The historiography of leisure has made considerable advances since the pioneering years of the early 1970s. Research into Victorian leisure has shown that some of the ruling elite attempted to fashion the life-style of working people in order to create a disciplined and reliable labour force which suited the needs of a maturing industrial and urban society, although it must be added that sections of the British public remained immune to attempts at moral reform and improvement. Professional labour leaders were also eager to control and regulate the amusements of the poor. According to trade union bosses like John Doherty, only a sober, industrious and thrifty working class could hope to achieve progressive reforms and some form of political and economic emancipation: workers who were intemperate would apparently stifle the opportunities and aspirations of the emerging Labour movement. Nowhere is this more true than in the Labour leadership's perception of and policy towards working-class drinking.

Bankruptcy law in early nineteenth-century England called less loudly for reform than did the machinery of its courts. The “Commissioners in Bankruptcy,” spoken of in evidence before parliamentary committees as “London's main commercial court,” sat in a room in the Guildhall, always inadequate for their needs, but at times overrun by cooks when it was claimed as an extra kitchen for municipal feasts. There were seventy commissioners, grouped in fourteen lists of five. The post was in the gift of the Lord Chancellor, and as it was agreed that £300 a year was the most commissioners could expect to earn, it is not surprising that they were respectable rather than distinguished men, though in ambitious youth men as distinguished as Lord Macaulay might be glad of the Chancellor's patronage. The income, consisting of a guinea fee for each meeting, was brought to its maximum by expedients which destroyed the dignity and impaired the efficiency of the court. Of the five men, the necessary majority of three sat, while the other two went about other work, which might at times be that of practising as counsel before other “lists.” Guineas were easily added to by adjournments which increased the number of meetings. It was less obvious that they might be multiplied by three, by hearing before each set of three commissioners three bankruptcies, but this seems generally to have been done. Thus in a crowded room, at many tables, many bankruptcies marched on, at varying speeds, broken by frequent adjournment, which brought extra fee but at times better progress by resort to a private room in a coffee-house near by.

Francois de Callieres (1645–1717) was a diplomatic envoy and man of letters who in 1716 published De la Manière de Négocier avec les Souverains. A Normand of literate and noble, but modest ancestry, he lived for many years in various parts of Europe before securing, somewhat late in a long life, a position in the service of Louis XIV. Although he won admission to the Académie Française for a panegyric on the King and published several other books including a noteworthy contribution to the ‘Battle of the Ancients and Moderns’, the high point in his sombre but determined life came during the Nine Years War when as a secret envoy he negotiated the crucial terms with the Dutch which led to the Congress of Ryswick (1697) and peace. Thereafter he held the sensitive position of secrétaire du cabinet at Versailles and supplied the secretary of state for foreign affairs with a flow of memoranda on the conditions of peace.

French naturalization of the Scots appears to have evolved from lands granted to individual Scots by Charles VII during the Hundred Years War, and it would seem that the libertas testandi associated with these grants in the fifteenth century was an early form of what were later called lettres de naturalité in the sixteenth century. French naturalization was granted not only to individual Scots but to all Scottish subjects by certain French monarchs from Charles VII to Louis XIV and had its origins in the ‘Auld Alliance’, as the Scots referred to their relationship with France, and the establishment of the garde écossaise by Charles VII in 1445. The sixteenth century saw a continuation of Scottish military service to the kings of France as well as a continuation of grants of lands, pensions, titles and privileges accorded by grateful French monarchs to Scottish soldiers in the main, but other Scots as well, many of whom were, and others who became by letters patent of naturalization, loyal subjects of the king of France.

At the close of his article on ‘The East Fulham By-election, 25 October 1933 C. T. Stannage was allowed extra space to attack the account of the 1933–5 by-elections given in K. Middlemas’ and J. Barnes’ Baldwin, to re-state the charge that Baldwin deceived the country at the 1935 general election over the need to re-arm, and to suggest that there was no essential difference between the government's position on rearmament and that of the Labour opposition. It is not my wish to rush to the defence of Messrs. Middlemas and Barnes (who are no doubt capable of looking after themselves). But Dr Stannage's account of the rearmament controversy seems over-simplified. And, as it has been accepted uncritically by no less a figure than Henry Pelling, it may be worth looking at the question in rather more detail.

