This is an analysis of the extensive forgeries of Reformation history by Robert Ware of Dublin in the late seventeenth century, one of which, Archbishop Cranmer's speech at Edward VI's coronation, is still widely quoted and used as historical evidence. Ware's activity is explained in the context of Popish Plot agitation in Ireland and England, and John Strype's part in preserving some of the forgeries in the historical record is delineated. The survival of Ware's forgeries in English and Irish historiography over three centuries to the present day is exposed.

In reply to the comment by Andrew Farrant and Edward McPhail on Ben Jackson's article ‘At the origins of neo-liberalism’, this communication briefly examines the development of the political thought of Friedrich Hayek in the 1940s. It argues that the chronology of Hayek's critical analysis of the ‘Keynesian welfare state’ is more complex than Farrant and McPhail suggest. Farrant and McPhail underestimate the extent to which neo-liberalism in the 1940s was a body of ideas in flux, trying to come to terms with a changing political context, but not yet achieving a mature and stable ideological statement.

The soldier, publisher, and pamphleteer John Streater is a comparatively neglected political writer of the 1650s, who represents the turning of the dispersed Levellers to classical republicanism. In the 1650s he is seen as a brave and uncompromising voice of opposition. In the autumn of 1653 he was prosecuted by Cromwell for publishing a work entitled The grand politick informer. This article rediscovers this publication, identifies it as Streater's first newsbook, and explores its implications for Streater's career and canon. In 1654 Streater wrote two series of newsbooks which criticized the Protectorate in an oblique fashion. The grand politick informer, a work of unbridled ferocity, shows that Streater learned to tame his voice after his 1653 prosecution and imprisonment, and to couch his antagonism to the government in the language of classical allusion.

Historians have done much to unpick the image of development in poor countries after the Second World War as a technocratic phenomenon driven by centralizing planners and advocates of modernization. Yet scholars have done less to ask how development interacted with other major aspects of decolonization, notably the transformation of colonial subjecthood to postcolonial citizenship. Using the case of the Bhakra–Nangal dam complex, constructed in northern India during the late 1940s to early 1950s, this article argues that a major development project impacted not just on economic growth and the extension of state power, but significantly influenced the integration of postcolonial India's diverse political territories. At the same time, ideas about development and citizenship both offered resources that technocrats and dam-displaced people alike could use to make arguments about the relationship between people, territory. and the state. Development was not a rarefied space that escaped politics while extending state power, but was entangled in the broader processes through which subjects of an empire became citizens of a postcolonial state.

In 1750 Frederick II of Prussia created a new trade company in Emden. Diplomats, merchants, and other observers in Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Hamburg reacted with great concern to this Prussian bid to join the world of overseas commerce. These concerns were not unfounded. Frederick pursued his goal with great determination. The article explains why Prussia embarked on this ultimately unsuccessful venture and why established commercial powers such as Britain or the Netherlands felt threatened by the new competitor. In this context the article explores an international debate about political economy that was associated with the creation of the Prussian trade company. This debate took place in Britain, the Netherlands, Hamburg, and Prussia. The case of the Prussian Asiatic trade company suggests that the concepts of Oceanic and Atlantic history need to be extended beyond the narrow stretch of coastal regions. In the Prussian case the drive to join the world of overseas commerce originated from the inland and from a country that had traditionally been oriented towards overland commerce and European expansion. The study of the events and debates associated with the creation of the trade company also suggests a partially new perspective on Prussia's economic policies in the period.

This article examines the political theory of the late nineteenth-century American Populist movement, with a particular focus on its theories of state and corporation. Recent scholarship on populism has tended to present the phenomenon as a variant of direct democracy intrinsically opposed to intermediary bodies, a feature consistently traced back to American Populism as well. In this account, American Populists opposed new discourses of corporate personhood and free incorporation in the late nineteenth century owing to their tendency to distort natural bonds between peoples and leaders and to disperse the popular will. This article questions the tenability of this opposition through a close contextual engagement with original Populist texts. As the first self-declared ‘populist’ movement in modern history, Populists theorized about the usage of corporate personality for their own co-operatives and put forward ambitious visions of American statecraft, breaking with the proprietary individualism that characterized Jeffersonian agrarianism before. The article focuses on two particular genres of Populist thinking: first, their advocacy of the corporate form for their co-operative farm organizing and, secondly, a specifically statutory vision of state reform. It concludes with reflections on how these findings destabilize assumptions governing the current populism debate in political theory and American historiography.

