The British response to the mass unemployment of the 1930s was in striking contrast to that of the other major industrialized countries. Only in Britain was a policy of accepting the apparent logic of capitalism, and waiting out the slump, successfully maintained in a reasonably stable, democratic setting. In an article on ‘The New Deal, National Socialism and the Great Depression’, John A. Garraty wrote that ‘in both Roosevelt's America and Hitler's Germany economic objectives were subordinated whenever necessary to political aims’. In neither country was there ‘any consistently held theory about either the causes of the depression or how to end it’ Britain under the National government represents almost precisely the opposite case. First, the government's policy of minimal direct intervention to relieve unemployment was directed towards achieving its central objective of ensuring that the depression would cause no fundamental changes in existing economic and social relationships. Immediate political considerations were subordinated to this overriding goal, Secondly, the government's approach, though not all of its particular actions, was based on a rational, comprehensive and widely accepted theoretical foundation.

Lord Hardinge succeeded Minto as viceroy of India in November 1910, after a distinguished career in the diplomatic service and in the Foreign Office as permanent under-secretary from 1906 to 191 o under Sir Edward Grey. Up to the outbreak of the First World War, he was considered a successful as well as a very popular viceroy. From August 1914 until the end of his viceroyalty in March 1916, the Mesopotamia Expedition was his greatest concern and India's most important undertaking. The expedition and subsequent inquiry had important effects on Britain, India and throughout the East, and had perhaps a more profound impact upon Hardinge's career and personality than any other event during his forty-two years of government service.

The Armenian crisis of the middle 1890s is sometimes regarded as a matter which is far removed from the main current of history. No doubt many Armenians were killed; no doubt it was the occasion (though hardly the cause) of Lord Rosebery's resignation from the Liberal leadership; but was it really a matter of great importance to anyone except the Armenians and possibly the British Liberals? It will be argued here that the manner in which that crisis was handled throws some useful light on the diplomatic and political processes of the period. It provides a baleful precedent for the much greater sufferings of the Armenians in later years; for the Jews in Hitler's Europe; and for many 'minorities' down to our own time. A powerful argument could be advanced for the view that the failure of the Powers to intervene on behalf of the Armenians was an essential link in the chain of events which led to the First World War.

On 23 December 1910, Jean Victor Augagneur, deputy for the Rhône, directed this attack in the French Chamber on the influence and the methods of the parti colonial. Augagneur was not an opponent of French imperialist expansion, who would have been inclined to exaggerate the importance of the parti colonial for political or ideological purposes. On the contrary, he was a professional colonial administrator who had recently been governor general of Madagascar (1905–10). As such, he was deeply sympathetic to a policy of imperialist expansion and critical only of the process by which this policy was formulated and executed. His contention that a powerful pressure group existed which was capable of influencing decisively the making of French foreign policy has to a large extent been confirmed by subsequent historical research.

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 1939 White Paper remained the basis of British rule in Palestine during the first three years of war. The military crises that erupted in the Middle East between 1940 and 1942 did not permit consideration of any alternatives - if only because Britain could not be certain that in would still be in the area at the end of the war. Since his appointment to the War Cabinet in September 1939, Churchill had tried, in vain, to halt the implementation of the White Paper.

Perhaps because the subject seemed so obvious, there has been little work done on women under fascism. This omission is unfortunate not only because Fascist policy was more complicated than the general impression of it but also because it offered an interesting example of the interaction between propaganda and reality in an authoritarian society. Women played an important role in several major propaganda campaigns of fascism, such as the ruralization policy and the battle to increase the birth rate. Concern for the role of women was at the heart of the conservative and stabilizing nature of fascism and, in so far as it meant the subjugation of the private lives of citizens to the demands of the State, policy towards women reflected the totalitarian and imperialistic side of fascism as well.

Studies of the Anglo-German naval agreement of 1935 have so far failed to provide a complete analysis of the factors which prompted the British government's decision to sanction German naval rearmament. Diverse views on the causes of this British decision have included the interpretation that the naval agreement represented the beginning of appeasement, that it was an attempt to curry favour with Hitler's Reich at the expense of France and other continental powers, or that it was intended to become part of a general international system of naval arms limitations but because of unforeseen difficulties remained simply a bilateral agreement. The severest critics of the agreement suggest that British statesmen were the victims of Hitler's guile and of their own ignorance and credulity which blinded them to the serious consequences their conduct had for British foreign relations.

