This article reinterprets the post-Suez British role in the Middle East through a comparison of the military interventions in Jordan in 1958 and Kuwait in 1961. Moreover, it places these operations in the broader context of the debate about British decline. It is argued that in addition to the familiar constraints on British action imposed by limited resources and the changing international climate, the projection of power in the region proved to be a great test of nerve for British ministers and officials. Paradoxically, this proved to be true as much of the successful interventions in Jordan and Kuwait as of the earlier failure over Suez. Utilizing very recently released documents from British and American archives, the article aims to shed light on the dynamics of decline at the microcosmic level, in the belief that insights gleaned here may well be of value in revising macrocosmic theories of the process.

This article attempts to establish a connection between the practical legitimation of war and the theories of international law, examining Sweden's efforts to justify her intervention in the Thirty Years War in 1630. Swedish argumentative strategy is analysed in the light of two major traditions of thinking about war: theological and humanist ‘just war’ traditions. The article argues that Swedish leaders did not appeal to the more belligerent humanist arguments which would have enabled them to describe their campaign as a just war either on the grounds of pre-emptive defence or humanitarian intervention. Instead, they tried to interpret it as being within the limits set by the more restrictive theological tradition. This strategy eventually forced them to relinquish attempts to present their intervention as a genuine war and to develop an argument of ‘police-action’, even though it resulted in a loss of credibility. The case study suggests that in the early seventeenth century the prevailing normative language of just war was that of the theologians.

Twenty years ago, the study of modern China in the west was heavily focused on rural China. It used the rise to power of the Chinese Communist Party as its overarching narrative, and treated the communist victory of 1949 as a watershed. This review surveys several recent trends in the writing of Chinese history in the west which have challenged these models. Among the changes of emphasis in the field that are noted are: a new interest in China's place in global history, urban history, and the history of consumption; a rethinking of the significance of nationalism and imperialism; warfare as a vehicle of sociocultural change; and a reinterpretation of Chinese modernity that stresses the similarities, as well as the differences, between the Chinese Communist Party and its predecessors, the Nationalists, and also stresses continuities as well as changes across the ‘barrier’ date of 1949. The review highlights areas of interest to non-specialists in Chinese history, and concentrates on studies of the Republican period (1912–49) published since the 1990s, although it also covers work covering topics in the late imperial and early People's Republic periods.

This article re-examines the resistance to literary modernism in interwar Britain from the angle of popular literary theory and practice. Drawing on the papers of some of the notable working-class writers of this period, it disputes Jonathan Rose's claim that a rejection of modernist ‘obscurantism’ was a response distinctive to working-class autodidacts. Moreover, many middle-class readers responded to modernism in the same terms that Rose takes to be peculiar to a working-class intelligentsia. Negative reactions to modernism are better explained as a response conditioned by a literary discourse in which plebeian autodidacts as well as middle-class readers participated. The article approaches this discourse via the aspiring authors who joined writing clubs in the interwar period. Because these people were at once fairly typical readers and writers, their ideas and practices disclose more about popular understandings of literature than debates in the national press or literary reviews do. Their ideas about what constituted good writing and their hostility to modernism were underpinned by a popular conception of literature that derived from English romanticism.

After the execution of Charles I in 1649 a series of daring and desperate attempts were made on the lives of agents and ambassadors dispatched to continental Europe by the fledgling republic. This essay explores the evidence relating to these plots, and to the murders of Isaac Dorislaus and Anthony Ascham, in an attempt to show that the royalists responsible were not merely desperadoes seeking revenge for the murder of their king, but the employees and emissaries of prominent exiled courtiers. The complicity of Montrose, Cottington and Hyde in such conspiracy can be both documented and explained, in the context of the struggle for diplomatic recognition and financial assistance in the months of shock, outrage and uncertainty after the regicide. The concerns of diplomacy and high politics which lay behind these plots also helped to determine the reaction of European leaders, as it gradually became clear on whose side fortune smiled in Britain.

