The passage of the 1926 Judicial Proceedings (Regulation of Reports) Act prohibited the detailed reporting of divorce cases in newspapers. The voluminous press coverage of divorce cases commanded a large readership, but this very popularity had provoked anxiety about how such stories affected public morality. An overview of the range of opinion about this issue from the passage of the 1857 Divorce Act until the First World War will provide a context for an account of the steps by which the law underwent revision during the 1920s. The analysis will show both how the meaning of the public ridicule of sexual transgression changed over time and the ways in which the logically necessary but inherently unstable relationship between the erotic and public decency provided an impetus for such changes in meaning. The 1926 legislation represented one effort on the part of the state to control and to regulate that relationship. It did so, not so much to protect the individual's privacy from public scrutiny and so extend the scope of the individual's freedom of personal conduct, but in order to preserve the public decorum crucial for the maintenance of hierarchies of class, gender, and age.

J. H. Hexter's brilliant analysis of More's Utopia in the Introduction to the Yale edition of the text in 1965 was favoured by a resounding endorsement from Quentin Skinner in a no-less-brilliant analysis of the Yale edition in Past and Present in 1967. Given the status of both scholars as interpreters of the political thought of the early modern period, Skinner's prediction that Hexter's analysis would ‘cause a reorientation of [the] entire historiography’ of the subject was bound to be something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Skinner, in any case, clearly considers the claim to have been justified in the event. In his recent masterly study of the history of political thought in the early modern period his treatment of Utopia is especially-and avowedly-indebted to Hexter's work. Meanwhile, the most stimulating challenge presented to Hexter's thesis-by Dermot Fenlon in the Transactions of the Royal Historical Society in 1975-serves in its way to vindicate Skinner's prediction. Fenlon is concerned not to contradict Hexter's basic hypothesis but to stand it on its head. Fenlon's thesis in turn was assimilated into the survey literature when it was adapted by G. R. Elton to hammer Christian humanism in his Reform and Reformation in 1977.

‘Socialist planning’ was a notable, if unlikely casualty of Labour government after the Second World War. Between 1931 and the election victory of 1945, central economic planning was, in the words of G.D.H. Cole, the ‘professed creed of the Labour Party’. Depression and war demonstrated that the anarchy of free-market capitalism had to ‘give way to ordered planning under national control’. Labour won the election of 1945 with a commitment to ‘plan from the ground up’ through the socialization of industry, the establishment of a national investment board and the use of wide-ranging economic controls. Planning was the defining characteristic of Labour's socialism in this period and it could indeed be argued that the party did not find so effective a political rhetoric until ‘Labour and the scientific revolution’ in 1963.

This essay is a critical historiographical overview of the recent literature on the writing of sacred history (history of the biblical Jews and early Christians) and history of religion in early modern Europe. It considers the rise of interest in this branch of intellectual history in the last decade, placing it in the context of the rise of the history of scholarship as a historical discipline. It then charts how the characterization of early modern history of religion as stale, pedantic, and blandly ‘orthodox’ until it was swept aside by a critical and heterodox ‘enlightenment’ is being revised, first in new approaches to early modern histories of biblical Judaism and historicizations of the Old Testament, second in new readings of early modern scholarship on primitive Christianity. It concludes by suggesting new avenues of research which divorce narratives of intellectual change from the linear and inconclusive emphasis on ‘enlightenment’, favouring an approach that conversely emphasizes the impact of confessionalization in creating a newly critical scholarly culture.

Historians have displayed a curious ambivalence towards the English Revolution of 1688. On the one hand, they have argued that it preserved the monarchy; on the other, that it altered it. Edmund Burke was one of the earliest to voice this ambivalence. ‘The Revolution was made', he wrote in 1790, ‘to preserve our ancient, indisputable laws and liberties and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty.’ But then he added,’ They [who led at the Revolution] secured soon after the frequent meeting of parliament, by which the whole government would be under the constant inspection and active control of the popular representative and of the magnates of the kingdom.’ Macaulay expressed the same uncertainty in a single sentence: ‘But, though a new constitution was not needed, it was plain that changes were required.’

This article examines policy towards juvenile delinquency in colonial Kenya in the interwar period, arguing that juvenile offenders were the subject of scant official interest until the 1930s, when a series of official reports was commissioned and legislation enacted which attempted to modernize the management of juvenile offenders in keeping with current metropolitan policy. This impulse for reform is placed in the context of colonial discourses on eugenics and the effects of urbanization and detribalization on young Africans, arguing that while key metropolitan principles about delinquency retained their influence on transferral to the colony, they were blended with a distinctive colonial rhetoric about African psychology and capacity for development.

