Evidence from the Piovego, the fraud magistracy of early modern Venice, offers a critical perspective on the documentary record of credit and the ways in which this was used in practice. Although it was formally illegal to charge interest on personal loans, a variety of legal fictions were employed to evade the ban. Such fictions significantly reduced the transparency and certainty of exchange, pushing personal loans into a world of semi-legality. This was a ‘baroque economy’, in which people were aware of the potential discrepancy between surface form and underlying substance, and private agreements might be contested on grounds of substantive fairness. The ‘hidden transcripts’ presented by litigants indicate that the formal record must be interpreted through a ‘thick description’ that considers its role as a resource in a broader process of negotiation. Far from being a ‘market’, characterized by price competition, choice, and transparency, the informal economy of credit was embedded in long-term power relationships. Rather than celebrating intermediaries such as brokers and notaries as facilitators of ‘market’ relations, we need to understand them as part of a hierarchical network of power and wealth, embedded in long-term relationships.

Traditional historiographies of the Reformation, seeing it as a unified, directed transition from Catholicism to Protestantism, seem increasingly untenable. This article looks in detail at three individuals from the British Reformation whose careers did not fit this pattern: a Scotsman, John Eldar, and two Englishmen, John Proctor and John Redman. Enthusiasts for Henry VIII's Reformation, they found themselves alarmed, but disempowered and compromised, in the face of Edward VI's more radical religious changes. Redman died in 1551, but Proctor and Eldar both celebrated Mary I's Catholic restoration, while not entirely forgetting their Henrician sympathies. The article argues that these men represent a distinctive religious strand in Reformation Britain. Such ‘latter-day Henricians’ valued Henry VIII's distinctive Reformation: anti-papal, anti-heretical, sacramental, Erasmian, and Biblicist. The vicissitudes of religious politics in both England and Scotland in the 1540s and 1550s left no space for such beliefs, although the article suggests that traces of Henricianism can be seen in Elizabeth I herself. It also argues that the impotence of the latter-day Henricians under Edward VI is a symptom of the paralysing weakness of all English religious conservatives in the reign, a predicament from which they were rescued only by Mary's restoration.

This article analyses how, in the last half-century, scholars have differed over the nature of Italian foreign policy under the fascist regime. It examines the debate between orthodox and revisionist historians over Mussolini's foreign policy in general, and also over three specific areas of Italian policy in the interwar years: Franco-Italian relations, Italian participation in the Spanish Civil War, and the alliance with nazi Germany. The author concludes that much of the debate has arisen because of conceptual befuddlement; writers have been primarily concerned with questions of coherence and continuity, and not with understanding Italian foreign relations. Historians have also disagreed over whether Mussolini had a ‘programme’, but a closer look shows that many of them were engaging in a semantic debate, and did not differ over the nature of fascist policy.

The ‘religious right’ came to prominence in the US during the late 1970s by campaigning on ‘social issues’ and encouraging many fundamentalist and evangelical Christians to get involved in politics. However, the fact that it clashed with ‘born again’ President Jimmy Carter over tax breaks for religious schools believed to be discriminatory, together with its illiberal stances on many issues, meant that it was characterized as an extremist movement. I argue that this assessment is oversimplified. First, many Christian schools were not racially discriminatory, and their defenders resented being labelled as racists. Secondly, few historians have recognized that the Christians involved in the religious right were among the most secularized of their kind. The religious right was often mistakenly categorized alongside earlier American Christian political movements that had displayed extremist and anti-democratic tendencies. The Carter administration's records and oft-ignored religious right ephemeral literature partly substantiate the movement's contention that it was defensive rather than theocratic in nature. One of my conclusions is that more attention must be paid to the subtle nuances of the political and theological views of religious right leaders, because the confusion surrounding the religious right is partly a function of its leaders harbouring internally inconsistent views.

Too often religious policy in Henry VIII's reign after the break with Rome has been seen as fluctuating and inconsistent as he was influenced first by one group of ministers and courtiers and then by another. Here it is argued by contrast that Henry VIII was very much the dominant force in the making of religious policy and that his policy, which he pursued skilfully and consistently, is best characterized as a search for the middle way.

