England has not known a simple two-party system, or a party system of any sort. The lineage of English parties is fragmented and discontinuous. Most of the apparent continuities, like the myth of a long-standing two-party system, have been invented in retrospect by politicians and publicists seeking the justification of a pedigree. Party itself has not been a constant phenomenon, which could be defined by the political scientist and then searched for by the historian. The English experience, rather, is of a succession of discontinuous two-, three-, even four-party systems whose components both develop and relate to each other through changing conventions. Often the fiction of the ‘two-party system’ has disguised the reality of three or more parties; parties which, themselves, can be the vehicles for a wide range of issues. It is a commonplace, which was evident to Hume and Bolingbroke, that whigs and tories exchanged many of their policy commitments in the early eighteenth century; but the same suggestion has been made of the Conservative and Labour parties today. The content of a party's programme has always been almost infinitely flexible; except in respect of the questions raised by a small number of threats, challenges or problems. The existence and endurance of party systems has usually articulated the ideological polarity which such challenges induce.

This article explores the response of the moderate wing of the civil rights movement to the war in Vietnam. The moderates, made up of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, and leaders such as Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, were initially opposed to the civil rights movement taking a stand against the war. This reluctance was the result of a number of factors, including anti-communism and their own closeness with the administration of President Lyndon Johnson. Crucially, it also resulted from their own experiences of the black freedom struggle itself. The article also documents and analyses the growing anti-war dissent amongst the moderates, culminating in the decision of both the NAACP and the Urban League to adopt an anti-war stance at the end of the 1960s. Despite this, they remained unenthusiastic about participating in peace movement activities, and the reasons for this are explained. Finally, the article suggests that the war was important in exposing existing divisions within the civil rights movement, as well as in generating new ones.

Historians have become increasingly concerned to describe and to explain the role of capital and capitalists in three related episodes of Transvaal history: the Jameson Raid at the end of 1895, tne outbreak of the South African War in 1899, and the Reconstruction period after that war. This article reviews recent analyses, and seeks a new synthesis of the published evidence.

This article demonstrates the connections between journalism, patriotism, and the culture of public discussion in late Victorian Britain, taking as a case study C. P. Scott's use of the Guardian in opposing the Boer War. It asserts that while opposing the war, Scott was simultaneously trying to redefine ‘patriotism’ and preserve a rapidly waning ideal of the press as an agent of public discussion, two interrelated goals. In contrast to a predominant image of the patriot as blind supporter of the government's imperial expansionism, the Guardian put forth an ideal of a critical patriotism. At the same time, Scott rejected the prevailing contemporary notion that the press should merely ‘represent’ the readers' interests. Instead, he sought to use leading articles and news reports to encourage a culture of public discussion. Scott's journalistic and political goals overlapped, as his notion of patriotism required maintaining a healthy public sphere. Although this study demonstrates Scott's role in the persistence of critical ideals of patriotism and journalism, it concludes that Scott had to content himself with appealing to an elite audience.

The political history of Liberalism in the twenty years after 1886 was dominated by two great concerns: the need to find a unifying platform for the party which would be capable of sustaining it as an effective political force in the post-Gladstonian era and the need to come to terms with the growing economic and political strength of organized Labour. It was axiomatic that the two concerns were closely connected and that ‘social reform’ was the crucial link between them. It seemed clear that a more active social policy would not only renew the reforming impetus of Liberalism, but would also enable the Liberals to retain working-class support and so help to prevent the formation of a separate Labour party. This was the assumption that spurred Liberals to a redefinition of their political creed and led to the formulation of a ‘new Liberalism’ committed to policies of state intervention and social reform of the kind implemented by Asquith, Churchill and Lloyd George after 1906.3 However, while the New Liberalism may have acted as a cohering influence on the Liberal party (itself a moot point) and provided a firm intellectual justification for its policies, it proved less successful as a means of retaining Labour's undivided electoral support. With the formation, first of the Independent Labour Party in 1893, and then of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900, there was set in train the formal organizational separation of the Liberal and Labour parties that was so drastically to affect the subsequent fortunes of Liberalism and so decisively to shape the pattern of modern British politics. The question that remains is whether this rift was the result of the tardiness with which the Liberals adopted their new policies, whether it was the product of other, quite separate factors, or whether in some way the nature of the New Liberalism itself may have contributed to the breach.

