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.

This article examines the circulation of printed questionnaires as a research strategy among those investigating the constituent parts of the British Isles between the mid-seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries. It traces the origins and development of published ‘heads’ or ‘articles of enquiry’ as a means of acquiring information on antiquities, geography, and natural history and pieces together the research networks through which this methodology was shared and elaborated. The learned societies, ecclesiastical infrastructure, and periodical publications of the day are shown to have been instrumental in promoting this practice and in forging links between scholars and the ‘learned and ingenious’ in the parishes to whom such ‘queries’ were addressed. It is argued that these questionnaires were an important and insufficiently appreciated aspect of regional studies during the period. Though the responses to them are shown to have been highly variable, both in quantity and quality, it is suggested that they helped to establish what has become an important technique of data collection in modern academic inquiry.

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.

By the time Hobbes wrote Leviathan, he was a theist, but not in the sense presumed by either side of the present-day debate concerning the sincerity of his professed theism. On the one hand, Hobbes's expressed theology was neither merely deistic, nor confined to natural theology: the Hobbesian God is not merely a first mover, but a person who counsels, commands, and threatens. On the other hand, the Hobbesian God's existence depends on being constructed artificially by human convention. The Hobbesian God is not a natural person; he exists as a person only insofar as he is by fiction represented. Like the state and pagan gods, he is an artificial person by fiction. The upshot is that Hobbes was a sincere theist and that his seventeenth-century critics were right to think that, in their sense, he was an atheist: he did not steadfastly believe in an independently existing deity who precedes human convention. Hobbes was agnostic on this question. He nevertheless believed that God is brought into being as an artificial person. This ‘personal theology’ not only involved a heretical interpretation of the Trinity, it also came to play a significant role in his moral and political philosophy.

This is a review of recent English- and German-language publications on suicide, both as an act and a subject of discourse, in the early and late modern periods. It argues that, while publications on the theme have increased considerably in the past two decades, the problematic character of the evidence for suicide has led to a focus on attitudes to suicide at the expense of empirical investigations. The latter have largely confirmed the link between social isolation and suicide, posited by Durkheim, but have revealed differences in patterns across social groups. The growth of lenient attitudes to suicide has proven to be more protracted and contested than originally believed. The ambivalent role of clergy, the persistence of religious sanctions against suicide, and continued efforts by the state to curb suicide all suggest that the term ‘hybridization’ better characterizes the changes over this period than the older term ‘secularization’. Finally, this review recommends that historians undertake further empirical investigations of suicide, where possible, and that they broaden suicide research to include suicidal behaviours and alternative responses to despair in order to identify the specific allure of suicide.

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.

This article assesses the state of modern English rural history. It identifies an ‘orthodox’ school, focused on the economic history of agriculture. This has made impressive progress in quantifying and explaining the output and productivity achievements of English farming since the ‘agricultural revolution’. Its celebratory account was, from the outset, challenged by a dissident tradition emphasizing the social costs of agricultural progress, notably enclosure. Recently a new school, associated with the journal Rural History, has broken away from this narrative of agricultural change, elaborating a wider social history. The work of Alun Howkins, the pivotal figure in the recent historiography, is located in relation to these three traditions. It is argued that Howkins, like his precursors, is constrained by an increasingly anachronistic equation of the countryside with agriculture. The concept of a ‘post-productivist’ countryside, dominated by consumption and representation, has been developed by geographers and sociologists and may have something to offer historians here, in conjunction with the well-established historiography of the ‘rural idyll’. The article concludes with a call for a new countryside history, giving full weight to the cultural and representational aspects that have done so much to shape twentieth-century rural England. Only in this way will it be possible to move beyond a history of the countryside that is merely the history of agriculture writ large.

On returning to England in 1900 after an absence of some thirty-two years, James Ford Rhodes was much surprised by a number of changes he observed, and more particularly by the novel attitude of a number of newspapers and journals which had previously reflected more traditional assumptions and beliefs. Radicals, from Paine and Cobbett, Bentham and the Mills to Cobden, Bright and the Manchester School had traditionally identified America as the precursor of the new millennium. In contrast to this radical tradition was a conservative counter-theme that insisted that within its revolutionary and republican origins lay the seeds of American self-destruction. All such convictions seemed confirmed by the civil war, and The Times under Delane – the apogee of this conservative tradition – continued to prophesy the imminent collapse of the Union throughout most of the war. Yet in 1901 Rhodes noticed a far more sympathetic approach to American matters by the conservative Times and Spectator, and their formerly denigrating tone now echoed ironically in the pages of the radical Speaker. The purpose of this article is to try to explain some of the intellectual origins of this fundamental realignment, with reference to changing English interpretations of the American race, of the American revolution and of the American constitution, particularly as reflected in James Bryce's American Commonwealth, the classic exposition of this reinterpretation. This realignment was effected by a small body of academics, jurists and intellectuals whose writings in learned journals, legal textbooks and works of comparative politics lacked extensive appeal.

