Before 1914, a more intimate relationship started to develop between overseas commercial activity and foreign policy. This occurred as a consequence of the politicization of international business relations that came about when other great powers began increasingly to challenge Britain's global commercial, political, and imperial supremacy. Britain had traditionally followed a laissez-faire line when it came to supporting or protecting British overseas business enterprise. In the mid-1880s, Britain was compelled to review its policy. After this, the British government was prepared to offer limited assistance to British firms, but this often took place only in regions which were significant in terms of overall policy interest, including Turkey, Iran, and China. This article examines British commercial diplomacy in the Balkans, a region which has not received much attention from historians in this framework. British commercial diplomacy there followed the general line of limited intervention and support was offered mostly on legal grounds. Local political troubles and great power politics also played a role in diplomatic decision-making as did negative cultural perceptions, but to a considerably lesser degree. In most cases, the British government refrained from supporting British business enterprise in the Balkans on account of fears about financial speculation.

Sidney and Beatrice Webb, in their book The State and the Doctor, which was submitted in the first instance as a memorandum to the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws in 1909, dismiss the work of the free dispensaries and medical missions in one short paragraph.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent and character of the early legitimist opposition to the Orleanist regime. It seeks to demonstrate the secondary importance of their political loyalties for most of those with a significant material stake and status in the existing society. The basic theme is thus one of the effective formation of a conservative alliance pursuing the politics of selfinterest and prepared to sacrifice its ideals to do so. The cause of the legitimate monarch after 1830 could only have succeeded, and only came close to succeeding, if and when it promised to serve as the most efficient guarantor of social order. It failed because it appeared too concerned with ideology and ideals and not sufficiently with compromise, conservative unity and material progress. Its weakness was evident in 1830 in the manner in which its potential supporters reacted to the change of government.

There seems to have existed in France, at least after 1830, a general belief in the enormous social and political potenntial of education. Socialists, even after the penetration of vulgar Marxism, regarded ignorance as the great obstacle to working-class emancipation; democrats of all shades believed that the authentic Republic would emerge when a secular state primary education system became established; while, for conservatives, to entrust popular education to the Church was the only hope of preventing radical social change or collapse. Education became, therefore, one of the central political issues of the Third Republic. Recent work on the history and civics textbooks used in schools has given some indication of the picture of their society and its history which French schoolchildren were presented with, and of the way in which this may have guided their future attitudes and reactions. It is always difficult to assess the influence and importance of such material in the formation of mentalités, but, in order to do so, it must be remembered that the school textbooks were not the only formers of popular attitudes in this sphere. Not only did state school and Catholic textbooks present rival views, albeit mainly to two distinct audiences, but the period from 1900 to 1940 saw a flourishing of popular history books addressed to adults. These were mainly of Right-wing inspiration and were directed against the academic orthodoxy of the Republican University. A central role was played in this enterprise of historiographical vulgarization by the nationalist and royalist Action Francaise movement, whose ideology was often explicitly or implicitly present in it. The aim of this paper is to analyse the view of the past presented by the Action Franchise historians, and to suggest that the function of their historiography was to project a particular conception of what society was and ought to be like.

The ordinary revenue of the kings of Scotland in the early seventeenth century was drawn from a wide variety of sources. The comptroller received the revenues known as ‘property’ - fixed revenues and rents from Crown lands, payments from royal burghs, customs duties and the impost of wines. Out of these he met the"expenses of the royal household. The treasurer was responsible .for meeting nearly all other official and royal expenses out of the ‘casualty’, which included feudal casualties (irregular payments such as wards and reliefs), escheats, compositions and other profits of justice. The collector general and the treasurer of the new augmentations received various revenues from former church property. Administration of these revenues was simplified in 1610 when the earl of Dunbar, already treasurer, was appointed in addition comptroller, collector general and treasurer of the new augmentations, thus bringing responsibility for all branches of the ordinary revenue into the hands of one man, though he continued usually to be referred to simply as the treasurer. This amalgamation of offices became permanent, though the four offices all continued to exist in name until 1707, and separate accounting for the different branches of revenue continued until 1636.

The challenge of Joseph II's enlightened absolutist reforms in the 1780s imposed upon the Hungarian political opinion the painful dilemma of choosing between ‘fatherland’ and ‘progress’, between ‘nation’ and ‘civilization’, between national identity and modernization. These responses created the conceptual basis for the emergence of the modern Hungarian nation. The following characterizes the Hungarian liberals' and conservatives' intellectual horizons and value systems between 1830 and 1848. These two schools represent at least two different modernization strategies, and at least two concepts of national character and two perceptions of adversaries. The ideas here discussed concern the very bases of social organization and the nature and legitimacy of the state; they reveal how Hungarians conceived of the nation; how they saw foreign countries and the European equilibrium; how they perceived themselves and their adversaries, and how they envisaged their past and future.

