In the first year of Victoria's reign, the English reading public's expectations of ‘A new and complete edition’ of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments began to receive fulfilment, as the initial three volumes were issued by Seeley and Burnside. Not all were prepared to give the work a magnanimous reception. Chief among the detractors of that age was Samuel Roffey Maitland, destined in the near future to become librarian at Lambeth Palace under Howley's tenure as archbishop of Canterbury. This essay explores the nature of Maitland's fervent objections to Foxe and his martyrology, and also examines Maitland's relationship to the major religious movements of his day (including Tractarianism). It argues that Maitland was offended by what he perceived as Foxe's extreme partisan bias (as a member of the puritan wing of the English church) and equally, by the poor editorial job which he believed to have been performed in the Cattley/Seeley project. Furthermore, it maintains that Maitland had a sympathetic though rather complex relationship with the divines of the Oxford Movement, including John Henry Newman. Maitland's scholarly credentials as a Foxe critic are also examined.

This article addresses the development of the British government's policy towards the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France, which arose from the British occupation of Toulon from 28 August to 19 December 1793. The discussions conducted by prime minister William Pitt and foreign secretary Lord Grenville on the shape of Toulon's civil government under occupation clarify official British perceptions of an ‘ideal’ Bourbon monarchy in France. British thoughts on this subject were determined, not only by traditional English whig beliefs about the institutional foundations of political, constitutional and civil liberty, but also by consideration for the upheavals that the French Revolution had witnessed. Alhough Pitt and Grenville were interested in establishing a model government capable of healing the French social and political conflicts that had emerged since 1789, their deliberations on the fate of Toulon reveal that the French ancien régime was still a negative entity in British minds despite the advent of the French Revolution and Revolutionary Wars.

In France during the period 1830–1905, the very boundaries of the debate on the social question were dictated by a foreign example, the English Poor Law. French fears of national public assistance programmes were grounded in a widespread disdain for the Poor Law. In this article I examine many of the major French works on charity and assistance written between the 1830s and 1900s and the debates surrounding reform proposals. I argue that the opponents of compulsory, tax-financed public assistance created a negative image of the English Poor Law in order to discredit attempts to introduce, first, the ‘right to assistance’ in 1848–1851, and later, bills providing for free medical assistance for the poor and aid to the elderly indigent in the 1890s and 1900s. I conclude with a discussion of how the proponents of mandatory, national assistance programmes defeated a carefully orchestrated and misleading public relations campaign led by some of the opponents of social welfare during the 1890s and 1900s.

During Italy's ‘two red years’ (1919–20), left-wing catholics challenged the authority of the church and the landowners in large areas of northern Italy. Calling themselves the estremisti (the extremists), left catholic unions organized peasants and workers in land and farm occupations and encouraged a series of radical strikes. Left catholic leaders became national figures, in particular Guido Miglioli at Cremona and Romano Cocchi at Bergamo. This article examines these innovative struggles and their troubled relationship with the traditional socialist Italian left during this turbulent period. No alliances were formed between the estremisti and the ‘red’ unions until 1921–4, when fascism was already rampant and the revolutionary wave had already subsided. The article analyses why alliances were not built earlier, and why the socialists were so hostile towards the catholic left. Both the theory and the practice of the traditional left prevented any positive appraisal of the estremisti. In addition, there are detailed accounts of the extraordinary mass movements inspired by Cocchi and Miglioli in some of the richest and most staunchly catholic regions of northern Italy.

Historians of the Edwardian tariff reform movement have disagreed about its aims. This article examines the motivations of the leadership of the Tariff Reform League, which was by far the most influential organization in the tariff lobby. It argues that the League's leaders were more empire-minded than often allowed, and that it was the preferential tariff which they were most determined to promulgate and defend. Indeed, attempts by the Balfourite wing of the Unionist party to twist tariff reform away from its imperial origins were strongly resisted by the League, and the forces of protection within the organization were also carefully controlled. When the Tariff Reform League finally gave way on the issue of imperial preference in January 1913, it was not because it had suddenly ceased to be concerned about the unity of the empire. Rather, the widespread public hostility to the imposition of food duties showed no sign of diminishing, thus making it difficult to persuade a critical mass within the Unionist party that tariff reform was a politically viable strategy of imperial federation.