The historiography of English republicanism is dominated by the concept of classical republicanism. Its greatest shortcoming has been neglect of that subject's religious dimension. The consequent need is not simply to recover the radical protestant republican religious agenda. It is to explain why, when classical republicanism came to England, it did so in the moral service of a religious revolution. One context for the answer lay in Christian humanism. Another was the reformation, both magisterial and radical. Both informed the practical identity of the republican experiment as an attempted reformation of manners. So did the rational Greek moral philosophy, as indebted to Plato as to Aristotle, common to certain humanist and Christian political languages. In addition many of the themes of republican writing reflect the struggle by a traditional society to respond to unsettling forces, not only of political and religious, but also social and economic, change. Drawing upon all of these contexts, republican writers attempted to oppose not only private interest politics, embodied by monarchy or tyranny, on behalf of the public interested virtues of a self-governing civic community. This was part of a more general critique of private interest society; a republican attempt, from pride, greed, poverty, and inequality, to go beyond the word ‘commonwealth’ and reconstitute what Milton called ‘the solid thing’.

In the late eighteenth century, the British electorate began thinking about politics and statecraft in a new way. Britons challenged the natural rights of the nation's aristocracy to rule, and actively linked the personal behaviour of individual noblemen and women to real or imagined public consequences. Aristocratic gaming provided Britons with a rich vocabulary for voicing such concerns. The noble gamester, perceived as erratic, self-interested, and without honour, personified those aspects of private aristocratic vice most likely to undermine national well-being. The 1784 Westminster election specifies two aspects of this controversy. The political unworthiness of notorious gamester Charles James Fox (a front-runner in the election) was linked early on to his personal financial mismanagement, which intimated, in the public mind, his potential abuse of public funds. Fox further contaminated his suitability for public office by allowing the fifth duchess of Devonshire, herself a gamestress, to canvass for him. Her presence in Westminster not only dramatized Fox's gamester persona, but effeminized it. Pittite propaganda stressed Fox's culpability on both counts, and emphasized a new concern with private virtue as fundamental to the moral prerogative to rule.

In the eighteenth century, parish officers used the laws of settlement to regulate the immigration of the poor to their parishes. Their regulation went well beyond ridding their parishes of indigent immigrants. Parish officers monitored the immigration of the non-indigent poor; they insured that their parishes acquired the documents which guaranteed that a poor immigrant would not become the responsibility of the parish to which he had immigrated; and they even removed non-indigent immigrants from their parishes, using their parishes' funds to pay for sending these immigrants back to the parishes which were legally responsible for their welfare.1 To the modern observer, such regulation of migration from one parish to another may seem odd, so odd that some historians have assumed that this regulatory activity did not occur.2 Obviously, then, the parishes' regulation of immigration was part of a world now lost. Regulation of immigration by parish officers disappeared in 1795, when parliament abolished the legal foundations for this practice.3 In detective stories, discovery of the circumstances and implications of a disappearance reveals the structure of the world in which it occurred. So may it be with the regulation of immigration.

In 1882, when Dicey's so-called age of ‘Individualism’ was over and the high tide of laissez-faire was receding, there emerged for die first time in Britain a thoroughly dogmatic pressure group for extreme laissez-faire. This was the Liberty and Property Defence League. The League originated as part of what Beatrice Webb described as the ‘reaction against empirical socialism [which] came to a head under Mr Gladstone's administration of 1880–85’. But it out lasted Gladstone's second government and defended laissez-faire widi some effect until the end of the century.

