Seventeenth-century English men and women, caught in the upheaval of the Civil War, sought to understand what it was to be English and sought to grasp England's proper role in the world. One of the ways in which they did this was through their encounters with other people. The Irish had a long history of interaction with the English, but in the middle of the seventeenth century their role in defining Englishness became acute. Late Tudor and early Jacobean commentaries on Ireland had stressed the superiority of English culture while acknowledging some virtues of Ireland and its people that would make it amenable to beneficial transformation by the English. In the middle of the century, occasioned by the events of the 1641 uprising, this ameliorative view of the Irish gave way to the view that English and Irish were incompatible. Earlier studies have emphasized the role of religion in the discordant relationship between the two peoples in the seventeenth century. This essay maintains that the shift in attitude had as much to do with ethnicity as it did with religion and considers the central role of John Temple and his treatise The Irish rebellion in changing English attitudes on both a national and local level. The study suggests that Temple's view became the dominant one for more than 200 years because of the demographic changes within the Irish community in London and puritan concerns about a godly community that occurred at the time Temple set forth his ideas.

There was constant tension between Britain and the United States from 1840 to 1865. The Liberals, who dominated British government during this period, had no doubt why: American governments, pandering to the democratic mob, provoked crises with Britain for domestic electoral purposes. They did this by encouraging acts of aggression or provocation by American citizens, and by threatening and bullying the British government, in order to get their way on issues of contention. Furthermore, they succeeded, even though Britain's leaders usually thought either that right was clearly on the British side or was sufficiently ambiguous to justify greater concessions by the Americans than were finally secured. This policy of appeasing the United States was forced on Liberal governments because their middle-class constituency perceived a ‘special relationship’ between the two countries, based on blood, religion, liberal traditions, and trade. They would not contemplate the threat of war with the United States, and since no important British interest was involved, the British government usually gave way. When it did not, as during the Trent affair, the British interest was to prevent further crises.

The critic and philosopher Hippolyte Taine is presented here as one of the pioneers of the theory of the unconscious in European social thought: a source of the more explicit writings on unconscious motivation in the works of Nietzsche, Pareto, and others. Preceding forms of French liberalism – particularly those of Guizot and Cousin – had depended upon an underlying belief in a number of ideas – in God, in our ability to understand his will, and in reason. A representative regime would be able to mobilize rationality in society and give it effective sovereignty. Taine's life can be interpreted as one of increasing conservatism, but it was consistent in his rejection of such a conception of rationality; first through his technical philosophy, then through the discussion of psychological motivation in mass political movements set out in the Origines de la France contemporaine. It is argued that such a rejection of rationalism was a crucial first step in the elaboration of new forms of liberalism – technocratic, welfarist, and economically individualist. Taine's work represents the passage from one type of liberal theory to another at a crucial moment in French history, the consolidation of universal male suffrage as a foundation of the Third Republic.

The Church of Ireland has been regarded as almost devoid of a high church element and as unreservedly hostile to Tractarian claims. This article questions these assumptions. It considers the evidence for an influential, if minority, high church tradition within the Church of Ireland and shows how far its adherents during the 1830s and early 1840s looked to English Tractarians for support. The very raison d'être of the Irish church was questioned under the reforming and erastian pressures unleashed by a whig ministry in the early 1830s. Tractarian rhetoric stressing apostolical descent and continuity was echoed by Irish high churchmen in their concern to demonstrate that they belonged to a church that was not a creature of the state and was no mere Protestant sect; Irish high churchmen held many theological and spiritual ideals in common with the early Tractarians, but guarded their independence. Irish high churchmen and English Tractarians nevertheless became estranged: the Protestant credentials of Irish high churchmen were suspect as a result of the low church and Evangelical backlash against ‘Puseyism’; Irish high church attempts to put church principles into practice, notably over the foundation of St Columba's as an establishment to educate Roman Catholic converts in high church teaching, were cold-shouldered by English Tractarians. The Irish high church tradition survived but was weakened by Roman Catholic undermining of its assumption of apostolical continuity as well as by ultra-Protestant critiques. Disestablishment in 1869 paved the way not for a high church ‘restoration’ on the Caroline model, as Irish high churchmen wished and as early Tractarian rhetoric assumed, but for the completion of an Evangelical ascendancy rooted in the Irish Articles of 1615 and the church of James Ussher.

