The British response to the mass unemployment of the 1930s was in striking contrast to that of the other major industrialized countries. Only in Britain was a policy of accepting the apparent logic of capitalism, and waiting out the slump, successfully maintained in a reasonably stable, democratic setting. In an article on ‘The New Deal, National Socialism and the Great Depression’, John A. Garraty wrote that ‘in both Roosevelt's America and Hitler's Germany economic objectives were subordinated whenever necessary to political aims’. In neither country was there ‘any consistently held theory about either the causes of the depression or how to end it’ Britain under the National government represents almost precisely the opposite case. First, the government's policy of minimal direct intervention to relieve unemployment was directed towards achieving its central objective of ensuring that the depression would cause no fundamental changes in existing economic and social relationships. Immediate political considerations were subordinated to this overriding goal, Secondly, the government's approach, though not all of its particular actions, was based on a rational, comprehensive and widely accepted theoretical foundation.

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.

If a revolution has taken place recently in the history of political thought, the name of Quentin Skinner must figure prominently in the vanguard. His work has been concerned with redefining the boundaries between philosophy and history; to put the matter briefly he makes a plea for ‘less philosophy and more history’. With regard to Thomas Hobbes his work involves two distinct – but related – projects: to revise our view of Hobbes's impact and influence on his age; and to clarify the interpretation of Hobbes's written work. Characteristically, the first project is presented as a guide to the second. History becomes the handmaiden of philosophy.

1848 has gone down in history – or rather in history books – as the year when England was different. In that year a wave of revolution on the Continent overthrew constitutions, premiers and even a dynasty but in England, by contrast, the middle classes rallied round the government and helped it preserve the status quo. This interpretation of 1848 has long been the established orthodoxy amongst historians. Asa Briggs took this view thirty years ago and it has lately been endorsed by F. B. Smith and Henry Weisser. Most recently, John Saville, in his book on 1848, has concluded that events in England ‘demonstrated beyond question and doubt, the complete and solid support of the middling strata to the defence of existing institutions’. He claims that ‘the outstanding feature of 1848 was the mass response to the call for special constables to assist the professional forces of state security’ which reflected a closing of ranks among all property owners. Although some historians, notably David Goodway, have recently stressed the vitality of Chartism in 1848 they have not challenged the traditional view that the movement failed to win concessions from the establishment and soon declined. Thus 1848 in England is generally regarded as a terminal date: the last chapter in the history of Chartism as a major movement. Thereafter Britain experienced a period of conservatism – described by one historian as ‘the mid-Victorian calm’–which lasted until the death of Palmerston in 1865.

On the morning of Wednesday, 24 February 1585, a bill ‘for imploying of Landes and Tenementes given to the Maintenance of Highewayes, Bridges etc.’ was read in the house of common for the seond time and committed for consideration by several members that afternoon in the hall of the Middle Temple. The committee decided to introduce a completely new measure which was itself committed after the second reading on 9 March. At one point in these proceedings William Fleetwood, recorder of London, told the lower house that he had advised the bill's promoter to make it ‘a private bill but he would not and therfor he shall see what will come of it’. Undoubtedly irked at this refusal to accept his advice, Fleetwood may have felt some satisfaction when the bill was rejected on its third reading in the lower house. Nevertheless, the bill's promoter had good reason to introduce his measure as a public rather than as a private bill. Private bills were expensive. Fees were payable at every stage, for the reading, committing, engrossing and endorsing such bills, and then, if all went well, fees had to be paid if the promoter wanted the bill printed and thus made public. Besides the cost, private bills stood less chance of getting through both houses of parliament. Not only was there a great risk of one's measure getting swamped by the large number of private bills always introduced in the first few weeks of a session, but it was also frequently asserted that private bills should have low priority on the agenda of parliament.

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.

This article seeks to contribute to a better understanding of the formation of masculinity in early modern Italy, by focusing on literature defending women written by men. The article argues that defence of women emerged as a crucial feature in male self-fashioning and group identity formation in specific environments, such as the courts, the academies, and the Venetian socio-cultural scene of the 1540s and 1550s. By detecting how demarcations of self and other were shaped in the literature under examination, the article suggests that men defending women fashioned themselves both in regard to female ‘otherness’ and against other contemporary male identities. In this process of inclusion and exclusion both gender and social status came into play. Although defence of women initially emerged as a key determinant of elite masculinity, it gradually became the bone of contention among different social groups of men seeking to negotiate, redefine, and appropriate for themselves an idealized form of masculinity.

