This investigation and my ability to describe alien office structure is due more to chance than prior intention as it arose out of a difficult examination of the life of Thomas Pitt, second Lord Camelford (1775–1804). Lacking direct sources about him, I turned to an examination of his friends and associates and gradually a pattern emerged: an international network of secret agents. But who directed them, and from where? For a time the answer eluded me, and I was not helped by the statement in the guide to the public record office, that no alien office correspondence remains. In fact there is a considerable quantity, but with the exception of H.O. 5, which is entirely alien office, it is scattered in other H.O. classes as well as various F.O., W.O., and A.D.M. classes. But the late Alfred Cobban provided a lead and he had clearly recognized 1792 as a turning point in secret service. Others who have written before on this subject limited themselves to an examination of one of William Wickham's principal agents, Dandré, no doubt chiefly because at the time they wrote, much material that I have been able to consult was not then available to the public; i.e. a large part of the Wickham collection; the Talbot papers and the residue of Lord Grenville's papers.

In myEngland under the Tudors I took the liberty of advancing the view that Henry VII’s reputation for rapacity and extortion is probably not borne out by the facts and that his policy did not turn from just to unjust exactions. Though I knew, of course, that this opinion contradicted one held by many since Henry VII’s own time I did not imagine it to be provocative; I thought that the work of such scholars as Professors Thorne and Richardson, Miss Brodie and Mr Somerville, had shown the old notions to be quite as mistaken as I maintained. However, I have since discovered that I was too simple in that assumption; in particular, I have been challenged to say how I would dispose of the well-attested facts that Henry VII deteriorated in the second half of his reign into a grasping miser and that he showed deep remorse in his last weeks. The short answer is that I do not regard the first fact as attested at all and cannot believe that remorse in the face of death should be interpreted so trustingly. But, since the issue still appears to be in doubt, I should like to rehearse it here rather more thoroughly. I believe that this historical revision results from an important change in historical method which involves both a more critical attitude to the sources and a better understanding of that age in its own terms.

This review traces historians' use of the concept of popular culture, since its entry into the discipline in the 1970s. ‘Popular culture’ was initially loosely understood as the values, pleasures, and pastimes of the poor, and research in the field was heavily influenced by both Marxism and cultural anthropology. By the 1990s, earlier conceptions of popular culture appeared crudely reductionist, and heterogeneity, diversity, and ‘appropriation’ were firmly established as key terms and concerns for the historian of popular culture. But in the search for social and cultural complexity, the role of politics and the simple force of power and social inequality have been neglected. I argue here that wealth and power have long been key determinants shaping the character of popular cultural practice, and that their operation needs to be incorporated into our analyses. In this way, the study of popular culture offers the promise of research that is both of intrinsic interest and of broader historical significance.

Recent scholarship discussing the ‘federal moment’ in world history after 1945 has re-examined alternatives to the nation-state in the years of decolonization, arguing against any inevitable transition from empire to nation. This article focuses on the case of East Africa, where federation seemed an attractive and likely prospect by 1963, yet never came to pass. Here, the politics of federation should be understood as a constitutive part of the contested nation-state-making process, rather than a viable alternative to it. For the leaders who initiated the politics of federation in the 1960s, regional unity promised the further centralization of power and a means of defeating ‘tribalist’ opposition. For their opponents, federation was seized on as a means of promoting the autonomy of provinces or kingdoms within a larger federal unit. Ultimately, regionalist aspiration was inseparable from national politics, and negotiations among the leaders of East African states demanded the definition of national interests which divided states rather than united them. Such conclusions suggest that historians of the federal moment might more productively focus on the functions of federalist discourse in the making of nation-states rather than debating the viability of federalist projects.

The mercurial rise of Venizelos, the most prominent Greek statesman of this century, has been a hotly debated issue of modern Greek history. The tendency until recently has been to explain his success in terms of social changes, and to see the rise of the Liberal party as the triumph of modernizing bourgeois forces in early twentieth-century Greece. This article, however, compares Venizelos both with the generation of politicians which preceded him, and with his leading contemporary, Gounaris. It argues that Venizelos's enormous popularity hinged upon his response to the nationalist, quasi-messianicfervour which gripped Greece after its humiliating defeat by Turkey in 1897. Parliamentary government came to be seen as passive and elitist, political parties as causes of national decline. Using his rhetorical skills and the press, Venizelos presented himself as the agent of national regeneration. His attitude towards class politics, and to the very idea of political parties, was complex and ambivalent. Hence, his rise should be interpreted, not in terms of a simple Marxist or whiggish schema, as the product of Greece's bourgeois revolution, but as the expression of a new more confident nationalism, which reinforced the personality-centred quality of Greek politics.