When Gladstone's Liberal government passed the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act in 1883, its supporters hoped that the future conduct of politics would be purer and more equitable. Not only would the grosser forms of corruption (such as bribery or intimidation) now be punished more severely, but the advantages previously enjoyed by wealthier candidates would now be minimized because the new law imposed strict limits on campaign spending which applied equally to all candidates for a particular constituency. But these noble goals, it soon appeared, were little closer to realization because the law contained a crucial loophole by failing to constrain the expenditure of the numerous pressure groups active in British politics. Because of this loophole, electoral corruption might continue to flourish, even if the perpetrator would no longer be the candidate's agent, but rather the pressure group treasurer. This view that the intent (if not the letter) of the law was being subverted was a common theme of Edwardian political journalism. As the Westminster Gazette observed, ‘when a by-election takes place each candidate has the assistance of a cloud of outside organizations which spend on the election a large sum of money which is not included in the official election expenses… clearly the result is to drive a coach-and-six through the Corrupt Practices Act.’ On the floor of the House of Commons similar arguments were aired. One Liberal MP contended that the statute ‘had been of great service in securing more honest representation than before, but no one who had followed political events closely could fail to see that its whole purpose was avoided, and that its terms were entirely circumvented, by the action which political organizations took on behalf of a candidate, which he was wholly unable to do for himself.’ Such assertions remained unsubstantiated, however, because infringements by pressure groups were rarely subjected to legal review in the election courts, being considered too difficult to define and expensive to prove.

The young Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) had perused many of the Epicurean writings of the French Enlightenment. According to Carlyle, such ‘Epicureanism’ consisted primarily in an emphasis upon pleasure and pain as the springs of human action, and a positing of self-interest as the foundation of sociability. However, Carlyle soon came to reject such notions, seeking salvation in the writings of Kant and Schiller, who stressed the possibility of disinterested virtue, and the importance of free, moral activity. Indeed, the Epicureanism debate continued to resonate in Carlyle's subsequent political writings, and particularly his notorious polemics against laissez-faire and ‘public opinion’. Finally, in Carlyle's last major work, Frederick the Great, he found himself faced with the unenviable task of painting an Epicurean into a patina of heroic virtue. Despite his best efforts, however, Carlyle's biography remained haunted by the spectre of Epicureanism. Nonetheless, as Carlyle's contemporaries recognized, his writings had done much not only to discredit the Epicureanism of the French eighteenth century, but also to shape the moral and political ideals of the British nineteenth.

Historians have praised Joseph Chamberlain's workmen's compensation act of 1897, the foundation of Britain's modern insurance-based compensation scheme for on-the-job injuries, as a forward-looking social programme of great benefit to workers. By contrast, the Liberals' support of the option of potential unlimited employer liability for worker injuries has been viewed as unimaginative and a failure of political leadership at a crucial juncture in the history of the Liberal party's relationship with labour. This article re-examines the employers' liability/workmen's compensation debate of the 1890s, arguing that historians' criticism of the Liberals' position stems from a misunderstanding that the crux of the debate was over the method of fair compensation. To the contrary, as this article demonstrates, the real issue was workplace safety. Far from being caught napping, Liberals strenuously argued the workers' long-held position that workplace safety, that is, the prevention of accidents, was much more important than compensation after the accident occurred and that Chamberlain's compensation scheme would do nothing to improve safety. Significantly, this article reveals that the Liberals were correct in that, while employers immediately gained protection from unlimited liability at minimal cost, worker safety, in fact, did not improve and may have even declined during the first decade of the act's operation.

In the summer of 1867 Lord Derby's minority Conservative government, scarcely recovered from the political steeplechase which ended in the Second Reform Act, launched an expedition into Abyssinia, the declared aim of which was to free a group of British captives in duress there. This expensive little war is now remembered, if at all, as a lavish and triumphant picnic for the Indian army yet, as a recent historian has pointed out, it does not deserve to be dismissed as a ‘military curiosity’. Certainly for contemporaries its origins were a vexed issue and one which was never satisfactorily resolved. Critics in the press and parliament laid the blame on the previous Liberal administration. They maintained that back in 1863 the Foreign Office had lost an important letter from Theodore of Abyssinia. When the king failed to receive a reply, he reacted to this snub by throwing the British consul and a group of missionaries into fetters. Responsibility for any such blunder lay in the last resort with the foreign secretary of the day, Lord John Russell. Elderly, frail, and with a reputation for rashness untarnished by time, Russell's term of office (1859–65) had been marked by a series of crises which had brought Britain into dangerous or ignominious confrontation with the U.S.A. over the Trent incident, with Russia over the Polish rebellion, and with Prussia over Schleswig-Holstein.

