This article examines the role which education played in church/state relations during the Occupation. It begins with an evaluation of catholic reactions to the defeat and explains why so many church leaders were quick to blame military collapse on the laïcité of the republican educational system. It then investigates the policies which the church wanted to see pursued in regard to schools and assesses how these were received by the Vichy government. Analysis of these issues reveals that Vichy was not as pro-clerical as is sometimes believed. Although initially sympathetic to church requests, by 1942 the regime had become reluctant to introduce any measure that might provoke religious division. At the same time, the article illustrates that French Catholicism was not a monolithic bloc. Arguments over education served only to intensify divisions already present within the church and soon led to catholic disenchantment with the Vichy regime.

A little body of illuminati, whose residence is in the Prime Minister's garden, and their business to cultivate the Prime Minister's mind. These gendemen stand in no sense for a Civil Service cabinet. They are rather of the class of travelling empirics in Empire, who came in widi Lord Milner, whose spiritual home is fixed somewhere between Balliol and Heidelburg. Their function is to emerge from their huts in Downing Street, like the competitors in a Chinese examination, with answers to our thousand questions of the Sphinx.

The activity of the foreign Powers in Persia during the early twentieth century has begun to receive historians’ attention; the British role in the Persian struggle against Kajar despotism, however, has not been made clear. The British have been pictured as indecisive and as not significantly supporting the Persian revolution. Or, where they have been described as aiding rebellion, only vague implications exist as to their purpose: hints that before the Anglo-Russian Convention the British encouraged the revolutionaries in order to extend British influence, presumably at Russian expense, and that after the Convention the British tried to make the shah honour his promises to the constitutionalists to obtain political stability and a secure environment for British trade. At least partly correct, if limited in scope and inexplicit about details, these ideas do not allow a full understanding of British policy during the tumultuous Persian struggle for a constitution. A thorough examination of the exact impact of the Anglo-Russian Convention on Russians and revolutionaries in Persia is required for comprehension of British attitudes and policies.

At the close of World War I two schools of thought about the future conduct of international relations emerged into plain view. On the one hand, the traditionalists presumed that the principles and practices of pre-1914 diplomacy could and should be sustained. This implied a routine of continual competition among the sovereign nation states, the anarchy of which was mitigated only by the collective fear of hegemony by one state (the mechanism of the balance of power) and by a sense of belonging to a common civilization (the old Concert of Europe). Tacitly accepted as the final arbiter of vital questions was the instrument of war. On the other hand, the First World War had provided ample grounds for a swingeing critique of Realpolitik when practised in an age of mass armies and technological warfare.

Of all types of military and naval activity, combined operations have had a particular fascination for public and politicians in the English-speaking world. In England, from Drake's raid on Cadiz in 1587 through to actions initiated by Sir Roger Keyes' Combined Operations Head Quarters in 1940, this mode of warfare has offered the romantic and morale-boosting spectacle of a beleaguered nation striking back at a powerful and threatening adversary. To politicians and administrators such operations seemed to present tantalizingly rich results at little cost. From the early part of the sixteenth century, France and Spain were largely immune from decisiveEnglish military action on the continent, but seemed extremely vulnerable on their seaboards and, as their overseas empires grew, in their colonies. A naval squadron with a small seaborne army could inflict damage upon the economy and prestige of these powers out of all proportion to the forces employed. Even when France was able to continue the fight after major colonial defeats, as she did between 1761 and 1763 and after 1809, England was at least enriched by the profits from her seizures. The belief that the navy could be relied upon to defend Britainand carry the war to the enemy received significant support from the great school of naval historians that developed between 1870 and 1914.1 Their works, supplemented by popular histories, and enlisted unsuccessfully by the royal navy in its attempt to resist a reorientation of British strategy between 1905 and 1911, added great weight to the conviction that British strategy traditionally lay in the application of sea power, of which combinedoperations was a major element. Assisted by newsreel and film, the spectacular developments in the power and technology of combined operations since 1941 have ensured continued public interest in this mode of warfare.

On 17 February 1827 Lord Liverpool suffered a paralytic stroke. His physical disintegration was followed by the break-up of the alliance which he had built and presided over for fifteen years. He had been a living guarantee that catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform could not be passed, which secured the support of the king and the country gentlemen. At the same time, he had guarded the backs of his liberal foreign and finance ministers against the threat of conservative attack, and thus enabled the government to adapt its policies in those departments to the pressures of the post-war world.