This article considers British society's response to the suspension of cash payments in February 1797. Although this event marked the beginning of the so-called Bank Restriction Period, during which the Bank of England's notes were inconvertible, there have been no detailed studies on the social and political situation surrounding the suspension. This article provides an in-depth examination of the events leading up to and immediately following the suspension. It questions existing accounts of the suspension as a smooth transition into the nationwide use of paper money and describes the complex process that came into play to avert a nationwide financial collapse. The decision to suspend the Bank's cash payments stemmed from deep-rooted financial instability, exacerbated by recurrent invasion scares that heightened after the French attempt on Bantry Bay, Ireland, in December 1796. Under such circumstances, national support for drastic financial measures could not be taken for granted. The article demonstrates that the declaration movement, which was a form of consolidated and visualized trust in the financial system, played a crucial role in the 1797 suspension crisis.

On 21 October 1639 and 29 May 1652 the English Channel off the Downs and Dover was the scene of two highly significant events. The first of these was the crushing defeat inflicted on a Spanish armada by a Dutch fleet under the command of Maerten Harpertszoon Tromp while an English squadron commanded by Sir John Pennington watched from a distance and did nothing. On the second of the two dates Tromp and the English admiral Robert Blake clashed in the armed encounter off Dover which sparked off the first Anglo-Dutch War.

I would like to discuss George Mosse's excellent and stimulating book, Fallen soldiers, mainly from a French point of view, and to comment upon some issues about the political and moral consequences of the First World War upon French and German societies.

The core of the question is Mosse's assumption of a strong relationship between the war experience and the emergence of nazism in Germany. Hence, I shall examine first the reasons why, in Mosse's argument, Hitlerism appears as a consequence of the war. Then I ask why such an evolution did not happen in France, although the war experience was quite similar in the two countries.

This article addresses a neglected facet of a familiar political debate, the contribution of Anglican royalist writers to the Engagement controversy. A new interpretation of the core issues at stake in the debate is offered by focusing on these Anglican responses. The work of Quentin Skinner, Margaret Judson, and John Wallace concentrated on the discussion of the duty of obedience to de facto powers. This article contends, however, that it was a debate over the nature of oaths and the lawfulness of taking apparently contradictory sworn promises which was at the heart of the controversy. Writers offered competing interpretations of the bond of oaths and covenants, the supporters of the Rump claiming that they were conditional and dependent for the obligation on circumstantial considerations, the Engagement's opponents claiming that these sworn bonds were non-reciprocal and indissoluble. In this debate both pro- and anti-Engagement authors used casuistic arguments to urge their readers either to take or to refuse the declaration of loyalty to the Commonwealth. Yet, whilst in print Anglicans had counselled against subscribing, in two manuscript cases of conscience they allowed correspondents to take the Engagement.

On 27 February 1919, while Britain and most of Europe were gripped by serious industrial unrest, 600 trade unionists and 300 employers met leading cabinet ministers and civil servants at a National Industrial Conference in London. After a morning's debate, the trade unionists and employers separated, each to select thirty representatives to form a ‘provisional joint committee’ (P.J.C.) which might translate the morning's general good humour into hard practical proposals for mutual cooperation and reform. Within five weeks the committee had drawn up a report embracing twenty-six reforms, which was duly confirmed by the reconvened conference on 4 April and approved in principle by Lloyd George (with impeccable timing) on 1 May. The report was a major initiative in domestic policy. Although pledged at the 1918 election to build a ‘land fit for heroes’, the government – fully absorbed in the immediate problems of European settlement, demobilization and decontrol – had had little time to consider its practical implementation. With the report, both sides of industry had provided it with an agreed programme of reform which enabled it, in the industrial sphere at least, to commence the fulfilment of its election promises.

Political and historical studies are still severely handicapped by the absence of an historical dictionary of political terms and slogans. Without such a dictionary the investigation of significant political expressions is still very difficult and time-consuming, while the process of critical political self-understanding and education lacks a vital tool. The great philological dictionaries of the European languages are of little help in this field of political semantics, because they have been the work of scholars whose main interest was philology and literature. International links, historical perspective, and political sensitivity can be found in no dictionary of the English, French, or German language. Littré's French dictionary notes that Europe is the name of a number of heavenly bodies and plays a part in Greek mythology. The Oxford English Dictionary, on the other hand, treats Europe as a proper name and omits it altogether. Without the benefit of competent lexicographical guidance the intensive historical study of the idea of Europe, which has been carried out for the last twenty years, has failed to discover the time and circumstances which led to the adoption of Europe as a symbol of political interest. The main fault of past historical investigations lies in a concentration on literary works and famous men of letters and a neglect of political literature, pamphlets, and diplomatic documents. Political expressions are the offspring of national and international conflicts. They become stereotyped symbols of loyalty or enmity and one criterion of their establishment in political life is the frequency of their use—and abuse—by one recognizable political group. When and how did this first happen to Europe?