This article locates Sir Thomas More’s Utopia within the broader context of the sixteenth-century Greek revival in England. More and the other humanists whom Erasmus befriended during his time in England became the first Englishmen to learn Greek and to make a polemical point of preferring Greece to Rome. During the period of Utopia’s preparation and publication, this circle’s Hellenism took on a new intensity, as several of its members were called upon to defend Erasmus’s controversial project of using the Greek New Testament to correct the Vulgate. Responding to opponents of the new Greek learning, the Erasmians launched a particularly energetic attack on Roman philosophy. It is argued that Utopia intervenes in this quarrel by dramatizing a confrontation between the values of the Roman republican tradition and those of a rival commonwealth theory based on Greek ethics. Utopia suggests that, when seen from a Roman perspective, Greek advice looks like ‘nonsense’. But, for More, that ‘nonsense’ yields the ‘best state of a commonwealth’.

The most recent survey of the early years of the long parliament has restated the traditional view that the parliament was united against the king from the first, under the leadership of John Pym. This opinion is so deeply ingrained in the historical consciousness that one reviewer has expressed surprise at the evidence adduced by Mr Fletcher of divisions of opinion in the Commons as early as 1641. Some of these disagreements were noticed four years ago by Professor Ashton, yet he calculated that there was a majority of 400 to 80 against the king, and titled his chapter ‘From Consensus to Confrontation’; according to Dr Manning, the king was ‘almost powerless’. It is surprising that this view has held the field so long, when the most cursory reading of the Commons Journal shows it to be a myth. In a period for which we have so little hard evidence of the course of events, the evidence of the journals should not be ignored; none the less, it will be suggested that the role of peers, in and out of parliament, was at least as important as anything that happened in the lower house in the first few months. Not all the issues involved can be discussed here: this paper will consider, in outline, some of the evidence concerning finance, the reforming legislation, and the impeachment of Strafford.

There is one major gap in the historiography of British strategic policy during the interwar years. Historians have not examined that policy of the 1920s as if it was a coherent topic in its own right. Although writers like Brian Bond, James Neidpath, Stephen Roskill and Malcolm Smith have elucidated aspects of that matter, such as the development of the Singapore base or of the policies of the fighting services, they have still treated each such issue and department in isolation from the rest. Even those scholars like Correlli Barnett and N. H. Gibbs who have sought to examine strategic policy in the interwar years as a whole, have primarily seen the strategic decisions of the 1920s not as an autonomous historical subject but rather as a prelude to Britain's position in the 1930s. Consequently, historians have made these decisions seem inexplicable and unconnected, by removing them from the context of their time and of strategic policy. This approach has led writers to misconstrue the evolution of strategic policy during the 1920s. They have done so because of their assumptions about that issue. They have not recognized these assumptions as being such, but have treated them instead as a bedrock of self-evident fact. Yet when these assumptions are examined, they can be demonstrated to be false.

John Graunt's analysis of the London Bills of Mortality of 1662 is famous as a pioneering contribution to the study of human populations. But comparatively little attention has been given to his highly influential discovery that the numbers of men and women were evenly balanced. Why did Graunt think that what we now call the sex ratio was important, and why did he see it as essential to contradict received opinion? What can we deduce about Graunt's own attitudes to women? Why was he concerned to discredit polygamy? Further investigation suggests, not that Graunt shared the misogyny of many of his contemporaries, but that he was motivated by the dangers inherent in his own shifting religious views, which included Socinianism and anti-Trinitarianism. The religious controversialist Bernardino Ochino can be detected as a dark influence behind Graunt's thinking. An exploration of Graunt's cultural hinterland confirms that men did indeed believe that they were outnumbered by women, a conviction accentuated by the unnerving upheavals of religious conflict, plague, and civil war, and apparently confirmed by prophecy. Seventeenth-century misogyny seems to present itself to us as qualitative, but it included a numerical dimension which was in effect culturally determined.

DESPITE the vast influence and patronage at his disposal, Sir Robert Walpole was compelled, on occasion, to pursue a course of action which he heartily disliked. At the time of the excise crisis in 1733, the First Minister was forced to revise his policies by pressure, not only from the opposition, but also from the radicals within the ministerial camp. The radical group, usually known as the ‘Old Whigs’, suddenly found themselves in a position to play a decisive role in parliamentary politics for the first time in more than a decade.

