A foreigner, an elector of the empire, a dual sovereign cast in the double role of absolute monarch in Saxony and constitutional ruler in Poland-Lithuania, Augustus II was Poland's George I. In the last septennium of the Great Northern War the two kings, united by a formal defensive treaty of a local character and by the bonds of the loosely knit northern alliance, pursued analogous aims in relation to Sweden: what Livonia was to the one, Bremen with Verden was to the other. The disintegration of the northern alliance in September 1716 in the thick of the preparations for a Russo-Danish landing in Sweden opened the way for negotiations leading to a separate peace between Charles XII and Peter I at the expense of the remaining northern allies. The northern crisis had begun.

In the winter of 1561/2 Henry Machyn, citizen of London, noted two special events in his diary: the extraordinary Christmas revels at the Inner Temple and the performance on 18 January, before Queen Elizabeth, of a play and a masque by these same gentlemen. These events are inextricably connected and in terms of political propaganda must be viewed in conjunction. The play was Gorboduc, written by two Inner Templars, the Queen's cousin Thomas Sackville and the Protestant Parliamentarian Thomas Norton. The revels at the Inner Temple celebrated the accession and reign of Robert Dudley as the lawyers' Christmas Prince. He had been chosen by the governors and Parliament of the Inner Temple in gratitude for his intervention in a dispute with the Middle Temple over Lyons Inn, one of the Inns of Chancery historically under the jurisdiction of the Inner Temple. Dudley had intervened with the Queen, opposing his influence against that of Sir Robert Catlin, Lord Chief Justice of England, and Sir James Dyer, Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, who had championed the cause of their old Inn, the Middle Temple. Elizabeth was moved by her favourite to speak to Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper, asking him to confirm the right of the Inner Temple. The grateful Parliament and governors of the Inner Temple pledged themselves and their successors to Dudley, offering their legal skills in his service and promising never to give counsel in a cause against Lord Robert. The value of this pledge to Elizabeth's chief suitor from men as eminent as Richard Onslow, Anthony Stapleton, Robert Kelway, William Pole, Roger Manwood and Richard Sackville is clear. The elevation of the favourite to the dignity of Prince Pallaphilos was in terms of propaganda a very splendid return for Dudley's intervention on the Templars' behalf. Nor was this pledge of loyalty ephemeral; the bond was mutually advantageous and it was one the Templars continued to honour. In 1576 the Parliament of the Inner Temple still referred to Leicester as ‘chief governor of this House’.

In a theoretical sense it may be said that the Revolution of 1688–9 established the supremacy of Parliament in the English constitution, but from a practical point of view the result of the Revolution was a –mixed and balanced’ constitution, in which power was shared between Crown and Parliament, and exercised within a framework of law. Although the doctrine of a ‘mixed and balanced’ constitution was an old one, the Revolution made clear the need for Crown and Parliament to work together, and in the reign of William III a new definition of their relationship was achieved. In this process the question of finance was crucial, for Parliament saw in control of finance the most effective instrument to limit the power of the Crown, while the Crown insisted that monarchy could not maintain its proper place in the constitution without some degree of fiscal independence. The outcome was, like most aspects of the Revolution Settlement, a compromise, in which the Crown received an independent income for the Civil List, while Parliament assumed responsibility for the military forces and the debt. The Civil List compromise of the reign of William III resolved the conflict between the Stuarts and their Parliaments for control of finance, and was an important step in the achievement of political stability within the ‘mixed and balanced’ constitution.

Naval historians traditionally have been preoccupied with operations at sea. Yet sea power hinges on the dockyards without which there would be no navies and no battles to write about. If Britain's greatness in the eighteenth century depended on a navy greater than any other in Europe, it depended no less on land-based facilities sufficient to create and maintain that navy. Two-thirds of the fleet on the eve of the American Revolution had been built in the navy's own dockyards, and virtually all the ships of the fleet were fitted and repaired in them, although in wartime especially upkeep to some extent devolved on the limited facilities of overseas bases. Moreover, decommissioned ships—the ships in Ordinary—which in peacetime were several times more numerous than those in service, were maintained at the royal dockyards. The requirements of an ever-growing fleet—170 ships of twenty guns and upwards in 1739, 271 in 1775, 360 in 1787—made the yards much the largest employer in eighteenth-century Britain. Slightly more than 5,000 workmen of all kinds were employed in 1754; by 1775 the number had risen to more than 7,500 and exceeded 9,500 in 1782 when, due to the demands of war, the number of sixth-rate ships and above was approaching 500.