The influence of British Indian example on the Irish Land Act of 1870 has received some notice in recent years. Dr E. E. Stokes, for one, has commented that it was men with an Indian background like J. S. Mill and George Campbell who educated the Liberal party to think ‘that the State might justly lay hands on the sacred institution of private landed property’. It is argued here that the general influence was very much less than has been suggested. Nor did Indian example point to a single course of action by the state on the Irish problem. Mill and Campbell, the two leading advocates of Irish land reform to draw on India, put forward solutions which, if intended to secure practically the same end, differed significantly in their approach.

The process of parliamentary reform which laid the foundations for a democratic political structure in this country contained much that was haphazard, and it is the object of this paper to discuss some of these elements, and particularly some of the conceptions and aims on which the legislation was based, and the technical defects of the legislation itself.

On the eve of the Henrician Reformation, the law of treason was markedly less well developed than one might suppose. Over a century of dynastic war, party violence, and the vigorous extermination of opponents had left strikingly little deposit in the law which was still essentially defined by the famous act of 1352, the first, and to this day the basic, treason statute. Minor attempts to vary the law may here be ignored, and the only serious alteration—the act of 1397 which omitted the demand for an ‘overt deed’—was repealed in 1399. The reasons for what might at first sight seem a surprising reluctance to extend the grasp of the treason law are not obscure. For one thing, most of the so-called traitors of the later fifteenth century were men who had had the misfortune to fight on the losing side in a civil war. Their treason grew out of the see-saw of politics and was committed in open war. They were therefore commonly amenable (if not already killed in battle) to the summary procedure of treason trials under the law of arms and did not come within the purview of the law of England at all. This method of dealing with the vanquished had one disadvantage: conviction by a constable's or marshal's court did not involve forfeiture of lands. The Crown therefore had recourse to the authority of the high court of parliament, and acts of attainder followed each turn of the wheel in the civil wars.

Historiography of the years immediately preceding the English civil war has tended to conceive of two disparate entities in politics, Westminster and the localities. There are in practice two distinct kinds of history, reflecting diis division, which connect only on rare occasions. The latest major work on the period can, despite its title, limit itself almost entirely to the confines of Westminster and the court, while the student is faintly aware of volumes of local works which contain scarcely a hint of what passes outside the town wall or beyond the county boundary. Parliament was indeed an aggressively self-conscious and independent body, and the county or borough was frequently particularist and introverted, but this did not preclude all contact between the two. Dr Pearl has demonstrated how vulnerable parliament was to the influence of London, and vice versa, and there have recently been several local studies which illustrate the close relationship between the county and the centre. But by and large, Clarendon's assessment of the importance of the Buckinghamshire petition against the attempt on the Five Members, and the obvious prominence accorded by Commons leaders of both sides to petitioning, has not been sufficiently appreciated. Parliament was deeply concerned about what might be termed ‘public opinion’: events in the localities, and the reactions to parliament's policies.

Property and trade must first of all be formed privately, then the flag and protection can come in as well. (Bismarck minute on Krauel to Bismarck, no. 24 of 22/4/1885, in R.Kol.A.2835.)

It is almost a commonplace nowadays that the passing of the Ballot Act of 1872 revolutionized Irish politics. Sir Robert Ensor is quite categorical: ‘But where the act had revolutionary consequences, which its authors had neither foreseen nor intended, was in Ireland.’ The authority quoted is Charles Stewart Parnell, who had insisted: ‘Hitherto the Irish voter, powerless against the intimidation of his social superiors, had returned members to one or other of the two English parliamentary parties’ and now with secret voting ‘need do so no longer’. By way of conclusion Ensor goes so far as to reflect: ‘that but for the undesigned gift of this act, the whole of his meteoric career, with its profound reactions upon English history for half a century, might never have occurred’. Elsewhere he attributed the emergence of the classic Irish party to agricultural depression and Parnell's magnetic leadership, though without in any way specifically retracting the ballot point.