This review considers how historians have approached the role of ideas in understanding the beginnings of early British abolitionism. It pays particular attention to the work of Eric Williams, Roger Anstey, David Brion Davis, and, most recently, Christopher Leslie Brown. It uses Brown's Moral capital as a point of departure for offering an alternative approach to the role of ideology in early British abolition and about its operation generally.

Western writers have long criticized the Chinese term Zhongguo, translated as ‘Middle Kingdom’, for its ethnocentric purport. This article proposes to address this criticism by re-examining salient features of Zhongguo's etymological past. The discussion is divided into two parts. The first part offers an overview of the term's historical usage and argues that contrary to the common view, Zhongguo as applied to the imagined whole of Chinese political and cultural traditions or to any of its discrete period segments had not been employed primarily as an ethnocentric expression but as a simple identity label. The second part revisits a late Qing (c. 1861–1912) episode in which Chinese writers made a rare, if not unprecedented, attempt to dispute and, indeed, to reject the name in light of the foreign criticism. Though their arguments did not, in the end, alter how nationalists named the Chinese nation, these debates revealed a cultural posture that became prevalent as educated Chinese negotiated the crossroads of modernity.

The assumption by Henry VIII of an effective supremacy over the English church and the enforcement of the legislation which accompanied it has received considerable attention in recent years. Yet, though the main themes of the story are clear, the obstacles which the central government met in the dioceses of England, and the way in which policy emerged as a response to them, has not been examined so meticulously. The problems confronting the government in 1534 are obvious enough: the bishops, as well as many others, who had been brought up in the first three decades of the sixteenth century, and who had administered the affairs of church or state in the period before the divorce, were left in a state of suspense in 1534. What tangible effect would the royal supremacy have? If it was to bring in a new order, what would that order be? And what part should bishop, priest or layman take in promoting or hindering it? For the bishops who had obtained their sees by papal bull before 1534, the dilemmas posed in the years to come were great. For Fisher of Rochester, the way forward was to the scaffold. Others, like Warham of Canterbury, Sher-burne of Chichester, Nix of Norwich, West of Ely, Blythe of Lichfield and Coventry, died during the crucial period 1533–8, thereby making room for those who had not been bishops before the assumption of the supremacy. But, for a small group of bishops, there was no escaping the problems of comparison which these years brought. Between 1534 and 1538, the translation of the royal supremacy into a practical reality in the dioceses and parishes of England was attempted.

The idea of the school museum as an active resource for object-based learning played an important but now neglected part in programmes of educational reform during the closing decades of the nineteenth century and the opening decades of the twentieth. In this article we focus on the role of the Kew Museum of Economic Botany in supplying schools with botanical specimens and artefacts for their own museums during this period, to support a broad variety of curricular agendas, from nature study to geography and beyond. The evidence suggests that this scheme was remarkably popular, with demand among teachers for museum objects outstripping supply, and increasingly being met in other ways. Seen from the perspective of Kew, the distribution of specimens, artefacts, and visual materials to schools was a way of extending the ethos of economic botany into the classroom. For the teachers who requested specimens in large numbers, and the pupils who studied and handled them, however, such objects may have had other meanings and uses. More broadly, we propose new avenues for study that can help us to better appreciate the ways in which museum objects, expertise, and practices moved across professional, institutional, and increasingly global boundaries in this period.

This article explores the middle-class response to life under the early Communist state in Hungary. It is based on an oral history of the Budapest bourgeoisie, and challenges some of the dominant indigenous representations of the central European middle class as persecuted victims who were forced into ‘internal exile’ by the Stalinist state. Despite being officially discriminated against as ‘former exploiters’, large numbers achieved educational and professional success. Their skills were increasingly needed in the rapid modernization of the 1950s, and the state provided them with semi-official opportunities to remake themselves into acceptable Communist citizens. Middle-class testimony revealed how individuals constructed politically appropriate public personas to ensure their own upward mobility; they hid aspects of their pasts, created ‘class conscious’ autobiographies, and learnt how to demonstrate sufficient political loyalty. The ways in which individuals dealt with integrating into a system which officially sought to exclude them and which many disliked ideologically is then examined. In order to ‘cope with success’, respondents in this project invented new stories about themselves to justify the compromises they had made to ensure their achievements. These narratives are analysed as evidence of specifically Communist middle-class identities.