Since the appearance of volume I of The decline and fall of the Roman empire in 1776, the religion of Edward Gibbon has been subject to intense debate. He has been variously identified as an atheist, a deist, even as a somewhat detached Christian. Examination of his relations, both personal and scholarly, with the varieties of religion and irreligion current in eighteenth-century Britain leads to the conclusion that he remained resolutely critical of all such positions. He did not share the convictions of dogmatic freethinkers, still less those of determined atheists. The product of a nonjuring family, Gibbon benefited from the scholarly legacy of several high church writers, while maintaining a critical attitude towards the claims of Anglican orthodoxy. It was through the deliberate and ironical adoption of the idiom of via media Anglicanism, represented by such theologians as the clerical historian John Jortin, that Gibbon developed a woundingly sceptical appraisal of the history of the early church. This stance made it as difficult for his contemporaries to identify Gibbon's religion as it has since proved to be for modern historians. Gibbon appreciated the central role of religion in shaping history, but he remained decidedly sceptical as to Christianity's ultimate status as revealed and unassailable truth.

This article explores the impact of the First World War on the social reform movement in France, emphasizing hospital policy and medical insurance. I argue that the war gave birth to a concerted reform movement which succeeded in bringing about fundamental changes to health care policy. During the inter-war years, the French embarked on a mission to replace the traditional hospital, the maison des pauvres, with modern facilities designed to cater to the middle class as well as to the poor. In 1928, a landmark law was passed which extended medical insurance to workers and the lower middle class. By 1940, over one half of the population was covered by medical insurance, and dozens of modern hospitals had been constructed. The impetuses to this national reform legislation were the numerous local experiments, whose stories I examine in some detail. Despite the image of Third Republic ‘decadence’, the success of health policy reform during the 1920s and 1930s shows that France was indeed capable of important domestic reforms. Under Vichy, these reforms were consolidated and after the Liberation, Vichy's efforts were saluted and affirmed by French politicians.

This article revisits the controversy surrounding the protection that Britain accorded the high commission territories on the advent of South African unification in 1910. Instead of incorporating these regions into the new Union from the start, the imperial government retained responsibility for them and further issued a schedule stipulating the terms on which transfer could take place later. The historiographical controversy centres around the respective roles of the high commissioner, the Liberal government, and the African inhabitants of these regions in formulating Britain's policy on this question. The present author agrees with Ronald Hyam that London made the decision to withhold the areas from the Union and that this decision has proved of critical importance to the welfare of the people concerned. This article, however, emphasizes that in the context of 1909 the question of transfer did not appear to possess the importance that it later took on, for all statesmen assumed that, sooner or later, the Territories would be transferred. What seemed more important at the time was the schedule governing transfer. This was primarily the work of the high commissioner – Lord Selborne. Though not without a trace of old-fashioned paternalism, his proposals display a modern enthusiasm for bureaucratic state building.

Queen Victoria, her court, the embassy in Paris, the prime minister, and the press, led by The Times, were early and impassioned sympathizers with Alfred Dreyfus and bitter critics of his persecutors. This article traces the development of their views and the information available to them, analyses the principal themes as they saw them, and attempts to explain how and why they formed their opinions. It considers why the Dreyfusard position was so congenial to them. It argues that their own principles and prejudices – conservative, patriotic, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant – were confirmed by a critique of French political culture, seen as corrupted by a combined heritage of absolutism, revolution, Catholicism, and demagoguery. This appears to be confirmed by contrast with the few dissenting voices in Britain, on one hand Catholic and Irish, on the other, anti-Semitic socialist, who showed little sympathy with the Dreyfusards, and even less with the views of their British supporters.

By the later eighteenth century, the Danish–Norwegian monarchy had a convincing track record for stability and the near-absence of domestic unrest. That stability, despite the wide-ranging claims of the Royal Law of 1665, depended less on force than on a consensus derived from religious unity, a traditionally approachable monarch, and a fairly accessible system of justice. But the crown also relied on a widespread loyalty which was bound to come under strain at the accession of the demented Christian VII in 1766. Despite the removal of censorship restrictions in 1770, however, a convincing public discussion of social and political issues was slow to emerge. Only after the resolution of the political crisis in 1784 did the government feel sufficiently secure not only to tolerate, but even to come to rely on, an unprecedented if moderate public debate. That debate, as reflected through samples of the Copenhagen press studied here, remained even in the 1790s largely supportive of the view that absolutism offered a viable way to lasting reform.

