This article is concerned with the longing for home of British soldiers during the First World War. What, it asks, can such longings reveal about the psychological impact of trench warfare? Historians have differed in the significance that they ascribe to domestic attachments. Some argue that a ‘cultural chasm’ developed between the fronts, producing anger and disillusionment among soldiers which would surface fully fledged after the war, while others assert the continuing vitality of the links with home. Evidence for both these perceptions can be found in the letters written by British soldiers to their families. The functions of nostalgia could range from reassurance or momentary relief from boredom and impersonal army routines, through flight from intolerable anxiety, to survival through the power of love. Although animated by solitude, nostalgia provided a means of communication with loved ones. Its emotional tones varied according to the soldier's age and the nature of his attachments to home. The young soldier's reminiscences of home conveyed, not just the comforting past, but the hateful present. Nostalgia, being rooted in early memories of care, could be a potent vehicle for arousing the anxieties of loved ones, especially mothers. Among married men, the desire to return to wives and children could provide a powerful motivation for survival. This analysis suggests a different and more varied account of the genesis of the ‘disillusionment story’ of the war than is put forward in some recent studies. Among men of the ‘war generation’ particularly, disillusionment was not only a post-war construction, an artefact of cultural memory, but a powerful legacy of the emotional experience of the war itself.

The Third Reform Act has never received the attention which historians have given to its famous predecessors, though its political effects were arguably the most profound of the three. And though there was not the same pressure from extra-parliamentary agitation as in 1831–2 or 1866–7, the enactment of a major electoral reform in 1884–5 predictably overshadowed other parliamentary business. Lord Kimberley saw this clearly in 1883: ‘From the time when we propose the extension of the county franchise until (by some Government) the Redistribution of Seats is carried, there will be a political crisis and all other measures will be practically postponed.’ But in their explanations of the prolonged controversy, which lasted until the end of November 1884, historians have become absorbed in the tactical aspects of the political game and have tended to lose sight of the substantive issues at stake. Charles Seymour stated in 1915 that ‘the question of reform in 1884 was…fought out, not on principles, but upon the method of procedure’. Professor Weston has depicted the situation in terms of a Tory ‘cave’ fostered by the queen, forcing negotiation upon a reluctant Salisbury; while Dr Fair, in seeking to rebut her argument, has taken a similar standpoint to Seymour's. ‘It was not the details of reform or redistribution which were at stake. It was a spirit of mutual distrust.’

There has been disagreement among historians about the nature of the local response to the Diggers in Surrey, and about the relative importance of popular hostility and gentry-led opposition in the defeat of the Digger movement. It is argued here that a distinction must be made between the Diggers' reception in Walton and their treatment in Cobham: popular opposition was much in evidence in Walton, where the Diggers were treated as outsiders, but the response of Cobham's inhabitants was more ambivalent: some of Winstanley's most active fellow Diggers were Cobham inhabitants, and in this parish it was the local gentry who took the lead in the campaign against them. It is argued that the existence of a degree of local support for Winstanley was in part a reflection of Cobham's long tradition of landlord/tenant conflict, of the absence of a settled minister during the 1640s, and of the hardships experienced in the area in the aftermath of civil war.

Two central developments in the economic history of Edwardian Britain are rarely considered in conjunction. Large flows of investment overseas between c. 1905 and 1914 have been regarded as a feature of ‘high imperialism’, or more innocuously, as a phase in the growth of an international economy. In domestic politics, the ‘New Liberal’ achievement of tax and welfare reforms has been viewed as a stage on the road to the ‘welfare state’, and as a bid for political survival. Was there any link between the export of capital and domestic politics? This article will describe how capital flows affected the choice, timing and scope of Liberal social and economic policies.

