Drawing upon recently published research and previously unseen archival sources, the article provides a new explanation of the British conquest of Burma in 1885. Previous explanations have attributed British motives for conquest to either the need to defend the eastern borders of Britain's Indian empire from French expansion in mainland south-east Asia, or the desire to open Burma and China to British trade and investment at a time of perceived economic depression. The article contends that while French expansionism certainly loomed large in the British decision to invade, commercial interests and considerations were pivotal in persuading the British government of the French threat. In particular, the role of London-based ‘gentlemanly capitalists’ in shaping government policy is emphasized and explored. In the process, new insights into the methods and strategies of City financiers are revealed. Besides contributing to the debate surrounding the ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ thesis of Cain and Hopkins, the article also evaluates the importance of socio-economic conditions in Burma itself as a factor which stimulated British expansion.

Charles Booth dates the beginning of the agitation for old age pensions from the late 1870's, which were marked by two publications of first importance in the field. He himself drew inspiration from the pamphlet of Mr Hookham who, in 1879, published ‘The Outline of a Scheme for dealing with Pauperism. The Question of the Day’. Running neck and neck with Mr Hookham, however, was another now long-forgotten gentleman named Canon Blackley who produced a scheme of national insurance which acquired widespread commendation. The two of them together symbolize both the desire for social action and the cleavage of opinion as to the direction such action should take.

The consolidation of the Indian Empire after the Mutiny brought with it a more closely defined honorific hierarchy. From the first investiture at Windsor in 1861 of the Star of India and increasingly agter the assumption by the Queen of her new title of Empress, high service came to be rewarded in honours and distinctions with a discriminating lavishness reminiscent of the creations of the Younger Pitt. But the title assumed by the Queen and announced on 28 April 1876 had not originally been designed for India alone. It was Disraeli's caution that induced the Queen to abandon the style of ‘Empress of Great Britain, Ireland and India’. In his anxiety to avoid controversy many assurances were given that the United Kingdom would not be affected. Thus limitation of the title to India did not at first have any special significance. In reply to Lowe's criticisms, the Prime Minister saw no reason why two of the Queen's sons should not become Dukes of Canada and Australia. It was only in the course of the preparations for proclaiming the title on the first day of 1877 that the Indian Government, recovered from its surprise, suggested that the occasion might be invested with a political as well as a symbolic significance. The Viceroy, Lytton, came to believe that the occasion was a unique opportunity, not merely for broadening the base of the imperial Government through a popular symbol, but for materially strengthening the executive by a new understanding with the native princes of India.

Geoffrey Elton's model of Tudor politics, which emphasized the importance of political institutions and which dominated our understanding of Tudor politics for much of the second half of the twentieth century, has been challenged by a number of historians for over twenty years. They have re-emphasized the importance of social connections and cultural influences and turned attention away from studying the privy council to studying the court. In doing so, they have gone back to re-examine earlier approaches by Sir John Neale and Conyers Read which Elton had challenged. Yet, these new socially and culturally derived approaches, recently labelled ‘New Tudor political history’, remain varied and its practitioners sometimes at odds with each other. Focusing on both established seminal works and recent research, this review considers the different elements of these approaches in relation to Tudor court politics. It assesses the methodological problems they raise and identifies what shortcomings still remain. It demonstrates that Tudor politics are increasingly defined as based on social networks rather than institutional bodies, making issues of access to, and intimacy with, the monarch central. Our understanding has been further enhanced by exploration of political culture and its relationship to political action. However, the review points to the need to integrate more fully the political role of women and the relationship between the court and the wider political community into our understanding of Tudor politics, as well as place England into a European context.

Through the end of the eighteenth century, Lake Ontario had a large population of Atlantic salmon. However, the salmon population declined precipitously in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the fish had disappeared completely by 1900. This article analyses the responses of both Natives and settlers to initial salmon abundance and subsequent diminution. Although the extirpation of the lake's salmon is generally attributed to the construction of dams, this article identifies earlier and broader causes of salmon decline. In both Canada and the United States, commercial fishing captured unprecedented numbers of fish while agriculture and deforestation compromised salmon spawning habitat. While primary responsibility for the extirpation rests with the settlers, both Natives and Euro-Americans treated the fish as a commodity. As the salmon dwindled, sportsmen's groups came to the fore in setting fisheries policy. Sportsmen supported enhanced conservation measures but based their strategy on unrealistic methods for reviving the fish population through pisciculture.

