This parliament saw two controversial government proposals: to ratify the Five Articles of Perth which introduced Anglican-style ceremonies into church worship, and to introduce a new tax on interest payments. A rare division list survives. It shows the split to have been partly regional: opposition was concentrated in Scotland's central belt, with government supporters in the more conservative northern and Border regions. The most important division, however, is that between ‘court’ and ‘country’. These concepts, familiar in English history, are shown to be applicable to Scotland. An earlier argument that government faction was responsible for the division is shown to be mistaken. The ideological divide, which persisted until after 1638, has implications for our understanding of the events of the 1640s both in Scotland and in England.

This article reveals that the diplomatic and financial history of 1931 was even more turbulent than believed to date. New documents found at the Bank of England show that an intricate system of cross-deposits was set up by the Austrian Central Bank covertly to direct funds to the Creditanstalt via American and British banks – to compensate it for taking over the bankrupt Bodencreditanstalt – suggesting that the received accounts of the collapse of the Creditanstalt need to be revised. Further, documents have come to light which show that France exacerbated the 1931 run on the Austrian schilling in order to force Austria to abandon the Austro-German customs union project of that year. This article considers the relationship between the collapse of the Creditanstalt and the abandonment of the Austro-German customs union, incorporating the new evidence to provide a novel interpretation of the financial diplomacy of that year.

In 1975, Max Beloff wrote an article entitled ‘The Whitehall factor: the role of the higher civil service, 1919–39’, which historians have been singularly slow to exploit. Influenced, no doubt, by the publication in the same year of the Crossman Diaries, Beloff argued that no modern political history could be complete which ignores the influence of the civil service on policy-making. ‘The anonymity of the civil service’, he argued, ‘may or may not be a valuable convention of the constitution: it is one which the historian of modern Britain accepts at his peril.’ The peril was greatest, he suggested, for the inter-war period because it was then that higher civil servants in Britain ‘probably reached the height of [their] corporate influence’. In contrast to their predecessors, they controlled a far more centralized machine whose influence had been greatly extended by increasingly interventionist policies. In contrast to their successors, they were a highly compact group – being a mere 500 in number.

In the General Introduction and Conclusion to our book, Paris 1961: Algerians, state terror, and memory, we argue that the time has come to move beyond the current phase of political battle, the fixed-position trench warfare, over the events of ‘17 October’ for a more open history that can begin to address some wider and more fruitful questions. At the core of the polemic during the last decade has been the almost obsessive ‘battle of numbers’ that has raged between the maximalist Jean-Luc Einaudi (200–300+ deaths at the hands of the police) and the minimalist Jean-Paul Brunet (at most 30–50 deaths, but only 13 conclusively ‘proven’). In replying to Jean-Paul Brunet, we shall discuss two substantive issues: the nature of the evidence and its interpretation, and inevitably the question of the number of fatalities.

Although ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ are among the most historic words in the language of English politics, their origins have never been subjected to modern scholarly study. Modern historians of the Exclusion Crisis are attracted by other aspects of the period; we find in the words little of die immediate relevance or historical continuity which Macaulay saw when he wrote glowingly of ‘two nicknames which, diough originally given in insult, were soon assumed with pride, which are still in daily use, which have spread as widely as the English race, and which will last as long as the English literature’.

This article utilizes the metaphor of the post-war Lost Generation to investigate the chronology of middle class political realignment and Liberal decline. It suggests that the Liberalism of twentieth-century Norwich owed its existence to the perpetuation of a closed culture based on business, chapel and urban residence. It questions the degree to which dissenting Liberals had been assimilated into the dominant ideology before 1914 by reference to marriage ties and associational links such as the freemasons. It asserts that the downfall of this Liberal culture in the long run, though not immediately, was the result of the Great War, which allowed the younger generation to break out of their insular world and mix more freely with the Anglican upper-middle class. However, it also demonstrates that the closed culture was such that those of the Edwardian political generation, although affected by the War, did not reject their Liberalism. Most continued to actively support the party into the 1930s, questioning the view that the middle classes had largely deserted the Liberals by 1924. Rather, it was the political maturation in the 1930s of the War generation which heralded the end of urban Liberalism and the triumph of middle class Conservatism.

In their use of the term ‘mob’, historians of the eighteenth century have generally neglected to define and to analyse it and have often shown a tendency to confuse the uses to which it might reasonably be applied.

