A national militia has been the cry of every patriot since the Revolution, and this measure, both in Parliament and in the field, was supported by the country gentlemen or Tories, who insensibly transferred their loyalty to the House of Hanover. In the language of Mr. Burke, they have changed the idol, but they have preserved the idolatry.

Recent works by Kevin Sharpe and Julian Davies have revised thinking about the religious policies of the Caroline church. Davies's distinction between ‘Laudianism’ and ‘Carolinism’ sums up one of the major conclusions he shares with Sharpe; that Charles I was the initiator of many of the religious policies previously attributed to William Laud. The following article tests this conclusion by viewing the religious policies emanating from England through the eyes of James Ussher, the Irish archbishop of Armagh. It finds that, from the Irish perspective at least, it was impossible for a contemporary to make the same distinction between ‘Laudianism’ and ‘Carolinism’, about policies that were deeply unpopular across the Irish Sea. What follows is an examination of Ussher's reception of a range of policies he considered detrimental to Calvinist unity in the face of catholic threat, including a detailed examination of his attempts to save the Calvinist Irish Articles. Through consideration of his own patronage concerns and directions in publishing it is demonstrated here that, through the 1630s, the Irish protestant primate continued to believe (rightly or wrongly) that behind the religious tensions of Britain lay the dual spectre of ‘Arminianism’ and popery.

A State Health Service is not as new an institution as is generally supposed. It existed in the ancient world in Greek lands, and, perhaps in imitation, in the Roman West. While, of course, it cannot be said that the National Health Service of twentieth-century Britain was inspired by the practice of antiquity (which, indeed, was probably unknown to those who created it), the modern scheme constitutes a return to a view of the State which obtained in ancient times. The beneficent activity of the Church and then of privately supported hospitals mitigated the results of the disappearance of the ancient Welfare State. The evidence, scanty as it is, for the Health Service among the Greeks throws light on their attitude towards the proper function of the State as well as on their great appreciation of the skill and activity of the medical profession.

The emphasis on class, industrial structure and workplace relations proffered by Foster and others as an explanation of the nature and development of popular politics in this period is rejected. Continuities in personnel, values, motivation, policies and strategies suggest that militant grass-roots liberalism of the 1850s, and the culture of self-improvement which pervaded it, were essentially continuations of a radical platform of the 1830s which was preserved, even enhanced, through the Chartist period. Radicals' emphasis on retrenchment, tax reform, democratic accountability and local self-government represented a commitment to a democratic, capitalist environment capable of sustaining material progress and promoting moral and spiritual self-improvement and individual responsibility. They sought, rather than rejected, cooperation with more moderate reformers, seeing no contradiction in combining support for Chartism with more limited campaigns to repeal the corn law or to reform local government. Radicals, however, were also divided amongst themselves. This was particularly evident in Oldham with Cobbettism drawing support from an extensive semi-rural hinterland and a more aggressive petit bourgeois artisan, nonconformist radicalism, associated with respectability and moral reform, based in the town itself. Cobbettism was progressively marginalized from the mid-1830s, however, drifting, for a variety of reasons, into the tory camp. For urban radicals, the liberalism of the 1850s represented a logical extension of their campaign, not a betrayal.

In contrast to the prevailing historiographical consensus, this essay will seek to demonstrate that there was a widespread and persistent concern with foreign policy in the early years of the French Revolution, the product of the interplay between inherited diplomatic assumptions on the one hand and revolutionary politics and values on the other. In particular, it will show how and why public opinion in France after 1789 abandoned its pre-revolutionary concern with Britain, Russia, and the global balance of commercial power in favour of Austria, the émigrés, and the security of the frontiers. In this light, considerable attention will be given to the development of Austrophobia in the period. Rooted in traditional French distrust of the Habsburg dynasty and reinforced by widespread opposition to the Austrian alliance of 1756, this would find its most virulent expression in the popular myth of a sinister counter-revolutionary ‘Austrian committee’ headed by Marie-Antoinette. The argument of the essay will turn upon the links between the emergence of that myth and the popularization of the ideas of Louis XV's unofficial diplomacy – the secret du roi – and its outspoken apologist Jean-Louis Favier. Adopted by various disciples after his death in 1784, Favier's ideas gained in popularity as the menace of counter-revolutionary invasion – aroused in particular by the emperor's reoccupation of the Austrian Netherlands in July 1790 – began to dominate the popular forums of revolutionary politics. They would ultimately help to generate a political climate in which the Brissotins could engineer an almost universally popular declaration of war against Austria less than two years after the revolutionaries had declared peace and friendship to the entire world. From this perspective, the growth of Austrophobia between 1789 and 1792 and its profound influence on the development of revolutionary foreign policy might usefully be described as the triumph of ‘Favier's heirs’.

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.

