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.

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.

Historians of Tudor government have tended to write about the relationship between rulers and ruled in terms of the ability of central government to impose on the localities things which they did not want, in particular the Reformation and taxes to fight wars. Students of the localities have written in terms of the local obstructions in the way of the enforcement of central directives. Students of parliament have examined that institution in terms of its power to block government initiatives. Students of the institutions of central government have explored their subject in terms of the degree of ‘bureaucratic’ development exhibited by these institutions, in other words, how well suited they were to the task of efficient government. But there is another aspect to the functioning of Tudor government, and that is the ways in which subjects could secure their own objectives by use of its machinery. Recent research has begun to provide some insight into this neglected topic. It is axiomatic to revisionist writing on parliament that parliament was, primarily concerned with legislation, and that legislation was as much a matter for localities and interest groups as it was for the crown. Diarmaid MacCulloch and Stephen Kershaw have pointed to the ways in which local communities turned to the central courts, and even the privy council, for support against aggressive landlordism. The accessibility of parliament, the council and the law courts, it may be argued, was a major factor behind the stability of English society in this period, offering a variety of fora within which redress of grievances might be pursued.

This is a review of recent English-language scholarship on the development of Russian identity since the collapse of the USSR in 1991. The first part examines literature on the economic and political changes in the Russian Federation, revealing how scholars became more sceptical about the possibility of Russia building a Western-type liberal democracy. The second part investigates approaches to the study of Russian national identity. The experience of empire, in both the tsarist and Soviet periods, gave Russians a weak sense of nationhood; ethnic Russians identified with the multi-national Soviet Union. Seeking legitimacy for the new state, President El'tsin sought to create a civic identity focused on the multi-national Russian Federation. The Communist and nationalist opposition continued to promote an imperial identity, focused on restoring the USSR or creating some other formation including the Russian-speaking population in the former Soviet republics. The final section discusses accounts of the two Chechen wars, which scholars see as continuing Russia's imperial policy and harming relations with Russia's Muslim population. President Putin's co-operation with the West against ‘terrorism’ has not led the West to accept Russia as one of its own, due to increasing domestic repression and authoritarianism.

Through an analysis of the debate between Charles Davenant in England, and Arthur Dobbs, Thomas Prior, and Samuel Madden in Ireland, it establishes that the founders saw the society as a response to Ireland's dependent status in the emerging British empire. The Dublin Society distinguished itself from other improving societies in the British Isles because it explicitly represented a new principle of sociality. The article describes the cultural origins of that principle arguing that a diverse set of groups converged on the ideal of association as a new form of order. The article concludes with a consideration of Madden's understanding, derived from his commitment to improving associations, that Irish national life was best understood as the pursuit of happiness rather than justice or virtue.

‘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 late nineteenth century is generally considered to be the period of Egyptology’s development into a scientific discipline. The names of Egyptologists of the last decades of the century, including William Flinders Petrie, are associated with scientific technique and objective interpretation as well as colonialist agendas. This article’s thesis is that rapid developments in scientific technique were largely driven by spiritual objectives rather than any other ideologies. Egypt – after being derided and ignored during the mid-century – became of great significance to the British when spectacular finds suggested that Egyptology might offer conclusive evidence against Darwinism and the higher criticism while proving events of the Old Testament to be historically true. Other groups used ancient Egypt – professing Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley as inspirations – but the teleologies they invariably produced owe more to spiritualism than to scientific naturalism, blurring boundaries between science, the occult, and religion. In terms of popularity traditional Christian approaches to ancient Egypt eclipsed all rivals, every major practising Egyptologist of the 1880s employing them and publications receiving large, demonstrably enthusiastic, audiences. Support for biblical Egyptologists demonstrates that, in Egyptology, the fin de siècle enjoyed a little-noticed but widely supported revival of Old-Testament-based Christianity amidst a flowering of diverse beliefs.

A study of the Victorian poacher raises several points of interest for historians of nineteenth-century society. First, he was such an ordinary figure, an accepted and normal part of rural life. In recent works of oral history, old people recall just how important poaching had been for their predecessors, and for the family and village economy. An examination of the statistics of rural crime in the nineteenth century reveals that, together with theft, trespass, vagrancy and Poor Law offences, poaching offences absorbed a major share of the magistrates' time. For example, in 1843, one in four convictions in Suffolk were against the Game Laws, whilst in Norfolk over 2,000 poachers were fined or imprisoned in the years 1863–71. Landowners such as Lord Ashburnham of Battle in Sussex, and Lord Musters and Sutherland in the Midlands, fought a daily, and sometimes losing battle, against these people. In the second quarter of the century poaching was widely regarded as one of the fastest growing crimes in Britain, and, unlike arson, highway robbery, cattle, horse and sheep stealing, it continued to be a prominent and permanent part of the rural scene. Even in the 1880s and 1890s contemporaries were periodically shocked by the bitterness and violence which accompanied this particular criminal activity. A study of poaching, therefore, tells us a good deal about the secret world of the village and the labourer.