It is widely recognized that ‘the individual’ was prioritized by the Thatcher governments. However, there has been little analysis by historians of exactly how the Thatcher government conceptualized ‘the individual’. In this article, we attempt to remedy this deficiency by undertaking a case-study of a key Thatcherite social policy reform: the introduction of ‘personal pensions’. This approach allows us to understand the position of ‘the individual’ on the functional level of Thatcherite policy-making. In doing so, we argue that there was no coherent or fixed Thatcherite concept of the individual. Instead, we identify three fundamental tensions: (i) should individuals be capitalists or consumers; (ii) were they rational or irrational; and (iii) should they be risk-taking entrepreneurs or prudent savers? This reflected, in part, conflicts within the diverse tapestry of post-war neoliberal thought. We demonstrate in this article that these tensions undermined the Thatcher governments’ original attempt to create a society of entrepreneurial investor-capitalists, which in turn cemented their preference for simply maximizing individual freedom of choice within a competitive – yet tightly regulated – market environment.

The history of reading can link intellectual and cultural developments with social or political change in the eighteenth century. Historians of the book increasingly argue that an understanding of historical reading practices is essential if we are to understand the impact of texts on individuals and on society as a whole: textual evidence alone is inadequate. Recent work on eighteenth-century readers has used sources including book trade records, correspondence, and diaries to reconstruct the reading lives of individuals and of groups of readers. Such sources reveal the great variety of reading material many eighteenth-century readers could access, and the diversity and sophistication of reading practices they often employed, in selecting between a range of available reading strategies. Thus, any one theoretical paradigm is unlikely to capture the full range of eighteenth-century reading experience. Instead, we can trace the evolution of particular reading cultures, including popular and literary reading cultures, the existence of cultures based around particular genres of print, such as newspapers, and reading as a part of social and conversational life. There is now a need for a new synthesis that combines the new evidence of reading practice with textual analysis to explain continuity and change across the century.

Wilkins's The principles and duties of natural religion, edited by Tillotson and published posthumously in 1675, designed to combat scepticism and infidelity, was reprinted nine times up to 1734 and was widely used as a textbook in the education of clergy and ministers. Hume's Dialogues concerning natural religion, substantially written in 1751 but withheld from publication on the advice of friends and only published posthumously in 1779, reversed Wilkins's procedure by scrutinising the tenets of natural religion from the perspective of scepticism. This essay explores the importance of Wilkins's text in the tripartite eighteenth-century scheme of natural religion, revealed religion, and ethics, and shows how Hume's parody of a well known passage from Wilkins – the ‘Galen's muscles’ of the title – was intended to contribute to the undermining of this scheme.

It is perhaps not surprising that the central thread of manorial land law should be found in the pauper problem; for one of the most urgent needs of any age or society is the prevention of destitution. The “sturdy beggar” and “such as walk by night and sleep by day” were the terror of Plantagenet as well as Tudor, while the distress of the aged and impotent was as bitter in the thirteenth as in the sixteenth century, though voiced by no popular poet or press. The Court rolls of the Abbot of Crowland's manors of Oakington, Cottenham and Drayton give constant evidence of the effort consciously or unconsciously made to obviate these unproductive elements of the population, which might become a burden upon the efficient classes.

In the belief that the immigrant Irish were not merely degraded but degrading, and in support of a cataclysmic theory of history towards which he was advancing, Friedrich Engels in 1845 was convinced that “the Irish immigrants in England have added an explosive force to English society which will have significant consequences in due course’. By ‘English society’ Engels intended that of Scotland also, but a century later the historian of die Irish in Scotland, Dr James Handley, was writing: ‘Whether die immigrant has revolted instinctively or not against die bleakness of Scottish industrialism … the fact remains mat he has not made his presence effectively felt among the forces that attempt to control it’. If, however, Engels expected too much of the Irish, Dr Handley appears to have done diem less than justice, although his use of the word ‘effectively’ may have a special significance for him.

