‘Thanks to thy sublime merits the times in which we live may be freely compared with the greatest days of Antiquity.’ So, in 1490, wrote Politian to the king of Portugal, casting a hopeful eye over something like a century of Portuguese imperial endeavour.1 Sixty years later, in a significantly different style, a Spanish chronicler surveying his own country's even more spectacular achievements saw them as ‘the greatest event since the making of the world, apart from the incarnation and death of him who created it’. Since then the idiom may have changed, but not the conviction, and at some time or other almost everything from the unshackling of man's mind from the bonds of medieval superstition to the rise of a capitalist economy has been attributed to the discoveries. Recently we have been invited to see Lisbon as the second Byzantium, and from the Sorbonne there has come the grand apocalyptic message of the birth of ‘un humanisme technique’ manifested in a new and seminal ‘sens du réel, sens du chiffre et de la précision’.

The relationship between Arminianism and Roman Catholicism in the early Stuart period has long been a source of historiographical controversy. Many contemporaries were in no doubt that such an affinity did exist and that it was politically significant. This article will consider how far there was ideological sympathy and even rhetorical collaboration between Caroline Catholics and those members of the Church of England whom both contemporaries and modern scholars have tended to describe as Arminians and Laudians. It will suggest that certain members of the English Catholic community actively tried to use the changes which they claimed to observe in the government of the Church of England in order to establish a rapport with the Caroline regime. In particular they enthused about what they perceived as a strongly anti-puritan trend in royal policy. Some of them argued that a similar style of governance should be exercised by a bishop over Catholics in England. This was something which they believed would correct the factional divisions within their community and align it more effectively with the Stuart dynasty.

The 1930s, a decade Labour in Scotland could have done without, ended appropriately. On Sunday, 3 September 1939, hours before war was declared, police closed down a Labour party meeting on Glasgow Green. The Glasgow left-wing weekly Forward, reporting this, concluded gloomily: ‘It is doubtful whether any other meeting will be allowed during the war period.’ Labour’s fortunes in 1939 were mixed, and it did not regard the imminent prospect of an election with enthusiasm. In Scotland it had recovered from the nadir of 1932, when after the secession of the Independent Labour party (I.L.P.) it was left with only three M.P.s out of the seven who had survived the 1931 election. But its gains in 1935 still gave it only 20 out of 74 seats, well short of its 1929 level of 37. It later won two by-elections, and acquired George Buchanan M.P. from the I.L.P. in 1938, but by then its municipal successes of 1932—5, when it took over most of the larger Scottish towns, had been checked. In November 1936 it lost Dundee. There was some recovery in 1937, but a net gain of only one seat in 1938. It had yet to take control in a single Scottish county.

Human occupation of Australia dates back to at least 65,000 years. Aboriginal ontologies incorporate deep memories of this past, at times accompanied by a conviction that Aboriginal people have always been there. This poses a problem for historians and archaeologists: how to construct meaningful histories that extend across such a long duration of space and time. While earlier generations of scholars interpreted pre-colonial Aboriginal history as static and unchanging, marked by isolation and cultural conservatism, recent historical scholarship presents Australia's deep past as dynamic and often at the cutting-edge of human technological innovation. This historiographical shift places Aboriginal people at the centre of pre-colonial history by incorporating Aboriginal oral histories and material culture, as well as ethnographic and anthropological accounts. This review considers some of the debates within this expansive and expanding field, focusing in particular on questions relating to Aboriginal agriculture and land management and connections between Aboriginal communities and their Southeast Asian neighbours. At the same time, the study of Australia's deep past has become a venue for confronting colonial legacies, while also providing a new disciplinary approach to the question of reconciliation and the future of Aboriginal sovereignty in Australia.

In May 1929 illegal Communist demonstrations in Berlin led to several days' fighting as the Prussian police sought to restore order. Over thirty civilians were killed. Communist publications hailed events as an heroic defeat, in which lessons had been learned for the ‘final struggle’ to come; the Social Democrats hailed a decisive victory over Bolshevik aggression. Liberals expressed concern at the soverity of police action; National Socialists expressed sinister satisfaction at a significant portent of the distintegration of social and political stability. Above all, the dramatic events of Blutmai (‘Bloody May’) reinforced an element of emotional tension in Weimar and Prussian politics of great importance in understanding the final collapse of 1933.