On 15 February 1647 hostility to the excise flared up at Smithfield market in London. A riot occurred when a purchaser of livestock refused to pay his excise and attempted to remove his livestock without doing so. When he was stopped by ‘the guard’ a crowd gathered in his defence. It was dispersed but another crowd gathered later burning down the excise office and ‘80. or 100.li [was] scattered and purloined’. The rioters were said to have drawn encouragement from excise disturbances in Norwich shortly before. The crowd that gathered later was led by butchers one of whom, William Taylor, was reported to have said that he would ‘bear down the Excise by Force’. The Kingdom's Weekly Intelligencer could not ‘heare of any man killed’, but remarked that the tumult ‘did arise to such a hight that many of the Officers of the excise were beaten, [and] their books torn’. The Weekly Account, emphasizing the seriousness of the riot, reported that the ‘Lord Mayor and Sherriffes of the City were forced to come in person to pacifie the tumult’.

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.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, British social purity campaigners framed the pornography trade as a major source of cultural and moral pollution. As in their anti-prostitution efforts, purity campaigners presented the abolition of pornography as an attempt to protect women, children, and impressionable members of the lower classes from sexual immorality. Their rhetoric and policy efforts, however, reveal deeply entrenched fears of middle-class vulnerability to the negative effects of pornographic literature and images. Building on existing obscenity studies scholarship, this article explores the role of class and gender tension in nineteenth-century pornography regulation. In contrast to the majority of work on Victorian pornography, this article focuses on the British lower classes as producers and distributors rather than consumers of pornography. In addition, this article argues for a higher level of female participation in the pornography trade than has been previously recognized. By focusing on the contradictions and biases at the heart of campaigns against pornography, this article explores the ways in which regulation efforts and discourses of obscenity were shaped by the class and gender dynamics of the pornography trade.

Historians have tended to discuss the image (in the singular) of the monarch in early modern England. In the case of Charles I, the Eikon basilike, literally ‘the royal image’, presented a picture of the king that claimed to be stable and authoritative. This article argues rather that royal images were the product of multiple influences, and shifted through changing circumstances, rendering all images unstable and open to differing interpretations. Charles, as well as being the son of the Rex Pacificus, inherited the martial expectations associated with the image of his brother; and images of the prince and his early years as king in the 1620s continued alongside the changed representations of personal rule. Though the Eikon for a time seemed to fix Charles's image, its very authority meant that it was, after 1660, even after 1688, appropriated by all – whigs and tories as well as Jacobites. Most importantly, through the 30 January sermons, Charles's memory became a text which all parties needed and sought to claim, a text both shared and contested in the political culture.

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.

In the winter of 1561/2 Henry Machyn, citizen of London, noted two special events in his diary: the extraordinary Christmas revels at the Inner Temple and the performance on 18 January, before Queen Elizabeth, of a play and a masque by these same gentlemen. These events are inextricably connected and in terms of political propaganda must be viewed in conjunction. The play was Gorboduc, written by two Inner Templars, the Queen's cousin Thomas Sackville and the Protestant Parliamentarian Thomas Norton. The revels at the Inner Temple celebrated the accession and reign of Robert Dudley as the lawyers' Christmas Prince. He had been chosen by the governors and Parliament of the Inner Temple in gratitude for his intervention in a dispute with the Middle Temple over Lyons Inn, one of the Inns of Chancery historically under the jurisdiction of the Inner Temple. Dudley had intervened with the Queen, opposing his influence against that of Sir Robert Catlin, Lord Chief Justice of England, and Sir James Dyer, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, who had championed the cause of their old Inn, the Middle Temple. Elizabeth was moved by her favourite to speak to Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper, asking him to confirm the right of the Inner Temple. The grateful Parliament and governors of the Inner Temple pledged themselves and their successors to Dudley, offering their legal skills in his service and promising never to give counsel in a cause against Lord Robert. The value of this pledge to Elizabeth's chief suitor from men as eminent as Richard Onslow, Anthony Stapleton, Robert Kelway, William Pole, Roger Manwood and Richard Sackville is clear. The elevation of the favourite to the dignity of Prince Pallaphilos was in terms of propaganda a very splendid return for Dudley's intervention on the Templars' behalf. Nor was this pledge of loyalty ephemeral; the bond was mutually advantageous and it was one the Templars continued to honour. In 1576 the Parliament of the Inner Temple still referred to Leicester as ‘chief governor of this House’.

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.

‘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’.

Modern British counter-espionage effectively began in April 1907, when a joint conference of naval and military officials, formed the previous year to consider ‘the Powers Possessed by the Executive in Time of Emergency’, recommended both an immediate strengthening of the laws against espionage, and a War is Office investigation of ‘the question of police surveillance and control of aliens’. These recommendations were to prove an important initiative, and did much to determine the course of British counter-espionage before 1914, yet at the time they probably seemed little more than an airing of old grievances unlikely to find new support, for they were among the last remnants n. of the abortive ‘Emergency Powers Bill’ which the War Office intelligence department had been advocating to strengthen home defence ever since the invasion scare of 1888. The 1906 joint conference had in fact hoped to further the cause of this great legislative package, with its radically new powers of access, requisition and seizure but, faced with the Liberal administration's commitment to the ‘continuous principle’ that a full-scale landing was impossible, had been forced instead to confine itself to the purely naval and military aspects of home defence. As its report confessed in April 1907, in the prevailing climate of opinion the only hope for the great ‘Emergency Powers Bill’ was as a series of ‘small and independent measures’.

