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.

In the final chapter of the final volume of his magisterial Commentaries on the laws of England, Sir William Blackstone sketched the’rise, progress, and gradual improvements of the laws of England’. Nearing the end of that chapter, he laid it down as his considered opinion ‘that the constitution of England had arrived to its full vigour, and the true balance between liberty and prerogative was happily established by law, in the reign of king Charles the second’. Now this is not a self-evident truth, for that reign is more likely to conjure up in our minds (along with Nell Gwynn and other not strictly legal relationships) unhappy visions of quo warranto proceedings against borough charters; the perjuries of Titus Oates; the double jeopardy of Stephen College; and Sir William Scroggs and Sir George Jeffreys blaspheming their undignified and brutal way through the pages of the State trials. Why should Blackstone have felt impelled to say such a patently silly thing?

In the last thirty-five years there has been a fundamental reinterpretation of the history of Christianity in China. This reinterpretation has resulted from a changing atmosphere in China that has greatly reduced anti-Christian feelings and allowed for more extensive study of Chinese historical documents. In addition, there has been a remarkable growth among Chinese Christian churches. These changes have led to a reconceptualization of the role Christianity played in China's long-term history. As a result, there has been a transformation from viewing Christianity as a failed foreign graft to a creative indigenous force. This historiographical review surveys the evolution of this reinterpretation as well as the most significant recent publications on the topic.

The second reform act came at the close of a remarkable period of constitutional debate, in which seven different governments had committed themselves to reform. Yet historians have shown little interest in this debate, seeing it as largely irrelevant to the making of the second reform act. This article seeks to reconnect the discussions of the 1850s with the measure of 1867, and to explore some of the issues that shaped the course of legislation. It argues that the failure to achieve reform in the 1850s was the result not of hostility to reform in the abstract, but of an inability to agree on the type of reform that was desirable. Depending on who was enfranchised and where, different reform bills could produce quite different electorates, making consensus elusive. The article shows how the Liberal opposition to the 1866 bill was fuelled by concerns over the nature of Liberal politics after Palmerston, and concludes that the disagreement over the rating franchise concealed a wider disagreement on the whole nature of reform, exerting a powerful influence on the measures of both 1866 and 1867.

‘Lord Randolph Churchill and Tory democracy’ is a cliché topic of late-Victorian historiography. All the monographs on Lord Randolph emphasise his enthusiasm for tory democracy. This enthusiasm has been explained by recent historians of Victorian Conservatism in terms of personal ambition rather than commitment to specific policies. But both these schools of interpretation are based on mistaken assumptions and insufficient or misleading evidence. I believe that neither the ‘orthodox’ nor the ‘revisionist’ explanations of Churchill's involvement with tory democracy fit the facts of the case in most of their aspects. The following inquiry examines the various ways in which Churchill actually was, or has been alleged to have been, involved with that ambiguous concept, tory democracy. This necessitates an examination of the usage and meaning which Churchill gave to the phrase and of the extent to which he associated it with progressive social policies. It is also instructive to compare Churchill's outlook with that of Gorst, his Fourth Party colleague, who was also identified with tory democracy. In order to assess the role which ambition played in determining Churchill's support for tory democracy it is necessary to consider his relations with the official tory leaders and his own political expectations. Finally, it is relevant to examine his involvement in the activities of the National Union of Conservative Associations. On the one hand, it has been argued that his role in the National Union was indicative of his desire to launch progressive toryism on a recalcitrant party, while on the other, it has been viewed simply as part of his campaign to further his own position in the party.

This article uses the British colonial history of border making in northern India to examine the assumptions and contradictions at work in the theorizing, configuring, and mapping of frontiers and borders. It focuses, in particular, on the development of the ‘water-parting principle’ – wherein the edge of a watershed is considered to be the border – and how this principle was used to determine boundaries in the northwestern Himalaya, a region that had long-established notions of border points, but no borderlines. By the twentieth century, the water-parting principle would become the dominant boundary logic for demarcating borders in mountainous regions, and would be employed by statesmen, treaty editors, and boundary commissioners around the world. But for the northwestern Himalaya, a region that British colonial officials considered to be the ‘finest natural combination of boundary and barrier that exists in the world’, making a border proved much more difficult than anticipated.

Chinese Tartary or Turkestan, or what has been since 1884 the ‘New Province’ of Sinkiang, is an irregular thousand-mile long tract in the heart of Asia, shut in on three sides by mountains and on the east by vast deserts. That it should still be in China's possession today, after a century in which so many of her outlying dependencies were shorn away, is one of the facts of modern history that it would have been most rash to predict.