Although the 1922–43 Special Powers Acts (SPAs) played a central role in prompting the Northern Irish civil rights movement in the late 1960s, virtually no secondary literature exists on the operation of the statutes. This article examines the manner in which the unionist government employed the acts during the tenure of the northern parliament. It suggests that the 1922–43 SPAs became a central grievance of the minority community because of the manner in which regulations introduced under their auspices were exercised: the ministry of home affairs initially used the emergency statutes to return civil order to the province; however, as violence declined the government began to utilize regulations to prevent the expression of republican ideals. Any attempt to garner support for a united Ireland was perceived as an attack on the Northern Irish constitution. Concurrent with this shift was a change in justification for the 1922–43 SPAs: from being required in order to establish law and order in the face of rising violence, they were soon heralded by unionists as necessary to maintain the constitutional structure of the North. In preventing the public exposition of republicanism, expressions of nationalism were likewise limited. This impacted upon a large portion of the minority community, giving rise to claims that the statutes were being unfairly applied.

In the aftermath of the First World War, two schools of divergent thought emerged among Whitehall's Middle East policy-makers. One, propounded by T. E. Lawrence, found support in the Foreign Office, where many favoured Arab national ideals and backed the Hashemite family for rulership positions in the region. The other, epitomized by Arnold Wilson, the civil commissioner for Iraq, was thought to reflect the India Office view that direct British rule in Iraq was essential and that Hashemite pretensions should be opposed. In this article, the author shows that the lines separating the India and Foreign Offices were not so clearly drawn. Many senior officials in the India Office were disturbed by Wilson's imperial programme for Iraq and some were prepared to support Hashemite aspirations. But Lawrence's 1920 campaign for Hashemite rule and his hyperbolic press attacks on Wilson's policies had the paradoxical effect of moving the India Office to defend Wilson and to revert to their anti-Hashemite stance. The article concludes with an analysis of the reasons behind the triumph of the Lawrentian over the Wilsonian schools at the end of 1920, when Wilson was removed from Iraq and Middle East policy-making was consolidated in the Colonial Office.

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.

This article examines the French response to the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany in January of 1933. It argues that French intelligence warned civilian and military leaders that the priorities of the new regime were rearmament and the militarization of German society in preparation for a war of conquest. This essentially accurate appreciation of the situation inside Germany had little impact on the course of French foreign policy. At this juncture French society was preoccupied with worsening economic crisis and pacifist sentiment had reached its inter-war zenith. The national focus was inward and domestic concerns took priority over the external threat from Germany. Finally, France was in a position of relative isolation and could garner no support for a policy of firmness from its erstwhile allies, Great Britain and the United States. This combination of national introspection and diplomatic isolation deterred a succession of governments from taking determined steps to meet the Nazi challenge in 1933.

The tax strategy of the Labour governments of 1964–70 was intended to be both radical and reforming. That is, it had to fulfil the demands generated by the Labour movement as well as address issues of tax reform which were less closely tied to party politics. This article assesses Labour's ability to do this by paying particular attention to the contrasting budgets of 1965 and 1966. It examines the ideas of Nicholas Kaldor and the interests of the trade unions as two of the forces which shaped tax policy. While recognizing the difficulty of introducing new taxes, the article none the less sees much that was traditional in Labour's approach and offers a pessimistic view of the capacity of the party to change its outlook in the 1960s.

In contrast to the prevailing historiographical consensus, this essay will seek to demonstrate that there was a widespread and persistent concern with foreign policy in the early years of the French Revolution, the product of the interplay between inherited diplomatic assumptions on the one hand and revolutionary politics and values on the other. In particular, it will show how and why public opinion in France after 1789 abandoned its pre-revolutionary concern with Britain, Russia, and the global balance of commercial power in favour of Austria, the émigrés, and the security of the frontiers. In this light, considerable attention will be given to the development of Austrophobia in the period. Rooted in traditional French distrust of the Habsburg dynasty and reinforced by widespread opposition to the Austrian alliance of 1756, this would find its most virulent expression in the popular myth of a sinister counter-revolutionary ‘Austrian committee’ headed by Marie-Antoinette. The argument of the essay will turn upon the links between the emergence of that myth and the popularization of the ideas of Louis XV's unofficial diplomacy – the secret du roi – and its outspoken apologist Jean-Louis Favier. Adopted by various disciples after his death in 1784, Favier's ideas gained in popularity as the menace of counter-revolutionary invasion – aroused in particular by the emperor's reoccupation of the Austrian Netherlands in July 1790 – began to dominate the popular forums of revolutionary politics. They would ultimately help to generate a political climate in which the Brissotins could engineer an almost universally popular declaration of war against Austria less than two years after the revolutionaries had declared peace and friendship to the entire world. From this perspective, the growth of Austrophobia between 1789 and 1792 and its profound influence on the development of revolutionary foreign policy might usefully be described as the triumph of ‘Favier's heirs’.