Following British abolition of the slave trade in 1807, the origins and nature of popular abolitionism have been much debated among historians. Traditionally, religion was seen as the driving force, with an emphasis on the role of Quakers and evangelicals, whilst in the twentieth century social historians began to stress the importance of economic and social change. This article revises both interpretations by helping to recover and analyse the abolitionism of enlightened Rational Dissenters. Legal inequality and their ‘rational piety’ encouraged heterodox Dissenters to become active in a wide range of reformist causes. Owing to evangelical dominance in the nineteenth century, however, the role of Rational Dissenters was marginalized in histories of abolitionism. Recovering Rational Dissenting abolitionism underlines the importance of religion in the campaign against the slave trade. Since Rational Dissent was to a large extent a religion of the commercial classes, this article also sheds light on the hotly debated relationship between capitalism and abolition.

James Bryce considered that 1914 would be a satisfying year. He had just been created a viscount and, at the age of seventy-six, could look back on a career of distinction in university life, politics and diplomacy. He could continue to write books and indulge in correspondence with his friends. In fact, the books were not written and his correspondence became very practical. The tension in Europe in the summer of 1914 caused many people to ask him for advice on the best course of action. What, in particular, were Liberals to do? Some M.P.s were talking of peace demonstrations to keep Britain out of European war, but Bryce hesitated. On the evening of 31 July, the matter was discussed with J. A. Spender who noted that ‘… Bryce … strongly advised not to join this demonstration. He agreed that violation of Belgium would be casus belli.’ When Belgium was violated, Bryce was committed to the war but his commitment was reluctant, hesitant and with foreboding. The consequences of his decision are the subject of this article.

It has long been a commonplace among historians of eighteenth-century England that effective participation in the political affairs of the nation was confined to the privileged few. The substantial truth of this is undeniable, but its recognition has carried with it the questionable assumption that there were

Two worlds of politics in the eighteenth century—a tight political establishment, linked to small groups of powerful managers in the provinces, who controlled parliament, the executive, and all that was effective in the nation, and outside this an amorphous mass of political sentiment that found expression in occasional hysteria and impotent polemic, but whose effective voice in the nation was negligible.

In the eighteenth century Louis XV's minister, Cardinal Dubois, defended himself against papal criticism of his appetite for church benefices by ordering that a list of benefices held by his seventeenth-century counterparts be prepared and sent to Rome. It was his way of proving that he was much less voracious than they had been.His defence serves to remind the historian of the extent to which the ancien régime church was dominated by powerful families and ministers, who enriched themselves considerably by amassing wealthy benefices. However, none of these cardinal-ministers, from Richelieu to Dubois, succeeded in founding ecclesiastical dynasties capable of preserving intact after their death the ecclesiastical possessions they had acquired; dynasties of this type had practically vanished by the mid-seventeenth century, having fallen foul of both the crown and of church reformers. While drawing enormous incomes from their benefices, Richelieu, Mazarin and Dubois accepted that their benefices, like their other offices, should be at the king's disposal after their death. This had not always been the case. Had Dubois’ historical curiosity been more disinterested, he would have discovered that during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, ecclesiastical dynasties of varying importance and staying-power had flourished within the French church, characterized by their ability to acquire and transmit large numbers of wealthy and prestigious benefices to family members over several generations. The minimum require ment for success was the breeding of younger sons and daughters prepared to ‘enter the church’ in order to perpetuate dynastic control of benefices.

Lynn Zastoupil, in his article ‘Moral Government: J. S. Mill on Ireland’, (Historical Journal, 26, 3 (Sept. 1983)), has made an important contribution to our understanding of the sources and character of Mill's views on Ireland. He is right to suggest that insufficient attention has been paid to the lengthy series of Morning Chronicle leaders written by Mill in response to the Famine. No less instructive is his emphasis on the centrality of moral regeneration to Mill's political and ethical enterprise. Ably analysing the evolution of Mill's opinions on Ireland between the 1840s and late 1860s, Mr Zastoupil effectively demonstrates the way in which Mill's changing position on the issue was at each stage informed by a fundamental moral purpose. What his article does not fully convey, however, is the extent to which the expression of that purpose was shaped and conditioned not only by Mill's assessment of Irish circumstances at any particular time, but also by a certain tension and ambivalence in his attitude towards Ireland and her people.

