By the end of the eighteenth century Britain was a world power on a scale that none of her European rivals could match. Not only did she rule a great empire, but the reach of expeditionary forces from either Britain itself or from British India stretched from the River Plate to the Moluccas in eastern Indonesia. Britain's overseas trade had developed a strongly global orientation: she was die leading distributor of tropical produce diroughout die world and in the last years of the century about four-fifths of her exports were going outside Europe. Britain was at die centre of inter-continental movements of people, not only exporting her own population but shipping almost as many Africans across the Atantic during die eighteenth century as all the other carriers put together. It is not surprising therefore that British historians have searched for the qualities that marked out eighteeth-century Britain's exceptionalism on a world stage. Notable books have stressed, not only the dynamism of die British economy, but developments such as the rise of Britain's ‘fiscal-military state’ or die forging of a sense of British national identity behind war and empire overseas.

This essay begins by celebrating the achievement of Wilhelm Levison, whoseEngland and the Continent in the Eighth Centuryhas both inspired and provoked new generations of explorers. The essay goes on to argue that the historiography of the earlier Middle Ages has been haunted by quests for the end of the Roman Empire. Recent attempts at periodisation, Marxist and other, have extended Rome's decline to span the ninth century, with the Carolingian heyday both truncated and belittled, while Anglo-Saxon England has been split down the middle by representations of the Vikings' impact as a re-run of the fifth-century barbarian onslaught. Since 1989, abundant and diverse historiographical takes, cross-cultural, interdisciplinary and comparative, have made it possible to see the ninth century as a formative and defining period in European history, not least because of multiple contacts between England and the Continent. The last part of the essay examines the pontificate of Leo III (795-816), to show England and the Continent meeting, figuratively speaking, in Rome. A wider world of connections is brought into view and the scene set for further explorations.

The ‘triumph of liberalism’ in the mid-twentieth-century west is well known and much studied. But what has it meant for the way the decolonisation of Africa has been viewed, both at the time and since? In this paper, I suggest that it has quietly but effectively shaped our understanding of African political thinking in the 1950s to 1960s. Although the nationalist framing that once led historians to neglect those aspects of the political thinking of the period which did not move in the direction of a territorial nation-state has now been challenged, we still struggle with those aspects of political thinking that were, for instance, suspicious of a focus on the individual and profoundly opposed to egalitarian visions of a post-colonial future. I argue that to understand better the history of decolonisation in the African continent, both before and after independence, while also enabling comparative work with other times and places, we need to think more carefully and sensitively about how freedom and equality were understood and argued over in local contexts.

Every city must in a sense have a city culture. Florence, however, was the only place in which there arose at the end of the Middle Ages what one might call a city ideology, that is to say a set of developed ideas as distinct from a way of living, which was particularly designed by and for city-dwellers. Much of the modern historical interest in Florence has centred around these ideas which emerged in the first half of the fifteenth century, the more so because even the innovations in the visual arts introduced at the same time by Donatello and his contemporaries are in part a by-product of them. The theme which I would like to develop in this paper therefore is the relationship between the city society and its ideology. This is of course a very old and well-worn theme. One of the common presuppositions of Renaissance historiography has been the understandable assumption that the ideology fitted the city, and a good deal of historical analysis has been applied to identifying the congruences between them and illustrating the growth of the humanist school out of the circumstances of Florentine life. The ideology, however, was created in the early fifteenth century, at the end of the period which I am going to discuss, when Florence had already been a great centre of industry and commerce and an independent republic for a very long time. Fruitful as it has been, this approach therefore leaves one with the disquieting feeling that a place which has been for so long and so conspicuously a centre of throbbing urban life ought to have had its ideological revolution much earlier, particularly since economic historians have emphasized the elements of commercial contraction rather than expansion in the early Renaissance period. Some historians have found themselves driven into the paradoxical position of regarding the early Renaissance as a symptom of economic decline. I would therefore like to look at the old theme obliquely by deflecting attention from the great innovations themselves and concentrating it on the factors which favoured or hindered ideological innovation in the century and a half before they appeared.