The eighteenth-century commodifications of childhood and the sciences overlapped in the production of science books for children. This article examines a children's book written by two members of the Unitarian circle around Warrington Academy in the 1790s, and contrasts it with a Church of England work. The analysis reveals the extent to which religious differences could affect parental attitudes to the natural world, reason, the uses of the sciences, and the appropriate way to read and discuss books. Although the sciences were admitted as suitable for children, the issues of the subjects to be chosen, the purposes they were intended for, and the pedagogical methods by which they were presented, were still contested. This article also goes beyond the usual studies of children's books by focusing on non-fiction, and by emphasizing readers and use, rather than authors or publishers. Yet producing a history of reading based entirely on actual readers will be exceedingly difficult, so this article suggests an alternative, by combining accounts of actual readers' experiences with attitudes towards practices like orality and discussion.

Recent work in the modern history of sexuality, now an established field of inquiry, is characterized by particular approaches to the interpretation of modernity and selfhood. In general, and in contrast to previous approaches, the books under review treat modernity as a localized process with specific effects. Sexual identity is understood in a similar way, as a phenomenon bounded by locality, class, age, nationality, gender, patterns of sociability, and other contextual factors. As such, speaking of sexual identity as a unitary entity, or as something that has historically been structured by an opposition of homosexual/heterosexual, no longer makes sense. In fact, the homo/hetero binary is of much more recent vintage than has been hitherto thought. These histories of sexuality challenge historians of all kinds to rethink the nature of categories like selfhood, identity, and modernity.

John Morley, a son of Blackburn, wrote of the Lancashire of the 1860s; ‘as a rule in the cotton districts where the trade relations between master and man have been … established on a satisfactory basis, the man, in the truly feudal spirit, takes part with his master, and wears his political colour. This current of things … “esprit de corps” interesting the employed in the triumph of this mill over that, is not likely to change immediately nor for a long while to come’.

As a result of recent studies English imperialism has come to acquire a somewhat surprising reputation for sobriety and restraint; that is English imperialism considered as a serious and responsible political movement in contrast to its occasional ally, jingoism, which Stead aptly termed ‘imperialism sodden with gin’. So far from being marked by ‘earth hunger’ and the lust for limitless expansion, the imperialist attitude is now regarded as primarily a defensive one, originating as an impulse of defiant self-assertion to safeguard existing British overseas interests from injury or extinction. The elements of exaggeration in the older picture have been carefully toned down. The swing in British policy is now held to have been more gentle, more limited in extent and duration, more seriously checked by the traditional regulators of Gladstonian finance and the priority of European affairs than was allowed for in the polemics of the older view. Just as the swing in British policy and opinion was less violent, so the distance that divided the Little Englander from the Big Englander is seen to have been much narrower than the party controversies of the nineties would suggest. Dr R. E. Robinson, who has been among the leading exponents of the new view, adopts the terms ‘forward school’ and ‘consolidationists’ rather than ‘imperialists’ and ‘anti-imperialists’. Certainly there were no voices among the prominent Radicals and Little Englanders prepared to advocate the liquidation of the Empire; their concern was rather to prevent its further extension in the form of subject tropical dependencies. Some indeed, like John Bright and Leonard Courtney, were willing to desert Gladstone over Irish Home Rule because they saw it as a measure striking at the integrity of the Empire. Courtney, who came to regret his assent to intervention in Egypt in 1882 and stood out as the most unflinching opponent of the Boer War, was nevertheless no disintegrationist. In 1887 he wrote to his friend, John Scott, in India: voter would think no more of giving up India than of giving up Ireland, not caring to inquire seriously what would be the fate of either when abandoned.

This article argues that during the closing decades of the nineteenth century a significant group of British imperial thinkers broke with the long-standing conventions of political thought by deliberately eschewing the inspiration and intellectual authority provided by the examples of the ancient empires. While the early Victorian colonial reformers had looked to the template of Greece, and while many later Victorians compared the empire in India with the Roman empire, numerous proponents of Greater Britain (focusing on the settler colonies, and associated in particular with the movement for imperial federation) looked instead to the United States. I argue that the reason for this innovation, risky in a culture obsessed with the moral and prudential value of precedent and tradition, lies in contemporary understandings of history. Both Rome and Greece, despite their differences, were thought to demonstrate that empires were ultimately self-dissolving; as such, empires modelled on their templates were doomed to eventual failure, whether through internal decay or the peaceful independence of the colonies. Since the advocates of Greater Britain were determined to construct an enduring political community, a global Anglo-Saxon polity, they needed to escape the fate of previous empires. They tried instead to insert Greater Britain into a progressive narrative, one that did not doom them to repeat the failures of the past.