The idea of industriousness has been an ever-recurring issue since Max Weber launched it as a putative explanation of the advent of economic modernity. The notion of ‘industrious revolution’ has provoked a renewed flourishing of publications focusing on this issue. Although most historians agree on the emergence of industriousness in seventeenth-century Europe, there is no consensus regarding the chronology, hence the real causes, of this mental and discursive shift. This article emphasizes the problematic role played by literary evidences in these social and cultural models of diffusion of new consumer values and desires. It then establishes the timing of the emergence of the ‘industriousness discourse’ using an original approach to diffusion based both on the quantitative analysis of very large corpora and a close reading of seventeenth-century economic pamphlets and educational literature. It concludes first that there was not one but several competing discourses on industriousness. It then identifies two crucial hinges which closely match the chronology proposed by Allen and Muldrew, but refutes that championed by de Vries and McCloskey. The industrious revolution as described by these authors would have happened both too late to fit its intellectual roots and too early to signal the beginning of a ‘consumer revolution’.

In the face of considerable scepticism from some British commentators, elections by secret ballot and adult suffrage emerged as central features of the end of British rule in Africa. This article considers the trajectories of electoral politics in three territories – Ghana (Gold Coast), Kenya, and Uganda. It shows that in each of these, the ballot box came to provide a point of convergence for the disparate ambitions of nationalist politicians, colonial policy-makers, and a hopeful, restive public: performing order, asserting maturity and equality, and staking a claim to prosperity. Late-colonial elections, we argue, constrained political possibility even as they offered citizenship, presenting the developmentalist state as the only possible future and ensuring substantial continuities from late colonialism to independence. They also established a linkage between nationhood, adulthood, and the ballot that was to have enduring political force. Yet at the same time, they established elections as a space for a local politics of clientelism, and for kinds of claims-making and accountability that were to complicate post-independence projects of nation-building.

This article argues that historians have misread Sir Thomas Smith's famous work as a narrowly factual description of English society and institutions, and Smith himself as a proto-rationalist thinker. Instead, De republica anglorum represents Smith's attempt as a citizen of the elect nation to theorize the ‘mixed monarchy’ inaugurated with Elizabeth's accession. It should thus be read as an important contribution to English Protestant apologetic of the 1560s, in conjunction with the work of men who more obviously engaged in that discourse: John Foxe, Laurence Humphrey, and John Aylmer. The article makes this case by reconstituting three cultural contexts which I argue need to be taken into account when analysing Smith's text. The first establishes Smith's ideological concerns and convictions in Edward VI's reign and in the early years of Elizabeth's. The second focuses on the immediate circumstances in which Smith wrote De republica anglorum: a polemical exchange between the Englishman Walter Haddon and the Portuguese Osorio da Fonseca concerning religious reformation and kingship. I then analyse De republica anglorum with reference to the key terms and issues identified in these contexts. The conclusion locates Smith's text in relation to one further context: Claude de Seyssel's The monarchy of France and its use by French Huguenot theorists in the 1560s. That nexus enabled Smith satisfactorily to address the central problem with which he and fellow apologists grappled throughout Elizabeth's reign: ungodly kingship in the guise of female rule.

Modern history, introduced to Oxford in the 1850s, was a subject that was hardly ‘modern’. The governing bodies of the university, as well as its teachers, intended history to strengthen and perpetuate the traditional values of liberal education. Beginning with the fall of Rome and concluding in the eighteenth century, history was not an innovative or experimental study of recent, let alone contemporary, issues and events. Instead, the study of history began and continued as an epic illustration of the qualities required of England's governing elite. Within a rapidly changing society that found the future more compelling than the past, modern history organized history, politics, economics and law as testaments to the enduring qualities of individual character and national institutions. All the liberal disciplines at Oxford, as well as those at Cambridge and subsequently at the new civic universities, reflected a national consensus about moral progress and social order which was reinforced by the content of those disciplines. The general frame of mind and expectations could not be attributed uniquely to Oxford. But there can be little doubt about the powerful influence Oxford exercized upon those graduates who left the university to assume careers of considerable national importance. It may be argued that among the various disciplines, none made so earnest and sustained an attempt to produce the right kind of men, fit for any undertaking, as did the Honours School in Modern History.