This article attempts to place the Canadian contribution to the collapse of the sanctions front against Italy in 1935 in perspective. It argues that Canadian policy on the question was powerfully conditioned by, and conditioned in turn, imperial policy taken as a whole. There is no attempt to assess blame, but rather, an effort at a modest redistribution of responsibility from the shoulders of British statesmen, over-burdened, onto those of Canadian leaders, the contribution of whom to the formation of general imperial policy has largely escaped notice. The Canadian contribution is instructive in an examination of the Ethiopian crisis, in particular, because Canada alone amongst the dominions invariably opposed a ‘forward’ policy against Italy and alone amongst its fellow dominions consistently failed to support a common front against fascism. It is not without significance that this policy – or lack of policy, perhaps more properly – also became Britain's own.

Bob Smillie, a volunteer with the Independent Labour Party (I.L.P.) contingent in the Spanish Civil War, died while held prisoner by the Republican side in Valencia in June 1937. His death, officially due to appendicitis, has been consistently treated as suspicious, not least by his comrade-in-arms George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia. This article re-examines the circumstances surrounding Smillie's death, using the papers of the I.L.P. businessman David Murray who was in Spain attempting to secure his release. Murray accepted the ‘official version’ of Smillie's death by natural causes – and defended it doggedly within I.L.P. circles – despite those who advanced views to the contrary. The article examines Murray's evidence in reaching his conclusions, and concludes that the I.L.P.'s response to Smillie's death reveals much about its precarious position within British politics in the late 1930s.

According to the prevalent view, German citizenship was acquired only by descent from German citizens from the early nineteenth century onwards. This article argues, however, that a complete reading of the available sources suggests that citizenship was linked to the place of permanent residence in post-1815 legislation, and that the regulation of citizenship was a state responsibility, not one of the powers of the Germanic Confederation. The central points of citizenship law remained unchanged by the 1848 revolution and the unification of German states in 1866 and 1871, so that the increasing emphasis on descent in the 1913 Citizenship Act reflected a new departure rather than a traditional German concept of nationality.

The traditional division of the Klan phenomenon into three or four separate outbreaks (Reconstruction, 1920s, post-1954, and post-1979) is a useful organizing construct for scholars, but is deceptively simple and not necessarily reflective of reality. Alabama's KKK is examined immediately following World War II. During this alleged period of dormancy there is, instead, a thriving Klan presence in perhaps the most racist of the deep South states. Postwar Alabama was especially tense as black voting registration aspirations and the growing appeal of biracial economic liberalism challenged the status quo. Klan resurgence was part of a determined white supremacist reaction. The concept of soft opposition is also coined and introduced to describe the efforts of elites to combat the Klan. While waging a vigorous opposition, elites were not so concerned with Klan depredations as abominations in and of themselves; rather, they were worried about the threat of federal intervention into southern race relations in response to violence. They opposed Klan excesses to perpetuate traditional elite, white control over southern blacks. Such opposition, while genuine, was less than effective, altruistic, or hard opposition; the kind needed to eliminate the Klan as an accepted part of southern society, which evolved only after 1979.

The history of fascism in Italy has been extensively covered while fascist Italy's role in colonies before the war, and occupied areas during it, have only been touched upon. There has been little or no coming to terms with fascist crimes comparable to the French concern with Vichy or even the Japanese recognition of its wartime and pre-war responsibilities. This article uses Italy's internment policy in Africa before the war and in the Balkans and Italy during the war to illustrate the repression of historical memory. On the one hand, foreign Jews were interned to protect them from deportation by German, Croatian or Vichy French forces. The reasons were political and humanitarian. On the other, Balkan civilians were interned in conditions that led to the death of thousands. Similar and worse policies had been carried out in Africa before the war. There is some excellent specialist work on Africa which is not part of general knowledge; the Balkans have not even been covered by specialists. This article puts forward some explanations for the repression of the recent past.

Although returning shellshocked soldiers constitute a specific subgroup, their situation also illustrates the wider difficulties of Great War returnees. Whether disabled or fully fit, each veteran faced a cluster of problems related to the psychological and social readjustment to civilian society. Rightly or not, many felt that the promises for the postwar world were unfulfilled. War neurotic ex-servicemen faced two areas of difficulty. First, like all returnees, they had to deal with a large and unwieldy bureaucracy that paid little attention to the needs of individuals. Second, Ministry of Pensions policy for war neurotic ex-servicemen, guided by Sir John Collie, tended to exacerbate the faults in the system. Substantial political objectives were implicit in the establishment of the Ministry of Pensions, not least because of the appointment of Collie – an influential expert on malingering – as one of its leading authorities. His approach conveniently fitted into the government's agenda. Its objectives were to uphold and support a restrictive military view of shellshock and thereby limit financial liability; and above all to preserve the existing distribution of wealth while maintaining a visible response to public concern.