On 26 April 1920 the Polish army launched a major offensive against Soviet Russia. The question of the French government's role in the unleashing of this attack has long been a matter of historical debate. P. S. Wandycz, whose work is the most recent detailed account of French eastern policy during the early twenties, attributes no major responsibility to the French for the outbreak of all-out war on Poland's eastern frontier. He states that the Quai d'Orsay was unenthusiastic about a Polish campaign and that the Poles had acted on their own initiative. N. Davies asserts that ‘Allied policy sought to discourage Poland from attacking Russia.’ ‘Without formally forbidding a Polish offensive,’ he writes, the Allies ‘emphasized that it “the offensive’ could not enjoy their support. On the other hand, Soviet and European Left-wing opinion has long condemned the Polish attack as a direct result of French influence. Vladimir Potemkin noted that Poland was incapable of waging a full-scale war with its own resources and that consequently Allied influence had to be decisive in determining Warsaw's attitude toward a continuation of the war.

The year 1934 was notable not only for the intense diplomatic activity throughout Europe that followed Hitler's coming to power but also for a spate of political assassinations. Among the victims were Austrian chancellor Dollfuss and the Rumanian politician Ion Duca, not to speak of Kirov and those purged in Russia in December. Perhaps the most notable of these acts of terror occurred in Marseille on 9 October when King Alexander of Yugoslavia and the French foreign minister, Louis Barthou, succumbed to the bullets of an assassin nicknamed Vlada the Chauffeur. The ensuing international crisis threw into sharp focus the evolving national interests and diplomatic styles of the European powers and serves as an illuminating case-study of a particular technique of conflict resolution.

It was often difficult in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to distinguish the interests of European financiers and concession holders operating overseas from the political policies of their respective governments. Concessions from a weak regime, in regions where political disorder and economic hardship were apparent, gave the power which held them a basis for the development of political influence in the country; and a basis too for an exclusive sphere of economic enterprise or, in the event of a total disintegration of the native administration, for a sphere of political influence which might follow a general partition among the European powers. In this context, railway enterprise was especially important. Railways promoted trade, and they could bring prosperity and progress to the areas through which they passed. They allowed military mobility too; and could be thus offensive or defensive instruments to be manipulated in accordance with economic and strategic interests.

Despite more than thirty-five years of scrutiny, the British policy of appeasement in the 1930s continues to be the subject of discussion and controversy. The search for explanations of Munich has even been intensified in recent years by the opening of the Cabinet papers. This essay does not pretend to make any contribution to the study of the ‘causes’ of Munich - the motives and determinants of British policy - or to decide the issue between the ‘guilty men’ and the ‘terrible times’ schools of explanation. The ensuing international crisis threw into sharp focus the evolving national interests and diplomatic styles of the European powers and serves as an illuminating case-study of a particular technique of conflict resolution.

Let us return to the undying fascination of Bradford and Sheffield. Like Wright before him, Temmel misses the point of my using the Bradford and Sheffield examples. Many schoolteachers often take the line that if the slowest children in their classes understand something the rest can be taken to have mastered it. In a somewhat similar way, I argued that if the Liberal party could be shown to be vastly more catholic than Vincent's definition allowed for in two large places where the structure of society was least favourable to a Right and Centre, then his overall contentions would have been brought most seriously into question. 1874 was a fair date to choose and comprehensive Liberalism was easily to be observed. Examination of the two boroughs showed that British Liberalism was much more broadly-faceted than Vincentian theory allowed; that ‘Whiggery’ was not just a family word, divorced in several respects from a doctrinal context; and that the Centre and the Radicals were in fact varied. If the Centre and Radicals flourished in those places, a fortiori they would elsewhere. The ‘slowest’ so to speak had obliged with data and so the Vincent case fell to the ground. Such an approach makes some intellectual demands upon the reader, not only logical but imaginative and factual. Nevertheless, it should not have proved too much for any able person in any serious profession.