Even though so much has so often been done, the study of parliament remains active, not least so for the sixteenth century. A fresh look at the present state of the question seems appropriate on this occasion when we are assembled to commemorate Sir John Neale, the foremost historian of the Tudor House of Commons. It is now nearly twenty years since Neale completed his life's work, and those twenty years have not been without further study and thought, sometimes assisted by the discovery of new evidence. No one, we may be sure, would have been better pleased than today's honorand to find that what so fully engaged his interest and his labours should continue to attract his successors – to know that he had not closed a book but opened a window.

Although sometimes seen as a bastion of royalism, the northern counties supplied some of the most militant members of the Long Parliament. Northern MPs and peers figured prominently in the war party, played a key role in negotiating the Solemn League and Covenant, and comprised an important element within the anti-Scots, pro-New Model Army faction at Westminster. Anglo- Scottish relations in the Civil War period were intimately linked with the parliamentary history of the northern counties during the 1640s. This article examines the development and structure of the northern interest in the Long Parliament, and in particular its collaboration with the parliamentary Independents. Analysis of the drafting of the Newcastle peace propositions and of the Commons' efforts to reduce the size of the Covenanting forces indicates that the Independents relied heavily on evidence of abuses committed by the Scottish army in the northern counties to advance their own programme for settlement and to frustrate that of the Scots and their English allies. It is also argued that the Independents' exploitation of the northern reaction against the Scots had a profound impact upon the relations between all three Stuart monarchies.

Amid the continuing re-evaluations of how the eighteenth-century British empire functioned, the role of land policy remains neglected. Yet it would not be disputed that land was the primary colonial resource. For colonists, its acquisition and exploitation was the most obvious route to wealth, privilege and political power, while in Britain, for those with access to government favour, colonial land was an investment opportunity for making monetary profit from political influence. By the mid eighteenth century, however, opportunities deriving from possession of colonial land varied a good deal. Proprietorial rights in Maryland and Pennsylvania, largely worthless up to the 1730s, rapidly became highly lucrative. In New England, mounting pressure on the supply of land had sharply forced up land values but diminished the average size of landholdings. For both colonists and British investors seeking new opportunities the highest returns on investment in land were likely to be made in the royal colonies of America and the West Indies, where title to land lay in the crown and its acquisition and tenure were subject to regulations which collectively amounted to crown policy. As it had developed over one hundred and fifty years, crown land policy offered terms which were relatively generous and restrictions which were easy to evade. Its study therefore, and particularly examination of attempts by the crown to change the traditional pattern, contribute to a clearer understanding of the imperial nexus in the period before the American Revolution.

For some years now, the repression of the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) by the Paris police on 17 October 1961 has been a subject of controversy. This is despite the fact that those who have written about this incident are in agreement about its magnitude (more than 14,000 people arrested in two days) and its senseless violence. Yet there remains disagreement over the emotive question of the number of people killed. The recent publication of a study by Jim House and Neil MacMaster provides an opportunity to return to this issue, and to raise important questions about the methodologies and standards of research that have been used.

This article is a revised and expanded version of my inaugural lecture as Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge, delivered on 12 March 2014. It highlights the evolution of Ecclesiastical History to include the study of Christianity in the global south and shows how recent developments in the study of African and world history have produced a dynamic and multi-faceted model of religious encounter, an encounter which includes the agency of indigenous Christians alongside the activities of missionaries. Investigating the contribution of faith missionaries to the production of colonial knowledge in Belgian Congo, the article challenges stereotypes about the relations between Pentecostalism and modernity, and between mission and empire. Throughout, consideration is given to the range of missionary sources, textual, visual, and material, and their utility in reconstructing social differentiation in African societies, particularly in revealing indigenous African criticism of ‘custom’.

This article explores the social, legal, and administrative response in Tudor and early Stuart England to people known in law as ‘Egyptians’ or ‘counterfeit Egyptians’ but commonly called ‘Gypsies’. It argues that such people differed from ordinary poor vagrants in their heritage, their language, and such activities as horse dealing and fortune-telling. Elizabethan and Jacobean publications placed Gypsies on the fringes of fecklessness, criminality, and the picaresque, and established a stereotype of deceit and imposture that has not yet disappeared. Acts of Parliament in 1531, 1554, and 1563 criminalized ‘Egyptians’, forbidding their entry, ordering their expulsion, and eventually making them liable to the death penalty. Enforcement, however, was haphazard, and repression co-existed uneasily with growing registers of tolerance. This is a neglected topic in early modern social history, with links to international and interdisciplinary Romani studies as well as work on itinerancy, ethnicity, and marginality.