In order to understand why Tsar Peter and King Augustus II of Poland fell into one another's arms when they met at Rawa in August 1698, and why they parted such bosom friends, we must first of all briefly consider the relations between Russia, Poland, Lithuania and Sweden in the last three or four decades of the seventeenth century. After the peace of Oliva with Poland in 1661 and that of Kardis with Russia in 1669, Sweden's possession of Livonia, Estonia, Ingria and Karelia debarred both the Polish Republic and the tsar from the Baltic, thereby furnishing them with a common grievance and object of envy. Sweden's granary and her bulwark against Russia and Poland, Livonia with the port of Riga— ‘the most valuable jewel of the crown of Sweden’ — was a particularly invidious token of predominance in the Baltic and one whose lustre still outshone the growing importance of Narva in Estonia.

Generally dismissed by historians as just an hysterical gesture by parliamentary whig leaders disappointed and angered over the failure of the second Exclusion Bill, the attempted impeachment in 1680–1 of Sir William Scroggs was in fact a complicated and important affair. Although a failure in legal terms (because King Charles dissolved two parliaments), it succeeded in political terms when the king dismissed Scroggs. A propaganda ploy to embarrass the duke of York and also the king of England, re-unite the whig party, and re-ignite anti-popery fervour to promote another try at Exclusion (contrary to recent revisionism), the proceedings provoked discussion of many central issues, but most importantly of the legislative authority of parliament, or control of the law; the affair provoked a ‘crisis of authority’. Print culture played an unprecedented role: four of the eight articles of impeachment against Scroggs were connected with the press. Press people, in effect, brought down a chief minister of the crown and severely embarrassed the government, an event of signal importance in the history of the press.

Cardinal Richelieu's spectacular military intervention in Italy in 1629 plunged his ministry into a desperate crisis from which it only narrowly emerged intact. It marked the definitive departure of France upon the difficult road of outright opposition to the Habsburg hegemony in Europe. This policy – as the cardinal well knew – was in many ways potentially counter-productive, with a risk factor so high that failure might well entail the end, not only of his personal career, but with it the adolescent Bourbon state. Indeed, his initiative had the almost immediate consequence of a rebellious challenge from a prince of the blood and his domestic allies, amounting to a prototype fronde des princes. For decades to come, French society was to be impoverished by the manifold negative impact of war, while political stability was persistently affected by the unrelenting material and ideological pressures of continuous hostilities.

The Indian Rebellion leader Nana Sahib became Victorian Britain's most hated foreign enemy for his part in the 1857 Cawnpore massacres, in which British men, women, and children were killed after having been promised safe passage away from their besieged garrison. Facts were mixed with lurid fiction in reports which drew on villainous oriental stereotypes to depict Nana. The public appetite for vengeance was thwarted, however, by his escape to Nepal and subsequent reports of his death. These reports were widely disbelieved, and fears persisted for decades that Nana was plotting a new rebellion in the mountains. He came to be seen as both a literal and symbolic threat; the arrest of suspects across the years periodically revived the memories and the atavistic fury of the Mutiny, while his example as the Victorians' archetypal barbaric native ruler shaped broader colonial attitudes. At the same time, he influenced metropolitan perceptions of empire through the popular Mutiny fictions in which he was a larger-than-life villain. Tracing Nana's changing presence in the British collective memory over generations illustrates the tensions between metropolitan and colonial ideas of empire, and suggests the degree to which an iconic enemy figure could shape perceptions of other races.

Generic fascism scholarship, which has turned strongly towards cultural political history in recent years, has focused heavily on themes of rebirth in fascist culture, but rebirth's counterpart of decline remains under-researched. After emphasizing the existence of several distinct and even mutually exclusive ideological strands in the NSB, this article shows how ideological difference was marked by narratives of decline. But they were equally used to generate a coherent political message about the contemporary state of the Netherlands. Central to their functionality as a unifying tool was party newspaper Volk en Vaderland, which served to promote a patriotic, news-focused, and peculiarly Dutch narrative of decline that overarched ideological difference. Yet more than just tying ends together, one narrative in particular served as a crucial ideological constant in the Movement, namely the Leider Anton Mussert's narrative of decline since the early modern Golden Age of the Dutch Republic, which tied traditional liberal patriotic themes into fascist discourse. Where other historians have emphasized Mussert's lack of moral and ideological leadership, the article impresses how narratives of decline functioned as moral support, and rallied NSB loyalists throughout the German occupation of the Netherlands, until Mussert's own death.