In the final years of the Napoleonic Wars, Napoleon allowed English smugglers entry into the French ports of Dunkirk and Gravelines, encouraging them to run contraband back and forth across the Channel. Gravelines catered for up to 300 English smugglers, housed in a specially constructed compound known as the ‘city of smugglers’. Napoleon used the smugglers in the war against Britain. The smugglers arrived on the French coast with escaped French prisoners of war, gold guineas, and English newspapers; and returned to England laden with French textiles, brandy, and gin. Smuggling remains a neglected historical subject, and this episode in particular – the relationship between English smugglers and the Napoleonic state between 1810 and 1814 – has attracted little scholarly interest. Yet it provides a rich historical source, illuminating not only the history of Anglo-French Channel smuggling during the early nineteenth century, but offering insights into the economic, social, and maritime history of the Napoleonic Wars.

Liverpool and Manchester have come to typify twentieth-century urban decay and their demise is strongly associated with the perceived decline of local government after 1918. By the 1930s, contemporaries had stereotyped northern cities as places of poverty and deprivation, in comparison to the prosperous south. The divide was reinforced by economic historians who focused on regional variations in unemployment and economic depression. This article challenges stereotypical images of interwar Liverpool and Manchester by illustrating the ambitious programmes of urban redevelopment implemented by their Corporations in response to political and economic instability. Grandiose projects such as the Wythenshawe Estate, Mersey Tunnel and Manchester Central Library aimed to stimulate employment and to boost local economies and morale. Redevelopment was promoted heavily to present new images of Liverpool and Manchester. Crucially, urban transformation was marketed as a way to communicate with the newly enfranchised, classless citizen and suggests similarities with broader strategies employed by the Conservative party to engage with the mass electorate. The level of ambition and innovation demonstrates that local municipal culture thrived and Liverpool (with close American links) is shown to have been at the forefront of innovations in civic design and urban planning.

Hobbes seems to have believed in ‘God’; he certainly disapproved of most ‘religion’, including virtually all forms of Christianity. This article disentangles the link between his ‘God’ and his ‘religion’; and in so doing illuminates what Stuart writers meant by ‘atheism’. Hobbes agreed with Sir Francis Bacon that ‘atheism’ was typically caused by bad religion (that is, by ‘superstitions’ designed to serve the interests of the clergy). The Hobbesian theory of language rules out the possibility of proving God's existence, but Hobbes seems to have believed in a Designer to whom a prudent man would offer worship. He also thought that commonwealths require revealed ‘religions’, which are shared systems of belief that rest on ‘faith’ in those who first proclaim them. Religions decay when ‘faith’ is undermined by the misconduct of ‘unpleasing priests’, especially if they enjoin ‘belief of contradictories’. Leviathan is anti-atheistic in seeking to undermine priestcraft and eliminate such flaws by reinterpretation of the Bible. Hobbes probably lacked ‘faith’. But he defended liturgy and ceremony even in the circumstances of the early 1650s; the religion that he favoured was a de-clericalized Anglicanism.

The present historiographical review discusses the subjective dimension of Nazism, an ideology and regime that needed translation into self-definitions, gender roles, and bodily practices to implant itself in German society and mobilize it for racial war. These studies include biographies of some of the Third Reich's most important protagonists, which have important things to say about their self-understandings in conjunction with the circumstances they encountered and subsequently shaped; cultural histories of important twentieth-century figures such as film stars, housewives, or consumers, which add new insights to the ongoing debate about the Third Reich's modernity; studies that address participation in the Nazi Empire and the Holocaust through discourses and practices of comradeship, work in extermination camps, and female ‘help’ within the Wehrmacht. In discussing these monographs, along the way incorporating further books and articles, the piece attempts to draw connections between specific topics and think about new possibilities for synthesis in an overcompartmentalized field. It aims less to define a ‘Nazi subject’ than to bring us closer to understanding how Hitler's movement and regime connected different, shifting subject positions through both cohesion and competition, creating a dynamic that kept producing new exclusions and violent acts.

By the later eighteenth century, the Danish–Norwegian monarchy had a convincing track record for stability and the near-absence of domestic unrest. That stability, despite the wide-ranging claims of the Royal Law of 1665, depended less on force than on a consensus derived from religious unity, a traditionally approachable monarch, and a fairly accessible system of justice. But the crown also relied on a widespread loyalty which was bound to come under strain at the accession of the demented Christian VII in 1766. Despite the removal of censorship restrictions in 1770, however, a convincing public discussion of social and political issues was slow to emerge. Only after the resolution of the political crisis in 1784 did the government feel sufficiently secure not only to tolerate, but even to come to rely on, an unprecedented if moderate public debate. That debate, as reflected through samples of the Copenhagen press studied here, remained even in the 1790s largely supportive of the view that absolutism offered a viable way to lasting reform.