Since the 1960s, the politics of the period 1860 to 1906 have received much attention, particularly by historians of the Conservative party. On the whole, it has been argued that Conservative electoral success during this period was a ‘negative’ achievement. Through an examination of the election of 1895 this article questions this argument. It suggests that both the nature of the Unionists' appeal and the factors behind their performance in general elections in this period have to an extent been oversimplified since the pioneering quantitative work of James Cornford. A content analysis of Liberal and Unionist candidates' election addresses is presented in order to make sense of the issues of the campaign, full details of which can be found in the appendix to this article. The Liberal message is shown to be more coherent, and that of the Unionists more positive, than is usually assumed. Cornford's methodology is also challenged, and an alternative (and simpler) approach is suggested. It is argued that in 1895 there was in general no inverse correlation between Conservative vote and turnout, or between Conservative vote and changes to the electoral registers. And although party organization was very important to the Unionists' success there seems little evidence of any over-arching plan to keep both turnout and the number of registered electors down.

The Colony of Sierra Leone originated in settlements of freed slaves on the West African coast carried out on the initiative of British philanthropists in the later eighteenth century. For over a century, British responsibility was as far as possible restricted to the small mountainous peninsula on which Freetown stands, and to certain nearby islands; but influence was inevitably obtained over nearby coast and hinterland, and during the nineteenth century some additional territories were incorporated in the Colony, though not always brought under effective administration. In 1896 the remaining regions not conceded to be under French or Liberian influence were proclaimed a British Protectorate; which also included, for administrative purposes, certain chiefdoms formerly part of the Colony. In this period, therefore, the term ‘Colony’ is applied to the peninsula and islands originally settled, with a few predominantly tribal areas around the river Sherbro; the term ‘Protectorate’ to territories the size of Ireland, which form the great bulk of the area marked ‘Sierra Leone’ on a modern map, and whose social organization was at this time exclusively tribal. At the beginning of 1898 British officials began to collect a House Tax which had been imposed on three of the five districts of the Protectorate. In February, resistance to the tax by certain Temne chiefs developed into open warfare in the north, and at the end of April a series of savage attacks took place on British and American subjects, mostly of African birth and descent, among the Mende and Sherbro people further south. These two outbreaks constitute the insurrection to be studied in this paper.

Historians have portrayed the Virginia Company and its colony, the first permanent English settlement in America, as an essentially commercial enterprise. The atmosphere of the colony is represented accordingly as one of proto-capitalist individualism. This paper shows that the Virginia Company promoters described the aims of its colony in civic terms: that is, in terms of a politics of virtue, citizenship, and the pursuit of the common good. Promoters of the colony drew on a civic tradition particularly hostile to commerce; a tradition in which wealth was portrayed as Asiatic luxury and corruption. The civic arguments of the Company were a response to the commercial and human disasters which characterized the first years of the colony and its Elizabethan predecessors. The civic ideology promoted by the Company was an attempt to remedy what were perceived to be the causes of this disastrous situation – corruption, greed, faction, and idleness. The promoters' civic arguments also provided an ideological motivation both for potential investors and colonists who might otherwise have been deterred by the financial and human expense.

This article examines the scholarly recovery and popular reception of ‘ancient poetry’ in later eighteenth-century England, with a view to elucidating the relationship between cultural primitivism and more overtly politicized discourses of national identity. The publication of the poems of Ossian, in the early 1760s, gave a new prominence to the earliest cultural productions of Celtic antiquity, and inspired the attempts of English literary historians, such as Thomas Percy and Thomas Warton, to provide an alternative ‘Gothic’ genealogy for the English literary imagination. However, both the English reception of Ossian, and the Gothicist scholarship of Percy and Warton, were complicated by the growing strength of English radical patriotism. As popular political discourse assumed an increasingly insular preoccupation with Saxon liberties and ancient constitutional rights, more conservative literary historians found their own attempts to ground English poetic tradition in some form of Gothic inheritance progressively compromised. The persistence of ancient constitutionalism as a divisive element of English political argument thus curtailed the ability of Gothicist literary scholarship to function as an effective vehicle for English cultural patriotism.

This essay surveys literature on the engagement of different European empires, including the French, British, Dutch, Russian, and German, with Islam. While the history of Islam and empire has attracted the attention of scholars for decades, most of their studies have been written primarily as contributions to the historiography of a specific empire or a distinct geographic region and rarely refer to research on other imperial powers, even though the questions and themes raised are remarkably similar. The article brings together these studies, exploring the following topics: Islam and imperial rule and, in particular, the ways in which religious institutions were accommodated and controlled in the colonial state; Islam and anti-imperial resistance; and the relationship between Islam, information, and colonial knowledge. It assesses the dominant themes in the field and points to a number of questions that remain to be studied.