The Plowden committee on the control of public expenditure has been described as a milestone in the modernization of postwar British government. Certainly it effected major changes in both the Treasury's structure and personnel and, by securing the establishment of the public expenditure survey committee, gave subsequent governments the opportunity to plan public expenditure rationally in relation to prospective resources. Ultimately, however, the committee was a failure. The civil service was re-examined by the Fulton committee within five years and public expenditure soon escalated out of control. The Plowden committee thus represented a major lost opportunity. The time had been ripe for a fundamental political and administrative adjustment to the needs of the extended postwar state; but the committee failed to build the necessary political, parliamentary or public support for its recommendations. The reason for failure was its restricted nature as an internal enquiry with largely ineffectual ‘outside’ members, which enabled vested Treasury interests increasingly to dictate its deliberations. A more open enquiry would have stimulated and brought the best out of the ‘modernizers’ within the Treasury. The committee, therefore, proved to be not an administrative milestone but a prime example of how British institutions, under the guise of reform, have traditionally deflected criticism, truncated discussion and thereby stifled the fundamental reforms required to halt Britain's decline. In relation to welfare policy, the committee failed to examine the relative efficiency of collective provision in given policy areas, opposed contracyclical demand management and covertly sought to cap welfare expenditure. In short, it accepted the electoral necessity but not the legitimacy of the welfare state.

In a letter to Erasmus dated 3 September 1516, Thomas More wrote: ‘I am sending you my “Nowhere”, which is nowhere well written’. More's use of the Latin word ‘nusquam’ in this sentence (not ‘Utopia’, as one might have expected) made explicit what would have been apparent to any reader of the book with a knowledge of Greek: that the island of Utopia which the character Raphael Hythloday describes is ‘nowhere’. The name ‘Utopia’, those readers would have known, was a compound of the Greek adverb ‘ou’, meaning ‘not’, with the noun ‘topos’, or ‘place’. The non-existence of Utopia operates throughout the work as a joke with at least two dimensions. On one level, the story Hythloday tells is ostensibly presented as fact, whereas humanist readers with a knowledge of Greek would have known it to be fiction. But additionally, Hythloday's argument (against the objections to communism voiced by ‘More’) that communal living really does work in Utopia is ironically undercut by the fact that Utopia is nowhere at all. Why More should choose to make this second joke is in a way the most fundamental question for the interpretation of Utopia, for if we do not understand why More thinks it is important that the commonwealth Hythloday describes is ‘nowhere’, we will not be able to understand what More is doing in the work as a whole.

This article reinterprets the post-Suez British role in the Middle East through a comparison of the military interventions in Jordan in 1958 and Kuwait in 1961. Moreover, it places these operations in the broader context of the debate about British decline. It is argued that in addition to the familiar constraints on British action imposed by limited resources and the changing international climate, the projection of power in the region proved to be a great test of nerve for British ministers and officials. Paradoxically, this proved to be true as much of the successful interventions in Jordan and Kuwait as of the earlier failure over Suez. Utilizing very recently released documents from British and American archives, the article aims to shed light on the dynamics of decline at the microcosmic level, in the belief that insights gleaned here may well be of value in revising macrocosmic theories of the process.

In the course of his challenging reassessment of the parliamentary politics of the early seventeenth century, Conrad Russell has suggested that modern students of the period have approached the subject with deep-seated preconceptions about the existence of fundamental conflicts between the crown and the house of commons. As a result, the willingness of the lower house to take up issues of parliamentary privilege has probably been over-rated. The explanation for this long-standing misapprehension lies in the fact that the views of those M.P.s who wished to pursue such issues have found their way into the record far more often than the silences of their colleagues who did not want to take them up.

On 2 July 1681 the earl of Shaftesbury was arrested and sent to the Tower, charged with high treason. As a peer he was entitled to be tried by his fellow peers, but before this could happen he would have to be indicted by a grand jury of commoners. Since an indictment could only be presented by a jury from the county in which the alleged offence had been committed, this meant that unless evidence from elsewhere were forthcoming the bill would have to be preferred in London. This created severe problems for the prosecution, because the London sheriffs were intransigent whigs who had flagrantly been packing the jury panels with like-minded supporters. Shaftesbury's fate would depend on whether the judges were entitled to remove such persons and replace them with others of a different persuasion.

