Revolutionaries of modern times often imagine themselves not only as creators of a new future, but also as constructors of a new past. They seek to reinterpret events, rewrite texts, desacralize old idols and icons, and institute new heroes, heroines and martyrs for the cause newly victorious. They hope to recast popular memory to justify the new order. Historians might easily associate such attempts to reconstruct history and manipulate memory with the violent context of the French Revolution. Recent work in French cultural history has provided scholars with a fuller awareness of the functions of revolutionary propaganda, from iconography to ritual. Investigations into festival, street literature, rhetoric, reading, audience, and memory have given the revolutionary experience in France a cultural history that England's still lacks.

This article examines the role of documents, their circulation, and their archivization in the enactment of the imperial constitution of the British Empire in the Atlantic world during the long eighteenth century. It focuses on the Board of Trade's dispatch of “Instructions” and “Queries” to governors in the American colonies, arguing that it was through the circulation of these documents and the use of archives that the board sought to enforce constitutional norms of bureaucratic conduct and the authority of central institutions of imperial administration. In the absence of a singular, codified written constitution, the British state relied upon a variety of different kinds of documents to forge the imperial Atlantic into a governed space. The article concludes by pointing to the continuing centrality of documents and archives to the bureaucratic manifestation of the imperial constitution in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution.

This article argues that in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, changes in the perceived value of children, both materially and emotionally, put them in a new position of possible danger. The valorization of childhood brought new risks to children. Children were thought to be vulnerable to child abduction, or “child stealing,” as contemporaries termed it. Between 1790 and 1849, 108 cases of child abduction were tried at the Old Bailey and then recorded in its Proceedings or heard before magistrates in London's police courts and at county sessions courts and subsequently reported in newspapers. These cases, along with fictional accounts of child abduction, give insights into what were considered the most common motives for this crime. While some child abductors were motivated by poverty and saw children's clothes as economic assets that could be sold, others were driven by a desire to assume a mother role and represented stolen children as their own. Popular interest in abduction stories was sustained while contemporaries shared common fears about the loss of children and the limitations of adults to protect children from harm.

The effects of industrialization on British life were the subject of a broad and intelligible set of debates during the early nineteenth century, often described as the “machinery question.” This question, concerning what today is called “technology,” was framed to include its effects on the whole of human life—an approach rarely seen by the late nineteenth century, a period marked instead by disciplinary specialization. An exception to this trend can be found in the work of the social critic and heterodox economist J. A. Hobson (1858–1940), better known for his critique of imperialism. From the 1890s, Hobson reopened the machinery question by offering an ethical analysis of mechanization which was both holistic and sustained. In addition to proposing this new lens for viewing Hobson, this article explores the challenges—as well as the opportunities—facing those returning to the machinery question more generally.

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) is well known as one of the earliest and most vociferous critics of Benthamite utilitarianism. However, Carlyle understood Benthamism as the culmination of a much longer eighteenth-century tradition of Epicurean thought. Having been an enthusiastic reader of David Hume during his youth, Carlyle later turned against him, waging an increasingly violent polemic against all forms of Epicureanism. In these later works, Carlyle not only rejected the pursuit of “pleasure” as an appropriate end for the life of the individual, but also took umbrage with Epicurean accounts of sociability as the philosophical underpinnings of laissez-faire, representative democracy, and “public opinion.” For Carlyle, self-interest, no matter how “enlightened,” balanced, or channeled by institutions, could never provide a stable foundation for a political community. Carlyle's contemporaries were aware that his work was intended as an attack on the Epicurean tradition. When John Stuart Mill attempted to defend Epicureanism against Carlyle, several of the latter's disciples and sympathizers responded by extending Carlyle's earlier censures on Epicureanism.

