The existence of royal ‘influence’ was central to the political system of eighteenth-century England. However, the influence of the Crown occupies a curiously tangential place in the political thought of the period. Always difficult to ignore, influence gained recognition chiefly from those groups intent on destroying it – the Old-Whig enemies of corruption, the Country opposition to Walpole and the radical reformers late in the century. But the constant ambiguity as to the exact nature of the balance of the constitution may be explained primarily by the presence of opposed views about influence. While the numerous enemies of influence seem to have had their way in the law-books and other standard accounts of die constitution, an interpretation of British government, leaning more to realism than to legalism, sometimes surfaced in those ministerialists who defended places for M.P.s as the essential lubricant to die machinery. A realistic assessment of influence not only departed from die model of three equal and independent estates, it was also to provide a basis for understanding political parties within the framework of the balanced constitution.

The essay examines the forced resignation of the duke of York as commander-in-chief of the British army in 1809 as a case study in the complexities of patriotism during the Napoleonic war. The recent work of Linda Colley and others has emphasized the conservative use of wartime patriotism as a means of defending the established political order in general and royalty in particular. But the parliamentary and outdoor pressure that prompted the duke to step down in response to suspicions that he had permitted his mistress to trqffick in army commissions indicates that staunch supporters as well as critics of the status quo did not hesitate to invoke patriotism as a means of criticizing royalty when it was thought to have neglected its duty to set a good moral example to the nation. There is no question that a large majority of the duke's critics felt that royalty was integral to what they believed was Britain's uniquely privileged position in the world. But the York affair suggests that a great many ‘patriotic’ Britons felt that the royal family had to be protected from its own occasional indiscretions as well as from the Napoleonic peril.

Few historical doctrines agreed better with the prejudices of what one may call the romantic-liberal school of historians of the last century than the classical theory of Germanic kingship. In early Teutonic society, according to this theory, there were normally no kings, but in each nation there was a royal race from which kings could be chosen by the ‘folk’ if need arose. ‘Kings’, wrote Tacitus, ‘are chosen by reason of their nobility, dukes because of their good qualities’, and it was assumed that such an arrangement, which so judiciously combined a romantic respect for aristocratic traditions with a democratic element of popular selection, still held good in the epoch of the Barbarian Invasions. More sober historians of a later epoch echoed the enthusiasm of earlier scholars. The king, wrote Kern, ‘possessed a certain hereditary reversionary right, or at least a privileged “throne-worthiness” in virtue of his royal descent. But it was the people who summoned him to the throne with the full force of law, in as much as they chose from among the members of the ruling dynasty either the next in title or the fittest. … What distinguished the king from a freely elected official was his hereditary right to the throne; but this was an hereditary right not of any individual ruler, but of a ruling family…All members of the ruling family are royal’. Bury put it even more clearly. ‘A German state might have a king or it might not, but in either case it was virtually a democracy.… Some of them had kings; any of them might at any moment elect a king; but the presence or absence of a king might almost be described as a matter of convenience, it had no decisive constitutional importance…. But the people who had no king required an executive officer of this kind likewise. Well, they had an officer who was called a graf…. The graf was elected by the assembly, and the assembly might elect anyone they liked. The king was likewise elected by the assembly, but in his case their choice was limited to a particular family, a royal family. In other words, the kingship was hereditary, and the grafship was not. But this hereditary character of the kingship was of a limited kind. When a king died, the office did not devolve on any particular kinsman of his; the sovran people might elect any member of the family they chose; they might refuse to elect any successor at all.

The object of this article is to reassess received views about the significance of the 1934 rally at Olympia for the fortunes of the British Union of Fascists. It begins by analysing the debate in the House of Commons which is traditionally seen as reflecting a reaction against BUF methods, and shows the extent to which it actually revealed sympathy amongst National Government members. Then follows a discussion of reactions in the press. The article suggests that far from being purely negative, the effect of Olympia in some parts of the press was to attract more attention, and not necessarily of a hostile nature. Finally it examines the reasons for hesitation on the part of the government in using the law and the police to curtail BUF methods in the aftermath of Olympia. It shows how far Mosley continued to conduct large indoor meetings, partly because he was able to make use of the existing law. The article concludes that the British defence of free speech after 1934 was less firm than is usually supposed and that resistance to fascism by the authorities was of marginal significance.

This article builds on the recent willingness among British, Canadian, and imperial historians to question older national histories, and to re-examine how the divergent societies, economies, and polities of the empire once interacted in a wider ‘British world’. It argues that the press acted as a key mechanism for the transmission of political ideas through the permeable internal boundaries of empire. This is demonstrated through analysis of contemporary debate over the Canadian–American reciprocity proposals of 1911. This controversy provided an opportunity for political groups in Britain and Canada to use the press to forge alliances with each other and work together on a specific issue. Two key forces made this possible. In Britain, constructive imperialists had since 1903 sought to rally Dominion support for tariff reform, initially with limited success. In Canada, neither western farmers nor eastern manufacturers seemed interested in imperial preference. It was the reciprocity proposals that changed the situation, providing the second driving force. Canadian manufacturing interests, seeking to prevent the lowering of tariff barriers against United States rivals, began to court British constructive imperialists. As a result political conflict was reshaped both in colony and metropole.