On 23 December 1910, Jean Victor Augagneur, deputy for the Rhône, directed this attack in the French Chamber on the influence and the methods of the parti colonial. Augagneur was not an opponent of French imperialist expansion, who would have been inclined to exaggerate the importance of the parti colonial for political or ideological purposes. On the contrary, he was a professional colonial administrator who had recently been governor general of Madagascar (1905–10). As such, he was deeply sympathetic to a policy of imperialist expansion and critical only of the process by which this policy was formulated and executed. His contention that a powerful pressure group existed which was capable of influencing decisively the making of French foreign policy has to a large extent been confirmed by subsequent historical research.

It has become a tradition to portray Transvaal history as a struggle between Boer nationalism and international capitalism, from the beginnings of large-scale gold mining in the 1880s until the electoral victory of General Botha and Het Volk in 1907. J. A. Hobson, writing in 1899–1900, predicted that after—as before—the South African War, the Imperial Government would have to face the dilemma of choosing between ‘an oligarchy of financial Jews, and the restoration of Boer domination’, since there was no other basis of political power. In his analysis of Transvaal white politics, he admitted that some gold-mining companies (the J. B. Robinson group, Barnato's and sometimes the companies of Albu and Goertz) were hostile to the influence of larger companies (Eckstein's and Consolidated Gold Fields), but denied that this affected the monolithic nature of international capitalism in the Transvaal. Later writers on the period, who have rejected almost everything that Hobson wrote, have nevertheless endorsed his interpretation. The Boer leaders were understandably happy to approve of such an analysis, since it placed them in a flattering light as the only realistic salvation for a magnate-dominated society. General Botha, for example, ardently courted the white working men on the Rand after the War, stressing the identity of material interests between farmers and artisans, in the face of the capitalist threat. General Smuts presented a more subtle and persuasive version of the argument, when attempting to persuade the Colonial Office to grant responsible government to the Transvaal and Orange River Colony.

Attainder was the most solemn penalty known to the common law. Attainder for treason was followed not only by the most savage and brutal corporal penalties and the forfeiture of all possessions, but in addition the corruption of blood passing to all direct descendants, in other words, by the legal death of the family. Before proceeding to an examination of the effects of parliamentary acts of attainder in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries it is necessary first of all to define the scope of forfeiture for treason as it affected landed property. Bracton's classic definition of forfeiture had involved for the traitor ‘the loss of all his goods and the perpetual disinheritance of his heirs, so that they may be admitted neither to the paternal nor to the maternal inheritance’. Feudal opinion had always been very much opposed to the stringency of this conception and the Edwardian statute De Donis Conditionalibus, confirmed implicitly by the treason statute of 1352, had protected entailed estates from the scope of forfeiture, thus leaving only the fee simple and the widow's dower within the scope of the law. The wife's own inheritance or any jointure which had been made for her, because they ante-dated her husband's treason, as distinct from her right to dower which did not, were not liable to ultimate forfeiture—though a married woman could claim them only when ‘her time came according to the common law’, that is after the death of her husband when she ceased to be ‘femme couvert’. This equitable principle was confirmed by a statute of the Merciless Parliament of 1388 which, however, included for the first time the rule that lands held to the use of a traitor were also included in the scope of forfeiture. Thus, by 1388, of the lands held by a traitor (as distinct from the wife's inheritance and jointure), only those held in fee tail fell outside the scope of the treason laws. This loophole was closed by Richard II in 1398 when Parliament declared forfeit entailed estates as well as lands held in fee simple and to the use of a traitor, thus reverting with one exception to Bracton's view of forfeiture.

On Sunday 20 February 1938, Anthony Eden, accompanied by the cheers of the waiting crowd, left the foreign office for an emergency cabinet session. That same evening he tendered his resignation as foreign secretary. Ten years later Churchill recollected his feelings on learning of the news.

Two major themes have been orchestrated in the course of recent research into the period 1688 to 1714. In the sphere of politics, die extent and intensity of party conflict, especially in Anne's reign, has been laid bare in the work of G. Holmes and W. A. Speck, among others; whilst J. H. Plumb, in The Growth of Political Stability has sketched the motive forces behind the spreading and then the quieting, of that conflict.1 In the second recently developed area, that of public financ , P. G. M. Dickson's The Financial Revolution in Englandhas provided us with the insights and precision necessary to qualify and confirm previous assertions about the substantial contribution made by the developing ‘funding system’ to the success of England, under William and then Marlborough, in holding off Louis XIV, and, consequently, in establishing the Hanoverian dynasty on the throne.2

The review examines the recent literature on German federalism. This literature has identified a decentralized, federal tradition in German history, dating back at least to the eighteenth century and in striking contrast with the ‘unitary’ traditions of the Prussian state. The review questions the extent to which centralization was indeed a Prussian phenomenon in German history by examining the relatively decentralized nature of the Prussian state and the strongly centralizing tendencies of smaller German states in the nineteenth century. The review also examines the origins of the new ‘federal’ historiography, both in terms of contemporary German politics and in terms of the political debate surrounding German unification in the 1860s. It concludes that the idea of a ‘unitary’ Prussian state tradition is simplistic and reflects the inherent anti-Prussian bias of German federalism in the unification era. In this sense, it is the federal counterpart of the better-known Borussian approach to German history.