The examination of Pufendorf's Monzambano shows that he was strongly interested in the question of sovereignty, and that the complex reality of the Holy Roman Empire demanded a completely new approach to the question of where sovereignty within the Empire lay. Pufendorf developed his account of the Empire as an irregular political system by using essential aspects of Hobbes's theory and thus departed from all previous writers on the forma imperii. But Pufendorf's writing on the Empire has not only to be linked with political and philosophical discussion about sovereignty within the Empire but also with his own main writings where he developed a more detailed theory regarding the issue of sovereignty in general. The peace of Westphalia was not only an international settlement but it also shaped the constitution of the Empire to a considerable degree, and this is of crucial significance for the history of political thought during the seventeenth century.

The comprehensive neglect of English church buildings in the century after the Reformation until the advent of Archbishop Laud has long stood as one of the standard readings of English church history. This article argues that attitudes towards the building and repair of churches in the pre-Laudian period were far more complex than has previously been recognized. It documents a sustained revival of church building and beautification in London that took place well before Laud's emergence, and which is inexplicable without reference to a whole range of practical and social, as well as religious, forces. This evidence, however, should not lead us to downplay the novelty and distinctiveness of the Laudian building programme. Rather, it is suggested here that Laudian polemic advanced a specific view of puritanism as incorporating a profane neglect and contempt of both church services and of the building which housed them. It is this vision of puritan neglect that not only provided a justification for Laudian changes to church practices and interiors in the 1630s, but which has also deflected the attention of later historians away from programmes of church repair in the reign of James I.

This review is intended to examine the development of representations of elves and fairies in British culture between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries. It will argue that a very clear two-stage evolution in those representations can be found in literary sources, from an inchoate range found in different kinds of text, with no apparent collective identity, to a coherent sense of a kingdom, to which the common word ‘fairy’ could be applied, to an intense interest in, and discussion of, the nature of fairies. The first development occurred in the late middle ages, and the second after the Reformation, and both were pan-British phenomena. These literary changes were, moreover, paralleled at each stage, and perhaps responsible for, changes in perception in culture at large. The alterations in representations of these non-human beings, with no clear status in Christian theology, may have wider implications for an understanding of late medieval and early modern cultural history.

‘Attainder’, A. F. Pollard once wrote, was ‘the characteristic instrument of Tudor policy’, and ‘acts of attainder [the’ favourite weapon’ of Henry VIII. Unfortunately Pollard did little more than throw out these striking phrases; he never made a systematic study of parliamentary attainder under die second Tudor. The use of attainder in die fifteenth century has been subjected to recent scholarly scrutiny, and certain bills from die period of Thomas Cromwell's ascendancy have been discussed by Professor Elton. But a careful examination of attainder under Henry VIII is still lacking. Since his reign marks die heyday of attainder by statute, such an inquiry is clearly important.

John Locke received the following letter from the Hague on 31 January 1689, whilst he was waiting in Rotterdam for a ship to take him home, now that his exile in Holland could come to an end after the Revolution:

I have been very ill this fortnight. The beginning was what is called the disease of one's country, impatience to be there, but it ended yesterday with violence, as all great things do but kings. Ours went out like a farthing candle, and has given us by this Convention an occasion not only of mending the Government but of melting it down and making all new, which makes me wish you were there to give them a right scheme of government, having been infected by that great man Lord Shaftesbury.

For historians of the Edwardian Conservative party one problem in particular continues to present severe difficulties. This problem in the history of the Conservative party was first outlined by Lord Blake in his study of the party from Peel to Churchill, namely how to explain the feet that Conservative politics came to be so dominated by the issue of Tariff Reform in the decade preceding the Great War. Indeed, to Lord Blake it seemed scarcely credible that the Conservatives should have even considered, let alone shackled themselves to, a policy which was apparently so disastrous both for the party's unity and its electoral prospects. Such incredulity is, in many ways, hardly surprising for, as all the studies of Tariff Reform have agreed, there were enormous difficulties involved in the adoption of this policy – and two problems in particular were clearly almost insurmountable. Firstly, the core of the Tariff Reform policy, that is to say the securing of the imperial markets for British producers through a system of preferential tariff agreements with the colonies, was severely handicapped by the fact that the self-governing colonies, the only worthwhile markets, were very lukewarm about the whole idea. This difficulty stemmed from the fact that the colonies had begun to develop their own fledgling industries and were thus none too keen to have them swamped by a flood of imported British manufactures. Secondly, the only agreement in which the colonies were interested entailed the Conservatives advocating duties on imported foreign grain and agricultural goods. This, of course, led to the Conservatives being labelled the party of ‘dear food’ and there seems little room for doubt that these ‘food taxes’ did the Conservatives a great deal of electoral damage, especially amongst the working-class electorate.