Most seventeenth-century English historians and analysts of periods of revolutionary activity, have viewed events in England between 1640 and 1660 as, at most, a failed political revolution which, while it may have temporarily transformed the political institutions of the English state, had little lasting impact on the everyday lives of its inhabitants. Repeated emphasis of this fact, however, has tended to obscure another important aspect of these years – the concerted efforts of successive puritan governments during the 1640s and 1650s to make substantial alterations in the accepted cultural norms of seventeenth-century English society. More recently this latter point has been highlighted in the work of historians like John Morrill, who has investigated the attempt to impose an alien presbyterian religious system on the country, and David Underdown, who has described puritan efforts to regularize and restrict the more unruly elements of rural popular culture. They have shown that, although such reformist initiatives were unpopular and often resisted, they nevertheless represented a determined thrust for cultural change, and in the short term were seen by many as a real intrusion and a serious threat to traditional practice.

The Ashanti expedition of 1873–4 provides a remarkable illustration of the use of military power in colonial policy. At a moment when the whole basis of Britain's West African policy was being questioned at home an Ashanti invasion of the states on the Gold Coast in 1873 brought about a calamitous decline in British prestige in the region. The tiny neglected British settlement on the Gold Coast, and the so-called ‘protectorate’, which even experts did not understand, suddenly received unwelcome publicity, which led finally to a reluctant exercise of military power. Sir Garnet Wolseley's march to Kumasi was one of the military dramas of the Victorian age.

That the making of a law and the enforcement of it are two different things is a commonplace which is nowhere more clearly exemplified than in the history of economic legislation. As a recent essay on ‘The Smugglers' Trade’ has shown, the point applied with special force to the sixteenth century when the government attempted on an unprecedented scale to control the economic life of the country, and especially the export and import of goods. The problem was twofold. In the first place the administration of the customs limped badly behind the rest of the financial administration. It was not until 1536 that nationally uniform rates were imposed, and at no time could the central government be sure of exercising effective control over the local customers and searchers and their deputies. While the royal lands were put under a modernized administration in the hands of such courts as those of General Surveyors and Augmentations, nothing was done either by Henry VII or by Thomas Cromwell to go to the root of the customs question. Cromwell, indeed, produced a comprehensive code with a preamble which showed that at least he knew what the trouble was; but somewhat in contrast to his usual practice, he did not approach the administrative problem at all. The customs were left in the exchequer from whose palsied hands the royal lands had been removed; consequently, when in an age of rising prices the value of the customs revenue began to outpace that of fixed land rents, the government of Elizabeth could do no better than farm a revenue which their own machinery was incapable of handling efficiently. Until the reign of Charles II, the English customs administration was never thoroughly reformed, and governments fell back either on the inefficient exchequer or on the dubious expedient of farming.

Christian relics have never received their due attention in history. Historians, justly suspecting the authenticity of the more eminent of them, have tended therefore to put them all to one side, forgetting that even a forgery can have its historical value; and only the theologians have taken notice of them, in their relations to the apocryphal improvements on Christian thought and story. This neglect is undeserved; for there are some of them that not only throw important sidelights on the history of their times, but even have played an active part in the moulding of that history.

The recent advances in Locke scholarship have given us a vivid description of the context in which Locke drafted the Two treatises of government. Yet, inadvertently, the result has been a skewed perspective on his concerns. As the focus has been on the English crisis in 1679–83 as the specific context from which Locke's theories emanated, the contexts in which they were published have attracted less attention. Redressing the balance, this article brings out Locke's participation in Francophone discussion in the context of a European crisis. After the Revolution of 1688–9 Locke's ‘Second treatise’ was translated into French by David Mazel, a Huguenot cleric. The article shows that Mazel's translation, the Du gouvernement civil, provided the Francophone readership with an anti-absolutist critique of the French regime, and that it emanated from the circle of Locke's closest friends. It was through the intermediary of a handful of Francophone Protestants that the Continental audience became aware of Locke's arguments and that he became known, not only as a theoretical philosopher, but also as a political theorist – as the author of, not the Two treatises, but the Du gouvernement.