In 1934 two commissioners (for England and Wales and for Scotland) were appoineted to tackle the problems caused by high and Persistent unemploed in areas dependent on a narrow and depressed range of industriues. These Statutory Special Areas were only some of the most depressed parts of the country, in scotland largely west-central Scotaland but excluding Glasgow. defects in the policies adopted, and in their implementation by the commissioners, are well known, especially their alleged failure to encourage adequatelythe newindustrial development the special Areas needed. Certainly the powers and the financial provision given tio the commissioners in 1934 were slight, but they were increased in new legislation in 1937 and had little time to become effective before the outbreak of war. In addition, lack of success, especially in the end towards which the policies were directed as much as because of their own inadequacy or insufficiency. the end, justifiable in the conditions of the 1930s, was to releive unemployement, not to encourage a distinctive policy of regional industrial diversification. The Report of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population Suggested a new direction in 1940, but its views were applied as part of an overall strategy only in the 1960s. A comment of 1952 may be applied from the pre-war years throughout the 1950s. Only the name of the special Areas had been changed.

This article subjects a variety of works on nineteenth-century politics to critical analysis, focusing on recent work in biography, popular politics, and on those works that have shown an interest in post-structuralist approaches. Mostly it examines texts produced between 1993 and about 1997 with a view to sensing an historiographical mood. Although the argument urges an open-minded reception to the linguistic turn in historical work, it brings the work of some of its adherents – perhaps especially James Vernon – under critical scrutiny and concludes that a price has been paid for the attempt at constructing a ‘cultural politics’. In particular the article expresses alarm at the apparent incoherence and sub-literacy of some post-structural statements.

This article explores the role of women investors in the Virginia Company during the early seventeenth century, arguing that women determined the success of English overseas expansion by ‘adventuring’ not just their person, but their purse. Trading companies relied on the capital of women, and yet in seminal work on Virginia Company investors women have received no attention at all. This is a significant oversight, as studying the women who invested in trading companies illuminates broader issues regarding the role of women in the early English empire. This article explores why and how two women from merchant backgrounds, Rebecca Romney (d. 1644) and Katherine Hueriblock (d. 1639), managed diverse, global investment portfolios in the period before the Financial Revolution. Through company records, wills, letters, court depositions, and a surviving church memorial tablet, it reconstructs Romney's and Hueriblock's interconnected interests in ‘New World’ ventures, including in Newfoundland, the North-West Passage Company, Virginia colony, and sugar trade. Studying women investors reveals how trade and colonization shaped economic activity and investment practices in the domestic sphere and also elucidates how women, in their role as investors, helped give birth to an English empire.

The article examines the intellectual and ideological debate about the notions of duelling, courtesy, and honour in the Jacobean anti-duelling campaign. Particular attention is paid to the two most important contributions to this campaign – Francis Bacon's The charge touching duells (1614) and A pvblication of his matiesedict, and severe censvre against priuate combats and combatants (1614), written by Henry Howard, the earl of Northampton. By placing these two treatises into their intellectual context of courtesy and duelling manuals, the article seeks to demonstrate their sharply contrasting responses to the problem of duelling. Northampton accepted the notions of courtesy, honour, and insult underlying the duelling theory, but still wanted to abolish duelling. His solution was therefore a court of honour which would solve all the disputes of honour between noblemen and gentlemen. Bacon, on the other hand, argued that the only efficient way of getting rid of duelling was to question the entire intellectual framework on which duelling rested. To accept the notions of honour, courtesy, and insult inherent in the duelling theory and to set up a court of honour, he insisted, was tantamount to encouraging duelling itself. In The charge touching duells Bacon was thus arguing as much against Northampton's plans to suppress duelling as against the theory of duelling itself.

