Readers in die Foreign Office archive for the 1930s will not find many documents longer dian C14471/42/18 of 1938, which fills the major part of die volume into which it has been bound. In line widi British official practice this ‘document’ actually consists of a collection of papers, in this case nine, having a common occasion and a common subject. Bearing die title ‘Possible future course of British policy’, it is at least as interesting as it is long.

There have been any number of biographies of Cecil Rhodes but they are all concerned with his imperialist dreams and dieir realization, paying litde attention to his business career and financial connexions in London. This is surprising in view of J. A. Hobson's identification of finance as ‘the motor-power of Imperialism’ and his reference to the prime role of Rothschilds (Rhodes' financiers) and other Jewish firms. The name of Rothschild is of course mentioned in the biographies, but the merchant bank's contribution is nowhere probed and the student of business history or imperialism is left to draw his own inferences from its characteristically low profile. Perhaps Rothschilds only receive passing mention because their contribution was very modest, an initial priming for a client that needed litde external financial support? Or, following Hobson, conceivably the bankers were the real powers behind Rhodes, ‘the prime determinants of imperial policy’? Recent revelations of some of Rhodes' business deals have not improved his reputation, and it is important to know if his financial backers were in any way responsible for the unsavoury aspects of his business record.

South Africa was part of the sterling area (an international currency and payments system centred on Britain) from 1933 until the area itself collapsed in the early 1970s. This was despite the fact that throughout this period, and especially after 1948, Afrikaner nationalists were actively undermining other elements of the British connection. The South African government was compelled to enter and remain in the area above all because of its dependence on Britain both as a customer for South African agricultural goods (the production and export of which were disproportionately significant in South African politics) and as a source of capital funds and goods (particularly for the highly capital-intensive gold-mining industry which dominated the South African economy as a whole). The British government promoted South Africa's membership of the area not just for reasons of economics (the flow of South African gold to London facilitated the maintenance of sterling as an international currency; trade with South Africa could generate substantial net earnings of convertible currency which helped to sustain British trade on a largely multilateral basis) but also for reasons of strategy, geopolitics and prestige.

The article attempts to show that Bonar Law had an effective and coherent strategy towards home rule. Previous interpretations have stressed his weakness and inexperience, either his ‘pandering’ to the extremists in the Tory party or his readiness to seek a compromise, when civil war began to loom large, in the autumn of 1913. Much of the blame for the political stalemate from 1912 until 1914 is directly, or implicitly, laid upon Bonar Law. Yet the tory leader was a more consummate politician. He sought to use the home rule crisis not only to reinforce his own fragile leadership but to return the Conservatives to office. This he proposed to do by allowing the political system to reach an impasse over home rule, by not helping the Liberals reach a compromise and yet inciting Ulster to resist the bill on its implementation. This left Asquith, the Liberal prime minister, with the impossible choice of imposing the bill onto Ulster (so provoking civil war) or of holding a general election when his government was perceived as unpopular. Bonar Law counted on Asquith preferring to hold an election though Asquith was saved from such a decision by the outbreak of war. It was, then, a ‘high-risk’ strategy to win office for the party he led.

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.

John Cusacke, an Irish gentleman who was educated on the continent and worked on the fringes of the court of wards, constructed a striking re-reading of kingship, law, colonial government, and parliament in a series of tracts written between 1615 and 1647. His writings provide insight both into seventeenth-century colonial theory and early Stuart political thought. Shaped in the cauldron of Irish land struggles and continental political thought, Cusacke rejected Old English constitutionalism, arguing instead that Ireland was a colonial dependency of England. Further, to gain royal favour for various projects, Cusacke recast contemporary conceptions of parliament and common law, rejecting the centrality of custom, insisting that the king was the law maker and vigorously attacking Sir Edward Coke. Cusacke's writings reached the libraries of James I and Charles I, and their officials Sir Robert Naunton, master of the court of wards, and attorney-general Sir Robert Bankes. Cusacke's tracts graphically demonstrate the existence of an absolutist political discourse in early Stuart Britain applied not to issues of theology or of international law but to domestic politics.

Though divorce followed by remarriage was illegal in early modern England, a considerable number of people whose marriage had failed or whose spouse had deserted ventured to marry again, either uncertain of the law or choosing to defy it. Bigamy, traditionally a spiritual offence, came to be seen as a significant social problem and was made a felony in 1604. Drawing on ecclesiastical and secular court records and a variety of other sources, this article examines the legal framework, offers a typology of bigamists, and explores the circumstances surrounding their actions. It finds that offenders, predominantly male, ranged from the unlucky or feckless to the cynically manipulative, among them a small number of serial bigamists. It also asks how such offences might come to light in an age of relatively poor communications, and examines the plight of those who had married a bigamist in good faith. Finally it examines the likelihood of conviction, and the punishment of those who confessed or were convicted.