France has always envied Paris. A popular interpretation of the history of France has been of conflict between the capital and the provinces in which Paris was the victor, at least from the establishment of the system of intendants by Louis XIV in the late seventeenth century. Radical Paris took the lead in the revolutionary upheavals of the 1790s, in 1830, 1848 and 1870–1. The conflict of the 1790s produced civil and foreign war and led to an even greater domination by Paris through the centralizing policies of Napoleon Bonaparte as military dictator. Under his rule and subsequently, all officials - civil, judicial, military, religious and educational - were appointed by the government in Paris. The Council of State was a corner-stone of this policy in the capital, the departmental prefect in the provinces. In 1830 the results of the July Days were acceptable on the whole to the French; but in 1848 provincial France roundly rejected the radical social revolution favoured by intellectuals and artisans in Paris; in 1871 the Commune of Paris was virtually isolated in its decentralizing and social-reforming ambitions and suffered bloody defeat at the hands of the regular army. Apparently, then, 1830 was the last, and perhaps only, time in the nineteenth century that ‘Paris led, France followed.’ Was 1830 so unique, and if so, why? The Revolution of 1830 was unquestionably Parisian, in that events in the capital determined the timing and location of acts of significant revolutionary violence and in that the major political and administrative changes which followed the revolution were enacted in Paris. Should one therefore assume that the provinces were passive, that they had little impact on events? This revolution may neatly illustrate the success with which Louis XIV, Napoleon and others had centralized France, but that conclusion needs to be based on evidence, not assumption. The most recent complete analysis of the revolution concentrated on Paris, but also delineated some aspects of provincial unrest in 1830, making use of the local studies written for the centenary of the revolution. Some provincial and departmental histories describe the events of 1830 and their local impact.

Much recent work has confirmed Norfolk's reputation as one of the earliest areas of England to adopt the practices of agrarian capitalism. As a response to the high levels of market orientation achieved there, relations between gentry and tenants, and latterly farmers and labourers, were coloured by a degree of hostility and violence rarely encountered elsewhere. In this article is printed an elaborate petition, which may confidently be dated to 1553, addressed to the queen and seeking legislation to restrain the economic activities of the Norfolk gentry. The petition shows a continuing tradition of agrarian agitation after the failure of Kett's revolt (1549); it offers an extended critique of the gentry's rapaciousness (which differs in emphasis from Kett's articles); outlines the difficulties the tenants faced at their hands, and reveals their capacity to organize and petition. A commentary places it in the larger context of mid-sixteenth-century agitations and attempts to identify the locality from which it arose.

The advent of the Hitler regime in Germany in early 1933, with its emphasis on the overthrow of the Versailles- peace treaty restrictions and the re-militarization of German society, caused a fundamental shift in the focus of Bntish intelligence activity. Germany replaced Russia and the Comintern as the primary target. The arm of German military power which commanded the most attention was the Luftwaffe, Germany's new air force. The bomber was the only weapon with which Germany could directly threaten Britain; by which London and the industrial Midlands could be made vulnerable; which could strike at the civilian population. Out of this nexus of strategic anxieties, the air staff created their ‘worst-case’ assumption. The worst case, as the air ministry consistently saw it during the 1930s, was a massive German air attack launched against Great Britain with the object of forcing a quick surrender, primarily through the collapse of civilian morale. Group Captain J. C. Slessor, director of plans in the air ministry (and a future chief of the air staff), admitted in his memoirs that,’ in those years immediately before the war the possibility of what was referred to as the knock-out blow bore very heavily on the minds of the Air Staff’.

In the later Middle Ages English kings borrowed to an increasing extent from their subjects rather than from foreign bankers. This development, often remarked, has usually been interpreted as both a sign and a cause of the Crown's weakness. Dependence on its subjects' goodwill is thought to have compromised the Crown's political authority, while its financial embarrassment enabled subjects to make a profit at the Crown's expense. Repeated borrowing thus brought not only an inexorable decline into insolvency, but increasing distrust of the Crown's promises and contempt for its rule. Such an interpretation derives much of its force from the view usually taken of these loans. They were, we are told, not ‘forced’ but freely made; not offered disinterestedly, but for profit.