The internal dissessions and upheavals in the Unionist party following the catastrophic defeat incurred at the general election of 1906 have been the subject of frequent examination by historians. Despite, or perhaps because of, the importance of the issues involved there has been general agreement that questions of policy were at the centre of this struggle. Balfour's official biographer has commented that any rumours of ‘disputed leadership’ were ‘ludicrous in the light of the correspondence that was passing in private’, while Chamberlain's biographer has asserted that he was staking ‘everything on policy’. Recently Dr Judd has suggested that Chamberlain ‘envisaged…a reunited Unionist party…very probably under his leadership not Balfour's’, but he took this analysis no further and Mr Fraser's judgement is typical that what took place was ‘a polite but ruthless struggle for the control of the Unionist party's machinery and policy’. The Birmingham leader is characteristically seen to have played through the whole episode with the straightest of bats, bound above all by personal loyalty to Balfour. Contemporaries, however, saw a different Chamberlain – one whose ruthless ambition bordered on fanaticism. Balfour noted that Chamberlain ‘cannot realize that because he is only thinking of one thing, it does not follow that every one else has the same limited intensity of vision’. Some were prepared to interpret Chamberlain's machinations in terms of a dual personality: ‘You know there are two Joes and that one honestly sees no harm in prosecuting such a manoeuvre’, but others were ready to place more sinister constructions upon them:

This article presents a reinterpretation of John Locke's contribution to debates about the interest rate in the seventeenth century. It suggests that his argument that England should maintain the ‘natural’ rate, rather than impose a lower rate, was motivated by his theological, moral, and social conceptions of credit and its dependence on trust. In order to solve the endemic shortage of metal coin limiting the growth of monetary exchange in England, Locke stressed that the higher, ‘natural’ rate of interest would facilitate interpersonal borrowing and lending among neighbours, allowing currency to flow more freely around the country. By contrast, while he acknowledged that institutional creditors such as goldsmith-bankers could quicken the circulation of money by issuing debt instruments like bills of exchange, he saw institutional credit as a threat to the moral community. Not only did he question how people could rationally trust financiers without any epistemic apprehension of their personal probity, but he moreover doubted whether individuals accumulating so much money were likely to act trustworthily. Finally, using an otherwise unstudied dialogue about the Bank of England, this article argues Locke extended his criticisms about the threats posted by private banks to the country's nascent system of public credit.

In Britain's empire across Asia and Africa from the mid-nineteenth century, two political-legal principles were central to colonial modernity, law and order, and the rule of law. These two principles secured the legitimation of colonial rule, in the eyes of those who ruled. It is striking then to see that in late colonial Burma, in the 1920s and 1930s, the colonial government struggled to maintain law and order and to embed the rule of law. Violent crime soared while the criminal justice system failed hopelessly for serious offences. This article seeks to explore the ways in which senior British officials in Burma navigated the disjuncture between the imperial principles that were central to colonial justification and Burma's reality. Perhaps most notably, they did so by putting blame for the soaring crime rates and the failures of the criminal justice system firmly on the Burmese. In the early 1940s, however, with the end of colonial rule clearly imminent, the legitimation of the colonial presence became of less pressing importance, and the failure of colonial practice to live up to its ideological rhetoric could now be more openly faced.

In the first half of the twentieth century, parole in the Deep South of the United States was part of a nexus of penal mechanisms providing white employers with a pliant black labour force. By contrast, in New York, which was at the forefront of innovations in parole policy, there was a surprising interracial consensus among white parole administrators and politicians, civil rights activists, and black prisoners themselves that the African American community was integral to parole administration and success. This article explores why different constituencies supported this consensus through debates on parole in the black press and via the desperate, and invariably futile, letters that prisoners wrote to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). These sources also indicate that, for black prisoners in New York, African American influence over the parole system was routinely constrained by widespread black poverty, racial segregation, and discrimination in employment.