This article explores the way in which the Counter Reformation priests sent to England after 1574 cultivated and harnessed the culture of the miraculous in their efforts to reform and evangelize the populace and to defend doctrines and practices assaulted by Protestant polemicists. Drawing on the insights emerging from recent research on Catholic renewal on the Continent, it shows how the seminary clergy and especially the Jesuits fostered traditional beliefs and practices associated with saints, relics, and sacramentals and exploited the potential of exorcisms and visions for didactic and proselytizing purposes. Close examination of these strategies serves to question some existing assumptions about the nature, objectives, and impact of the English Catholic mission and to illuminate the particular challenges that persecution presented to a movement determined to purge popular piety of its ‘superstitious’ accretions. It underlines the tensions between ecclesiastical direction and lay initiative which characterized a context in which Catholicism was a minority Church and highlights the frictions and divisions which these attempts to utilize supernatural power stimulated within the ranks of the Counter Reformation priesthood itself.

Consumption studies have arguably transformed the study of early modern cultural history in the past three decades, with the championing of previously neglected sources, application of interdisciplinary approaches, and exploration of the mentalities of acquisition, ownership, and use. But does the accumulation of writing about consuming and consumption in this period amount to much more than the historical equivalent of window-shopping? It is argued here that greater attention to the consumers as much as the consumed, to the motivations for consuming rather than the act of consumption alone, offers a way out of the explanatory cul-de-sac reached by over-indulgence in the early modern ‘world of goods’.

This article examines the role played by patient organizations in the making of the patient as consumer during Margaret Thatcher's term as prime minster. It details a crucial moment in the reconstitution of the relationship between state and citizen, as universal entitlements to welfare gave way to individualistic rights to, and choice of, services. Though patients had been regarded as consumers prior to this period, it was during the 1980s that the patient-consumer moved from the margins to centre-stage. By examining the activities of patient groups around three key themes – the provision of information, the development of patients' rights, and the notion of patient choice – this article shows that ideas about what it meant to be a patient-consumer came initially from patient groups. Through their work in these areas, patient groups built up a kind of patient consumerism that was concerned with the needs of the wider population, as well as representing demands made by individual patient-consumers. By the end of the 1980s, however, the patient-consumer was reconfigured by the Conservative government, and emphasis moved from the collective needs of patient-consumers to the rights of individuals within increasingly marketized services. This development thus raises questions not only about who speaks for the consumer, but also about the relationship between citizenship and consumption in contemporary Britain.

Until about fifteen years ago, most modern scholars saw Edmund Burke's thought largely as a reaction to the philosophical and political rationalism of his time: to them, although Burke was reactive, his revolt was original. When scholars did seek the historical ‘origin’ of his thought, it was generally found in Whiggery and that convenient catch-all ‘the’ British tradition of empiricist philosophizing. Of late, two groups of scholars have sought and found other ‘origins’: the first group, larger and perhaps better-known, finds Burke's thought to be rooted in the principles of ‘the’ natural law and, perhaps, also in the dictates of scholastic prudence; the other group, tiny and less well known, finds in Burke's traditionalism a partial continuation of the traditional way of thinking of seventeenth-century common lawyers. One consequence of undertaking this disinterment of Burke's ‘origins’ has been the burial of Burke's originality.

Despite more than thirty-five years of scrutiny, the British policy of appeasement in the 1930s continues to be the subject of discussion and controversy. The search for explanations of Munich has even been intensified in recent years by the opening of the Cabinet papers. This essay does not pretend to make any contribution to the study of the ‘causes’ of Munich - the motives and determinants of British policy - or to decide the issue between the ‘guilty men’ and the ‘terrible times’ schools of explanation. The ensuing international crisis threw into sharp focus the evolving national interests and diplomatic styles of the European powers and serves as an illuminating case-study of a particular technique of conflict resolution.

This article explores some of the tensions and interaction between two rival conceptions of the relationship between citizenship and patriotism in twentieth-century England. The first was widespread among the intellectual elite and greatly qualified the role of patriotism in sustaining a higher ideal of citizenship. The second was generally the preserve of popular writers and activists who conceived citizenship in terms of patriotic attachment to the English and English-British nation. However, the article maintains that the Edwardian intellectual elite often assumed an homogeneous national culture as the basis of successful citizenship, both local and international. In this regard, despite subjection to increasing strain, continuity as much as change is apparent in conceptions of citizenship up to and including the interventions of Enoch Powell in the debate over mass immigration. Subsequent attempts to ground citizenship in difference rather than sameness have greatly intensified the tension with a more persistent culture of patriotism.