A Number of important studies have been published in recent years on the subject of benefice and vassalage during the early Middle Ages, and it may consequently be worth while to re-examine some of the problems raised by the origin and early development of these two institutions. I have dealt elsewhere with, the circumstances which tended towards their union early in the eighth, century, under the early Carolingians, In this article I hope to indicate at least the principal features of the history of benefice and vassalage during the reign of Charlemagne. The Influence which Charles exercised on the public and private institutions of the Frankish state was so definite and far-reaching as fully to justify the limitation of the subject-matter of my inquiry to the space of a single reign. Unfortunately the lack of adequate sources, though less serious than for the preceding period, renders the task of tracing their history a somewhat difficult one. Although the capitularies contain a relatively large number of provisions that deal specifically with these institutions, we have very little information as to how they worked in practice. The narrative sources, with the exception of two or three texts, tell us little or nothing. We have to fall back on the evidence of charters, though even these only rarely, when dealing with a dispute or legal proceeding, throw some light on the subject. This is what we might in any case expect, for the essential feature of the entry of a person into vassalage or of the gift of a benefice was the oral act, and not any embodiment of it in writing.

The merging of the Lutheran and Calvinist (Reformed) confessions to form the United Church of Prussia was one of the most controversial policies pursued by Frederick William III after 1815. By the late 1830s it had provoked a large and well-organised movement of opposition, particularly among those ‘Old Lutherans’ in Silesia and neighbouring provinces who refused to abandon their liturgical traditions. This article examines the government's attempts to complete the process of unification through measures designed to atomize and silence Lutheran protest. Neither Prussian law nor Prussian law enforcement agencies, the article suggests, furnished an adequate foundation for Frederick William III's confessional policy. The unsuccessful campaign against Old Lutheranism exacerbated latent tensions between the executive and judicial branches of the administration and revealed the limits of government power and authority in the sensitive area of confessional policy. The aggressive and systematic confessional statism of the administration under Frederick William III was unprecedented in Prussian history; in this as in other areas of policy, the term ‘Restoration’ misrepresents political reality in post-Napoleonic Prussia.

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.

This article examines the causes and consequences of the exclusion of men from the British Women's Liberation Movement in the 1970s. In common with many of the new social movements of the period, the Women's Liberation Movement was strongly committed to organizational autonomy and self-reliance, in the belief that the demands of oppressed groups should be formulated and presented directly by the oppressed themselves rather than made on their behalf by others, however sympathetic. Using contemporary archival sources, especially newsletters, conference papers, reports, and correspondence, the article explores the debates that surrounded this commitment, and the differing perspectives offered by socialist, radical, revolutionary, and other feminists. It describes the problems created by the presence of men on the edges of the Women's Liberation Movement in its early years, and the controversies that arose over their removal and the definition of women-only spaces. However, even absent men proved to be divisive, and the ‘problem of men’ persisted throughout the decade. The article also considers the responses of men to their exclusion, and their own self-organization in men's groups.

The Cold War lasted for almost fifty years and ended nearly twenty years ago. A vast historiography continues to grow. In explaining the past and continuing debate, this article is necessarily selective. It has three aims. The first is to locate the main phases and trends in the debate about the Cold War. The second is to analyse the growing literature on the end of the Cold War. Thirdly, it attempts to identify a number of major themes by looking beyond geopolitical issues to various aspects of the cultural Cold War, to espionage and intelligence, and to the economic dimension. The review has three main conclusions. First, diplomacy and strategic issues have been extensively explored, though more is needed on the Soviet Union and especially on China. Secondly, analysis of the economic and intelligence dimension has improved, though, again, knowledge of the Soviet Union and China remains thin. Lastly, the growing coverage of cultural issues has deepened our understanding but needs to be integrated into political and strategic narratives.

The English republican movement of the late 1860s and early 1870s has received meagre notice in standard historical accounts of the Victorian period. If viewed as no more than a notorious episode of the time English republicanism perhaps deserved no better; but, if considered as a persistent element of the radical tradition dating from the 1790s, coming to climax and then anti-climax in the 1870s, it merited more than mere passing attention. It has never been the subject of a single substantial historical work, and given that it was so inextricably bound up with other elements of nineteenth-century radicalism, perhaps it never will. Nevertheless, it has been accorded more than passing reference in the work of Royle, Gossman, Hardie and Harrison.