Despite a recent expansion of interest in the history of Restoration Scotland, historiographical engagement with the place of the Highlands in the Restoration state continues to be relatively limited. Building upon recent research into the political culture of the later seventeenth century, this article offers a new conceptualization of the relationship between the center and the Highland periphery. It argues that the region was heavily integrated into wider political circumstances, while recognizing that contemporary statesmen remained concerned about its perceived wildness. From this basis, the article moves on to consider the nature of Highland policy, suggesting that tactical shifts spoke of deeper strategic uncertainty as to whether the Highlands were best controlled through the direct imposition of government power or by close cooperation with local elites.

To many seventeenth century observers, the political role of towns in the English Civil War was clear enough. Clarendon, for example, referred to the “great towns and corporations, where besides the natural malignity, the factious lecturers and emissaries from the Parliament had poisoned the affections.” Thomas Hobbes was even more specific: “The City of London and other great towns of trade, having in admiration the prosperity of the Low Countries after they had revolted from their monarch the king of Spain were inclined to think that the like change of government here would to them produce the like prosperity.” In similar fashion, the anonymous author of the 1648 tract Persecutio Undecima saw the commercial interests of the urban areas, especially London, as one of the significant factors in the calling of the Long Parliament and the subsequent outbreak of war.

In recent years a number of studies have examined the function of heroic narratives in the propaganda of empire and the construction of “Britishness.” Graham Dawson has argued that such narratives “became myths of nationhood itself providing a cultural focus around which the national community could cohere.” In the light of the nineteenth-century chivalric ideal, the Victorian military hero was expected to be “the embodiment of the virtues of bravery, loyalty, courtesy, generosity, modesty, purity, and compassion, and endowed with an indelible sense of noblesse oblige towards women, children and social inferiors.” The English and upper-class image of the “British” hero served, among other things, to inculcate these supposedly English characteristics in the Irish, Scottish, and Welsh. Courage was taken for granted as the essential characteristic of British imperial officers in the Victorian period but, while courage is a personal quality and is not in itself a quality belonging to the public domain, heroism is, by contrast, something definitionally public. The courageous man becomes a hero only when he is declared to be one. The roots of the hero are in dramatic narrative, which spans the epic myth and the reality of war. The hero is “made” whether in a dramatic fiction or in the representation of events, though the latter produces the problem of molding reality to the requirements of the genre. Military heroes in the genre of the imperial adventure story and in the representation of “real” events are hardly distinguishable, for they are “made” to serve the same purposes. The hero is part of a story and, as Northrop Frye has argued, that story or langue has certain generic features throughout history. On the other hand, though the hero is made, the individual can, and often did, prepare and present himself for the role.

In the autumn and winter of 1546-1547 there was a major change in the distribution of political power in England. A group of leading councillors linked by conservatism were driven from court and council. Some forfeited office, others their freedom, and the Earl of Surrey his life. Bishops Gardiner and Bonner went to gaol. Tunstal suffered the loss of much of his vast liberty of Durham. Great Norfolk lay under sentence of death, in the Tower. Lord Chancellor Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, was deprived of his office, allegedly for acts ultra vires, and was under house arrest in Ely Place, his London palace. He had also been fined 4,000 pounds, under the sentence given on the 6th of March and the additions to it made on June 29th.

Historians seeking an explanation of the political earthquake have often adopted a simple but attractive thesis. As Henry VIII's life ebbed the balance tipped toward the “Protestants,” perhaps because it was the king's own wish or because there was a secret pact, in fact a conspiracy, between Sir William Paget and Sir Edward Seymour. The chief historians of the transit of power have provided direct evidence supporting the idea of a pact between Paget, the ‘master of Practices,’ and the king's brother-in-law, the military hero Hertford who was also the uncle of Prince Edward.

Historians of early modern Europe have become accustomed to the dichotomy of the deserving and undeserving poor, though they still debate the origins of the transformation of attitudes toward the poor and poverty. Historians have studied less carefully the ways in which these presumably static categories flexed, as individuals and officials worked out poor relief and charity on the local level. Military, religious, and social exigencies, precipitated by war, the Reformation, and demographic pressure, allowed churchwardens and vestrymen to redraw the contours of the deserving and undeserving poor within the broader frame of the infirm, aged, and sick. International conflicts of the early seventeenth century created circumstances and refugees not anticipated by the poor law innovators of the sixteenth century. London’s responses to these unexpected developments illustrate how inhabitants constructed the categories of die deserving and undeserving poor. This construction depended upon the discretion of churchwardens and their fellow officers, who listened to the accounts and read the official documents of the poor making claims on parish relief and charity.