The dense marginal annotation made by freethinker, John Toland (1670–1722) and republican author and parliamentarian, Sir Robert Molesworth (1656–1725) on a copy of Martin Martin's Western Islands (1716) is an exceptional source for exposing the relationship between elite sociability and intellectual conversation. As an example of collaborative serial reading the case-study is unique, and allows a number of historical enquiries. Contextualizing Toland's and Molesworth's collaborative reading of the Royal Society sponsored work with the political and anticlerical projects both men pursued, the article argues that the surviving annotations are emblematic of the erudite, but still politically engaged, republic of letters of the period. Establishing the polemical engagement with clerical discourses about superstition, credulity, and ‘natural’ knowledge, by examining the literary, intellectual, and personal rhetoric at work in the marginalia, the article explores a case-study of cultural and intellectual debate at work in the early English Enlightenment.

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.

Scholarly works dealing with the Long Parliament's military finances have often necessarily relied on sampled data and exemplary evidence. This communication demonstrates that full, systematic analyses of the relevant materials in the Commonwealth Exchequer Papers have the potential to alter our understanding of these finances when certain questions are asked. Lacking a detailed calendar, this vast collection of documents is extraordinarily complex and opaque, and because of this it is very hard to deal with holistically. Nevertheless, this communication demonstrates that achieving a broad yet precise view of this vital quantitative material is sometimes possible. It will be suggested here that the army of the earl of Essex enjoyed full payment from the moment of its creation in August 1642 until the end of that October. This will be demonstrated by comparing the total payments received by the foot soldiers to a newly calculated model of their monetary needs during the period in question. Ultimately, there are many possible reasons for the army's failure to secure a decisive victory at Edgehill, but a financial crisis at the political centre was not one of them.

Interpretations that solely emphasize either continuity or controversy are found wanting. Historians still question how the English became Protestant, what sort of Protestants they were, and why a civil war dominated by religion occurred over a hundred years after the initial Reformation crisis. They utilize many approaches: from above and below, and with fresh perspectives, from within and without. Yet the precise nature of the relationship of the Reformation, the civil war, the interregnum and the Restoration settlement remains controversial. This review of recent Reformation historiography largely validates the current consensus of a balance of continuity and change, pressure for further reform and begrudging conformity. Yet ultimately it argues that continuity must form the foundation for any interpretation of the Reformation, for controversial or dramatic alterations to the status quo only made sense to contemporaries in the context of what had come before. Challenging ideas, like challenging individuals, did not exist in a vacuum devoid of historical context. The practical limits of possibility, constrained largely by the established norms and procedures, shaped the course of English Reformation. As such, practicality seems a unifying and central theme for current and future investigations of England's long Reformation.

This review provides an overview and critique of recent scholarship on German National Socialism. It focuses on four problems through which historians have recently challenged the Marxist scholarship that played a significant role in shaping debates on Nazism in the sixties and seventies : the composition of the Nazi electorate, the Nazi ‘racial state’, Nazi social policy, and the Holocaust. Although acknowledging the importance of such themes in recent work as the Nazi regime's racism, anti-Semitism, and modernity, the review maintains that the key issue in Marxist scholarship, the polarization between left and right during the interwar period in Europe, provides the essential context for understanding the Nazi regime's ideological extremes and racial practices. To make its case, it explores four examples of the left's influence, the German left's relative cohesion as political and social movements, its place in the discourse of ‘racial hygiene’, its role in debates on the ‘standard of living’, and finally, its relevance to Nazi expansionism and the ‘Final Solution’.

The Spanish Armada and the battle of Lepanto loom large in a remarkable period of international history shaped to a considerable extent by the deployment of sea power. Yet between 1581 and 1583, France also conducted a large-scale naval operation at great distance. A series of expeditions to the Azores reached a climax with the defeat in battle of a French fleet of sixty ships off the island of São Miguel in July 1582. Acting under the authority of Catherine de Medici and in the name of her rival legal claim to the Portuguese throne, the commander Philippe Strozzi had not only led the most ambitious oceanic operation in French history up to that date and a bid to extend France's overseas empire but a serious challenge to Philip II's union of the Iberian crowns. Yet this was more than just a puzzling anomaly in France's foreign policy. It was also an act of royal authority and the pursuit of reputation and status by the queen mother that was entirely consistent with the domestic priorities of the crown in the context of the Wars of Religion.