THE development of any major industry has, either more or less directly, important political repercussions. Its history therefore has a political aspect. The brewing industry's changing relationships with Parliament provide an apposite, even if an atypical, story to illustrate how one segment of the business world of the eighteenth century, with its appropriate set of political alignments, gave way to very different orientations in the nineteenth century. This article seeks to plot developments over a long period of time in a field which has received less detailed attention from political and economic historians than others which are more obviously the preserve of each. Width of survey of necessity limits the depth of evidence: the consequences of the changes which took place between 1830 and 1870 have here been explored in much less detail and in less personal terms than the parliamentary representation of the industry in the previous century.

On 10 May 1791 the British house of commons was divided on an unsuccessful attempt to move the repeal of the Test Act as it applied to Scotland. Since then this has been one of the more neglected of the many religious issues which were deeply embedded in late eighteenth-century British politics. It might be described as the ‘Scottish sequel’ to the movement in 1787–90 for the general repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Yet it had its own distinctive features and reverberations which were by no means confined to Scotland. It is proposed here to examine the background, nature, progress and outcome of the Scottish application, to consider how it differed from the events of 1787–90, to investigate the role of its sponsor and leading parliamentary advocate Sir Gilbert Elliot and to look closely at the voting on the subject of the Scottish M.P.s. The aim will then be to consider the episode against the background of contemporary parliamentary politics.

During the 1670s, the navy was the focus of increasingly critical scrutiny from parliament and the political nation. This article considers the causes and nature of this criticism, which had its roots in the perceived dominance of the catholic James, duke of York, in the field of naval appointments, and examines the political context of the various inquiries into the state of religious affection in the fleet. By so doing, the article identifies a dilemma which confronted the crown's opponents in the period 1678–81, namely the conflict between the requirement for a strong navy to oppose France and the risk that, because of York's influence over it, that same navy might in fact be an instrument of French and catholic designs. Finally, the response of the officers and men of the navy to the events of the popish plot, exclusion crisis and ‘tory reaction’ is examined, placing the navy in the mainstream, rather than on the periphery, of the political and religious history of the period.

When emissaries of the German underground opposition against Hitler's dictatorship sought contacts and co-operation with the British government in 1938, prime minister Neville Chamberlain said they reminded him of the Jacobites in King William's reign; but until May 1940, the British government was not averse to co-operating with Germans conspiring to overthrow their own government.

Scholars and students at early modern European universities wrote hundreds of thousands of dissertations. One reason why these sources have long been neglected is that they defy any individual's capacity for close reading. This article adopts a digital distant reading approach to uncover long-term trends in the titles of over 20,000 legal dissertations written at German universities during the seventeenth century. Providing a pathway into a forbidding archive, the article highlights the dissertations’ interest for the history of jurisprudence and its receptiveness to social change, the history of universities and academic publishing, baroque rhetoric, and cultural, political, and economic history. The titles reveal a markedly declining interest in civil law, with topical issues like debt and marriage eluding this trend. Initially, dissertations were often written in dialogic form, but these were gradually supplanted by more single-voiced and monographic texts. Jurists increasingly preferred sharply delineated, diverse, and often original subjects, writing about anything from somnambulism to pearl fishing. The way in which seventeenth-century jurists expanded the scope of their writing reflects broader revaluations of scholarly curiosity and baroque polyhistorism as well as the heightened stature of an epistemic community that interpreted ever more spheres of life through its own categories.

Recent historians have highlighted the importance of the web of illicit commercial transactions which connected competing imperial networks to create an integrated Atlantic economy but have paid little attention to how co-operation worked across borders. Of necessity, participants acted without the legal institutions which are often afforded a central role in narratives of modernization. In the case of Jamaica, a hub of illicit trade, most merchants found it difficult to survive in this high-risk environment but members of the Sephardic diaspora, a traditional, communitarian group, had competitive advantages which they exploited with vigour. They did not rely on innate attributes of kinship, ethnicity, or religion. They closed entry and built on a favourable historical and geographical legacy to cultivate attributes which maintained high levels of social discipline with credible rewards and punishments which were reinforced by their outsider status. Their competitive advantages did stimulate retaliation but also allowed the Sephardim to combine with the Christian elite to capture rent-seeking opportunities. Far from falling away as modernization gained pace, the Sephardic diaspora survived and flourished by constructing the strong private-order institutions needed in large swathes of the economy where neither impersonal corporations, nor state enforcement mechanisms, were able to manage risk.

Class has long been used as an analytical tool in the study of history and much has been written with regard to the formation of class-consciousness, which has to a considerable extent been related to the first half of the nineteenth century and especially to the events surrounding the passing of the first Reform Bill. Professor Briggs has noted the growing use of the term ‘class’ in the early nineteenth century and has postulated a middle-class consciousness created by the media of the Reform Bill and Anti-Corn Law agitations. ‘Sandwiched between an entrenched landed Parliament on the one hand and a bitter but still imperfectly integrated labour movement on the other, the middle classes were compelled to lay down their own postulates and programmes.’ More recently E. P. Thompson, in a brilliant and wide-ranging study of the working classes, has seen the formation of a working-class consciousness which involved ‘consciousness of identity of interests between working men of the most diverse occupations and levels of attainment’ and also ‘ consciousness of the identity of interest of the working class, or “productive classes”, as against those of other classes; and within this there was maturing the claim for an alternative system’.