Between 1957 and 1977 the University of Leeds engaged in a massive programme of rebuilding. Employing the architects Chamberlin, Powell, and Bon, Leeds transformed itself – becoming, in the words of one commentator, ‘Our first contemporary urban university’. Previously ignored by historians, this development in the history of the university illustrates a number of important themes. In the first place, it exemplifies the significance of architecture in defining higher education. Secondly – and more particularly – it shows how both academics and architects hoped to use Brutalist architecture to express the modernity of the University of Leeds. Thus the decision to employ avant-garde designers in the late 1950s and the resolution to dismiss them twenty years later both came from the same modernizing impulse. Thirdly, it shows how personal connection secured architectural patronage in this period. The Development Plan also highlights the way in which architects of the British modern movement used universities as laboratories in which to experiment with ideas about community and proper urban design. The modernist moment at Leeds, then, can be seen as representative of wider trends in British building, not least because it lasted for such a short period of time.

The League of Princes (Fürstenbund) was founded on 23 July 1785, when the representatives of Prussia, Hanover and Saxony signed at Berlin a main treaty and several secret articles relating to the domestic affairs of the Holy Roman Empire. During the following months a number of other German princes joined the League, notably the elector of Mainz, the landgrave of Hessen-Kassel, the margrave of Baden and the dukes of Brunswick, Saxony-Gotha and Saxony-Weimar.s Its general objective was the preservation of the imperial status quo. More specifically, it was aimed at the Emperor Joseph II and the innumerable schemes of expansion popularly attributed to him, not always without justification. More specifically still, the League was designed to prevent any renewal of Joseph's most cherished ambition - the exchange of the Habsburg possessions in the Netherlands (which embraced the larger part of present-day Belgium) for the Electorate of Bavaria. From the European perspective, the League was soon overshadowed by the reopening of the Eastern Question in 1787, eclipsed by the formation of the Triple Alliance in 1788 and finally extinguished by the Austro-Prussian rapprochement in 1792, but during 1785–6 it assumed great importance. Not the least affected was Great Britain, whose king - albeit in his capacity as elector of Hanover - was a founder-member of the League and one of its most enthusiastic protagonists. Despite the official British view - repeated ad nauseam to sceptical foreign diplomats - that Georg Kurfürst von Hannover and George III King of England were two entirely separate beings and that consequently the actions of the former could have not the least effect on the latter's domains, British policy could not help but be influenced.

This article explores the representations of burglary and burglars created by the burglary insurance sector in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Two lines of argument are developed: first, that the marketing strategy of the burglary insurance sector exacerbated existing fears about the nature and prevalence of burglary in a calculated bid to attract custom; and secondly, that the depictions of crime and criminal used in marketing this form of insurance were subsequently revised in the contracts issued to customers as part of the industry's commercial transactions, thereby securing against supposed ‘negligence’ by homeowners as well as malicious attempts to defraud insurers. As the self-styled commercial ‘protection’ against burglary, burglary insurance became an ordinary household investment. Its prosperity therefore enables us to identify certain ideas about crime and criminal then current. Crucially, this research highlights the intersection of media, state, and market discourse about crime in weaving a specific version of burglary into the very fabric of everyday life, uniting three domains that historians of crime have traditionally treated separately.

On 9 May 1950, Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister, offered to pool the coal and steel resources of France with those of its European neighbours. The proposal was directed principally at Western Germany. After a year of negotiations six western European states agreed to form the European Coal and Steel Community, an organization rightly seen as the beginning of the European Union. However significant at the time and subsequently, this creation resulted from a series of political bargains familiar to any practitioner of traditional politics. France was determined to limit the competitive advantages of German heavy industry to prevent future dominance by the Ruhr industrialists whose unsavoury past was also remembered. Jean Monnet, the head of the French delegation at the talks held in Paris, insisted on the ‘deconcentration’ of the steel and coal industries. Steel companies would be compelled to dispose of the colleries which they owned. To do this, however, Monnet had to invoke the help of the American high commissioner in Germany, John J. McCloy and his expert advisers. In terms of its origins the Coal and Steel Community can be considered the product of a bargain struck between the Federal Republic and America, not France and Western Germany. That the safeguards against vertical combinations and a single sales agency for coal proved unnecessary (and unenforceable) may partly explain the success of the first venture in European integration.

Scholars have long known of the proposed marriage in 1630 of John Dryden, grandson of Sir Erasmus Dryden, and Elizabeth Isham, eldest child of Sir John Isham. All knowledge of this proposed marriage came from correspondence revealing that, having reached a financial impasse, the two families aborted the proposed match. At first glance, such a case seems rather unremarkable, since similar stories abound of other contemporary families and in more detail. The Dryden–Isham match, however, takes on increased importance with the recent discovery of Elizabeth Isham's 60,000-word spiritual autobiography. Unlike the correspondence that mainly deals with the economic aspects of the match, Elizabeth's autobiography provides a more personal and emotional account, revealing the importance that familial love and honour played in the arrangement. In addition, the autobiography shows that the failed match caused Elizabeth to have a religious aversion to marriage, leading her to choose singlehood for the remainder of her life. Her experience forces scholars to recognize the significance that familial love, honour, and personal piety could have on marriage formation in the seventeenth century, and it illustrates the lasting impact that a failed match could have on a woman in early modern England.