The term ‘policing’ is often used to refer to a broad range of regulatory practices, which have been associated with the development of educative and social work frameworks in the modern state. The relationship between the concepts of ‘welfare’ and ‘penality’ (or ‘care’ and ‘control’) has been the subject of a number of recent studies of social intervention in twentieth-century Britain. However, the role of police officers themselves in the ‘policing of families’ has rarely been elaborated. From their initial appointment to London's Metropolitan Police in 1919 until their official integration on the same terms as male officers in the early 1970s, women police officers played a significant role in the detection and prevention of child abuse, neglect, and female delinquency. Through a case study of the work of the Metropolitan Women Police branch, this article considers the negotiation of a social work ethic within policing as well as the shifting configuration of the ‘care’/‘control’ nexus in welfare legislation and professional practice. The Metropolitan Women Police tended to see ‘care’ and ‘control’ as mutually reinforcing rather than conflicting concepts. Such a formulation was resonant with the rhetoric of social work and official legislation until the early 1960s. It also reflected the philosophy of crime prevention laid down as the principal object of policing, enabling women to justify involvement in child protection and welfare as an aspect of police work.

As the devil never leaves unbelieving heretics in repose, they conspired in such cities as Paris, Rouen, Orleans, Lyons, Toulouse and other large cities to surprise the catholic Christians and put them all to the sword. The king was apprised of this near the end of the year 1572, whereupon, considering well such a damnable enterprise, he sent orders to all the cities to inquire as to the truth of this endeavour…. When its truth was discovered, he ordered, so that the cost of the executions for which he otherwise would have had to pay might be avoided, that…[the huguenots] be put to death in all of the cities of France where they could be caught. [Explanation of the Saint Bartholomew's massacre provided by an anonymous catholic chronicler, 1581.]

William Gladstone's views on slavery and the slave trade have received little attention from historians, although he spent much of his early years in parliament dealing with issues related to that subject. His stance on slavery echoed that of his father, who was one of the largest slave owners in the British West Indies, and on whom he was dependent for financial support. Gladstone opposed the slave trade but he wanted to improve the condition of the slaves before they were liberated. In 1833, he accepted emancipation because it was accompanied by a period of apprenticeship for the ex-slaves and by financial compensation for the planters. In the 1840s, his defence of the economic interests of the British planters was again evident in his opposition to the foreign slave trade and slave-grown sugar. By the 1850s, however, he believed that the best way to end the slave trade was by persuasion, rather than by force, and that conviction influenced his attitude to the American Civil War and to British colonial policy. As leader of the Liberal party, Gladstone, unlike many of his supporters, showed no enthusiasm for an anti-slavery crusade in Africa. His passionate commitment to liberty for oppressed peoples was seldom evident in his attitude to slavery.

England was blighted by frequent agricultural depressions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Recurrent crises brought poor law reform to the parliamentary agenda and led to the passage of two non-compulsory pieces of legislation, Sturges Bourne's Acts of 1818 and 1819. These permissory acts allowed parishes to ‘tighten up’ the distribution of poor relief through two vital tools: the formation of select vestries, and the appointment of waged assistant overseers. Whilst previous studies have tended to represent the legislation as a failing reform in the dying days of the old poor law, we know remarkably little about the relief practices deployed by parishes operating under the auspices of Sturges Bourne's Acts. This article starts by detailing the genesis of the reforms before considering the provisions of the acts and their rates of adoption in rural England. Focusing upon administrative records from Wessex and West Sussex, the article proceeds to examine the inspection of relief claimants, and judgments made as to their ‘character and conduct’; the general measures taken to reduce outdoor relief; and their alternative strategies for allocating relief. It is argued that the reforms re-drew the distinction between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, ultimately changing individuals' and families' entitlement to relief under the old poor laws.

The career of Thomas Dugard, the focus of this article, can be very briefly outlined. The son of a Worcestershire schoolmaster, Dugard was educated at Sidney Sussex College Cambridge, where his uncle Richard was an eminent tutor. Thomas gained his M.A. in 1633, and the same year became Master of Warwick school where he remained until he obtained the wealthy living of Barford, south Warwickshire in 1648. He kept this living until his death in 1683, by which time he had, by the skin of his teeth, been enrolled by the heralds amongst the Warwickshire gentry. Thomas Dugard was not considered worthy of an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, although his brother William, the schoolmaster and printer, and his son Samuel, a clergyman and author, are included.