Perceptions of the role of the book in the Reformation are shaped by our knowledge of the German print world during the first decades of Protestant expansion. All indications point to evangelical domination of the press in the years when Luther first became a public figure, when the printed book undoubtedly played a crucial role in the dissemination of the evangelical message, and printing enjoyed a period of exuberant growth. But it is by no means certain that assumptions derived from this German model hold good for other parts of Europe. This article re-examines the German paradigm of book and Reformation in the light of two recent bibliographical projects. The first, a trial survey of publishing outputs throughout Europe, demonstrates that the different regional print cultures that made up the European book world were organized in radically contrasting ways. These structural differences were highly significant from the point of view of assisting or impeding the output of controversial literature. The lessons from this survey are then applied to an individual case study, France, which, it emerges, deviated from the German model in almost every particular. Together these two sets of data force us to call into question the natural affinity between print and Protestantism suggested by the German paradigm.

There are several points in post-war history at which, it is argued, Britain lost an early opportunity to enter the European community. The refusals to join the Schuman Plan and Messina deliberations in the 1950s, and the failure of the E.E.C. applications of Macmillan and Wilson, are most commonly mentioned. But some commentators have pointed to another ‘missed opportunity’, following Winston Churchill's return to Downing Street in October 1951. For, in opposition, Churchill had seemed a great exponent of European unity, and several of his ministers – foremost among them the home secretary, Maxwell Fyfe, and housing minister, Harold Macmillan – had shown great enthusiasm for his ideas. Hopes that Churchill's government would favour a more positive approach to European unification were quickly disappointed, however: within weeks the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, had ruled out any direct British role in Europe's emerging ‘supranational’ institutions, and in 1952 he defeated some determined efforts by Macmillan to change his policy. The ‘pro-Europeans’ did not forget this ‘betrayal’, however. They argued that a real opportunity to take the leadership of Europe had been lost and in the ensuing years, as Britain's failure to join the European community became more generally criticized, their thesis seemed credible. An examination of the evidence, however, allows a very different picture of this ‘missed opportunity’ to be painted.

Following the Paris Commune of 1871, around 3,500 Communard refugees and their families arrived in Britain, with the majority settling in the capital. This article is an exploration of these exiled Communards within the geography of London. The spatial configurations of London's radical and exile communities, and the ways in which Communards interacted with those they crossed paths with, is vital in understanding how some of the ideas that came out of the Commune permeated London's radical scene. Too often British political movements, particularly British socialism, have been presented as being wilfully impervious to developments on the continent. Instead, this article argues that in order to find these often more affective and ancillary foreign influences, it is important to think spatially and trace how the exile map of London corresponded with, extended, and redrew parts of the existing radical mapping of the city. In carving out spaces for intellectual exchange, Communard refugees moved within and across various communities and physical places. The social and spatial context in which British sympathizers absorbed and appropriated ideas from the Commune is key to understanding how the exiles of the Paris Commune left their mark on the landscape, and mindscape, of London.

This article presents a reinterpretation of James Harrington's writings. It takes issue with J. G. A. Pocock's reading, which treats him as importing into England a Machiavellian ‘language of political thought’. This reading is the basis of Pocock's stress on the republicanism of eighteenth-century opposition values. Harrington's writings were in fact a most implausible channel for such ideas. His outlook owed much to Stoicism. Unlike the Florentine, he admired the contemplative life; was sympathetic to commerce; and was relaxed about the threat of ‘corruption’ (a concept that he did not understand). These views can be associated with his apparent aims: the preservation of a national church with a salaried but politically impotent clergy; and the restoration of the royalist gentry to a leading role in English politics. Pocock's hypothesis is shown to be conditioned by his method; its weaknesses reflect some difficulties inherent in the notion of ‘languages of thought’.

This article argues that the development of teaching as a profession for women in England has often been written using an anachronistic and gendered conception of the term ‘profession’. A closer examination of the work of middle-class schoolmistresses in the first part of the nineteenth century reveals that the image of the amateurish governess was in part a fiction, which concealed the commitment and expertise of many women teachers. The mid-century reformers drew on this earlier tradition of feminine pedagogy and did not simply adopt the standards of boys’ education and their male peers. On the contrary, they contributed to the ongoing process by which teachers of both sexes sought to claim the status and authority of the ‘learned professions’. However, by the 1870s, the pressure to conform to the dominant model in boys’ education meant that this independent strand in education had largely been eclipsed.

The literary tradition about the makers of early written codes in Greece presents so many contradictions and inconsistencies that it is natural to take refuge in complete scepticism. But if the tradition is analysed, it appears that there are two strata, the first reasonably consistent, matter-of-fact and credible, the second progressively vitiated by influences which can be isolated and explained. The division between the two strata lies about the year 300 B.C. and the primary tradition is not necessarily less credible because of the existence of the secondary tradition, which proves not that the primary tradition was false, but that truth itself could not prevail against the pseudo-history which set in after Aristotle. The primary tradition about the personalities of the early makers of codes cannot be lightly rejected; the content of their codes, as far as it is given in the primary tradition, is not inconsistent with the general character of early Greek lawgiving as it can be reconstructed from other evidence.