It has become fashionable to characterize Henry VIII's second queen, Anne Boleyn, as evangelical in religion and as a patron of reformers. But this rests heavily on the later testimony of John Foxe and of one of Anne's chaplains, William Latimer. Contemporary evidence of Anne's activity, under critical scrutiny, turns out to offer a different impression, as does an analysis of episcopal appointments in the early 1530s. A remarkable sermon preached by John Skip, the queen's almoner, a few weeks before her death, casts further doubt on the claims for Anne's reformist zeal.

Since the publication in 1952 of the first volume of V. T. Harlow's The Founding of the Second British Empire 1763–1793, the debate on the nature and concept of empire in the twenty years after the American war of independence has focused on the questions of motivation and direction in imperial expansion. Harlow himself established the terms of the debate. The hiatus which traditional historiography had established in colonial affairs as a consequence of American independence, was swept away to be replaced with a set of themes appropriate to an empire which was undergoing continuous change after the Seven Years War. Two of these diemes in particular have caught the imagination of historians. As trouble and disenchantment spread in the colonies across the Atlantic, there was a marked swing in imperial direction towards die east – to Asia and the Pacific – where the second empire was to have its core. But the change was not only one of direction. The new empire reflected a revulsion against colonization and a clear preference for trade over dominion.

From prison Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote a poem to Sir Francis Bryan, warning him to keep the secrets they shared. This article seeks to discover what the secrets were, and from whom they must be kept. The secrets concerned their lives as courtiers and ambassadors at times of great suspicion and insecurity at home and abroad, c. 1536–41. As diplomats, Wyatt and Bryan were charged to mediate between Henry VIII, Francis I, and Emperor Charles V, but they also had more sinister undercover missions. They were sent to spy upon, and even to assassinate the papal legate, Cardinal Pole. Poetry reveals much about these men which other sources cannot.

Just after midnight on 24 January 1577, Alice Neate crept into a bedchamber at the New Hythe in Colchester and slit her sister-in-law's throat. She wrapped the body in a red blanket and dragged it out into the woodhouse yard where it was discovered the following morning. An intensive investigation immediately ensued. All the chief suspects except Alice Neate, namely neighbours who had visited the Neate cottage on the evening prior to the murder, satisfactorily established their innocence. The testimony against Alice was overwhelming. Even her husband conceded that his sister had been murdered and prayed, ‘God save [my] wife!’ To be sure it was only indirect evidence, yet nonetheless damaging because it came from her own husband. Her daughter Abigail's testimony, however, was utterly devastating. At first steadfastly maintaining her mother's innocence, Abigail's support collapsed when under pressure of ‘straight examination’ she finally admitted that her mother had persuaded her to conceal clear proof of the homicide. Abigail shared the bedchamber with her murdered aunt, and since she had been wide awake during the killing had been an eyewitness to the whole bloody tragedy. If that was not enough, Alice also had a clear motive. Her hatred of her sister-in-law was well known and stemmed from her belief that the murdered woman had herself murdered two of Alice's children. On the basis of this overwhelming case against her, Alice Neate was committed to prison where she was held until the next gaol delivery at which she was duly prosecuted, convicted and sentenced to hang for murder, according to the blood law of felony.

If any single turn of events condemned the Great Rebellion to its final collapse and made the Restoration ultimately inevitable, it surely took place that April night in 1659 when the regiments about London gathered at St James's in defiance of Richard Cromwell, ‘unanimusly crieing up the good ould cause And A Comanwealth, and noe single person’. The coup d'état which virtually ended the Protectorate left England at the mercy of the military grandees who had headed it and the Republican politicians who meant to profit by it. Both groups found themselves sunk too low in credit to erect a new regime in place of the one they destroyed, and after exposing their political bankruptcy for half a year longer they finally committed political suicide by quarrelling between themselves.

This review surveys the study of early modern sermons by historians and literary critics in recent years. It argues that sermons are becoming more important to research in the period, particularly given the revisionist historians' emphasis on religious politics and the shift to historicism in literary studies. None the less, sermons are rarely scrutinized by either group of scholars in a way that utilizes both their rhetorical artfulness and their political engagement: they are not studied as both texts and events. This is partly a result of the different perspectives from which they have been examined by previous generations of scholars. Although two recent monographs, Peter McCullough's Sermons at court and Lori Anne Ferrell's Government by polemic, demonstrate ways in which this might be corrected, it must still be acknowledged that much work remains to be done.