In June 1890 Lord Salisbury negotiated an agreement with Germany ceding Heligoland in return for the renunciation of German claims to Uganda, the cession of the German protectorate over the East African coast north of Witu, and the recognition of a British protectorate over Zanzibar. Although France was a party to the Joint Declaration of 1862 which guaranteed the independence of Zanzibar, Salisbury did not consider himself bound to consult her about the proposed change in the island's status. More surprisingly, he offered no assurance that French rights in Zanzibar would continue to be respected. When the French protested, Salisbury apologized for this oversight and entered into negotiations with their ambassador, W. H. Waddington. On 5 August a new agreement was signed whereby France recognized the British protectorate over Zanzibar in exchange for the recognition of her own protectorate over Madagascar and of her sphere of influence ‘south of her Mediterranean Possessions, up to a line from Say on the Niger, to Barruwa on Lake Tchad, drawn in such a manner as to comprise in the sphere of action of the [Royal] Niger Company all that fairly belongs to the Kingdom of Sokoto’.

Relations between Italy and Britain, even after Mussolini's seizure of power, remained entirely satisfactory within the framework of their traditional partnership in European affairs until the Ethiopian crisis of 1935. It is, however, well known that the first strains in the relationship rcame only in the period from July to October 1935, when British naval forces were concentrated in the Mediterranean. This particular episode as the Italo-Ethiopian crisis, occasionally referred to as ‘The Italo-Ethiopian emergency in the Mediterranean’, has been the subject of several untested and misleading assumptions made by historians whose attention has been focused almost solely on the international aspects of the Ethiopian crisis. This review is wholly based on Anglo-Italian records.

By 1811, just a year after the annexation of their national territory to the French Empire, the Dutch had organized the most effective and comprehensive system of elementary education in Europe. How had this been accomplished? Not, at any rate, in emulation of their former neighbours. At the zenith of its power, Imperial France had nothing to show for years of speculation and derelict legislation except the return of responsibility for the ‘écoles primaires’ to the Church. The respective condition of the two states made this contrast still more emphatic. France commanded financial and administrative resources which the most absolute of her monarchs would have coveted; the Dutch were exhausted by fiscal penury and torn by bitter political division.

This article is a revised and expanded version of my inaugural lecture as Professor of Modern History at the University of Cambridge, delivered on 20 Oct. 2011. It explores how the religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reshaped perceptions of the past, stimulated shifts in historical method, and transformed the culture of memory, before turning to the interrelated question of when and why contemporaries began to remember the English Reformation as a decisive juncture and critical turning point in history. Investigating the interaction between personal recollection and social memory, it traces the manner in which remembrance of the events of the 1530s, 1540s, and 1550s evolved and splintered between 1530 and 1700. A further theme is the role of religious and intellectual developments in the early modern period in forging prevailing models of historical periodization and teleological paradigms of interpretation.

This article argues that the myth of ‘the sexual revolution’, increasingly accepted in Britain's national media between 1963 and 1967, played a central role in causing the real transformation of British sexual culture that occurred from the late 1960s. It also argues that Christian agency played an important role in the framing and the legitimation of this myth. Until 1963, British debates about sexual morality had been dominated by Christian arguments. In 1963 and 1964, the existence of a rapid, widespread, inexorable, secular, and antinomian transformation of sexual mores was prominently proclaimed by Christian commentators, who thought it an inevitable consequence of ‘secularization’, whereas secular commentators usually objected that this narrative was insufficiently evidenced. After its initial discussion in the mainstream media in 1965, the ‘sexual revolution’ narrative was increasingly articulated without explicit reference to Christianity, but it usually retained theologically inspired structural features inherited from earlier religious discussions. In the late 1960s, elite perceptions of inexorable sexual liberalization decisively legitimated rapid decensorship, wider access to the pill, and the reimagination of ‘normal’ sexual behaviour, thereby importantly shaping real popular change. In this way, Christian clergymen made a significant, early, unwitting, and hitherto unacknowledged contribution to Britain's sexual revolution.

This review revisits the role of race in Ernest Renan's thought by situating contemporary debates in a long perspective that extends back to his texts and their earliest interpreters. Renan is an ambivalent figure: from the 1850s onwards he used ‘race’ to denote firm differences between the ‘Aryan’ and ‘Semitic’ language groups in history; but after 1870, he repeatedly condemned biological racism in various venues and contexts. I show that the tension between these two sides of Renan's thought has continually resurfaced in criticism and historiography ever since the late nineteenth century. Renan's racial views have been subject to particularly close scrutiny following Léon Poliakov's and Edward Said's critiques in the 1970s, but the ensuing debate risks developing into an inconclusive tug-of-war between attack and apologia. I propose three fresh directions for research. First, historians should situate the evolution of Renan's ideas on race in closer biographical context; secondly, they must reconsider the cultural authority of his texts, which is often more asserted than proven; thirdly, they should pay greater attention to his reception outside Europe, particularly regarding his writing on Islam.