John Stubbs's controversial pamphlet against Elizabeth's proposed marriage with Francis, duke of Anjou, The discoverie of a gaping gulf (1579), has conventionally been seen – with Edmund Spenser's The shepheardes calendar and Philip Sidney's letter to Elizabeth – as part of a propaganda campaign organized by Leicester and Walsingham to force Elizabeth to reject the marriage. Yet the evidence linking Stubbs with Leicester and Walsingham is thin. This article re-examines that evidence in the light of recent research on court factionalism, men-of-business, and concepts of counsel. It argues that A gaping gulf was an independent initiative taken by Stubbs which expressed very different attitudes to ‘counsel’ from Sidney's letter. It suggests that participants in public debate need to be explored on their own terms, rather than as necessarily catspaws of councillors; that there was an emergent Elizabethan public sphere independent of the court which, in holding different attitudes to counsel than councillors, could bring them into conflict with Elizabeth.

From its inception, the committee on national expenditure chaired by Sir Eric Geddes has been regarded as one of the most controversial exercises in the reduction of public expenditure essayed by any modern British government. The appointment in August 1921 of Geddes and a team of fellow businessmen to report on means of reducing supply services expenditure drew the criticism from contemporaries that it represented the abrogation of the executive's responsibilities for fiscal policy. The three reports which the committee produced in early 1922 were no less controversial: seeking a reduction of almost £87m in supply estimates of approximately £528m, they have been seen as the most radical statement of the policy of retrenchment adopted by the Lloyd George coalition. In view of this, and of the proud hopes of reconstruction which had been fostered after the armistice, the Geddes committee has often been the subject of obloquies from post-war British historians of liberal sensibilities.

There can be no doubt that those who joined the officers corps in the eighteenth century became members of an exclusive club with its own distinctive values. These values were imposed on all members of the corps and, as is the case with most exclusive organizations, only a very few individuals were confident or perverse enough to challenge the group standards. The officers corps had an honour code; a set of principles which was informally enforced to ensure that each member soon learned proper from improper behaviour. When there were violations of the code the subaltern officers would bring peer group sanctions to bear in the form of social and professional ostracism until the offender cleared his name by removing the blot on his honour.

The Young Conservatives were primarily a social club, hosting dances, beauty contests, car rallies and winning endorsements from sports stars. They made a virtue of this apolitical reputation to recruit a mass, middle-class membership, and with rhetoric of service and citizenship embedded themselves in local civil society. This article reflects on why this associational culture has been neglected by political and social historians. In the approach of Raphael Samuel's ‘Lost world of British Communism’, it explores the worldview and lifestyle of YCs in 1950s and 1960s Britain, drawing on national, local, and oral sources. Boasting of being ‘the free world's largest youth political movement’ it was a considerable political resource and confounds Conservatism's aged public image in this period. The article accounts for the Ycs' falling membership through the 1960s and discusses its legacy. Decline came as it experienced social and cultural change, as the value of mass party membership diminished and as, after the Macleod report, YCs sought to become more conventionally ‘political’. The resulting debates about politics–social mix are illuminating about political culture more generally. It argues the YCs were not simply victims of social change, but that the decision to become ‘political’ was also a factor. Until the later 1960s it contends the YCs attest to the persistence of strands of Conservatism described by interwar historians like McKibbin and Light – an associational appeal, whose light touch deftly avoided the appearance of being partisan in anything other than name.

The 30 December 1546 date for the finalizing of Henry VIll's will is vindicated and the text re-established as the king's own work, namely (1) the supposed priority of a copy dated 13 December is shown to be erroneous; (2) the hypothesis that the will was manipulated by faction is rejected because (a) a reconstruction of the operating procedure of the Dry Stamp Office indicates the strong probability of the traditional date, (b) analysis of provisions allegedly suggesting forgery reveals no valid grounds for suspicion, and (c) circumstantial evidence; (3) the real interest of the Seymour faction in January 1547 is demonstrated as lying in implementing the king's intentions. An hypothesis is offered as to the king's motives. The prominence given to reformers is explained as projecting forward a movement from orthodoxy to reform which was inherent in the Supremacy. The conciliar provisions for Edward's reign are argued to be an attempt to create a closed regency council which would prevent both faction and individual bids for supremacy. The fact that Edward Seymour could become de facto regent only by a coup which jettisoned the will, is a vindication of Henry's provisions.