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’.

By 1811, just a year after the annexation of their national territory to the French Empire, the Dutch had organized the most effective and comprehensive system of elementary education in Europe. How had this been accomplished? Not, at any rate, in emulation of their former neighbours. At the zenith of its power, Imperial France had nothing to show for years of speculation and derelict legislation except the return of responsibility for the ‘écoles primaires’ to the Church. The respective condition of the two states made this contrast still more emphatic. France commanded financial and administrative resources which the most absolute of her monarchs would have coveted; the Dutch were exhausted by fiscal penury and torn by bitter political division.

A hundred years ago there appeared Mill's England and Ireland, long since among the least known of his writings. At the time of publication it caused a furore, and gave its author a kind of notoriety that he had not previously experienced. In his pamphlet of some forty pages Mill issued a condemnation of Britain's conduct, past and present, towards Ireland, which surprised by its violence, in contrast to the judicious if superior tone that people had come to expect from him. This was startling; but the pamphlet's arresting novelty lay in its uncompromising demand for an immediate agrarian revolution in Ireland, as a long overdue act of justice, an inescapable moral obligation, and as the price of Irish loyalty in the future. Mill could not, of course, expect to convince his readers that he was justified in calling for such a sweeping measure without challenging assumptions which seemed built into the social foundations of nineteenth-century Britain. His impatient dismissal of these received notions was another aspect of the pamphlet eliciting a very unfavourable reaction. It is this aspect which is usually mentioned. England and Ireland is seen, when noticed at all, as the compact and forceful expression of ideas which Mill had been trying to inculcate for the best part of a generation.

Anyone who studies eighteenth-century British politics soon becomes aware of a lack of definite form in the major institutions of government. Contemporaries, although equally aware of this imprecision, did not consider that it detracted from the utility of the constitution. On the contrary the vagaries of the system were often cited as its chief asset, permitting such apparently irreconcilable elements as parliamentary supremacy and a royal executive to exist together in balanced harmony. Burke, the constitution's most eloquent defender, called this quality of comprehensiveness a ‘unity in so great a diversity of its parts’, and believed that such unity was capable of sheltering both prescriptive rights and necessary adaptations in society. But the quality which men of the eighteenth century were agreed to admire has been viewed less sympathetically by later writers, intent on clarifying points which contemporaries preferred to leave open. The whig historians of the nineteenth century attempted to cut through difficulties by treating as unworthy of consideration in the eighteenth-century scene those features which did not survive in the era of reform. The misinterpretations which thereby arose brought about a necessary reaction in the present century, especially from the late Sir Lewis Namier whose research revealed the Georgian scene as having a more traditional structure of politics and society than was previously supposed. But Namier's own work too paid disproportionate attention to parts of the scene at the expense of others, though he undoubtedly did so because the difficulty of dislodging a well-established whig orthodoxy led him to overstate his case.

Prior to 1944, the interpretation of the British anti-slavery movement was dominated by the ‘humanitarian’ ideas of the school of imperial historians centred round the great Sir Reginald Coupland. The turning point in slave trade and slavery studies came with the publication of Eric Williams' Capitalism and Slavery, significantly enough published at Chapel Hill—it would be interesting to find out whether the manuscript had previously been submitted to any English firms. In his bibliography, Williams remarked of Coupland that he ‘represents the sentimental conception of history; his works help us to understand what the anti-slavery movement was not’. But the attack went much further than personalities. Capitalism and Slavery included evidence which stood the more traditional interpretation on its head, while its conclusions rejected the simple moral motivation which had previously been picked out as the main factor behind the abolition of the slave trade and slavery. The whole thesis of Williams' book was that while the moral awakening of which Coupland and his followers had written may have genuinely affected the behaviour of individual supporters of abolition, the root cause of the abandonment of the slave trade and later of West Indian slavery was a change in the balance of economic pressure groups. Building on the work of Lowell Joseph Ragatz, Williams suggested that the anti-slavery movement was a group response of the middle class, to a decline in the relative power of the West India interest on the one hand, and a change in the needs of the increasingly industrialized society in which they lived on the other.

