This is a selective survey of books published over the last ten years or so and bearing on British naval history in the second half of the long eighteenth century.

The purpose of this article is to explore the political importance of Neapolitan Carnival and the government's involvement in steering and controlling the celebrations at various historical junctions during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is particularly important to note in this context the ritual pillages of cuccagne staged by the rulers. The sponsorship of such Carnivalesque entertainments quelled the rulers' fears from popular rebellion and disorder as much as they fed popular needs for bread and circuses; and it is in this context of maintaining intact the city's fragile social balances that we should interpret the ubiquity of these violent spectacles in early modern Naples.

This article reviews recent research investigating the impact of societal culture on combat performance in the western world during the first half of the twentieth century. It identifies two main strands of historiography. One group of studies has focused on societal culture's influence in shaping the form and functioning of military institutions. A second approach adopted by current scholarship has been to examine societal culture's effect on individual soldiers' resilience and motivation. The article compares and evaluates the results of this research. It concludes that, while sometimes overstressed at other factors' expense, especially combatants' common humanity and the complexity of militaries' own cultures, societal culture has proved to be a subtle yet important influence on martial performance.

This article examines Germany's efforts to instrumentalize Islam in the Balkans during the Second World War. As German troops became more involved in the region from early 1943 onwards, German officials began to engage with the Muslim population, promoting Germany as the protector of Islam in south-eastern Europe. Focusing on Bosnia, Herzegovina, and the Sandžak of Novi Pazar, the article explores the relations between German authorities and religious leaders on the ground and enquires into the ways in which German propagandists sought to employ religious rhetoric, terminology, and iconography for political and military ends. Interweaving religious history with the history of military conflict, the article contributes more generally to our understanding of the politics of religion in the Second World War.

The condition of the Anglican elite in eighteenth-century Ireland has been the focus of some debate by historians. Members of the Protestant Ascendancy class have been variously cast as a community under constant threat, or as a self-confident group secure in their control of the country's political and economic systems. Various contributions to this dialogue have been made through the study of popular movements and civil disorder. Rather than further comment on such phenomena this article seeks to examine the reactions of the Irish political elite to them. Although the country had no general Riot Act on the English model until 1787, legislative initiatives were made on several occasions prior to this. While these initially tended to be unsuccessful in parliament, local in their application, and to impose relatively lenient punishments, attitudes began to change in the 1770s. The political elite then moved comparatively rapidly to general legislation that created riot as a felony. Such developments suggest that prior to the last quarter of the eighteenth century civil disorder was not seen as a real threat to Protestant ascendancy, though Protestant fears finally culminated in legislative action in 1787. Arguably it was this event that marked the first great nadir in Anglican self-confidence in eighteenth-century Ireland.

This article addresses the perennial debate over the origins and nature of female power by examining the significance of ‘Women of Discord’ in Aztec (more properly, Mexica) culture. Influential, but often troublesome, these formidable figures embody the complex significance of female power, rooted in women's privileged access to the awesome earth forces through childbirth. This chaotic energy lent cosmological and dynastic significance to the mytho-historical Women of Discord, but also led to a persistent female association with disorder which had tangible (and often overlooked) consequences for the lives of ‘real’ women in Aztec culture. This article explores the ways in which beliefs about the female capacity for disruption both reflected and shaped reality, ensnaring all women in a cycle of myth and history which made femininity a source of both authority and apprehension. Importantly, in Tenochtitlan ideas about ‘disorderly women’ did not lead inevitably to their practical subordination or suppression; women held practical markers of influence and esteem in Aztec culture. Thus, the Women of Discord challenge our assumptions about gender by offering a distinctive perspective on the ways in which femininity and fertility may be seen as disruptive, without necessarily debasing women or depriving them of individual agency.

Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan offers the fiercest modern indictment against pride. Yet seventeenth-century polemicists and contemporary historians of political theory agree that arrogance is one of Hobbes's stylistic signatures. Does Hobbes, the author, fail to practise the modesty which he preaches to political subjects? Against critical consensus, I argue that Hobbes devises protocols of literary self-presentation consistent with his arguments for modesty. I make this argument by way of a close reading of Hobbes's Latin verse autobiography. Although the autobiography is usually cited as evidence of Hobbes's vanity, I read it as Hobbes's perverse profession of modesty. In the autobiography, Hobbes shuns the role of hero, casting himself as a ‘poor worm’ whose endeavours are motivated by fear. Acute consciousness of mortality, rather than lust for renown, moves Hobbes to philosophize. With this account of the affective springs of his own philosophy, Hobbes redefines the political theorist's vocation. Breaking with traditions that define political theory as a vehicle for heroic self-display, Hobbes defines political theory as a vocation for ordinary mortals.

