Robert Hooke's intellectual life was steadfastly dedicated to the pursuit of natural philosophy and the formulation of an appropriate method for studying nature, His daily life, however, was seemingly fragmented—an energetic rush in and around the city of London, with him acting now as curator (and later secretary) of the Royal Society, now as Cutlerian Lecturer in the History of Nature and Art, now as Geometry Professor at Gresham College, now as architect and surveyor of postfire London, and forever as a member of a number of intersecting social, intellectual, and professional circles that made up London's coffeehouse culture. Such a range of activities was perhaps wider than that of many of his contemporaries, though other diarists, most notably Samuel Pepys, recorded similarly crammed lives. Yet despite the apparently unsystematic nature of his daily round he was, also like Pepys, a methodical man who hated to waste time, and for long periods he kept a diary that helped him account for how he spent it.

I argue here that his diary keeping was an integral part of his scientific vision reflecting the epistemological and methodological practices that guided him as a student of nature. The diary should be read, I propose, not as an “after-hours” incidental activity removed from his professional and intellectual life; both its form and its content suggest that he chose to record a self that was as subject to scientific scrutiny as the rest of nature and that he thought that such a record could be applied to producing, in the end, a fully objective “history” with himself as the datum.

Eighteenth-century British foreign policy has been a marginal subject for several decades. During that period much good work has been produced, particularly on the diplomacy of the first four decades of the century, but this work has not been integrated into the general scholarship of the period. The textbooks for the century, commonly written by experts in high politics, generally offer a hurried account of foreign policy, that is, a jumble of names and dates that are not related to the problems discussed in the rest of the work. Foreign policy is rarely perceived as a crucial problem of political management or debate. Eighteenth-century scholars complain often, particularly in conversation, about what they regard as the excessively detailed nature of foreign policy studies and their supposed failure to address themselves to problems of general relevance.

The strong diplomatic bias of eighteenth-century foreign policy studies has certainly led to the production of many works that have few points of access for the general scholar. The domestic context of foreign policy and, in particular, the extent to which policy was debated are subjects that have received relatively little attention. Partly this is a result of the development of the subject. The great age of foreign policy studies was the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, an age in which history existed to study the growth and exalt the triumphs of the nation-state.

Recent scholarship has suggested that frequent receipt of news, especially in new media such as newspapers, altered conceptions of time in the early modern period. In particular, a new and modern “present” was born. This occupied a half-known and semifluid point between the fixity of the past and the unpredictability of the future. It created an imagined contemporaneous moment that linked geographically dispersed events. It was progressive, appearing to move the world ever forward into a novel state. However, close examination of English newspapers in the period 1695–1713, the first era of sustained news periodicals, calls these suggestions into question. Certainly the press of this era provided a constant and corrective update of information from all over Europe. This might have encouraged a sense of a fluid, contemporaneous, and progressive present. However, newspapers also tended to catalog information like a chronicle, which had the potential to fix contents as established history rather than fluid news. Delays in communication from distant places and journalistic practices of holding back stories for later publication ensured that information of different ages was presented on the same page. This destroyed any clear sense of a contemporaneous moment. The requirement to print the next issue even when there was no new information drew explicit attention to the lack of progressive development in some stories. This article posits a highly fractured presentation of time in later Stuart newspapers. It suggests that this is perhaps best analyzed by concepts drawn from “postmodern” theory rather than a hunt for emerging features of “modernity.”

“Liberal Imperialism” has been a confusing label ever since the Boer War, when it was first widely applied. It was then a source of controversy within the Liberal party, much of it centering around Lord Rosebery, who introduced the term. Some of his contemporaries considered Liberal Imperialism to be marked by dangerously aggressive policy, while J. A. Spender, who also lived through these years, later interpreted it as a revival of the Palmerstonian spirit. More recently historians have treated it as ideology. Bernard Semmel has called it “social imperialism,” placing its origins in the 1880's. G. R. Searle has argued that many of Rosebery's Liberal Imperialist ideas were part of an ideology of “national efficiency,” a set of ideas that crossed party lines and that emerged in 1900 as a consequence of wartime failures. “Liberal Imperialism” has also been used to refer more generally to the “imperialism” of Liberals before as well as after the outbreak of the Boer War. I shall argue that Liberal Imperialism is best understood, not as ideology, but as the rhetoric of party infighting during the Boer War, that it is best to confine the use of the label to the period of the war and its immediate aftermath, and that the spirit of the ideas used by Liberal Imperialists, particularly as regards their perspective on the Empire, was defensive and pessimistic. In these years the Liberal right — no less than the Liberal left, with its attack on “imperialism” — was engaged in reassessing Britain's world position.