The fine and delicate balance of political forces and interests in midnineteenth century Britain is nowhere better demonstrated than in the activities of certain social and religious pressure groups during the general election campaign of 1859. The two main parties were certainly conscious of their past and of the traditions imposed upon them by those who had gone before; equally certainly the differences between them were more the outcome of these traditions than of real contemporary disagreements as to policy or outlook. The Tory administration led by Lord Derby, which had come to power in February 1858, was in a minority in the House of Commons. Its survival depended on an ability to attract dissident Whigs and men of independent views. Derby, never the most optimistic of men, had realized as early as April 1857 that his party, ‘if not an actual corpse’, was at most ‘in a state of suspended animation’.1 By the beginning of 1859 it had become evident to a number of Tory leaders, and particularly to Disraeli, that if the government were to survive, it would be necessary to obtain help from quarters hitherto untapped by the party. A peculiar set of circumstances led Disraeli to look to sections of the Roman Catholic community for such support. Although Catholicism was a growing force in England, the centre of its political operations lay of course in Ireland, which then returned 105 members to Westminster.

Louis Napoleon'S assumption of personal power by abrogating the constitution of the Second French Republic is recognized as one of the momentous events of the nineteenth century. His coup d'état of 2 December 1851 and his decision to take the title of emperor the next year were dramatic steps in the rise of the new Bonaparte from exile to arbiter of Europe. Understandably, these acts have attracted the attention of numerous historians. Much less consideration has been given to certain consequences—that is, to the reaction of the great powers to Louis Napoleon—s climb to power and in particular to the search for the means to block any imperialist aspirations he might harbour.

The history of social and political ideas is often brilliantly illuminated by personal intellectual confrontations. Our understanding of the concept of progress is enhanced by consideration of the divergences between Diderot and Rousseau; our attitudes to revolutionary change cannot fail to be influenced by the debate between Burke and Paine; our appreciation of communist and anarchist ideals is refined by contemplating the dispute between Marx and Bakunin. Similarly our view of certain questions important to mid-nineteenth-century social philosophy may be sharpened by an examination of another confrontation, less famous though scarcely less revealing than the foregoing, embodied in the exchange of letters between Alexis de Tocqueville and Arthur de Gobineau. The present discussion of some aspects of their correspondence makes no attempt at a full-scale comparison of the two figures. Rather, it places an emphasis upon him who is now the lesser known—a stress which is all the more defensible in view of much of the debate's previous treatment at the hands of historians. Into such historiographical questions there is no need to venture—at least, not beyond stating the two broad considerations which seem to justify an essay in reinterpretation along the lines suggested here.

The first part of this study of Mill sought to show how much less radical he was on the subject of Irish land reform than is often supposed. In the earlier editions of the Principles of Political Economy from 1848 to 1857 there were passages which constituted a terrible indictment of landlordism, and insisted on the need for legislation to convert the tenant farmers into joint owners of their holdings: but in another passage this harsh criticism was substantially withdrawn, and the demand for fixity of tenure effectively retracted. Although they continued to reproduce the criticism and the call for a drastic measure, the editions of 1862 and 1865 were more moderate still in their conclusions on Irish land. With the progress of the changes in the economy and society set in motion by the Great Famine, Mill became more strongly convinced that the country should be left to evolve slowly under the existing law of tenure, only slightly amended. One cannot imagine Mill saying, ‘tenant-right…is equivalent to landlords' wrong’: but he and Palmerston were none the less in nearly complete agreement by 1865 on the degree of laissez-faire that was desirable in Ireland. For all his strictures upon aristocratic misgovernment and middle-class prejudice, Mill was too warm an admirer of British institutions to want to undermine their social basis over a wide area of the United Kingdom. The second part of this study deals with his action and his motives, in briefly advocating, without any reservations this time, the revolutionary land legislation from which he had always previously shrunk, despite his brave words written for the earlier editions of the Principles.

The field of Anglo-Irish administrative history, comprehensively surveyed by Dr R. B. McDowell, has been subjected to little detailed analysis. This article attempts to fill the gap in one important respect. It sets out to examine the role of the Irish Board of Works during the famine years. In 1846–7, at a time of grave national crisis, the Board of Works tackled the near-impossible task of providing public works for the relief of almost every family in Ireland. Despite the Treasury's efforts to control abuses, the Board of Works proved unequal to the task, and had to be replaced as the main tool of government policy.

The history of modern or transoceanic American imperialism began midway through the nineteenth century with the achievement of definitive continental boundaries for the United States. At that juncture, the focus of the country's expansionist impulses shifted to Latin America and the Pacific Ocean area, and the quest for territorial possessions and spheres of influence in both regions began. By the turn of the century, thanks to a liberal use of armed force, it had been successfully terminated, completing the first and most robust phase of American empire building abroad.