Although the argument of the Essay on population originated in a family disagreement between Malthus and his father Daniel, who idolized Rousseau, and the Essay itself attacks Condorcet and Godwin, both of whom drew on Rousseau's ideas about human perfectibility, Malthus's project can plausibly be seen as an extension of the social theory set out above all in Rousseau's Discourse on the origin of inequality. Malthus was animated by some of Rousseau's characteristic concerns, and he deployed recognizable versions of some of Rousseau's distinctive arguments, in particular relating to the natural sociability and natural condition of humankind, conjectural history, and political economy, especially with respect to the question of balanced growth. His arguments about ‘decent pride’, furthermore, that were emphasized in later editions of the Essay map neatly onto what has been called ‘uninflamed amour-propre’ in the Rousseau literature. When we treat the social question as a nineteenth-century question, or when we locate its origins in the post-Revolutionary political controversies of the 1790s, we risk losing sight of the way in which what was being discussed were variations on mid-eighteenth-century themes.

Via an examination of the Labour party's approach to by-election campaigning in Scotland between the fall of the first Labour administration in October 1924 and the party's return to office in May 1929, this article explores the changing horizons of British radicalism in an era of mass democracy. While traditional depictions of interwar politics as a two-party contest in which political allegiances were shaped primarily by social class have increasingly been questioned, accounts of Labour politics in this period have focused chiefly on national responses to the challenges posed by the expanded franchise. In contrast, this article considers local experiences, as provincial participation and autonomy, particularly in candidate selection and electioneering, came to be viewed as an impediment to wider electoral success, and political debate coalesced around attempts to speak for a political nation that was, as the focus on Scotland reveals, indisputably British. Often portrayed as evidence of ideological divisions, such internal quarrels had crucial spatial features, and reflected a conflict between two models of political identity and participation: one oppositional in outlook, local in loyalty, and rooted in the radical tradition, the other focused upon electoral concerns and Labour's national standing.

While the historiography on Ulster Unionism after partition has grown considerably in recent years, there has been no extended investigation of Unionism at Westminster (‘the Ulster Party’), its structures and effectiveness. This article uses new archival material to shed light upon the Party's membership, governance, coherence, and wider engagement. The later sections of the article review the nature of the ties binding the Party to Stormont and to Conservatism, unravelling some of their complexity, and placing a particular emphasis upon the relationship between Westminster Unionism and the fall of the devolved government in 1972. Here, new evidence is adduced from several underexploited or fresh sources to shed light upon the workings of the Party in the years immediately before this debacle. It is argued that the Westminster Unionists' (at best) highly ambiguous reaction to direct rule was a fitting culmination to fifty years of often jealous and defensive interaction with Stormont.

The Manchester Progressive Municipal Programme of 1894 has been viewed as indicative of a new Liberal approach to labour and social questions, heralding the New Liberalism of the Edwardian era and marking a gradual transition to class-based politics. Rather than focus on the role of senior individuals, such as Manchester Guardian editor C. P. Scott, in fostering the change, this article explores the practical problems of grass-roots party co-operation and the problems that Progressive approaches brought to Liberals. Progressive ideas had already permeated much Liberal thinking before 1890 and the Progressive Programme was less of a departure than might be imagined. Progressive policies may have helped consolidate Liberal working-class support but they did little to encourage co-operation with the Independent Labour Party (ILP). Where senior Liberals attempted to forge alliances they were invariably rebuffed. When Liberal candidates stepped down in deference to the ILP, Irish and working-class Liberal trade unionists revolted and split the party. The 1895 general election demonstrated the dangers of being too closely associated with the ILP and the limitations of Progressivism as a political strategy.

Common destiny: dictatorship, foreign policy, and war in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. By MacGregor Knox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+262. ISBN 0-521-58208-3. £19.95.

Hitler's Italian allies: royal armed forces, fascist regime, and the war of 1940–1943. By MacGregor Knox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+207. ISBN 0-521-79047-6. £16.95.