In his celebrated presidential addresses to the Royal Historical Society between 1974 and 1976 Sir Geoffrey Elton explored three “points of contact” between central authority and local communities: Parliament, the royal council, and the royal court. Parliament, he argued, was “the premier point of contact,” which “fulfilled its functions as a stabilizing mechanism because it was usable and used to satisfy legitimate and potentially powerful aspirations.” Elsewhere Elton, and other parliamentary historians such as Michael Graves, Norman Jones, and Jennifer Loach, have stressed parliament's role as a clearing house for the legislative desires of the governing class. The author of this article has recently drawn attention to the pressures which private legislation placed on the parliamentary agenda and the attempts by the government to control it. All of this supports Elton's contention that parliament, from the perspective of central government, was indeed a vital means of ensuring stability and channelling grievances.

However, few studies have viewed parliament from the perspective of the local communities and governing elites who sought parliamentary solutions to their problems or even parliamentary resolutions to their disputes with others. The major exception to this has been London. Helen Miller's seminal study of London and parliament in the reign of Henry VIII and Edwin Green's on the Vintners lobby, have been recently complemented by Ian Archer's on the London lobbies in Elizabeth's reign, Claude Blair's on the Armourers lobby, and my own study of the struggle between the Curriers and Cordwainers. These not only reveal the broader context of such disputes, but emphasize that parliament was only one of many arenas available to participants. This important point has also been stressed by Robert Tittler in his study of parliament as a “point of contact” for English towns.

Despite the extensive critical attention that has been lavished upon Sir Thomas More's Utopia, the influence of the early historical narratives of the discovery and conquest of America on the shaping of his fictional commonwealth remains problematic. Proctor Fenn Sherwin, writing in 1917, declared that “it should go without saying” that “the yet novel discoveries of unknown and unguessed of peoples in America and the tales of Spanish explorers” were a “considerable inspiration” to More. But Sherwin admitted that, apart from a few references to Amerigo Vespucci's Four Voyages, he could find no echo of their writings in the text of Utopia. Subsequent research on the rich literary allusions in More's published works and unpublished correspondence has provided some fascinating insights into his remarkable erudition and complex character. It has also prompted extensive debate about the relative importance of various classical and medieval sources in inspiring More's celebrated but enigmatic fictional account of an imaginary commonwealth. But no new evidence demonstrating that More was in fact steeped in the early literature on the New World has been produced. Claims that he read Columbus and Peter Martyr as well as Vespucci remain unsubstantiated.

Some commentators have been untroubled by that lack of evidence. H. L. Donner assumed that More was familiar with Peter Martyr's Decades of the New World and from that source learned that the Indians of the West Indies “had an intuitive knowledge of the most essential moral and philosophical truths.” Donner concluded that More modelled Utopian “morality and religion” in large measure on Peter Martyr's description of the West Indians.

No British writer has had a greater impact on the Anglo-American generation which came of age in the decade following World War II than George Orwell. His influence has been, and continues to be, deeply felt by intellectuals of all political stripes, including the Marxist Left (Raymond Williams, E. P. Thompson), the anarchist Left (George Woodcock, Nicolas Walter), the American liberal-Left (Irving Howe), American neoconservatives (Norman Podhoretz), and the Anglo-American Catholic Right (Christopher Hollis, Russell Kirk).

Perhaps Orwell's broadest imprint, however, was stamped upon the only literary group which has ever regarded him as a model: the Movement writers of the 1950s. Unlike the above-mentioned groups, which have consisted almost entirely of political intellectuals rather than writers—and whose members have responded to him as a political critic first and a writer second—some of the Movement writers saw Orwell not just as a political intellectual but also as the man of letters and/or literary stylist whom they aspired to be.