There has been much controversy over the role of apocalyptic thought at the court of Otto III of Germany (983–1002). This is in no small part a product of modern scholarship discussing the subject almost exclusively with reference to the so-called ‘terrors of the year 1000’, the result being highly polarised ‘all or nothing’ arguments, which run the risk of underestimating both the complexity and dynamism of eschatological expectation in this period. In contrast, the following paper argues that apocalyptic thought played an important part in politics under Otto III, but one which cannot be explained by the proximity of the first millennium alone.

Erasmus' Folly, orating in 1511, accused modern theologians of treating the scriptures ‘as if they were of wax’. Similar charges were to be commonplace in the sixteenth century. John Fisher, preaching in 1521, maintained that heretics have always ‘turned the wrong side of the scriptures outward, following their own brain and fantasy’. Thomas More, also, criticized the Reformers because they ‘abuse’ the scriptures, comparing Tyndale in 1532 to ‘a butterfly fallen on a lime twig, which the more it striveth and fluttereth, ever the faster it hangeth’. On this conservative side, the Erasmian image was personalized by the Dutch Albert Pighius, who referred in 1538 to ‘someone’ as saying ‘both truly and merrily’: ‘The scripture is like a nose of wax, that easily suffereth itself to be drawn backward and forward, and to be moulded and fashioned this way and that way, and howsoever ye list’. Now, that idea of a ‘nose of wax’ had been used against the papists by Tyndale in 1532: they ‘make it a nose of wax, and wrest it this way and that way, till it agree’.

The great Helmuth von Moltke, addressing the German Reichstag in May 1890 in the last year of his very long life, gave a sombre warning of wars to come: Gentlemen, if the war which has hung over our heads for more than ten years like a sword of Damocles—if this war were to break out, no one could foresee how long it would last nor how it would end. The greatest powers in Europe, armed as never before, would confront each other in battle. None of them could be so completely overthrown in one or two campaigns that they would have to admit defeat, accept peace on harsh terms, and not be able to revive again after a years' -long interval to renew the struggle. Gentlemen, it could be a Seven Years' War; it could be a Thirty Years' War; and woe to the man who sets Europe ablaze, who first throws the match into the powder barrel.

The one important, indeed invaluable, source for the history of the council in the early-fifteenth century is the Proceedings and Ordinances of the Privy Council of England, 10 Richard II–33 Henry VIII, edited by Sir Nicholas Harris Nicolas and published by the Record Commission in seven volumes in the years 1834 to 1837, but in so far as the title of this work implies a formal and continuous record of proceedings it is misleading, for, unlike parliament, the council left no regular account of its activities. The Rolls of Parliament, even though their account of the proceedings is one-sided, official and incomplete, do at least record such bare facts as the dates of meeting, the names of the Speakers, and usually the dates of adjournment; but there are no similar rolls for the council. The phrase ‘privy council’ in Nicolas's title is also something of an anachronism, at least for the early part of the period covered. At this time the future privy council was generally known simply as the council or the king's council, although it was sometimes called the continual council to distinguish it from the larger body known to contemporaries as the great council. This distinctionis usually made in official records, but chroniclers often referred indifferently to either body as the council, and the differences are not now always apparent to us.

In one of his characteristic outbursts to the British military attaché at Berlin, the Kaiser complained, ‘All my life I have worked for a good understanding with England, but you do not help me’. This is only one of the oft-repeated complaints, made sometimes to the British ambassador and more often to the military attaché, but its frequent repetition, in varying forms, represented a genuine conviction of German good-will and British lack of response. In the history of the ten years which began in 1892 this reproach has a special significance, for one at least of the important results of the developments of British policy in this period was that the era of co-operation between Britain and the members of the Triple Alliance was ended.