This article explores how walking in a particular type of terrain, the moorland area of north Derbyshire known as the Dark Peak, contributed to a localized sense of place which was framed by regional and national discourses and also testified to broader social and cultural uncertainties strongly shaped by gender and class. The punishing physical values of such wild upland areas offered challenges of stoicism, hardiness and endurance which were central to late-nineteenth century ideals of manliness, as masculinity was increasingly defined by forms of sporting activity which encouraged character-building battles against nature. Sensibility is not readily associated with this robust discourse of adventure. The ‘wild’ outdoors, so easily seen as an extension of the public, masculine world was, however, of far greater complexity. More than a focus for physical activity and trespass ‘battles’, it was a place where emotion and the elating intimacy of open space gave expression to needs which also intimate the masculine anxieties of the era.

Before 1914 one of the methods often suggested as a solution of the Home Rule problem and the more general one of constitutional reform in the United Kingdom was ‘Home Rule all round’, known also as ‘Devolution’ or ‘Federalism’ dependent on the occasion or the party affiliation of the would-be reformer. The concept was by no means a new one; it had been broached as early as the 1830s and had received much attention in the eighties and nineties at the time of Gladstone's two Home Rule bills. At best it meant the erection of four provincial Parliaments with separate executives for Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England, responsible for essentially local matters, and an overall Parliament sitting in London, elected on a population basis, responsible for general United Kingdom affairs such as postal services, customs, trade, defence and foreign policy; at the very least the scheme meant the devolution onto local government bodies, possibly provincial councils, of many of the more parochial problems considered at Westminster. ‘Home Rule all round’ attracted considerable interest in 1910 at the time of the Constitutional Conference and again during the tempestuous months of 1913–14 when the United Kingdom hovered on the brink of civil war and any and all compromise solutions were of necessity being explored. The role played by the Round Table Movement in these proposals and subsequent manoeuvres has only partially been recognized.

In 1957, against a background of political turmoil and international tension the Conservative government passed the Rent Act, a highly contentious piece of legislation designed to resolve the problem of housing shortages by removing the statutory restrictions on the rents of privately let accommodation which had been operative since the Great War. The government argued that by abolishing rent controls landlords would be encouraged to maintain, improve, and invest in private rented property and thereby increase its availability. The failure to achieve these objectives prompts an assessment of the Rent Act through an analysis of its origins. It is suggested that, although the government's rents policy was framed within a broad economic imperative, between 1955 and 1957 it became refracted through a number of political, administrative, and social constraints, ensuring that its central aim of creating a free market in rents could never be achieved. As such the Rent Act reaffirmed the strength of consensus politics as a major influence on the Conservative party's housing strategy.

Recent studies have challenged older views that the British state of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was rather powerless. However, such studies have focused largely on the executive, and particularly on the development of centralized revenue departments, or on the role of county elites in implementing state policies in the localities. This essay considers state formation as it was manifested at the base of the governmental system, and examines the extent of, and reasons for, support of national policies at the parish level. It argues that state power derived in part from institutional changes and innovations in procedure which made government in the localities more uniform, more professional, and more accountable; but that initiatives by parish vestries and a willingness on the part of such local elites to implement national policies also help to explain the strength of the state.

On the morning of Saturday 25 October 1924 Philip Snowden, the Labour chancellor of the exchequer, was woken by the sound of J. H. Thomas, the colonial secretary, hammering on his bedroom door. ‘Get up, you lazy devil!’ Thomas is reported to have said. ‘We';re bunkered.’ What Thomas really said was probably more vivid but less printable. The cause of his excitement was the publication of the Zinoviev letter, the greatest Red Scare in British political history. Allegedly written by Zinoviev, president of the communist International, to the British Communist party on 15 September 1924. this sinister document instructed British Communists to put pressure on their sympathizers in the Labour party, to ‘strain every nerve’ for the ratification of the recent treaty with the Soviet Union, to intensify ‘agitation-propaganda work in the armed forces’, and generally to prepare for the coming of the British revolution. A copy of the letter was first obtained by the Daily Mail, then circulated by the Mail to the rest of Fleet Street. It was published in the press four days before the general election of 29 October 1924, at a critical moment in the life of the first Labour government. Until its publication Labour leaders felt their election campaign was going well. Afterwards they changed their minds.