The study of how popular religious publishing operated in Britain in the eighteenth century has been neglected. Recent work on such publishing in the nineteenth century ignores the important eighteenth-century tract distribution societies that were the predecessors of the much larger nineteenth-century ones. This article provides a detailed account of the work of a society that is now little known, despite the wealth of surviving evidence: the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor, founded in 1750, which should properly be considered the first of the evangelical tract societies. It was founded by dissenters, but included many Anglicans among its members; its object was to promote experimental religion by distributing Bibles and cheap tracts to the poor. Its surviving records provide unusually detailed evidence of the choice, numbers, distribution, and reception of these books. Analysis of this particular Society throws light more generally on non-commercial popular publishing, the reading experiences of the poor, and the development of evangelical religion in the eighteenth century.

This article concludes that Australia was determined to possess nuclear weapons from the end of the Second World War. The best prospects for this lay in working with Britain through the so-called ‘joint project’. British defence planners knew that their small island would not survive a future atomic blitz and, therefore, needed ‘active’ deterrent weapons. The problem was that the US after 1946 moved to protect its atomic monopoly and denied Britain research, raw materials, and test facilities. Australia was, therefore, an invaluable partner in the British deterrent weapons programme, in all its aspects from research to testing, as long as the US refused co-operation. The quest for atomic weapons lies at the heart of many of Canberra's initiatives after 1945 – the decision to build an Australian National University; the construction of the vast Snowy Mountains scheme; and ultimately the decision to deploy Australian forces into South-East Asia in the mid-fifties. The height of Anglo-Australian co-operation coincided with the atomic tests after 1952, London's decision to help build atomic reactors in Australia, and the Suez crisis. Britain's acquisition of deterrent weapons in 1957, however, saw the end of imperial co-operation on atomic weapons and delivery systems.

There are grounds for arguing that the dynamic thrust of English Liberalism in the early twentieth century was in the direction of social democracy; and that this was a necessary condition of the survival of the Liberal party as a party of government. By 1910, according to this view, the party represented workingclass interests rather than those of any other class. But what about business Liberalism? We are likely to discover an upper limit of its strength among businessmen involved in the cotton trade (cotton bosses). As the party of Free Trade, the Liberals were well placed here. There was no sectional reason why the Conservative programme of Tariff Reform should attract these industrialists. Having no need of protection in home or Empire markets, the cotton industry had almost nothing to gain from an artificial restriction of competition, whereas it had much to lose if a system of tariffs increased production costs.

One of the most profound challenges facing the Labour party in the post-war period was its ability to understand and make policy to reform the private sector. Before the Attlee government, Labour had little to say on this issue, but that government's experience exposed the dangerous ‘vacuum’ this involved. In the 1950s the nature of the capitalist firm ranked alongside the alleged ‘embourgoisement’ of the working class as an issue framing Labour's ideological and policy debate. The centrality of this issue reflected the fact that understanding the firm was inextricably linked to a raft of broader arguments within the Left about the nature of modern capitalism. The benign view of the corporation that flowed from the revisionist wing of the party was challenged by the ‘declinist’ politics of the 1960s, and in office after 1964 Labour pursued a modernizing agenda which centrally involved seeking to shape the behaviour of the private sector in order to deliver the higher economic growth that Labour so much desired. The failure of this growth to materialize led to great disillusion across the party about the policies pursued by the Wilson government, and this in turn led to a fundamental rethink of policy that was to underpin the radical agenda of the party in the 1970s.

The tales of divine judgements on sinners which are found throughout John Foxe's famous martyrology, the Acts and monuments, and also collected in a concluding appendix to the work, have often been dismissed as the products of gossip, while Foxe's printing of them has been traditionally regarded as an idiosyncratic, but ultimately insignificant, aberration in his historical writing. After examining the sources for two of these stories of providential punishment, this article will argue that some of the anecdotes of divine retribution printed in Acts and monuments were sent to Foxe in pursuit of local feuds and private grievances, arising from personal hatreds and prospects of material gain as well as religious conflict. After examining the changes made to these stories in the different editions of Acts and monuments, this article will maintain that such providential stories were central, rather than marginal, features of Foxe's work and thought. It is hoped that this article will offer a fresh perspective on Foxe's editorial practices, on the accuracy of Acts and monuments and also on the conflicting objectives of Foxe and his informants.

A great deal of published historical work has been devoted to establishing the causes and chronology of the demise of the Liberal party in British politics. The downfall of the Liberals has been ascribed to the inevitable outflanking development of the Labour party; to the mutilation of Liberal principles involved in waging the first ‘total’ war; to the personal rifts and feuds between the rival followers of Asquith and Lloyd George—and to various combinations of these factors. Yet there has been no detailed analysis of the division within the Parliamentary Liberal party during the First World War. Although at the end of 1916 obviously certain Liberals supported Asquith and others Lloyd George, no attempt has been made to examine the way in which the rifts in the party were reflected in political action in the House of Commons during the time of the second coalition government, nor to determine accurately the lines of division in the party. An answer to the question of ‘How did the Liberal party divide during the First World War?’ has proved elusive, although some historians of the period have been more successful than others.