This article argues that political considerations, economic theory, attitudes toward public finance, and concerns about regional development all influenced contemporary responses to the Galway packet-boat contract of 1859–64. Though historians have conventionally depicted the dispute over the contract as an episode in Victorian high politics, it maintains that the controversy surrounding the agreement between the Galway Company and the state cannot be understood solely in terms of party manoeuvre at Westminster. In the context of the Union between Britain and Ireland, the Galway contract raised important questions about the role of the British government in fostering Irish economic development through public expenditure. Politicians and opinion-makers adopted a variety of ideologically informed positions when addressing this issue, resulting in diverse approaches to state intervention, often across party lines. While political calculation and pressure from interest groups certainly affected policy, the substantive debate on the contract helped to shape the late Victorian Irish policy of both British parties by clarifying contemporary ideas about the economic functions appropriate to the Union state.

Contrary to the widespread assumption that in imperial Germany urban affairs were conducted by a homogeneous ‘unpolitical’ notable elite until around 1900, a review of recently published case studies suggests that politics had entered local government by the 1870s. Frequent causes for the politicization of local affairs included confessional divisions, territorial change, or simply the wish of local elites to buttress their own positions. The ways in which liberals in particular took advantage of this emergence of political discourse at the urban level is highlighted by the case of Frankfurt am Main. The city's three liberal parties developed in competition with each other. Each managed to address and articulate the citizens' peculiar grievances with differing degrees of success. By 1880, public life inside and outside the town hall was conducted according to political ground rules, and this was accepted by every party. Against the still prevailing view of a rigid liberalism which after 1874 was in evident terminal decline, the decade after 1866 needs to be recognized as the period in which liberals took charge of municipal government across most of Germany, through the politicization of often highly individual local concerns with astonishing sophistication and flexibility.

The arming of Europe and the making of the First World War. By David G. Herrmann. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Pp. xiii+307. ISBN 0-691-03374-9. £29.50.

Armaments and the coming of war: Europe 1904–1914. By David Stevenson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Pp. xi+463. ISBN 0-19-820208-3. £48.00.

Authority, identity and the social history of the Great War. Edited by Frans Coetzee and Marilyn Shevin-Coetzee. Providence and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995. Pp. xxii+362. ISBN 1-57181-017-X. £40.

Dismembering the male: men's bodies, Britain and the Great War. By Joanna Bourke. London: Reaktion Books, 1996. Pp. 336. ISBN 0-948462825. £19.95.

Passchendaele: the untold story. By Robin Prior and Trevor Wilson. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996. Pp. xv+237. ISBN 0-300-066292-9. £19.95.

Battle tactics of the western front: the British army's art of attack, 1916–1918. By Paddy Griffith. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996 (paperback edition). Pp. xvi+286. ISBN 0-300-06663-5. No price given.

Government and the armed forces in Britain, 1856–1990. Edited by Paul Smith. London, Hambledon Press, 1996. Pp. xviii+324. ISBN 1-85285-144-9. £35.

Whether or not arms races cause wars was a historiographical preoccupation of the Cold War era. The issue was then of more than academic concern. Those opposed to the proliferation of nuclear weapons saw previous arms races as having destabilized the international system at best and as having led ineluctably to war at worst. Their critics countered that arms races possessed the capacity to increase terror and so promote more effective deterrence.

The prize question of the Berlin Academy of Sciences for 1780, on the utility of deception, has attracted both controversy and scholarly interest. Yet very little attention has been dedicated to the question's peculiar beginnings in the correspondence between the philosopher and mathematician Jean Le Rond d'Alembert and Frederick the Great, king of Prussia, in a discussion concerning the expulsion of the Jesuits from France. This correspondence not only reveals the prize question's complex genealogy in long-standing debates on the true ends of philosophy, but also helps revise conventional frameworks for understanding the relationship between philosophy and politics in Enlightenment Europe. Far from an adornment intended to boost the ‘Enlightened’ credentials of an absolutist king, d'Alembert held the momentum in this relationship, and recruited Frederick to his own campaign of promoting publicly useful philosophy. ‘Philosophy’ here amounted to a commitment to the truth and its public defence, rather than subscription to or belief in a specific set of ideas or political reforms. Placing pressure on rulers to disavow deceitful politics, the far-reaching implications of this conception of philosophy for political life were no less ambitious than the agendas espoused by protagonists of a supposed ‘radical Enlightenment’.