The study of English constitutional history has fallen on hard times. Once an intellectually thriving field, constitutional history now conjures up visions of bad tweed and bow ties coupled with dryly-legalistic discussions of statutes, charters, parliamentary debates, Year Books, and legal reports. Indeed, whether Whig, Neo-Whig, Revisionist, or Post-Revisionist in orientation, constitutional history has traditionally concerned itself with the “activity of government”; it has emphasized the formal structures of government, their historical origins, their changing composition, their evolving roles, and functions. These formal structures, the Crown, Parliament, the Council, the established church, and the law courts, together constituted the sinews of government. Constitutional controversy arose when the respective roles and functions of these formal structures came into conflict. Accordingly, constitutional historians became experts on the anatomy and development of the particular organs of government and their changing roles yet they were often unable to see the broader conceptual forest in which they were standing. As a result, some critics have lampooned constitutional history and its leading proponents as lacking theoretical engagement and being overly preoccupied with the minutiae of government at the expense of conceptual sophistication and breadth of vision.

The principal historians of the Cromwellian period, from S. R. Gardiner to Christopher Hill, have asserted that Oliver Cromwell was a master of statesmanship whose foreign policy was guided by clear, though perhaps archaic, objectives; that his diplomacy was always aggressive, and largely successful; and that with him England entered into her rightful place in the community of nations. These axioms have been repeated in every textbook. The phenomenon is not unknown in recent history where, until A.J.P. Taylor suggested differently, few English writers dared to question the culpability of Adolf Hitler in bringing on the 1939-1945 war. Though Mr. Taylor's views excited critical comment, they have not been without supporters, and are being addressed by historians of the Twentieth century. This essay re-examines the diplomacy of the Cromwellian period, specifically in the years 1654 through 1657. It suggests that a revision of long-established views is in order.

Milestones of English foreign affairs during the Protectorate exhibit an apparent uniformity of policy. From the Treaty of Westminster of April 1654 to the Battle of the Dunes, June 14, 1658, the trend was towards a firm association with France, with the ultimate objective to destroy Spanish power in Europe and the Western Hemisphere. Such a generalization must be treated with caution, however, for it can be demonstrated that the course of English policy between the conclusion of the First Dutch War and the death of Oliver Cromwell was guided less by a desire for an alliance with France than by a series of miscalculations, the cumulative effect of which left the Protector little choice but to join with France, and thereby to assist in the establishment of the hegemony of Louis XIV.

The lawn-tennis shoe was a popular, widely available commodity in late-Victorian Britain. Associated with new forms of sporting practice and consumption, this type of footwear was mass-produced in modern factories, promoted in the popular leisure press, and sold to both men and women in a variety of retail environments. This article analyzes processes of product innovation, production, and sale, and it situates the shoes within a wider context of sport, commerce, fashion, and class and gender relations. Like other late-Victorian sporting and recreational practices, lawn tennis combined material objects, physical activity, and the stylized display of gender and class ideals. Footwear was valued for symbolic and physically practical reasons. Ideas of intended use determined its design and material form. Sportswear created and communicated new masculine ideals. As lawn-tennis shoes moved from the court into everyday usage, the meanings attached to them accommodated a broader range of practices and contexts.