The object of this article is to reassess received views about the significance of the 1934 rally at Olympia for the fortunes of the British Union of Fascists. It begins by analysing the debate in the House of Commons which is traditionally seen as reflecting a reaction against BUF methods, and shows the extent to which it actually revealed sympathy amongst National Government members. Then follows a discussion of reactions in the press. The article suggests that far from being purely negative, the effect of Olympia in some parts of the press was to attract more attention, and not necessarily of a hostile nature. Finally it examines the reasons for hesitation on the part of the government in using the law and the police to curtail BUF methods in the aftermath of Olympia. It shows how far Mosley continued to conduct large indoor meetings, partly because he was able to make use of the existing law. The article concludes that the British defence of free speech after 1934 was less firm than is usually supposed and that resistance to fascism by the authorities was of marginal significance.

This article addresses one aspect of the legal proceedings known collectively as the ‘Nuremberg trials’: British policy towards, and trials of, Nazi war criminals in the British zone of occupied Germany. The killing of fifty allied airmen after their escape from Stalag Luft III illustrates how atrocities against British POWs affected British war crimes policy. The article examines one part of that policy: the efforts to expedite trials and the decision to end them. It examines the ambivalence that characterized British attitudes towards war crimes trials, and also discusses British hopes for an expeditious trial programme and political and legal objections to delays in prosecutions. Finally, it shows that concerns about the Stalag Luft III case led to extensions in the trial programme, but that eventually the programme was subordinated to Britain's broader policy of reintegrating Germany into the western fold.

In the twelve months preceding the end of the Second World War, the International Committee of the Red Cross and various voluntary organizations acting with the Red Cross, were able to dispatch food parcels to increasingly large numbers of concentration camp inmates in Germany and German-controlled territory. As Allied pressure on Germany increased during the last months of the war, the possibilities of sending large-scale relief into the camps prior to their liberation expanded dramatically. However, Allied blockade policy was so deeply entrenched that it was almost impossible for these possibilities to be fully exploited. Official relief agencies failed to convince Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) that improving the rations of the camp inmates would not strengthen the German working force but would alleviate the problems that SHAEF itself would confront when it liberated the camps shortly thereafter.

Lyndon B. Johnson fails to mention the 1966 White House Conference on Civil Rights in his autobiography and the conference has been equally ignored by historians. Yet this conference, promised in Johnson's famous Howard University speech in 1965, was to be the high point of Johnson's already considerable efforts on civil rights. Underlying the confusion and rancour that characterized the conference held in June 1966 (but more especially the ‘planning conference’, held in November 1965) was a struggle to maintain the integrative impetus of the ‘American Creed’ against the realization that integration was unlikely to take place except in the very long term. The conference transcripts, recorded verbatim, provide a useful reminder of the very different mood of the mid-1960s, suggesting that the extent of panic after the Watts riot went beyond racial issues into fears for the survival of political and governmental institutions. Especially evident is the fragmentation of Johnson's liberal civil rights coalition before dissent on the Vietnam War ensured his downfall.

While non-German biographers of Bismarck have usually kept a healthy distance from their subject, German biographers have often allowed their political and religious views to influence their portraits. Most German historians of the ‘long nineteenth century’ were fascinated by, as Hegel would have called it, the genius of such a ‘world historical individual’. Their work greatly influenced the images of Bismarck during the time of the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. Their counterparts in the 1960s and 1970s, however focused critically on the ‘impersonal’ movements of the Bismarckian empire. These, Marxist influenced, analyses did not include any biographies. It was only in the 1980s that three biographers achieved a politically detached evaluation of the chancellor's personality. With the centenary of Bismarck's death in 1998, a return to the pre-1980s views can be noticed in biographies of the chancellor. They threaten to oversimplify Bismarck's personality and government technique again.