The Congress system that arose in Europe after the Napoleonic Wars facilitated European imperial expansionism throughout the nineteenth century. Yet, the ties between that system and expansionism have rarely been unwound and studied in detail. Taking the French invasion of Algiers in 1830 as a case in point, this article shows how the Congress system's shared discourses of security and threat perceptions as well as its common practices of concerted diplomacy fostered European imperialism in North Africa. The article emphasizes obscured continuities and understudied multilateral diplomatic efforts. It uncovers the ways in which the post-1815 system decisively shaped the aims, justifications, and execution of the French war against Algiers. European, North African, and Ottoman actors each furthered or contested the idea that the invasion was part of an international legacy dating back to the Congress of Vienna, related to the concerted repression of North African ‘Barbary piracy’. In bringing these connections to light, it becomes apparent that the post-1815 international system cannot be understood in isolation from nineteenth-century imperialism.

The partial opening up of the formerly closed Soviet archives has had an enormous impact on the amount of new historical material available for research. Recent developments in research on Stalin and the Soviet Union are remarkable. The present article examines these developments with respect to three particular topics: ‘Stalin and Terror’, ‘Stalin and ideology’, and ‘Stalin and society’. It argues that whereas in certain areas new information has led to a greater consensus among historians, in others, such as Stalin's Great Terror, it has led to heated controversy. The article asks why, and suggests that the problem lies both in conceptualization and in the use of historical sources. More generally, the article discusses the present state of knowledge in the field. Because the study of Stalinism is often assessed in the light of the study of Nazism, it includes brief comparisons of Stalin and Hitler and Stalinism and Nazism where appropriate.

This article assesses the role of memory, interiority, and intergenerational relations in the framing of early modern experiences and narratives of travel. It adopts as its focus three generations of the Clerk family of Penicuik, Scotland, whose travels through Europe from the mid-seventeenth century onward proved formative in the creation of varied ‘cosmopolitan’ stances within the family. While such widely studied practices as the ‘Grand Tour’ have drawn on discourses of encounter and cultural engagement within the broader narratives of the ‘long’ eighteenth century, this article reveals a family made deeply anxious by the consequences of travel, both during and after the act. Using diaries, manuscript correspondence, memoirs, and material objects, this article reveals the many ways in which travel was fashioned before, during, and long after it was undertaken. By shifting focus away from the act of travel itself and towards its subsequent afterlives, it explores the ways in which these individuals internalized what they experienced in the course of travel, how they reconciled it with the familiar, quotidian world to which they returned, and how the ‘cosmopolitan’ worldviews they brought home were made to inform the generations that followed.

This article explores the emergence of women in the United States as a liberal voting group in the 1980s and the impact of this development on the power of liberalism, amid the Reagan revolution – an era often viewed as the apogee of conservatism. As the Republican party shifted in a more conservative direction in the 1980s, gender started to correlate with partisan preference/election outcomes in enough contests to give credence to the belief that women were becoming a decidedly liberal voting bloc. Contemporaneously, the equality-seeking movements of the 1960s and 1970s began institutionalizing their operations and exploiting these demographic shifts, becoming more entrenched than ever within the internal politics of the Democratic party. The National Organization for Women (NOW), the largest liberal women's group, proved to be particularly successful in this respect. Therefore, by presenting substantial archival evidence that liberal politicians and organizations remained a dynamic political force during the 1980s, this article details the growing organizational prowess of NOW and examines how liberals resisted the conservative challenge to fashion a political approach suited to the ‘Reagan Era’.