The so-called Bye plot of 1603 is one of the best documented in that procession of treasons which confronted late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean governments. For more than a century, it has also been almost entirely neglected by historians. Through an examination of the cases made against seven suspects – William Clark, George Brooke, Sir Griffin Markham, Anthony Copley, Bartholomew Brookesby, Sir Edward Parham, and John Scudamore – the methods by which the state acquired and deployed evidence in advancing the prosecution are here detailed and analysed. Comparison of each man's fate also reveals how, although the crime of high treason carried but one penalty, the punishments handed down, ranging as they did from execution to discharge before trial, reflected both the prisoners' own conduct and the current political imperatives in a year of dynastic change.

From the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 to the middle of the eighteenth century a protracted controversy took place over whether foreigners ought to be encouraged to come to settle in England. The debate was usually couched in terms of whether aliens should be offered naturalization in England. The word naturalize was sometimes used not in a technical legal sense, but in the first sense given in Johnson's Dictionary: ‘to adopt into a community’. In its stricter sense, the question was whether a cheap and convenient way should be offered to immigrants to acquire the rights of native-born English subjects. It was thought by both its advocates and its enemies that such an offer, by means of an act of general naturalization, would encourage a large influx of foreign protestants. The issue was debated repeatedly in parliament. Over a dozen attempts were made to pass an act for a general naturalization between the Restoration and the final passage of such an act in 1709. The act of 1709 was repealed only three years after its passage, but several more bills for a similar statute were introduced towards the middle of the century. The naturalization controversy is more easily followed, however, in the pages of the tracts, pamphlets, treatises, and broadsides, both in favour of and in opposition to a general naturalization, that tumbled from the presses throughout the period, and most profusely in the 1680s, 1690s, and 1700s. The debate aroused the interest especially of the growing ranks of those who, after the Restoration, interested themselves in trade matters.

For well over a century the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, the so-called New Poor Law, has been die centre of controversy. Just as contemporaries were drawn into bitter conflict over die measure, modern scholars have continued to debate die degree of ‘cruelty’ engendered in this novel poor relief scheme. The records of die individual poor law unions, however, reveal so many variations in administrative practices as to render invalid nearly all generalizations regarding me operation of die Act. The most obvious difficulty arises over the disparity between Poor Law Commission policy, ostensibly founded upon the recommendations of the famous Royal Commission report of 1834,3 and its actual implementation by the commissioners at Somerset House and their assistants in the field. It is by now a commonplace of poor law history that the commissioners, despite opposition from their secretary, Edwin Chadwick, pursued different policies in various parts of England.4 As we shall see, moreover, the commissioners often held certain provisions of their directives in abeyance, leaving their implementation to the discretion of provincial administrators.

21 November 1920 began with the killing of fourteen men in their flats, boarding houses, and hotel rooms in Dublin. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) alleged that they were British spies. That afternoon British forces retaliated by firing on a crowd of supporters at a Gaelic football match in Croke Park, killing twelve and injuring sixty. The day quickly became known as Bloody Sunday. Much has been made of the afternoon's events. The shootings in Croke Park have acquired legendary status. Concern with the morning's killing has been largely limited to whether or not the dead men were the spies the IRA said they were. There has been little or no consideration of the men who did the killing. This article is based on largely unused interviews and statements made by the IRA men involved in this and many of the other days that came to constitute the guerrilla war fought against the British forces in Ireland from January 1919 until July 1921. This morning's killings are a chilling example of much of what passed for combat during this struggle. Bloody Sunday morning is used here as a means to explore how generally young and untrained IRA men killed and how this type of killing affected their lives.