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.

Zeroing in on private garden plots, the article discusses the manner in which Germans portrayed themselves in relation to displaced persons (DPs) – former foreign workers, Allied prisoners-of-war (POWs), and concentration camp inmates – in immediate post-Second World War Hanover. Challenging the notion that a coherent narrative of German victimization truly emerged only in the 1950s, the article reveals how German gardeners already articulated loudly a discourse through which they sought to depict themselves as decent, hard-working sufferers, while portraying displaced persons as immoral and dangerous perpetrators. The plots of garden owners, as foci of German yearnings for Heimat, came particularly under threat. Germans cherished such sites, not only because they provided the opportunity for procuring additional sustenance amidst a post-war world of scarcity, but because they symbolized longings to inhabit a peaceful, productive, and beautiful space into which the most turbulent history could not enter, and upon which a stable future could be constructed. Only with the removal of DPs could Germans claim for themselves the status of victims, while branding DPs perpetrators, and reaffirm past patterns of superiority and inferiority in both ethical and racial terms. In so doing, Germans could realize the innocence integral for achieving Heimat and establish democratic stability after 1945.

The sixteenth-century theologians of the School of Salamanca are well known for their sophisticated reflections on the Spanish conquest of the New World. But the nature of their responses seems far from clear and is subject to historiographical debate. Recent studies from the discipline of intellectual history suggest that the Salmantine theologians challenged the legitimacy of Spanish claims to the Americas. Scholars associated with the field of post-colonial studies, on the other hand, forcefully stress their entanglement in Spain's imperial venture overseas. This article, however, argues that these seemingly irreconcilable approaches are not in fact mutually exclusive. It shifts our attention to the sorely neglected ius praedicandi, the right to preach the gospel, which served to translate the Spanish theologians’ deeply rooted belief in the hegemonic truth of the Christian faith into a discourse of otherwise ‘secular’ natural rights. In adopting this novel lens, the article makes a case for assessing the language of the university theologians in its own terms while simultaneously exposing the support of Salamanca for Spain's imperial venture.

During the 1890s evangelical Protestants took to preaching on the streets in southern Irish towns and cities. They provoked an angry response, with large Catholic crowds gathering to protest at their activities. This created a difficult situation for the authorities. Obliged, on the one hand, to protect the rights and liberties of the preachers, they also looked to nurture behaviour appropriate to the sectarian realities in Ireland. At stake was the extent to which Ireland could be treated as an undifferentiated part of the United Kingdom, with W. E. H. Lecky increasingly recognizing the need for a different legal basis in Ireland. These events formed part of the wider evolution of ‘constructive unionism’. More broadly, respectable Irish Protestant and Catholic disapproval of preachers and the ‘mob’ revealed the way in which class attitudes cut across sectarian identities, suggesting that the political dividends paid the wider unionist movement by this exposure of the apparent realities of ‘Rome rule’ were little valued in the locale. Similarly, interventions by home rule politicians reinforced the sense that conciliating British public opinion was a central concern. Here was an example of how locally orientated sectarianism helped shape national political agendas.

The signing of the Lateran Pacts between Mussolini and Pius XI not only changed the status of the Vatican, it also transformed its financial position overnight. After decades of financial difficulty, the Vatican acquired a substantial capital endowment, the investment of which the pope entrusted to Bernardino Nogara. But as the diary of Nogara reveals, as a result of the pope's ambitious spending plans, the lack of a proper system of financial control in the Vatican, and, above all, the impact of the Wall Street crash, within less than two years the Vatican was losing money hand over fist. This article explains how Nogara reconstructed the finances of the Vatican in the wake of this disaster, and explores the links between the Vatican's first experience of playing the international capital markets and the pope's notions of social and economic ethics.