This article draws on a collection of petitions by Palestinian Arabs and Jews to explore how families negotiated the admission of mentally ill relatives into government mental institutions under the British mandate between 1930 and 1948. In contrast to the conclusions of the existing literature, which focuses largely on the development of parallel Jewish institutions as establishing the foundations of the Israeli health system, these petitions reveal that the trajectories of both Arab and Jewish mentally ill were complex, traversing domestic, private, and government contexts in highly contingent ways. The second part of this article examines the petitions themselves as dense moments of engagement by Palestinian Arabs and Jews with the British mandate, in which the anxieties and priorities of the mandate were strategically re-deployed in order to secure admission into chronically underfunded and overcrowded institutions. Petitioners also sought to mobilize other actors, often within the state itself, as intercessors, a strategy which attempted to thread together state and society in a meaningful and advantageous way at a time when both seemed to be unravelling. Taken together, these pathways and petitions foreground the space of interaction between the British mandate and its subjects, thereby offering new perspectives on both.

In the autumn of 1913, Japanese radical journalist Ishikawa Sanshirō (1876–1956) fled Japan for Europe on a self-imposed exile that would last more than seven years. While there, he mingled with English social philosopher Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) and his circle of friends, and resided for several years with the family of French anarchist Paul Reclus (1858–1941), nephew and professional heir of famed nineteenth-century geographer Elisée Reclus (1830–1905). Ishikawa’s travels contributed to the development of an intricate web of non-state, non-institutional links, fuelling an exchange of knowledge that spanned four decades. His personal trajectory highlights the significance of individual-based activism to the early twentieth-century global spread of anarchism. The experience of exile is also a valuable opportunity to explore how chance encounters, emotional ties, and subjective politics shape ideas of social change in tension with ideological consistency.

The last medieval queens: English queenship, 1445–1503. By J. L. Laynesmith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xxviii+294. ISBN 0-19-924 737-4. £35.00.

The marrying of Anne of Cleves: royal protocol in Tudor England. By Retha M. Warnicke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+343. ISBN 0-521-77037-8. £19.95.

Mary of Guise in Scotland, 1548–1560: a political career. By Pamela E. Ritchie. East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 2002. Pp. xii+306. ISBN 1-86232-184-1. £20.00.

My heart is my own: the life of Mary Queen of Scots. By John Guy. London: Fourth Estate, 2004. Pp. xii+574. ISBN 1-84115-752-X. £20.00.

Queenship in Britain, 1660–1837. Edited by Clarissa Campbell Orr. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Pp. xii+300. ISBN 0-7190-5769-8. £49.99.

Therefore if any man be in christ, let him be a new creature.Old things are passed away: behold, all things are become new.2 Cor. 5:17, Geneva Bible

The Reformation's claim to be, in Patrick Collinson's words, the ‘greatest geological fault line in European civilisation’ rests not on the fact that it proposed a new set of answers to old questions, but rather that it proposed old answers in a new world – the one that came into being with the advent of printing. This confluence transformed the ways in which the yearning for purification and renewal endemic to the religious impulse was enacted and institutionalized during the early modern period. Most radically, the Reformation challenged the socio-political hierarchies of degree, descent, and gender that had ordered medieval society. These hierarchies were most powerfully symbolized by the person of the king. In important ways they were perceived to be embodied in and dependent on him and, through him, on the women who came to be queens. To understand early modern queenship, we must bear this cultural context in mind. Too often, however, historians fail to do so, writing instead of kings and queens in terms more suited to modern political biography. This limits our ability to comprehend not only the phenomenon of kingship, but also – for as long as personal monarchy remained the dominant form of European government – political culture more generally. This review article provides an opportunity to address this historiographical deficiency. I therefore want to begin by sketching out the contours of early modern queenship, before turning my attention to the books under review.

This article discusses the early modern nexus between feather-work and textiles with a focus on Spanish Peru. Whilst Peruvian feather-work has been defined as pre-Columbian, this article presents new textual, visual, and material evidence that shows its significance in the material culture of colonial Peru, which serves to initiate a broader debate on the dynamics of cultural encounters in the Ibero-American world. I chart the development of craft cultures beyond the moment of the Spanish conquest of the Americas by discussing Peruvian practices of feather manufacturing in relation to the production and usage of textiles in early modern Spain. This approach, I argue, will enable a reconsideration of the dynamics of the Spanish Empire, whose centres and peripheries were linked through circulating objects that constituted a shared material world. In the particular case of feather-work, this was a world that jointly valued the aesthetics of knots and the intricacy of knotting.