The First World War was launched in the belief that force could be an effective instrument of policy. Underlying the decisions of July and August 1914 was a hard core of calculation, based on the advice to governments that the fighting would be fierce but short, and that its political and economic repercussions could be contained. In addition, because the two sides were closer to military equivalence than in previous crises, both could believe that they had a reasonable prospect of victory. But such equivalence, given the weapons technology of the day, might also deny either coalition a speedy, surgical triumph. And it is from the prolongation of the war as well as its inception – from its not being over by Christmas – that its historical importance derives. Among the consequences were eight million dead, and the dislocation of the Western economic system. Without the war it is unlikely that either Lenin, or Mussolini, or even Hitler, would have come to office. As far as such things can be said with certainty, the First World War was a precondition of the Second. A four-month rather than a four-year conflagration would have had other, now unknowable, consequences. It would not, presumably, have had these.

Historians generally discount the advent of the First French Empire as the result of Napoleon's personal ambition. Napoleon, however, could not have brought about the transition from republic to empire without wide support, not only among the political and military elite, but also among the French people. This article re-examines the reasons why, a little more than ten years after the execution of Louis XVI, moderate-conservative elements in the political elite opted for a monarchical-style political system, and why it was so widely accepted by ordinary people across France. It does so by examining the arguments in favour of empire in three ‘sites of ideas’: the neo-monarchists in Napoleon's entourage; the political elite, preoccupied with many of the same concerns that had plagued France since 1789; and the wider political nation, which expressed a manifest adhesion to Napoleon as emperor that was marked by an affective bond. The push to empire, it is argued, was an expression of a dominant set of political beliefs and values. Napoleon, on the other hand, only reluctantly came to accept the notion of heredity.

The idea that the autocracy might have successfully modernized itself has, in recent years, spread widely beyond academic circles. However, a look at traditional and recent historiography shows that very few historians support this line. Even those who argue that Russia itself was developing rapidly have seen little prospect of the autocracy surviving the process. Equally, those who argue that radical socialist revolution might have been avoided tend to suggest, often by implication rather than in an explicit fashion, that a democratic, capitalist, bourgeois, and constitutional revolution was the alternative path. Thus it was not so much a question of tsarism or revolution but rather what kind of revolution was Russia facing?

The paper argues that the De ortu et auctoritate imperii Romani of Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (1446) has been unjustifiably ignored by historians of quattrocento humanist political thought simply because of its adherence to the ideal of universal imperial government. At present, when De ortu is addressed at all, it is considered merely as an anachronistic product of a ‘medieval’ mentality. It is shown, however, that Aeneas, by working within a demonstrably Ciceronian framework, actually articulates a philosophically coherent defence of a single universal empire by exploiting a conceptual ambiguity in Cicero's own presentation of the foundations of social and political association. Aeneas suggests that Cicero's account of the communal nature of human beings, so far from sanctioning republican civic institutions, actually justifies the imposition of universal empire. A study of Piccolomini's political thought thus points to a greater diversity within the political viewpoints associated with humanism than current scholarship on the subject acknowledges. Moreover, it reveals the level of philosophical sophistication to which renaissance defences of empire could aspire.

If anyone could be claimed the father of the school for the scientific study of Indian defence policy it would undoubtedly be Sir Charles Metcalfe MacGregor. With the re-opening of the Central Asian Question in the early 1860s, it became MacGregor's mission in life completely to recast the Indian defence structure and it counter-insurrectionary role to enable it to undertake large-scale offensive operations against a major European military power. Almost single-handedly, he began to create the machinery within the Indian Army establishment—the special departments, professional institutes, journals and literature—to stimulate a greater awareness of the special and peculiar nature of Indian defence problems that this new role involved, and to encourage an iconoclastic re-examination of prevailing defence assumptions. From MacGregor's groundwork there was logically bound to arise a sense of Indian Army professionalism separate and distinct from that of Great Britain, and the beginnings of the belief that obligations of national defence are inseparable from nationhood. It was MacGregor who first appreciated on the basis of systematic and scientific study that India constituted a vast manpower reservoir, greater than that of Ireland and Egypt together, upon which Britain relied for the prosecution of her imperial, military and foreign policies in the East; that the North-West Frontier presented the only strategic boundary that Britain had to defend; and that the geo-strategic and demographic facts of her existence had made India potentially a great military power bound to adopt a ‵Continental′ military policy and defence structure in many respects parallel to those of the major European military powers.