A revisionist explanation of the political events of the Glorious Revolution has crept into recent literature virtually unscathed. Briefly summarized, the argument contends that it is difficult to discover evidence of resistance to the Crown in the debates of either the House of Lords or the Convention parliament during 1689. According to J. P. Kenyon, a major advocate of this new interpretation, John Locke's Second treatise of government misled historians and even some contemporaries into believing that parliament deposed James II for breaking the original contract between sovereign and people. Actually, during the long debates in and between both houses ‘it was clear that the word “abdicated”, or the Lords’ preferred choice, “deserted” both implied a voluntary act, if not a rational choice, on James's part’. The Lords especially, Kenyon argues, were careful to dissociate themselves from contract theory. Whig ‘revolution principles’, then, built upon the ‘haste and confusion of the occasion’ were rooted in a misunderstanding of actual events, a mis-understanding fostered by the writings of Locke and Algernon Sydney and enshrined as doctrine by whig politicians and historians.

As Oliver Cromwell set out on his controversial reconquest of Ireland in 1649, it was widely believed in England that the Levellers were opposed to all English rule in Ireland, and that these pro-Irish views were responsible for the mutinies and disorders in the commonwealth's armies which delayed the setting out of Cromwell's expedition.

The article seeks to establish the reasons why Conservative governments in the 1950s decided not to proceed with legislation to restrict immigration from the Commonwealth in the 1950s. It is thus particularly concerned with the debates about proposals that were put before the Eden cabinet in 1955 and the subsequent postponement of any decision to take action.

The various constraints such as the need to placate opinion in the African and West Indian colonies, a strong desire to present an enlightened view of conservatism at home and abroad and uncertainties about possible reactions which could be exploited by their Labour opponents, are examined. It is argued that these factors outweighed the arguments of senior figures in government urging a speedy response to pressures building up for restrictions within the parliamentary backbenches and in a number of constituencies. The significance of the race riots that took place in Nottingham and the Notting Hill district of London are discussed.

The article concludes that many of the factors which had contributed to a delay in imposing restrictions were seen, at the beginning of the 1960s, to possess less relevance than in the previous decade. This paved the way to the passage of the Commonwealth Immigration Act in 1962 which finally ended unrestricted entry.

In the first great age of English scholarship, to write history was to write polemics. England was a legal, not a geographical expression; to write her history was to interpret her law, or the relation of that law to the Crown, and so to take sides in the battle of parties. The law was timeless; its principles were the same in all ages; the past was a storehouse, not of mere examples, but of authoritative precedents. A statute whose making was ‘beyond memory’ was of greater authority than one whose beginnings were known. What the constitution was it had always been and to define its past was to define its true nature in the present. No scholar wrote more openly to support a cause than Dr Robert Brady, who was Master of Caius College from 1660 to 1700 and defended the Stuart monarchy with his learning in the last ten years of its existence; but the paradox of his career is that no man did more to bring to an end the climate of thought in which his work had been born. An interpreter of history in an age remembered rather for great textual scholars, he was a principal agent in bringing English historical method out of its medieval and into its modern period. For the student of English historiography in its peculiar and intimate connexions with legal and political thought he is, therefore, a notable figure.

On 22 August 1849 a privately sponsored peace congress opened in the Salle de Sainte Cécile in Paris. In the chair was Victor Hugo, assisted as vice presidents and secretaries by a team of men from Britain, the United States, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Several of these men, such as Richard Cobden, were members of the legislatures of their respective countries: others were prominent clergymen and philanthropists. Seated before them were delegates from a slightly wider range of countries which in that blissfully Eurocentric era were deemed to represent the world. They had been brought together by an invitation sent by the London-based Peace Congress Committee to well-known individual sympathizers, peace societies, religious bodies, philanthropic and other civic groups. The business before them consisted of a series of propositions advocating international arbitration, general and simultaneous disarmament, a congress of nations, an international court, and various measures designed to facilitate international communication. This peace congress was the second in a series of four convened between 1848 and 1851 in Brussels, Paris, Frankfort and London to co-ordinate and develop various pressure-group activities which had gained momentum during the late 1840s in Britain and the United States.