The study of the Edwardian Conservative party is rapidly becoming as much of a minefield as that of the Edwardian Liberal party. Both parties were in serious difficulties in the years immediately preceding the First World War. But whilst the condition of the Liberal party is at least openly acknowledged as a disputed area, its perils clearly marked, the condition of the Conservative party is treacherous ground, the hazards uncharted. From one point of view, ‘it would be easy to give an account of Edwardian politics in which the emphasis fell on “the crisis of Conservatism” and on the parlous state of the Conservative party on the eve of the War… The fundamental weakness of the Conservative party lay in its inability to win elections.’ Alternatively, ‘Both at the local-government level and in national by elections in 1912 and 1913, what was at work was not so much “The Strange Death of Liberal England” as “The Strange Revival of Tory England”. The most likely outcome, moreover, was not apocalyptic, merely a Conservative triumph in the general election scheduled for 1915.’ By a curious coincidence, or perhaps editorial perversity, these two views are juxtaposed on consecutive pages of the same collection of essays.

One of the central problems that needs careful analysis and explanation by any historian of the revolutions of 1848 is that of the failure throughout Europe of the predominantly urban, middle-class revolutionary governments to secure tiie support of the peasant masses. With the notable exception of die alliance that Kossuth formed between Magyar peasants and gentry, which resulted in die heroic resistance of the Hungarians until late in 1849, there seems little evidence of die peasantry being won wholeheartedly to die revolution. In fact, far from a repetition of the Jacobin model of 1793–4, the more familiar pattern emerges of counter-revolutionary armies, composed largely of peasantry, destroying die urban revolutions. Peasants from every part of Europe made up the armies of Windischgrätz, Radetzky, Haynau and Paskievitsch which crushed Prague, Milan, Vienna, Budapest and ultimately Venice. Little or no support came from the German countryside for the dying Frankfurt Assembly in the spring of 1849; and, in the rather different conditions of France, the ballot box army from the rural areas in April and December 1848 dealt fatal blows to the aspirations of the Parisian revolution. In most of the great cities of Europe, the middle class had some limited measure of success in gaining and keeping the urban poor on their side. It was this alliance, after all, between the advanced sections of the bourgeoisie and the rapidly expanding lower classes of the cities, that was principally responsible for the toppling of so many of the Restoration governments in February and March 1848. But in a largely pre-industrial society, as Europe was at this time, the peasantry still formed the vast mass of the population, and could rightly be seen to be the arbiters of the bourgeois revolution.

While it is incontestable that the Great Fire led to a new awareness and to stronger measures to prevent and to fight fires, this was not because it was the worst in a long series of serious fires, but because it was one of the first. London had no really large fires in the four centuries before 1666, but was to experience fifty or more in the following 200 years. This article asks why. Alongside the obvious facts of rapid population growth and the resulting shoddy building, the continued use of timber for housing, and the inadequacy of fire prevention measures, it suggests that the growth of London's maritime trade and the concentration of stores of new types of highly flammable products, particularly along the river, created a new vulnerability to disaster that made earlier forms of fire control inadequate.

A hundred years ago there appeared Mill's England and Ireland, long since among the least known of his writings. At the time of publication it caused a furore, and gave its author a kind of notoriety that he had not previously experienced. In his pamphlet of some forty pages Mill issued a condemnation of Britain's conduct, past and present, towards Ireland, which surprised by its violence, in contrast to the judicious if superior tone that people had come to expect from him. This was startling; but the pamphlet's arresting novelty lay in its uncompromising demand for an immediate agrarian revolution in Ireland, as a long overdue act of justice, an inescapable moral obligation, and as the price of Irish loyalty in the future. Mill could not, of course, expect to convince his readers that he was justified in calling for such a sweeping measure without challenging assumptions which seemed built into the social foundations of nineteenth-century Britain. His impatient dismissal of these received notions was another aspect of the pamphlet eliciting a very unfavourable reaction. It is this aspect which is usually mentioned. England and Ireland is seen, when noticed at all, as the compact and forceful expression of ideas which Mill had been trying to inculcate for the best part of a generation.

On 12 January 1873 the British yacht Enchantress entered the harbour of Zanzibar. On board were a former Governor of Bombay and a suite of six government officials—the Resident in the Persian Gulf, two men from the Foreign Office, a military and a naval attaché and one of the country's foremost Arabic scholars. What had brought such an important group into such an unimportant eastern backwater? The answer is only partly to be found in the state of British public opinion on the slave trade question. The origin of the mission is to be sought not in Exeter Hall but in the Huṣns on the bare slopes of the Jabal Akhḍar.