The strange circumstances of the hasty clandestine wedding of Thomas Thynne and Maria Audley in 1594 raise questions about possible motives for it. He was the teenage heir to a rich Wiltshire gentleman, and she was a young attendant of Queen Elizabeth, but their families were divided by political faction. Private correspondence afterwards and contentious court of Arches proceedings lasting to 1601 reveal the tactics adopted on the one hand by her family to try to prove consent of both bride and groom to marriage, on the other the countering tactics of the Thynnes to disprove it. The parents exploited ecclesiastical court procedure, and attempted to influence witnesses and judge. This case shows attitudes to marriage making, beliefs about rituals and tokens, and conceptions of the law of marriage in Elizabethan England.

The peculiar problems and difficulties in the way of achieving a national system of elementary education in nineteenth-century England have long been so obvious and notorious that a new attempt at an objective and comprehensive view must seem surprising and rash. My excuse for nevertheless making that attempt is not the discovery of any new material, which, even if it were to become available, could hardly alter the well-known outlines of the harrowing tale as told in the standard histories: nor could much be added to the careful sketch made of the Church's contribution by F. Warre Cornish, or the excellent summary of the educational principles in conflict given by W. F. Connell. To the details of these, and of the distillation of them which appears in the best text-books, I can suggest only one positive amendment. But looking at the matter from the sheltered advantage of one who has not to write a detailed thorough book about it, it seems to me that none of the existing books can do the subject justice, for none of them tells the whole story. If such substantial books as have already been written fail to tell the whole story, it is obvious that a brief article will not succeed in doing so, and I can only aim to suggest something which the ideal complete history must not omit. For more than half a century we have been learning that the issues of Church and State in the Middle Ages can never be understood if Church and State are regarded as susceptible of separate histories. To see them thus is to see two things where men at the time saw but one. Similarly, the problems of Victorian public education cannot properly be understood in their multi-dimensional reality if they are split into categories normal, perhaps, for our own time, but strange to theirs.

Just over fifty years ago, Prime Minister Macmillan made an extensive tour of Africa, culminating in his ‘wind of change’ speech in Cape Town, 1960. This article traces Macmillan's progress through Africa with particular emphasis on his intervention in South African politics. It offers a novel reading of the ‘wind of change’ speech, arguing that the message was far more conciliatory with respect to white South African interests than is usually assumed. Pragmatism rather than principle was always the prime consideration. Far from being cowed by Macmillan's oratory or his message, Verwoerd stood up to Macmillan and, at least in the eyes of his supporters, gave as good as he got. The shock of the ‘wind of change’ speech was more evident in Britain and in British settler regions of Africa than in South Africa. Macmillan's advisers had an inflated view of the import of the speech and in many ways misread Verwoerd's brand of Afrikaner nationalism. One of the consequences of the speech was to embolden Verwoerd politically, and to prepare him for the declaration of republican status in 1961 and departure from the commonwealth.

In the familiar triptych of British political history between the first and third Reform Acts, whose panels are neatly divided by the years 1846 and 1867, the confused and uninspiring iconography of the large central canvas contrasts sharply and puzzlingly with that of its flanking pieces. In 1855 Gladstone lamented that

The Session of 1845 was the last of those that witnessed party connection in its normal state. Throughout the decade which preceded that year it was in full and brilliant blossom. Since then we have had properly speaking…none in the best sense of the term: none compact and organized after the ancient manner.

Weak states can control strong states, provided the weak can persuade the strong to admit, that they are vitally interested in their integrity and independence. In the late nineteentli century everybody understood the influence of the Ottoman Empire upon British policy, and the influence of Austria-Hungary upon Imperial German policy in the near east. In the heyday of the Great Powers of Europe it was not expected tliat orientals should aspire to similar influence: their futures would be decided by Europeans. Until the work of Robinson and Gallagher revealed the extent to which the khedive of Egypt controlled Lord Cromer, the history of late nineteenth century imperialism was written from this assumption.

Crown policy towards the nobles and the rule of the provinces under the early Tudors reflected the values and social structures of ‘civil society’ in lowland England. Using as a case-study the Dacres, a minor peerage family who were wardens of the Anglo-Scottish marches, this paper explores the strains and tensions which were created by the application of these norms to the ‘peripheral’ parts of the Tudor state. The paper outlines the political ambitions, resources, and estate-management policies of a border baron, and argues that Henry VIII's policies for the rule of the borders and his expectations of his officials there were unrealistic. It also suggests that the traditional approach of historians to the problems of Tudor politics and government reflects too much a view of events as seen from ‘the centre’ and needs to be balanced by a more sensitive treatment of the problems of the ‘periphery’.