Unlike their fellows in a number of other industries, English farm labourers came relatively late to the idea of trade unionism. Admittedly, unsuccessful attempts at combination had been made by some few labourers from the 1830s onwards – and particularly during the later 1860s – but it was not until the years 1871–2 that appreciable numbers of them displayed real interest in the principles of trade unionism

The Popish Plot is the proper starting point for a reassessment of society and culture in late seventeenth-century England. The origins of the plot have become increasingly obscure, primarily because historians have made the erosion of Calvinist religious values and belief a defining characteristic of social and political change after the Restoration. John Kenyon has argued that the plot was an instance of mass hysteria, with its roots in the overcrowded, rumour-infested environment of London. Having identified post-Restoration nonconformity with cranks mentally ‘unhinged’ by the civil wars and the Great Fire, Kenyon interprets the plot as an obvious fabrication foisted on a paranoid and credulous nation by adventurers and religious extremists. Christopher Hill, in rare agreement with Kenyon, sees the decline of the religious approach to politics until ‘by the time of the Popish Plot it had degenerated into a stunt manipulated by cynical politicians’.

IN a vigorously argued paper, Mr J. P. Cooper has attacked my interpretation of Henry VII's reign.1 If the point at issue were only Mr Cooper's view of my methods and scholarship—or, for that matter, my view of his—I should feel neither justified nor inclined to trouble anyone again with these problems. But Mr Cooper is almost as much concerned to prove Henry VII rapacious as he is sure that I am wrong; and the truth about Henry VII's government deserves all the elucidation it may need. If, therefore, I reluctantly recur to an argument in which I have already had an extended say, it is because I believe Mr Cooper to be in error on a matter of first-rate importance; I hope to show that he has arrived at a mistaken view from partial, and partially misinterpreted, evidence. In a field in which things are far from clear or straightforward this is neither surprising nor shocking; it is more disconcerting to find that one who so readily chastises others for their supposed failings should himself be strangely inclined to inaccuracy in discussing other people's views and even in transcribing documents.2 A self-appointed hound of heaven ought to be more precise in his quest.

Australian public debate in the 1990s was dominated by issues surrounding the ‘impending’ republic. At the same time, Australian historiography experienced a return in the attention of historians to Australia's relations and ties with Great Britain, paralleling the increasing interest of Australians in severing the remaining constitutional links with the United Kingdom. Australian ‘Britishness’ has, unarguably, been a common theme in many contemporary histories. In subjects ranging from war, ‘dedominionization’, and republicanism, historians have noted with interest the challenges in history which have faced the imperial connection in Australia. This paper reviews the exploration of Britishness in recent historiography, and pays particular attention to a few key publications.

This article examines the contributions of the Miskitu people of colonial Nicaragua and Honduras to Britain's largest military intervention in interior Central America – the invasion of Spanish Nicaragua in 1780. Lacking the local skills and knowledge essential to offensive operations in the region, the expedition relied on an existing alliance with the Miskitu. Charting the evolution of this alliance, this article reveals not only the importance of indigenous manpower to colonial endeavours but also how intercultural campaigns generated powerful assumptions about martial skills and racial categorizations. These assumptions were highly vulnerable to misunderstandings that, in turn, had a profound effect on supposedly rigid European concepts of national policy, military planning, and strategic interests. The failure of British officials to appreciate the needs of their allies ended hopes of defeating the Spanish empire. But the failure also shaped understandings of the Miskitu and broader British interests in Central America. The raising of military labour was much more than the process of hiring soldiers. It was a broader process of negotiation, understanding, and misunderstanding that helped define the expansion of European empires in the new world.

In the last two decades, British urban history has flourished. The Tudor and Stuart periods have attracted particular attention, so that we are well informed on the party factions and politics of this time. There are excellent general accounts by Drs Clark, Slack and others; and notable local studies like Dr Evans' account of Norwich. However, it is interesting that early eighteenth-century towns are by no means as well covered, especially in the area of politics. We have studies of Norwich and the West Midlands, but these mostly concern the period after 1760. On the first half of the century, most of the available published material comes from incidental references in books on broader party politics and organization; for instance in works by Drs Holmes, Brewer and Colley.

This article examines the early evolution of British policy, prior to the Second World War. The British government adopted an ‘open’ policy towards foreign direct investment (FDI), despite periodic fears that some foreign acquisitions of UK firms in key sectors might be detrimental to the national interest, and a few ad hoc attempts to deal with particular instances of this kind. During the 1930s, when the inflow of foreign firms accelerated following Britain's adoption of general tariff protection, the government developed a sophisticated admissions policy, based on an assessment of the likely net benefit of each applicant to the British economy. Its limited regulatory powers were used to maximize the potential of immigrant firms for technology transfer, enhanced competition, industrial diversification, and employment creation (particularly in the depressed regions), while protecting British industries suffering from excess capacity.