When Joseph Chamberlain launched his striking tariff reform campaign in 1903 he was contributing to a very old debate. At the centre of the discussion had usually been the triangular relationship between free trade, protection and imperial unity. Were preferential tariffs compatible with British free trade? Was imperial preference necessary to maintain imperial unity? Could an empire divided against itself on tariff questions stand? Questions of that type became increasingly pertinent in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Entry for British exports into continental markets had become more difficult in the 'eighties, not only because of the tariff barriers which were more prominent but also because Britain found herself with few bargaining counters in the European tariff negotiations. The Anglo-French commercial treaty of 1860 had provided that neither party would, in its own country, subject the produce of the other party to higher duties than similar produce from other countries. This Most-Favoured-Nation clause had been the basis of a series of commercial treaties linking the European nations. The new network which arose in the ’eighties, covering Europe and the Americas, was negotiated largely without British intervention and the classification and rates were not designed to favour Britain. Britain sometimes even had difficulty in securing renewal of her M.F.N. agreements.

An expeditionary force of the Indian Army landed in Turkish territory at the head of the Persian Gulf almost immediately upon the declaration of war by Britain against Turkey on 5 November 1914. After winning some minor engagements against Turkish forces, it marched into Basra, the chief town of southern Mesopotamia, on the 23rd. The subsequent course of the campaign in Mesopotamia included a number of setbacks for the British. The principal city, Baghdad, was not captured until after nearly two and a half years of fighting, and the chief northern city, Mosul, not indeed until after an armistice had been signed with Turkey. Even so, by the time hostilities ceased, large areas in the south had been under continuous British occupation for four years and the possibility of further advance was throughout the war present in the minds of British leaders, whether in London, Simla or Mesopotamia itself. Against this background of military conquest and a pre-war diplomacy among the European powers, excluding Russia, in which Mesopotamia had been marked out as the British sphere if Turkey was partitioned, it is unsurprising that the political future of the country should have been much discussed within British official circles. War aims went through several phases whose study contributes to understanding of British aims in the war as a whole.

On 3 August 1914 a short-lived Radical body of intellectuals, the‘Neutrality Committee’, issued a statement to the press calling upon Britain not to depart from a policy of strict neutrality. A similar organization, which went under the title of the British Neutrality League, and supported by an imposing array of Liberals—Lord Welby, the Lord Provost of Glasgow, the Lord Mayor of Manchester, the Bishop of Hereford and C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian—did much the same. It implored the nation not to take part in a Continental war, since no British interest was involved: ‘the violation of Belgian neutrality was insufficient to bring us into war’. Other spokesmen of moderate and left-wing Liberal opinion followed suit, among them a fairsized number of Cambridge scholars. Meetings and demonstrations were held throughout the country to protest against possible British intervention. Organized by the socialists in Trafalgar Square, these were of impressive proportions. In Parliament, too, a small group of dissenting M.P.s withstood the gathering war hysteria and urged the Government to accept the German guarantee of Belgian ‘integrity’, though this might mean a temporary invasion of her frontiers. All in all this last-minute spectacle of opposition to British involvement in the 1914 War has sometimes led to the historical assessment that the Radicals, together with their socialist allies, were men of an insular mind and isolationist in their approach toward European politics.

It has often been argued that British ministers in the years leading up to the Union of South Africa in 1910 were so obsessed with the principle of white self-government that they forgot their obligations to the African majority.1 The result, it is alleged, was that African interests in general were sacrificed on the altar of Anglo-Afrikaner reconciliation, and in particular betrayed in the South Africa Act of 1909. If there is a partial exception allowed—the withholding of Basutoland, Bechuanaland and Swaziland from the Union—then, it is assumed, the credit for this could not possibly be given to the imperial government. The recent article in the Journal of African History by Alan R. Booth argues that, in the apparent absence of any actual imperial policy or concern, local African tribal and missionary pressures on the high commissioner were decisive in bringing this about.

The separation of Norway and Sweden in 1905 and the subsequent developments in Scandinavian politics evoked in British diplomacy a concern and an activity which are remarkable in view of the neglect into which Baltic questions had fallen during the preceding half-century. This new concern (like the previous neglect) can be explained satisfactorily only by reference to changing strategic circumstances. The diplomatic events are of interest not only because of the light which they shed upon the evolution of wider European politics at the time, but also because of their relation to strategic calculations; and they provide one of the rare instances before 1914 in which the direct influence of the Committee of Imperial Defence on foreign policy can actually be demonstrated.