Over seventy years ago J. A. Hobson put forward the theory that the Anglo-Boer War had been created by the Rand mining magnates and their financial allies, in their search for increased profits. Subsequently this interpretation was extended to the immediate post-war period of British Crown Colony administration, for it was argued that the politics of the post-war period were equally dominated by the Rand mining magnates. More recently, increasing doubt has been cast on this interpretation, for it has been found, inter alia, that the idea of the mining industry engaged in politics as a coherent and monolithic group did not accord with the great variety of behaviour to be found in practice amongst the mining magnates. In the 1960s, however, an attempt was made to overcome this weakness and to return to a strictly economic interpretation of the period, by grafting on to Hobson's basic interpretation the concept of financially-based rivalry between conflicting groups of mining magnates as the key to Transvaal political divisions.

‘No member of this House’, proclaimed Bulstrode Whitelocke in February 1642 ‘ought to publish any speech or passage of this House, though it be very frequent.’ Very frequent it was; by this stage of the Long Parliament more than 100 purported speeches of named members were in printed circulation. Orations attributed to 45 M.P.s had been published, at a time when only ‘75 M.P.s made the motions, spoke to the issues, and delivered the reports of conferences and committees’. Printed speeches must have become a familiar genre to the customers of London booksellers. Invariably they were quarto in format; typically a pamphlet consisted of a single address, between three and eight sides in length and carelessly printed. Titles were informative and unpretentious: Mr. Thomas Pury his Speech upon the clause, the which concerns Deans and Chapters is a representative example. Most gave the date, or alleged date, of delivery, and the name of the printer responsible. There was nothing surreptitious, in other words, about the phenomenon. The chronological Thomason catalogue shows that speeches were significantly more numerous than any other kind of ephemeral tract, at least until March 1642, and that during the first session they were the only source of printed information about parliamentary debates. After March 1642 the flow of publication dried up. Large-scale publication of individual parliamentary speeches is therefore unique to a particular fifteen month period. Their importance, as historical sources, hardly needs stressing. The purpose of this article is primarily to explain the nature, and limitations, of the evidence this material can provide.

The overwhelming majority of studies of the relationship between the British government and private industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are, in reality, merely studies of the government's policy towards industry. The attitude of private industry towards the government has been almost entirely neglected, and this has inevitably led to a distorted understanding of the relationship as a whole. It is, for example, hardly ever made explicit in the extensive literature on the growth of state intervention in the British economy that in the decades before 1914 the assault on laissez-faire was pardy led by private industry itself. This development was most noticeable overseas, where the British government became involved in commerce and trade largely in response to requests for diplomatic support from British firms faced with growing competition from continental and American commercial interests, often supported by their respective governments.

Analysis of policy after 1945 has been profoundly shaped by the idea of a post-war settlement, which is increasingly viewed as inherently inflationary. For much of the period 1951–64, British economic policy was centrally focused on reducing inflation. The extension of sterling's convertibility in the mid-1950s forced British policy-makers to be sensitive to overseas perceptions of British policy and performance. At the beginning of the Conservative government's period in office, monetary policy was believed to be the most effective instrument to control inflation, but its limitations slowly became apparent and created enormous tension between the Treasury and Bank of England. In the literature stimulated by the Phillips curve, the formation of price expectations is the central element in inflationary dynamics, and it is argued that after 1955 Conservative policy was driven by the need to find alternatives to monetary policy to prevent and then limit inflationary expectations. A number of these initiatives – a steep rise in unemployment and confrontation in pay bargaining – sit uncomfortably with the idea of the post-war settlement and an alternative perspective on the Conservative years, emphasizing the Radcliffe committee and the investigations into incomes policy, is proposed.