One of the greatest problems in the discussion of eighteenth-century British foreign policy concerns the assessment of the influence of the particular character of the British political system. British foreign policy, and thus the country's alliance strategy, was conditioned by the subtle interplay of internal processes, the functioning of her domestic political system, and the international situation. As historians are concerned increasingly to probe the nature of the domestic pressures influencing the formulation and execution of policy, so it becomes more important to define the political, as opposed to constitutional, role of Parliament and public opinion. This is of obvious significance for the study of Britain's relations with her allies. Were these made more difficult as a consequence of the distinctive character of the British political system? There was no shortage of contemporaries willing to state that this was the case. An obvious category of discussion concerned the citing of domestic pressure as a reason why concessions could not be made to foreign powers, both allies and those whose alliance was sought. This was of particular significance when ministries explained why gains made during war could not be surrendered at peace treaties and gains made at the peace could not be yielded subsequently. Their defense of the retention of Gibraltar was based on this argument. Similar arguments were used by British ministers in seeking to persuade allies to do as they wished. Diplomatic pressure on France over the state of Dunkirk or on Spain and Portugal over commercial disputes made frequent use of the argument of domestic pressure.

In late 1654, the fate of the Stuart restoration to the British and Irish thrones appeared to rest upon the professed religion of the fourteen-year old Henry, Duke of Gloucester, son of Charles I and Henrietta Maria and brother of Charles II. At Henrietta Maria's instigation, and with the aid of the court of France, serious efforts were undertaken to convert the Protestant duke to the Catholic faith. This attempt, which ultimately failed, preoccupied the English exiled courts in Paris and Cologne for its duration between October and December 1654 and caused scandal and division in royalist circles. It also generated international publicity: as one observer concluded, “this is one of the greatest actions now in foot in Christendome: wherein all Protestants of all countryes will thinke themselves concerned.”

To date the “Gloucester affair” has received little sustained scholarly attention or critical scrutiny, a neglect likely attributable to the tendency among historians to study successes rather than failures. Perhaps for this reason the Stuart courts and royalists in exile have not generated much systematic treatment in the last half-century. In this case, prince Henry remained Protestant, and it would be more than five years before Charles II reclaimed his thrones. The attempted conversion of the duke of Gloucester, however, affords a valuable opportunity to investigate the formation of political and religious policies, along with the conduct of diplomacy, in the exiled courts and within the royalist communities. Charles II essentially was a king in name only: he had scant economic resources, held his court at the pleasure of the rulers in whose territories he resided, and, after September 1651, no longer had his own army. The struggles to recover the crowns of England, Scotland, and Ireland for the House of Stuart during the 1650s required extensive negotiations for financial and military support from both Catholic and Protestant powers. Charles was forced to balance the demands of Catholic rulers for assurances that Catholics in the three kingdoms would be treated favorably, while simultaneously maintaining and strengthening the support of British and continental Protestants for his restoration.

Political participation in eighteenth-century Scotland was the preserve of the few. A country of more than one and a half million people had less than 3,000 parliamentary electors in 1788. Scottish politics was orchestrated from Westminster by one or two powerful patrons and their northern clients—a fact summarized in book titles like The People Above and The Management of Scottish Society. The way Edinburgh danced to a London tune is well illustrated in the aftermath of the famous Porteous riots of 1736. After a government official was lynched the Westminster government leaned heavily on the city and its council. And the nation as a whole was kept under tight rein after the Jacobite rising of 1745-46.

This does not mean that ordinary people could not participate in political life, broadly defined. Burgesses could influence their day-to-day lives through membership of their incorporations (guilds) and through serving as constables and in other town or “burgh” (borough) offices. Ecclesiastical posts in the presbyterian church administration—elders and deacons of kirk sessions—had also to be filled. Gordon Desbrisay estimates that approximately one in twelve eligible men would be required annually to serve on the town council and kirk session of Aberdeen in the second half of the seventeenth century. With a 60% turnover of personnel each year, distribution of office holding must have been extensive among the middling section of burgh society from which officials were drawn. For burgesses and non-burgesses alike, other avenues of expression were open. In periods when political consensus broke down or when sectional interests sought to prevail townspeople could resort to riot.