The Movement writers were primarily an alliance of poet-critics. The “official” members numbered nine poets and novelists; a few other writers and critics loomed on the periphery. Their acknowledged genius, if not leading publicist, was Philip Larkin, who later became Britain's poet laureate. Orwell's plain voice influenced the tone and attitude of Larkin's poetry and that of several other Movement poets, especially Robert Conquest and D. J. Enright. But Orwell shone as an even brighter presence among the poet-novelists, particularly John Wain and Kingsley Amis, whose early fictional anti-heroes were direct descendants of Gordon Comstock in Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) and George Bowling in Coming Up for Air (1939).

In his attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of Dr. De Puebla, Spain's first resident ambassador to England, Garrett Mattingly dismissed as unimportant certain unflattering remarks about the envoy made by a royal councillor to two Spanish officials, who knew the councillor as Dr. Pedro Panec. Mattingly, unable to identify Panec, believed him to be insignificant in Tudor service and, therefore, his remarks to be uninformed. Nonetheless, the available sources reveal Pierre Le Pennec as the Spaniards' Dr. Panec, a cleric and lawyer from Morlaix, doctor of civil and canon laws, prothonotary of the Roman Church, king's clerk and councillor, and political agent in Henry VII's foreign service.

Historians of early Tudor diplomacy (when the term is not used interchangeably with foreign policy) have focused on the routine functions of ordinary diplomatic representatives, but Pennec has not merited the interest of Tudor diplomatic historians because he did not serve extensively as one of the king's ordinary diplomats. His only ordinary diplomatic function was in 1499 when he carried procuratorial letters to the Roman Curia for Henry VII.

The connection between political reform and aristocratic decline is central to an understanding of nineteenth-century Britain. No one denies that the landed elite dominated the institutions which passed the parliamentary reform acts of 1832 and 1867. However, historians continue to speculate about the motives that inspired these remarkable measures. Was the ruling class retreating, retrenching, being overthrown, or surrendering gracefully? The articles appearing in this issue by David Spring, Richard Davis, and Thomas Gallagher occasion an opportunity to reflect further on this question. The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to a neglected aspect of the reform process, especially in relation to the 1832 act, the first and most important step in the aristocracy's displacement. This element was the spirit of reform, a progressive force, that made the great reform bill something more than either a concession or a cure.

Professors Davis and Gallagher remind us of the extraordinary change in the political firmament wrought by the 1832 act. Those who argue, in response to the traditional interpretation of the Whig historians, that the great bill scarcely altered anything find it increasingly difficult to sustain their case.1 John Cannon, Michael Brock, and others have already undermined much of the ground upon which the revisionists, led by D. C. Moore, based their analysis. An extraordinary array of convincing evidence has been adduced to show that Earl Grey and his colleagues were not in the business of trying to cure the source of demands for reform in order to avoid yielding to the demands themselves. Professor Davis has been particularly effective in demonstrating Moore's anachronistic view of deference.

Authorities on John Bunyan have traditionally failed to associate him with the radical millenarians known as the Fifth Monarchists. Only William York Tindall, in an analysis of Bunyan's millenarian principles, suggested their affinity with the views of the Fifth Monarchy Men. There is, however, an unnoticed passage in one of Bunyan's own works which indicates that he was at one time an adherent of Fifth Monarchist ideology. The work in question, The Advocateship of Jesus Christ (more commonly known under the second-issue title, The Work of Jesus Christ as an Advocate), was published in May 1688, shortly before Bunyan's death. Unlike several of his posthumous works, this book was not concerned with millenarian themes but with Christ's role as an attorney who pleaded the cause of the elect before God the supreme judge. Nevertheless, near the end of this work Bunyan recalled that “I did use to be much taken with one Sect of Christians, for that it was usually their way, when they made mention of the Name of Jesus, to call him, The blessed King of Glory”. Upon reflection—in a climate charged with tension as hostility to James II mounted—Bunyan calmly observed that ”Christians should do thus; ‘twould do them good.” He was not, of course, suggesting a revival of the Fifth Monarchy movement, but reminding his readers that their ultimate sovereign was Christ, not James II.