It has often been argued that British ministers in the years leading up to the Union of South Africa in 1910 were so obsessed with the principle of white self-government that they forgot their obligations to the African majority.1 The result, it is alleged, was that African interests in general were sacrificed on the altar of Anglo-Afrikaner reconciliation, and in particular betrayed in the South Africa Act of 1909. If there is a partial exception allowed—the withholding of Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland from the Union—then, it is assumed, the credit for this could not possibly be given to the imperial government. The recent article in the Journal of African History by Alan R. Booth argues that, in the apparent absence of any actual imperial policy or concern, local African tribal and missionary pressures on the high commissioner were decisive in bringing this about.

Studies of the Anglo-German naval agreement of 1935 have so far failed to provide a complete analysis of the factors which prompted the British government's decision to sanction German naval rearmament. Diverse views on the causes of this British decision have included the interpretation that the naval agreement represented the beginning of appeasement, that it was an attempt to curry favour with Hitler's Reich at the expense of France and other continental powers, or that it was intended to become part of a general international system of naval arms limitations but because of unforeseen difficulties remained simply a bilateral agreement. The severest critics of the agreement suggest that British statesmen were the victims of Hitler's guile and of their own ignorance and credulity which blinded them to the serious consequences their conduct had for British foreign relations.

Based on the analysis of primary sources from party archives and the private papers of politicians in six countries, this article evaluates the influence of Christian Democrat transnationalism on European integration in the crucial formative period from 1947 to 1957. It shows how the Christian Democrats' co-operation in the Nouvelles Equipes Internationales and the Geneva Circle shaped and re-enforced their historical orientations, ideological preferences, and common party interests and played an important role in structuring the concept and the reality of a ‘core Europe’ of continental countries. It is crucial to include ‘soft’ factors such as the growing transnational political networks in the analysis of European integration history to avoid a monocausal explanation that focuses exclusively on inter-state relations and sees the integration process solely as the product of a multilateral bargaining process driven by national (economic) interests.

As British efforts to secure the approaches to India intensified in the closing years of the nineteenth century, expert knowledge of the states bordering the subcontinent became an increasingly sought-after commodity. Particularly high demand existed for individuals possessing first-hand experience of Qajar Persia, a state viewed by many policymakers as a vulnerable anteroom on the glacis of the Raj. Britain's two foremost Persian experts during this period were George Nathaniel Curzon and Edward Granville Browne. While Curzon epitomized the traditional gentleman amateur, Browne embodied the emerging professional scholar. Drawing on both their private papers and publications, this article analyses the relationship between these two men as well as surveys their respective views of British policy toward Iran from the late 1880s until the end of the First World War. Ultimately it contends that Curzon's knowledge of Persia proved deficient in significant ways and that Anglo-Iranian relations, at least in the aftermath of the Great War, might well have been placed on a better footing had Browne's more nuanced understanding of the country and its inhabitants prevailed within the foreign policymaking establishment.

Although the 1922–43 Special Powers Acts (SPAs) played a central role in prompting the Northern Irish civil rights movement in the late 1960s, virtually no secondary literature exists on the operation of the statutes. This article examines the manner in which the unionist government employed the acts during the tenure of the northern parliament. It suggests that the 1922–43 SPAs became a central grievance of the minority community because of the manner in which regulations introduced under their auspices were exercised: the ministry of home affairs initially used the emergency statutes to return civil order to the province; however, as violence declined the government began to utilize regulations to prevent the expression of republican ideals. Any attempt to garner support for a united Ireland was perceived as an attack on the Northern Irish constitution. Concurrent with this shift was a change in justification for the 1922–43 SPAs: from being required in order to establish law and order in the face of rising violence, they were soon heralded by unionists as necessary to maintain the constitutional structure of the North. In preventing the public exposition of republicanism, expressions of nationalism were likewise limited. This impacted upon a large portion of the minority community, giving rise to claims that the statutes were being unfairly applied.

This article revisits the late seventeenth-century histories of two of England's most successful overseas trading monopolies, the East India and Royal African Companies. It offers the first full account of the various enforcement powers and strategies that both companies developed and stresses their unity of purpose in the seventeenth century. It assesses the complex effects that the ‘Glorious Revolution’ had on these powers and strategies, unearthing much new material about the case law for monopoly enforcement in this critical period and revising existing accounts that continue to assert the Revolution's exclusively deregulating effects and that miss crucial subtleties in the case law and related alterations in company behaviour. It asks why the two companies parted company as legal and political entities and offers an explanation that connects the fortunes of both monopoly companies to their public profile and differing constituencies in the English empire and the varying non-European political contexts in which they operated.