French naturalization of the Scots appears to have evolved from lands granted to individual Scots by Charles VII during the Hundred Years War, and it would seem that the libertas testandi associated with these grants in the fifteenth century was an early form of what were later called lettres de naturalité in the sixteenth century. French naturalization was granted not only to individual Scots but to all Scottish subjects by certain French monarchs from Charles VII to Louis XIV and had its origins in the ‘Auld Alliance’, as the Scots referred to their relationship with France, and the establishment of the garde écossaise by Charles VII in 1445. The sixteenth century saw a continuation of Scottish military service to the kings of France as well as a continuation of grants of lands, pensions, titles and privileges accorded by grateful French monarchs to Scottish soldiers in the main, but other Scots as well, many of whom were, and others who became by letters patent of naturalization, loyal subjects of the king of France.

After the disavowal of Marxian socialism, the major obstacle to historical studies in the West increasingly appears to be the U.S.A.'s intellectual exceptionalism. That nation's unprecedentedly powerful and self-referential historical profession is largely committed to echo this exceptionalism by its engagement with the demands of the U.S.A.'s ‘civil religion’. For U.S. historiography, the main index of self-absorption or international engagement is nevertheless still its relationship to British historiography. This article argues that the alleged death of British history in the U.S.A. is not a consequence of any loss of intellectual vitality in the subject; it is, rather, a result partly of growing intellectual introversion in the host culture, partly of the inadequate versions of British history often exported to the American market.

Hitler's willing executioners. Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen. London: Little Brown and Company, 1996. Pp. x+622. £20.

Questions about the motives of the perpetrators and, by implication, the causes of the Holocaust, have long been in the forefront of academic or non-academic discussions of the Nazi period – from the time of contemporary observers to the present day. A wide range of possible responses to these questions has been put forward, drawing on concepts from a variety of disciplines, such as history, psychology, sociology or theology. Daniel Goldhagen's book on the motivation of the perpetrators of the Holocaust claims to be a ‘radical revision of what has until now been written’ (p. 9). This claim is made on the book-jacket and by the author himself. His thesis can be summarized as follows: Germany was permeated by a particularly radical and vicious brand of anti-Semitism whose aim was the elimination of Jews. The author defines this as ‘eliminationist anti-Semitism’. This viral strain of anti-semitism, he states, ‘resided ultimately in the heart of German political culture, in German society itself’ (p. 428). Medieval anti-Semitism, based as it was on the teachings of the Christian religion, was so ‘integral to German culture’ (p. 55) that with the emergence of the modern era it did not disappear but rather took on new forms of expression, in particular, racial aspects. By the end of the nineteenth century ‘eliminationist anti-Semitism’ dominated the German political scene. In the Weimar Republic, it grew more virulent even before Hitler came to power. The Nazi machine merely turned this ideology into a reality. The course of its actualization was not deterred by anything save bare necessity: ‘the road to Auschwitz was not twisted’ (p. 425). When the ‘genocidal program’ was implemented along with the German attack on the Soviet Union, it was supported by the general German population, by the ‘ordinary Germans’ – the key phrase of the book – who became ‘willing executioners’. They had no need of special orders, coercion or pressure because their ‘cognitive model’ showed them that Jews were ‘ultimately fit only to suffer and to die’ (p. 316).

One of the more absorbing events in the great drama of the Popish Plot, which swept through English political life in the autumn of 1678, was the discovery of the corpse of a Westminster magistrate, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, in a ditch near Primrose Hill on 17 October 1678. This event, which sparked off a great deal of panic in London and gained some notoriety at the time, has continued to perplex historians, both professional and amateur, ever since. The speculation as to how Godfrey met his death and who did the deed, has tended to obscure the fact that we still know surprisingly little about this prominent Westminster merchant and justice of the peace before his demise. Despite an intensive historical investigation of Godfrey's murder, if murder it was, a lack of evidence has always been the main problem for any historian attempting to analyse Godfrey's character and career prior to his death. This was compounded by the allegation that on the night before his disappearance Godfrey burnt a large number of his personal papers. However, located in the collections of the National Library of Ireland is a small white leather-backed volume containing seventeenth-century copies of the correspondence of Sir Edmund Godfrey to his close friend the Irish healer and stroker Valentine Greatrakes. This letterbook is a significant addition to the historical record in that it contains what may be the only surviving personal letters of the ‘murdered’ magistrate during the late 1660s and early 1670s.