The ordinance 1353, later confirmed in Parliament, introduced an entirely new conception of the office of the Mayor of the Staple. The compulsory marts in which the chief export wares had to be sold were then fixed in English ports, at each of which a Mayor of the Staple was appointed. Until then the Staples had only been fixed in English ports for two very brief periods, from the Kenilworth Ordinance of May 1326 to August 1328, and from September 1332 to February 1334, subject to interruptions owing to the needs of Royal finance: otherwise, from 1313 to 1326 and from 1340 to 1353, the Staple had been fixed in a Netherlands town.

The seventy-five years from the Second Punic War to the legislation of Tiberius Gracchus were critical years in the history of Rome. Within this period Rome imposed her will on the Hellenistic world and brought the West under her sway. The foundations of the Empire were laid in these years. Yet the period closes with violence and blood-shed in Rome herself and the seeds of civil war in Italy. The strain of conquest and the immensity of success disturbed the stability which had made the victory possible. Imperial rule called for changes in administration; deep economic movements began to touch the life of the people; but the strength of tradition, political and social, and the dominance of the Senate limited their range of vision. The result was to provoke, whether or not it was justified, an attempt at revolutionary reform.

The structuring of time in the early modern period has traditionally been associated with a broad, European-led shift towards ‘accuracy’, and with it connotations of ‘modernity’. Yet, a fuller examination of the temporal world of early modern merchants challenges such a teleology. Taking as its focus the English East India Company (EIC), this article situates concerns for accuracy in the management of time (and with it profit) within a broader spectrum of temporal influences, including seasonal, indigenous, and embodied time. It draws upon the experiences of the merchant Isaac Lawrence (1639–79), whose trade began around the Mediterranean Sea but ended in the service of the EIC in Persia. Like many of his contemporaries in the Company, Lawrence died relatively young and in obscure circumstances; however, the survival of his personal papers through his brother William Lawrence affords vital insights into how time was observed, measured, and felt within mobile early modern lives. Read alongside Company records, Lawrence's experience makes clear the necessity of reading subjective temporalities into historical understandings of time within global frameworks.

Conservatism claims to be a philosophy of common sense and everyday experience, in which sensation takes priority over reason. This article asks how this was understood by both Conservative thinkers and grassroots members in mid-twentieth-century England, and how it sat alongside other ways of understanding the feelings and experiences of ordinary people, in a period in which these came to be regarded as a privileged form of political authority. The article shows that the Conservative everyday was rooted in individual sensory experiences, but always underpinned by the collective evocation of reverence, majesty, and awe. It traces understandings of the everyday and the awesome through political texts and grassroots publications, showing that the tension between them is what gives Conservatism its distinctive character. This is conceptualized in Burkean terms as the beautiful and the sublime. The latter guarantees order, hierarchy, and allegiance, while the former works to soften and socialize power – making it seem a matter of custom and common sense. The article suggests that this combination enabled Conservatism to adapt to the challenges of mass democracy but became ever harder to sustain in the emotional culture of post-war England, when feelings became a marker of personal authenticity, rather than cultural authority.

This article examines economic nationalism in India, specifically the role of capitalists in late colonial Bombay. It shows how swadeshi was the fulcrum that supported the expressions of nationalism and capitalism. The notion that Indian capital needed to be used for the benefit of Indian nationals became established as nationalist thought by the 1930s. Such swadeshi capitalism – Indian capital for Indian industries – recasts the notion of swadeshi as a broader, more sophisticated cultural response to colonialism and globalization. As capitalism transitioned from mercantile activities to capital-hungry industrialization, nationalism was itself reframed from being anti-colonial in 1905 to being anti-globalization by the 1950s. Swadeshi capitalism helped to overlay a radical, grittier form of economic nationalism over the intellectually driven version of the nineteenth century. Swadeshi, as a form of economic patriotism, can be distinguished from similar expressions of nationalism within the British empire and dominions. This article is an effort to decolonize the narratives of modern capitalism by shifting the focus away from the global West. It will appeal to readers interested in South Asian history, and those interested in cultural responses to globalization, the contested nature of economic nationalism, and histories of capitalism in the global South.