In January 2003 Enoch Powell's personal archive was opened to the public. The release shed new light on the nature of Powell's thought on immigration, and in particular, his reasons for making the so-called ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech of 1968. Historians have suggested that Powell's primary concern was a post-imperialist desire to sever all links with the New Commonwealth. However, papers written immediately after Powell's time in India (1943–6) reveal that his objections to immigration were established long before he abandoned his fierce love of empire in 1954. These objections were rooted in a seemingly liberal commitment to national homogeneity as a prerequisite for democracy. The imagery, reasoning, and political context of Powell's speeches in 1968 demonstrate a striking continuity with his ideas of 1946. Powell's example suggests that British attitudes to mass immigration may owe more to the experience of empire than to post-war changes in national identity.

This article reveals the existence of a hitherto unknown Black Chamber in the Dutch Republic and the identity of its principal codebreaker, Abel Tasien d'Alonne (1646–1723), acting also as private secretary to Grand Pensionary Heinsius. On the basis of an analysis of a number of previously unidentified worksheets, three cases are put together that merited d'Alonne's attention, one related to a French diplomat at the court of the Bavarian Elector during the years 1707–9, one related to an undercover agent of the Bavarian Elector in the Dutch Republic during the years 1711–12 and one related to a French emissary to the state council in Brussels during the period 1714–15. The emergence of a Black Chamber in The Hague is remarkable because the Dutch could always call upon the Black Chamber of Hanover for the solution of any intercepted, coded documents. This indicates that the development of inter-allied relations during the war played a more important role in the rise of the Dutch Black Chamber than one would expect.

At some point in or shortly after 1607, the opening passage of Francis Bacon's earliest surviving philosophical work, Valerius Terminus of the interpretation of nature – the first version of what ultimately became Bacon's Instauratio magna – was copied into the natural philosophical notebook of Edmund Leigh (c. 1585–1658), a Bachelor of Arts at Brasenose College, Oxford. Whereas contemporary scribal copies of Bacon's political, religious, and legal writings are common, copies of his unpublished philosophical writings are rare, and tend only to be found in unique exemplars with a direct Baconian association. As such, the Valerius Terminus has hitherto only been known from a single manuscript, with corrections in Bacon's hand, that was first printed in 1734. The discovery of a ‘user’ copy in a student notebook is therefore significant for what it suggests about the circulation of Bacon's earliest philosophical ideas. This significance is enhanced by the fact that the new copy appears to record an early draft of Bacon's work.

Throughout its history the United Kingdom Liberal party has been a conglomerate. On the other hand, it was very rarely just an anti-Conservative Front, feeding off the grasslands of negation. Whatever the manifold stresses and strains of a given moment, the liberty-loving and reforming mentality almost invariably held together the disparate elements for purposes of positive action. And with the Conservative party essentially standstill and inherently strong at most times, this was scarcely surprising in the context of the battle for political power. That context was shaped by the break-up of the vast Liverpool-style coalition and the emergence under Lord Grey of a left-centre administration. The bundle of ideologies and interests behind Grey stuck together until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, although economic and social changes, along with alterations in the constitutional structure both springing from and causing them, did much to shift the influence they exercised. While it is true that the first and second Reform Acts were of crucial importance, the forces behind their passing should not be ignored. The hens did come before the eggs, even though the eventual arrivals were uncommonly large chickens, and hatching out was far from automatic

In the twelve months preceding the end of the Second World War, the International Committee of the Red Cross and various voluntary organizations acting with the Red Cross, were able to dispatch food parcels to increasingly large numbers of concentration camp inmates in Germany and German-controlled territory. As Allied pressure on Germany increased during the last months of the war, the possibilities of sending large-scale relief into the camps prior to their liberation expanded dramatically. However, Allied blockade policy was so deeply entrenched that it was almost impossible for these possibilities to be fully exploited. Official relief agencies failed to convince Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) that improving the rations of the camp inmates would not strengthen the German working force but would alleviate the problems that SHAEF itself would confront when it liberated the camps shortly thereafter.