additional light on this general subject by studying the often curious activities of some Spanish envoys to France and England with respect to Spanish Protestants who had taken refuge in those lands. Through a careful scrutiny of related but seemingly minor matters we can frequently learn more about major ones.

In the spring and summer of 1942 the German military forces in north Africa and southern Russia made significant advances. In June the German army reached EI Alamein, only seventy miles west of Alexandria, while in August the German army reached the outskirts of Stalingrad. As a result of these German advances, Britain, which was the allied country with primary responsibility for defending the Middle East against the Axis powers, became concerned about the possibility that the German air force might attempt to bomb the oilfields and oil refineries in the Middle East in order to deny the oil in that area to the allied governments. Britain was also alarmed about the possibility that, instead of bombing the oil installations, the Germans might attempt to capture them intact in order to utilize the oil for their war machine. In 1942 total Middle Eastern oil production constituted only about six per cent of total world oil production. However, all Middle Eastern oil was refined locally - about two-thirds at Abadan in Iran - and played a vital role in the conduct of British military operations in the Middle East and southeast Asia.1 In 1942 Britain had troops stationed in Iran, Iraq, Egypt, and Bahrain, the four main Middle Eastern oil-producing nations, and thus was well placed to defend and, if necessary, to destroy the oil facilities in those countries. However, at this time Sa'udi Arabia, the remaining Middle Eastern oil producing nation, was a neutral power with no British or American troops stationed on its territory. As a result of Sa'udi neutrality it was difficult for Britain to defend the Sa'udi oilfields against German air attack. It was also difficult for Britain to make the necessary preparations to destroy the Sa'udi oilfields in the event that the German army advanced into the Arabian peninsula. The purpose of this communication will be to discuss the manner in which the British government attempted to deal with these problems. It will also discuss the reaction of the United States government and the American-owned oil company in Sa'udi Arabia to this situation.

Eighteenth-century Jamaica, the ‘devil of a country’ to which Dr Alexander Johnston referred, seems an unlikely candidate, at the historian's first glance, for consternation. Today's visitor would find that the ‘Garden Parish’, St Ann's, truly exudes everything warm and wonderful associated with tropical stereotypes. Yet two hundred years ago Dr Alexander Johnston, ‘Practitioner of Physick and Chiurgery’ rarely observed this very paradise, the foothills of coastal St Ann's, in a positive light. To this particular Scot, the bright reds and greens clearly took second place to the shabby problems of daily life in the Caribbean.

When Napoleon returned from exile on the island of Elba, he immediately set about gathering the support that he hoped would re-establish him as ruler of France. No sooner had he disembarked at Antibes on 1 March 1815 than he began issuing proclamations in which he portrayed himself as the leading soldier of the Republic and a man of the Revolution. His appeals found a welcome response in the French populace that astonished his opponents and perhaps surprised the emperor as well. Napoleon had changed the very nature of Bonapartism by allying himself with the tradition of the Revolution, and the federation movement which swept across France during the six weeks prior to Waterloo was a direct response to his new appeal.

In 1791, in one of the most remarkable documents penned in eighteenth-century Georgia, a group of white women petitioned for the life of a male mulatto slave who had been condemned to death not because of the offence he had committed but because of his reputation as ‘villain’. Although barely a page long, the Sunbury petition provides a fascinating statement of the racial attitudes, political consciousness and modus operandi of elite white women in early national Georgia. The women of Sunbury were articulating their understanding of the role and duties of women in the new republic. If necessary, those duties included correcting the civic behaviour of men.

One of the difficult and important decisions which confronted Napoleon during his last days in Paris concerned the use of his fleet. Strategically there was overwhelming argument for its immediate and energetic employment. On land, Austria was starting the war with large advantages; in numbers, in preparation, in position, in geographical facilities of every kind. But on sea, she was nowhere. Never a formidable naval power, her small fleet was at the moment in a condition of more than ordinary decrepitude. That of France, on the contrary, had recently been raised by the Emperor to a size and efficiency which had attracted the uneasy attention of the British admiralty. Obviously, therefore, if Italy were indeed to be freed to the Adriatic, it was of the first importance that France should assert and use to the full her maritime superiority in the Adriatic. Only so could the famous Quadrilateral be taken in the rear, and Austria made conscious of her one geographical disadvantage: the inadequacy of her railway communications with her front. The Emperor had accordingly given detailed instructions for the sending of such a fleet, prepared to effect a landing at Venice. But now at the last moment the threatening attitude of England caused him to countermand them. For the Derby government not only dispatched a formidable fleet itself to the Mediterranean, but proceeded to advance an urgent request for the neutralization of the Adriatic. ‘Before the Emperor leaves Paris,’ wrote Malmesbury to Cowley on 2 May, ‘make a great effort to keep us out of the war by obtaining his consent to neutralise the Adriatic.’

In 1648, Essex was the scene of a major military campaign of the Second Civil War. This essay seeks to explain why that campaign was fought. There are several reasons why such an investigation is worthwhile. Firstly, it challenges the fashionable historical idea that the Civil Wars were fundamentally a conflict between centre and localities. Secondly, it concentrates upon the Second Civil War as a serious proposition, not as a pathetic appendage of the earlier conflict to be dismissed with contempt but not consideration. Thirdly, it demands a look at Essex as a county caught up in the violence of civil war.

The conservative tradition in America. By Charles W. Dunn and J. David Woodard. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1996. Pp. ix+199. ISBN 0-8476-8167-X. $14.95.

Hoods and shirts: the extreme right in Pennsylvania, 1925–1950. By Philip Jenkins. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. 343. ISBN 0-8078-2316-3. $29.95.

From demagogue to Dixiecrat: Horace Wilkinson and the politics of race. By Glenn Feldman. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc., 1995. Pp. xviii+311. ISBN 0-8191-9783-1. $32.50.

From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: race in the conservative counterrevolution, 1963–1994. By Dan T. Carter. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Pp. xv+134. ISBN 0-8071-2118-5. £21.95.

According to political scientists Charles W. Dunn and David Woodward in The conservative tradition in America, the dramatic Republican gains in the 1994 elections exemplified the eclilse of New Deal liberalism by a resurgent conservatism, a politcal shift that began in the late 1960s and which Ronald Reagan's victory in the 1980 fortified. In their short survey the authors investigate the intellectual roots of modern conservatism and attempt to define and explain the recent manifestation of this heritage. The three other recent works reviewed here provide a larger historical context, which Dunn and Woodward ignore, for understanding conservatism and right extremism in America.