For the last two centuries Edward Gibbon has been regarded—either favourably or disparagingly - as the Enlightenment's greatest celebrant of the ‘triumph of human reason’. He has been almost invariably portrayed as an essentially optimistic believer in rational man's potential for social progress and moral advancement. Much of Gibbon's modern reputation as the Enlightenment's historian par excellence is due to early and widespread acceptance of certain assumptions about his religious sentiments. There has been a strong tendency to assume that Gibbon stood in the vanguard of what Peter Gay has called ‘modern paganism’: ‘The French philosophes and British infidels like Hume or Gibbon rejected revealed religion so vehemently and so completely that the Christian contribution to their ideas was modest and subterranean; they were usually unaware of it’. Gibbon has been traditionally seen as a vocal deist, while the account of the rise and consolidation of the Christian church contained within The history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire (1776–88) has often been thought intrinsically anti-christian.

One of the basic points of the National Socialist programme was the promise of the ‘Liberation’; of German nationality groups who had come under the control of neighbouring states through the peace treaties of 1919. Accusing a country of maltreating its German minority became a classic Nazi gambit in opening aggressive operations in the late 1930's. In most instances Nazi propaganda charges were vastly exaggerated, but if ever there existed a situation which might have provided some justification for Hitlerian wrath, it was Fascist repression in South Tyrol.

The increasing emphasis of historians of the eighteenth century on the role of aristocracy under the old régime justifies looking once again, more carefully, at the upper clergy of the established religious cults. The leaders of the established churches were ex officio, if not also by birth, always members of the aristocracy. No comprehension of the membership, organization, or objectives of the eighteenth-century aristocracy is possible without consideration of its ecclesiastical wing—in the case of episcopal churches, of its bishops.

Deficit financing, revenue projections and interest rates in Spanish Naples provide the context to reflect upon the exigencies of debt resolution, the illusions of mathematical certainty and the perils of temporizing in political decision-making. ‘Creative accounting’ explores the micro-history of an equation, which provided the mathematical rationale to lower Spanish interest rates to 3·3 per cent and to resolve the controversy over the ‘just’ rate of interest. In an attempt to generate revenues during the Spanish financial crisis of the 1570s that surrounded Philip II's second bankruptcy in Castile, Philip's Castilian accountants devised a proposal to suspend the hearth census in the Kingdom of Naples for fifteen years in exchange for a prepayment at discount. An analysis of the mathematics of the discount schedule raises questions about early modern economic realities. Changes in the significance of figures and quantitative relationships, like changes in the meaning of words, reveal the mental processes used to represent economic fact and to construct solutions to economic difficulties even in the midst of crises.

Historians of America's post-war social movements have said little about the financial underpinnings of activism, and this article aims to address this oversight. It focuses on the Black Panther Party, which was formed in Oakland, California, in 1966, and was soon one of America's most visible, and controversial, black power organizations. The article sketches the array of funding sources from which the party drew, and reconstructs the apparatus it fashioned to steward those resources. It condenses the discussion to one of the organization's most lucrative streams, that of book publishing, and relates this to the period's literary culture, which, in the US, witnessed a ‘black revolution in books’. Between 1968 and 1975, members of the party published some ten books, which together raised $250,000 in advances, and additional sums through their sale, serialization, and translation. The production of these works relied on the assistance of several freelance writers, and was guided by the party's commercial agency, Stronghold Consolidated Productions. By recovering the role of these groups and the infrastructure they fashioned, the article shows how publishing was connected to the wider financial structure of the organization, and prompts us to see that the Panthers’ books were not just accounts of their activism, but examples of it.

This article examines the origins of the ‘Parry Report’ (1965), the implementation of which led to the massive expansion of Latin American Studies in the United Kingdom. Drawing on material from several archives, the article argues that the Report was the product of a peculiar geopolitical conjuncture – decolonization, the 1959 Cuban Revolution, Britain's rejection from the European Economic Community – that prompted the Foreign Office to convene a group of academics (and selected others) from institutions then in the process of formalizing links with US-based private foundations. It seeks to show how extramural and intramural factors, geopolitics and academic politics, combined to generate an interdisciplinary area study that survived long after the conditions that had given rise to its genesis had disappeared.