The question of the direction of the speech which Lloyd George made at the height of the Agadir crisis of 1911 has recently been raised again by Dr Cosgrove. His article, however, is in some respects not entirely satisfactory. Most of the material that he uses to revive the traditional version of the Mansion House speech – namely that it was directed against the Germans – is derived from letters which deal with reactions to it, most of them Foreign Office reactions, and some of them at a considerable remove from the event itself. Admittedly one can build a prima facie case on ‘the entirely different impressions’ which the speech was observed to produce in Paris and in Berlin. There was the placing of it by Paul Cambon, the French Ambassador to London, at the end of a line of mounting irritation in England against the attitude of Germany, as the sort of thing the Spectator might have quoted in support of its thesis of the necessity of the union ‘intime évidente, affirmée’ of England and France; and his suggestion that French papers be encouraged ‘à publier quelques appréciations flatteuses de ce discours et de son auteur’.

Sir Edward Grey presided over the Foreign Office, Lord Salisbury ruled it. While Salisbury's Foreign Office can still be discussed in Palmerstonian terms, Grey's resembled its modern—day counterpart. After 1906, men who had been clerks began acting as true advisers. This change was in part due to the increasing volume of business and to the personalities of the men involved, but it also resulted from a belated administrative revolution which brought the Foreign Office into line with the other great departments of state. The years under Lord Lansdowne were the transitional ones both in terms of policy and of Foreign Office organization.

Historians have long debated which continental sources gave a major impetus to the early Elizabethan religious reform. While many have examined the alleged Reformed influence on the English church, that of the Lutherans has also been discussed by some. However, these have in the main failed to appreciate the full implications of this German influence which was linked closely with ongoing diplomatic developments on the continent. During the early years of Elizabeth's reign, political considerations more than religious actually dominated the minds of politicians like William Cecil in formulating the nation's ecclesiastical policy. In fact, some key decisions on religion were the direct result of contemporary diplomatic talks with Lutheran princes.

The thirteenth edition of The campaign guide: A handbook for unionist speakers was published on the eve of the Great War. This massive 900 page Guide, like its predecessors, was ‘prepared with a view to giving to Unionist Candidates and Speakers…a handy reference work covering the whole field of contemporary political controversy.’ The fourth largest chapter in the book (74 pages) dealt with Ireland and was reflective of the ‘present position’of ‘THE IRISH QUESTION’ being ‘in the front rank of political controversy’ Four years later Election notes, an 87 page pamphlet assembled prior to the 1918 election as a hasty substitute for what would have been an entirely inappropriate Campaign guide, had no chapter on Ireland, no reference to the Irish question in the index and, in fact, conveyed not a single word on the subject.

Canadian Confederation took shape at a conference at Charlottetown in September 1864, was designed in detail at the Quebec conference in October 1864 and revised into final form in London in 1866–7. The sequence of conferences forms part of the stately tread of Canadian nationhood, and provides a counterpart to the Annapolis and Philadelphia conventions which originated the other great nation of North America, just as the Fathers of Confederation echo the Founding Fathers of the United States. Subsequent meetings in other cities were to reinforce the aura of the nation-building conference, through Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Durban to the less resounding triumphs of Montego Bay and Victoria Falls. Intercolonial unions, it seemed, were formed by calling conferences. From this assumption it could be deduced as a corollary that if no conference was called, there was no interest in intercolonial union. In Canada, the preservation of the Province House at Charlottetown as ‘the cradle of Confederation’ is a gesture to national feeling, but the mystique thus fostered risks creating historical distortion.

It is widely assumed that after 1918 the British general staff ignored the experience it had gained from fighting a first-class European enemy and that it was not until the establishment of the Kirke committee in 1932 that it began to garner the lessons of the Great War and incorporate them into its doctrine. This article demonstrates that in fact British military doctrine underwent a continuous process of development in the 1920s. Far from turning its back on new military technologies, the general staff rejected the manpower-intensive doctrine that had sustained the army in 1914 in favour of one that placed modernity and machinery at the very core of its thinking. Between 1919 and 1931 the general staff did assimilate the lessons of the First World War into the army's written doctrine. But what it failed to do was to impose a common understanding of the meaning of that doctrine throughout the army.