Let me start by making it clear that, taken at face value, my title is entirely a piece of mischief: I am not about to disclose the fact that there were actually no learned women in Italy in the fifteenth century. Indeed, this paper is built around the careers and works of five distinguished women intellectuals of that period: Isotta Nogarola (1418–66); Costanza Varano (1426–77); Cassandra Fedele (c. 1465–1558); Laura Cereta (1469–99); and Alessandra Scala (1475–1506). There is, however, a serious point to my choice of words in the title. The point is that the ‘learned lady’ of the Renaissance (the cultivated noblewoman, beautiful, charming, gifted, ‘gentile’) has a mythic place in the secondary historical literature on humanism. From Isabella d'Este to Sir Thomas More's daughters and the English Tudor princesses, the cultivated gentlewoman is the Beatrice or the Laura of some male humanist's circle, his hi adoring pupil, his inspiration, his idol. Scholars adopt a fondly indulgent tone when discussing the women, which carries the implication that their intellectual calibre, their actual standing as scholars and humanists, is not a real issue, is perhaps not in fact of any real substance (a figment, rather, of their male admirers' or suitors' imaginations). The single scholarly piece of any significance on the life and work of Alessandra Scala concludes with typical sentimental indulgence:Her noble and elusive aspect – for no portrait of her survives, unless perhaps she smiles at us, unrecognised, in the guise of a saint or a goddess, from one of Botticelli's canvases, or that of some other Florentine artist – yet that aspect shines forth from the shadows of the past, and casts a beauteous and gracious light upon the discordant chorus of Florentine humanism at the end of the fifteenth century.

Anglican parish registers have been the basis for most studies of population trends and characteristics in early modern England, and one of the most important of the techniques used in analysing them has been family reconstitution. But Anglican registers at all times were an incomplete and inaccurate record of vital events, and their defects tended to become more pronounced in the later part of the period during which they afford the chief source of empirical information about population behaviour. And there are inherent limitations and biases in the results that can be obtained by family reconstitution. This article attempts to describe the range of difficulties and dilemmas involved in studying the demography of populations in the past when using this source of data and this technique of analysis. A variety of tests is deployed to establish the degree of reliability attaching to the results obtained in a recent exercise based on the family reconstitution of 26 parishes, and more generally to assess the opportunities open to scholarship in this area and the pitfalls associated with such work. The conclusion is that reliable results can be obtained but that great care is needed in the selection of suitable registers, and that a number of tests should be employed to monitor the internal consistency and the demographic plausibility of any findings.

This article examines the development of the idea of the ‘superwoman’ among British Edwardian feminists and contextualizes it within the aristocratic political thought of the day. I examine the idea of the ‘genius’ and the ‘superman’ in order to shed light on why, for some Edwardian feminists, the ideal feminist agent was to be an elite, discerning, remote figure. I argue that Edwardian feminism witnessed an ‘introspective turn’, marked by an interest in character, will, and personality as the key components of emancipation. The focus of political change was firmly located within women themselves. This belief was widespread, even though only a minority chose the language of the ‘superwoman’ to elaborate it. References to the ‘superwoman’ indicates the impact of Nietzschean and egoist ideas upon the women's movement. The ‘superwoman’ was used to position feminism as a movement not just for political rights but for wider social regeneration, and represents a characteristically Edwardian belief in the power of the ‘exceptional individual’ to promote social change.

British colonial policy initiatives of the 1760s and the American revolutionary war led to a period of sustained lobbying by the West India interest in Britain; lobbying which developed from an informal body into a more professionally organized lobby, along the lines of modern economic interest groups. The composition of the lobby and its activities during the revolutionary period are examined here. Its considerable influence is also assessed and explained. The article finds that the lobby won major concessions from the British government and vitally affected British policy towards North America. It nevertheless concludes that the lobby enjoyed its greatest influence in the early century when ironically its organization was weaker but its goals coincided more harmoniously with those of British colonial policy. Its later reorganization was a response to the increasing conflicts of interest between the white elites of the British Caribbean and the mother country which intensified during the period of the American revolution and its aftermath.

In the last two decades historians have been increasingly interested in the modernization of the monarchy, and the nature of the republican threat. This review evaluates some of this recent literature. The first section argues that while Walter Bagehot's views about ceremony in The English constitution (1867) have influenced historical writing, these approaches do not yield much information about what the monarchy actually meant to people. The second section turns to the political powers of the monarchy, and examines the wide range of views about what the constitutional limits of royal power were. It also shows that even radical writers were often unable to dispel the monarchy from their imaginations. Finally, the review suggests that criticism of the royal family was not necessarily republican, and arose more from concern that particular figures were failing to conform to shared public values. Pure republicans were few, and did not usually focus their energies on the monarchy, but rather on the nature of parliamentary representation and the power of the Lords.