In France during the period 1830–1905, the very boundaries of the debate on the social question were dictated by a foreign example, the English Poor Law. French fears of national public assistance programmes were grounded in a widespread disdain for the Poor Law. In this article I examine many of the major French works on charity and assistance written between the 1830s and 1900s and the debates surrounding reform proposals. I argue that the opponents of compulsory, tax-financed public assistance created a negative image of the English Poor Law in order to discredit attempts to introduce, first, the ‘right to assistance’ in 1848–1851, and later, bills providing for free medical assistance for the poor and aid to the elderly indigent in the 1890s and 1900s. I conclude with a discussion of how the proponents of mandatory, national assistance programmes defeated a carefully orchestrated and misleading public relations campaign led by some of the opponents of social welfare during the 1890s and 1900s.

‘Who Killed Cock Robin?’ Familiar words to children, but not normally found over a leading article in a staid old tory newspaper. Certainly not when Britain was in the darkest period of a struggle for her very existence. Yet the Morning Post's use of the nursery rhyme was most appropriate on Monday, 4 December 1916. The previous day there had been an historic confrontation between the prime minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, and his secretary of state for war, David Lloyd George. What happened when they met at 10 Downing Street was not clear – nor, it should be added, is it clear to this day – but by Monday morning it was widely assumed that Lloyd George had held a pistol to Asquith's head and forced the old prime minister to yield the higher direction of the war to a small committee with the secretary for war at the helm. Therefore the answer should have been easy: Lloyd George killed ‘Cock Robin’.

With the recent rise in global history as a discipline, early modern Europe's Asian trade has become a new focus of interest. In French historiography, however, this still remains marginalized. Some studies of the French East India Companies and the French presence in Asia exist, but the impact of this on metropolitan France remains woefully underexplored. This article outlines the history and historiography of the French East India Companies and their wider role and importance, outlining pathways of both existing, current, and possible future research.

The Tudor regime faced its greatest challenge in Ireland at the turn of the sixteenth century. The extension of royal authority had run into fierce opposition from a confederacy of Gaelic lords led by Hugh O'Neill. The Tudors stigmatized such resistance as rebellion but the fact that it was taking place in a dependent kingdom in which the monarch was not resident quickly rendered it a war of liberation. This prompts comparison with the other great independence struggle of the early modern period – the Dutch revolt. In both cases the language of faith and fatherland came to the fore. In Ireland this rhetoric was directed at the English-speaking descendants of the Norman conquerors whose support was crucial to the success of O'Neill's cause. Yet it fell on deaf ears because the confederates were unable to legitimize their struggle in the eyes of these catholic loyalists. The sources of political and religious legitimacy were stronger in The Netherlands. While the Netherlandish provincial estates were founts of popular sovereignty, the Irish parliament was an organ of the Tudor state. And whereas in Holland the source of ecclesiastical authority was the non-hierarchical Dutch Reformed Church, in Ireland it was externalized in the person of Clement VIII who could not be won over in spite of the efforts of Peter Lombard, O'Neill's agent in Rome.

The following Communication presents a newly discovered manuscript by John Locke. The manuscript dates from 1667–8 and it deserves notice as the most significant example of Locke's thought on the toleration of Catholics prior to the Epistola de tolerantia (1689). The manuscript, entitled Reasons for tolerateing Papists equally with others, reveals Locke's engagement with Sir Charles Wolseley's Liberty of conscience, the magistrates interest (1668) and significantly informs the compositional history of Locke's Essay concerning toleration (1667–8).

The measure of 1723 known as the ‘Waldiam Black Act’ (9 Geo. I, c. 22) has acquired a lasting notoriety. Lecky called it ‘a special and most sanguinary law’, and even Sir Leon Radzinowicz finds it ‘remarkable’ as the most severe legislation of the eighteenth century, its comprehensive nature making it an ‘ideological index’ to the capital laws at large. The Act was extended for five years in 1725 (12 Geo. I, c. 30), amended in 1754 (27 Geo. II, c. 15) and made permanent in 1758 (31 Geo. II, c. 42). Effectively it survived for a century, until Peel took it off the statute book despite opposition from the Quarterly Review. Its main provisions were directed against ‘wicked and evil-disposed Persons going armed in Disguise, and doing Injuries and Violences to die Persons and Properties of his Majesty's Subjects’. It became a felony without benefit of clergy to go abroad into woods in any form of disguise or with a blackened face. Commission of a specific act of destruction or larceny was not necessary for a prosecution to lie.