In a letter to Oliver Cromwell in April 1653, John Rogers wrote that his soul was “boiling over into earnest prayers to the Great Jehovah for wisdom, counsel, and courage for you … the great deliverer of His people. …” Rogers perceived in the person of Cromwell another Moses, charged with the duty of liberating the saints of “the Commonwealth of Israel.” Yet in a face-to-face confrontation with Cromwell in February 1655, Rogers warned him, “in the name of the Lord Jehovah,” that his condition was “very desperate,” and that “the next Vial which is to be poured out … the scorching hot one … must fall upon him … [for having] forsaken and betrayed the Cause of Christ.” In less than two years, Rogers had gradually slipped from a summit of hopeful expectation into an abyss of bitter disillusionment, as he watched the man in whom he had placed all trust take for himself the crown that had been reserved for the Lord Jesus.

Born in 1627 at Messing, Essex, John Rogers was the second son of Nehemiah and Margaret Rogers. Nehemiah Rogers, an Anglican clergyman and a firm advocate of the policies of Archbishop William Laud, endeavored to educate his son in a manner that would fit him for service in the Church of England. Early in life, under the tutelage first of his father and later of two Puritan clergymen — William Fenner and Stephen Marshall, John Rogers became acutely aware of contemporary theological controversies and intensely preoccupied with his own religious condition. Later as a minister in Ireland, Rogers recounted various childhood experiences in his quest for some assurance of salvation:

Joseph Chamberlain, British Colonial Secretary from 1895 to 1903 in the Salisbury administration, remains a subject of controversy for historians largely because of his role in the Jameson Raid. Just as his contemporary protagonists and antagonists, known as Unionists and pro-Boers, marshalled official and unofficial documents to support their cases, so have historians of recent times. There is a difference, however, between the historians writing in Chamberlain's era and those whose work is of recent date. At the turn of the century historians and polemicists had to depend upon official Blue Books and popular sources, while recent historians have had access to more extensive forms of evidence, such as personal letters and memoirs, edited and unedited diaries, and unexpurgated governmental records. Access to original sources, although it has not resolved differences in interpretation, has enabled Jean van der Poel to construct a good case for Joseph Chamberlain's complicity in the Jameson Raid. Van der Poel defines complicity as Chamberlain's foreknowledge of, failure to stop, and alleged advice in favor of the Johannesburg uprising and the Rhodes-Jameson plan, which she argues were integral parts of the same master scheme that set off the Raid. Similarly, historians of the earlier period, although precluded by lack of evidence from asking all of Van der Poel's questions and although not inclined to link the Raid and uprising into a single master plan, did, with few exceptions, address themselves to the question of Chamberlain's responsibility as an accomplice of the Raid and uprising.

Assessments of the famous “Peace Ballot,” officially “A National Declaration on the League of Nations and Armaments,” have undergone little change since its results were announced in June 1935. Like contemporary observers, historians are unclear on the origins of the ballot, are impressed by the public response, and are uncertain of the meaning of “the most remarkable popular referendum ever initiated and carried through by private enterprise.” Historians will probably never reach a consensus on the exact meaning of the ballot and are likely to go on echoing the diverse judgments of contemporaries. But the origins of the referendum are not obscure, and in The Impact of Hitler: British Politics and British Policy 1933-1940 Maurice Cowling has offered a stimulating thesis that could embrace the ballot and suggest a new evaluation of the political controversy that surrounded the preparation and conduct of that much-heralded “National Declaration.”

Cowling has persuasively argued that foreign policy was the form party conflict took in Great Britain in the late 1930s. Politicians conducted it in the light of party considerations. Cowling selected 1935 as the year foreign policy first became “central,” when Abyssinia became the focus of all political discussions. And it was the issue through which Stanley Baldwin reestablished Conservative “centrality” in domestic politics after strong “swings” against the government in by-elections during 1933 and 1934.

According to the Cowling thesis, in the class-polarized politics of the 1930s, party leaders had to be especially sensitive to the opinion of the center, which, in 1935, meant presenting policy in terms that the League of Nations Union and its largely Liberal constituency would approve.