The passage is not important for its relevance to political conditions in 1688 but for its indication that Bunyan had once apparently been a disciple of the Fifth Monarchists, a fact not hitherto known. Unfortunately, he did not indicate at what point in his career he was attracted to these people, but it was either the period between his conversion in 1653 and his imprisonment seven years later, or the period from about the publication of The Holy War in 1682 to the collapse of the Fifth Monarchy movement in 1685.

Anti-alienism has frequently been the dark underside of organized patriotic movements in twentieth-century Britain. Love of nation has all too frequently been accompanied by an abstract fear of foreigners or a concrete dislike of alien immigrants residing in Britain. Numerous patriotic leagues have used xenophobia and the supposed threat posed by aliens to define themselves and their Conservative creed. Aliens symbolized “the other,” which held values antithetical to members of the patriotic leagues. These currents have usually become even more pronounced in times of tension and crisis. From the end of the First World War through the 1920s, Britain suffered an enormous economic, social, and political crisis. British unemployment never fell below one million as traditional industries such as coal, iron and steel, shipbuilding, and textiles declined. Electoral reform in 1918 and 1928 quadrupled the size of the electorate, and the British party system fractured with the Liberals divided and Labour becoming the alternative party of government. Industrial unrest was rampant, culminating in the General Strike of 1926. The example of the Russian Revolution inspired many on the Left and appalled their opponents on the Right, while many British Conservatives felt that fundamental aspects of the existing system of capitalism and parliamentary democracy were under challenge.

Twice this century, the wartime mobilization of civilian academic science has been rightly recognized as one of the most remarkable achievements of Britain, the Commonwealth, and the United States. If the first world war demonstrated the Empire's “strength in unity,” the second placed far greater demands on Allied and imperial resources in research, development, and supply. Where the first war witnessed a limited application of scientific advice, on request, and in response to limited problems, the second saw scientists and engineers develop an enormous range of technologies, frequently ahead of military requirements. In the course of the scientific war, new principles of liaison emerged, replacing peacetime practices of professional and institutional coordination. Imperial relations fostered by peacetime bureaux devoted to natural products and industrial research were overtaken by new, larger, and more powerful ministries devoted to supply and production. In certain respects, the demands of science began to drive imperial policy, weaving a fabric of relationships that survived to influence Commonwealth and international science diplomacy well after the war had ended.

At an official level, these were among the most apparent outcomes of imperial science at war. The principal technical results of Allied collaboration—in radar, jet engines, the atomic bomb, for example—are well known. However, beneath myriad homerics of technical and organizational triumphs resides an equally important legacy of imperial rhetoric, symbol, and metaphor, in which the discourses of imperial science and commonwealth became re-examined and revalorized. The respective roles of the “metropolis” and the “periphery”—the geometries of Empire—were redefined by decisions that governed the supply of raw materials, the sharing of sensitive information, and the development of weapons.

When a powerful state seeks to impose its will on a weaker one, it expects to be subject to condemnation, which must be weighed against its assessment of national interest. Failure does not eliminate the condemnation; indeed it may intensify it. In most books and articles on the Jameson Raid and its antecedents, the fact that it was a fiasco foredoomed to disaster seems to add to the gravity of the indictment against those who planned it. In recent years scholars have devoted considerable attention to the question of the complicity of Joseph Chamberlain. Most of them have concluded that he was aware of an impending rising but that he was not acquainted with the details, principally because he did not choose to know. Most investigators have also averred that the High Commissioner in South Africa, Sir Hercules Robinson, knew far more about the preparations for a coup than he was willing to admit.

The overthrow of the Transvaal Government, of course, had been the subject of discussions among Imperial officials long before the Raid. Robinson's predecessor, Sir Henry Loch, had plans as early as 1893 to intervene in the Transvaal in the event of an insurrection and the Secretary of State for Colonies, Lord Ripon, knew of these plans and did not prohibit such action, even though he did not encourage it, and at the time of Robinson's appointment in 1895 he discussed with Ripon intervention to support a Johannesburg rising. Edmund Garrett, who talked to Ripon at this time, stated that if the raid had occurred while Ripon was in office, he could have telegraphed, “Ripon is in it up to his neck.”