In the history of early modern political thought, gender is not well established as a subject. It seems that early modern politics and its philosophical underpinnings are characterized by an exclusion of women from the political sphere. This article shows that it is indeed possible to write a gendered history of early modern political thought that transcends questions of the structural exclusion of women from political participation. Through a nuanced reading of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century commentaries on Aristotle's practical philosophy, it deconstructs notions on the public/political and private/apolitical divide and reconstructs that early modern thinkers saw the relationship of husband and wife as deeply political. The article argues that it is both necessary and possible to write gender in and into the history of political thought in a historically sound and firmly contextual way that avoids anachronisms, and it shows – as Joan Scott has suggested – that gender is indeed a ‘useful category’ in the history of political thought.

By taking the Austrian province of Tyrol as a case-study, the article explores the relationship between Enlightenment, anti-Enlightenment, and national sentiments in and around the 1790s. Characterized by economic crisis and political turbulence, this period had profound consequences for the formation of national and regional identities amongst the region's German-speaking majority. In reaction to the challenges posed first by the centralist reforms in the Habsburg monarchy, and secondly the experience of the French Revolutionary Wars, the local nobility and clergy articulated a greater Tyrolian provincial consciousness, and also a stronger sense of their German identity. The mobilizing experience created by Tyrol's fight against the invading French armies meant that these sentiments were disseminated among and articulated by broader sections of the German-Tyrolian population as well. The article assesses the meanings and nuances of regional consciousness, local patriotism, German identity, and dynastic loyalty, and argues that national feeling in Tyrol was strongly influenced by anti-Enlightenment political and social forces.

Eric Hobsbawm's concept of ‘social banditry’, as presented in Bandits of 1969, is probably the single most influential idea in the modern study of bandits and outlaws. Key to Hobsbawm's argument is the assumption of a more or less direct relation between ‘a bandit's real behaviour and his subsequent myth’ – in other words, that the popular perception of bandits reflected the social reality of banditry, and that accordingly the Robin Hood myth had some basis in historical events. This article seeks to qualify some of the basic premises of Eric Hobsbawm's concept of social banditry by examining the context and process by which popular and official knowledge of banditry emerged. This analysis is based on a case-study of the thugs of early nineteenth-century colonial India. Though seldom described as such, thuggee is one of the best-documented instances of banditry historically speaking. This makes the findings and theoretical considerations made in connection with thuggee pertinent to banditry worldwide and during various periods. By focusing on issues of methodology it is hoped that a critical discussion of Hobsbawm's model, rather than just being a polemic deconstruction, may suggest a new approach to the study of banditry more generally.

Recent historical writing has shown the petite bourgeoisie to have been a distinctive group within British politics and society during the nineteenth century. Its politically active members provided a fluctuating and positive challenge to the authority of both the landed aristocracy and the developing urban elites. In the 1790s, an active fringe of small masters, shopkeepers and less prosperous professional men joined with the wage earners and artisans of the Corresponding Societies. They were cautious Painites, giving depth and breadth to the eighteenth-century radical tradition which sought to extend the franchise and reduce the power of government.

John Locke is famous for his liberal and tolerationist works, published in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, which attacked the belligerent intolerance of the Restoration Church of England. But his early writings, the Two tracts on government, were composed in the period between 1660 and 1662 when the details of the church settlement were the subject of heated debate. The thought of the young Locke defended an uncompromising settlement which would rigidly enforce uniformity in religious worship and secure the restored monarchy from clerical subversion. Whilst scholars have previously focused on the changes in Locke's thought from royalist Anglicanism to whig toleration, this article focuses on the Tracts in their own right. By placing them in the context of the Restoration debate on adiaphora, ceremonial ‘matters indifferent’, the typicality or otherwise of Locke's early thought can be discerned. This article argues that the legalistic understanding of adiaphora meant that this debate touched on political authority and obedience as well as theological questions, not least because matters indifferent fell under the purview of the monarch as supreme governor of the church.