Thex period 1772–84 was the formative period of British Indian history. During these years Indian affairs were constantly before Parliament; the questions of the relation of the East India Company to the State, and of the home to the Indian administration were dealt with, and the system of government instituted in 1784 was not fundamentally changed until 1858.

Yet another survey of the much-traversed field of Anglo-German relations will seem to many historians of modern Europe to border on the realm of superfluity; probably no two countries have had their relationship to each other so frequently examined in the past century as Britain and Germany. Moreover, even if one restricted such a study to the British side alone, the sheer number of publications upon this topic, or upon only a section of it like the age of ‘appeasement’, is simply too great to allow a compression of existing knowledge into a narrative form that would be anything other than crude and sketchy. The following contribution therefore seeks neither to provide such a general survey, nor, by use of new and detailed archival materials, to concentrate upon a small segment of the history of British policy towards Germany in the period 1864–1939; but instead to consider throughout all these years a particular aspect, namely, the respective arguments of Germanophiles and Germanophobes in Britain and the connection between this dialogue and the more general ideological standpoints of both sides. In so doing, the author has produced a survey which remains embarrassingly summary in detail but does at least attempt to offer a fresh approach to the subject.

This address examines the ‘Old Corruption’ of Georgian Britain from the perspective of diplomacy and material culture in Delhi in the era of the East India Company. Its focus is the scandal that surrounded the sacking of Sir Edward Colebrooke, the Delhi Resident, during the reign of the penultimate Mughal emperor, Akbar II. Exploring the gendered, highly sexualised material politics of Company diplomacy in north India reveals narratives of agency, negotiation and commensurability that interpretations focused on liberal, Anglicist ideologies obscure. Dynastic politics were integral to both British and Indian elites in the nineteenth century. The Colebrooke scandal illuminates both the tenacity and the dynamic evolution of the family as a base of power in the context of nineteenth-century British imperialism.

This paper explores the way in which nineteenth-century travellers to Salonica conveyed in writing the experience of travel to, and in, this Ottoman city. Their descriptions of the city indicate the power of certain aesthetic tropes in shaping their impressions. The claims of the picturesque were pre-eminent for decades but they coexisted with other rationales for travel – in particular the value of the direct impression conveyed by a landscape impregnated with classical and Biblical associations. Nor were most travellers insensible to the changing political prospects for the Macedonian port. The historical value of such works lies less in their reliability as testimony to the changes in the city itself than in the way they express patterns of authorial cultural taste.

The early National Trust reflected current concerns about national identies. Small-scale buildings, acquired 1895–1910, demonstrate a desire to monumentalise English political, religious (Anglican) and literary traditions for English-speaking peoples at home and abroad, particularly in America. Its active, though overlooked, founders include Liberal politicians such as James Bryce (Britain's ambassador to Washington). Its buildings had antiquarian appeal but seeing them only in terms of their architectural history or regional characteristics overlooks conscious attempts to use architecture as historical evidence for a vision of an English life and social order, as both that order at home and England's status abroad altered.

Replying, on 13 January 1308, to letters of Philip IV of France describing the arrest of the Templars, Albert of Habsburg, King of the Germans, after expressing the customary sadness at the turn of events and extolling his own role as the leading prince in defence of the faith, remarked that although a crime of such evil infamy ought to be reprehensible and damnable in all persons, nevertheless it is known to be more reprehensible among the religious, who ought by the splendour of their life to be mirror for others and an example. Throughout the 193 years of its history the Order had indeed been in a position where it was a mirror for others and an example, a position which made it a particularly sensitive indicator and, in its turn, promoter, of social change. This paper is an attempt to tiace this interrelationship.

Examining the political thought of the Irish Revolution poses two distinct problems. First, we need to establish how we should date the Revolution for the purposes of intellectual history. There is no doubting that the 1916 Easter Rising was an event in British and Irish politics, but it was also an event in the world of ideas. Any serious consideration of this episode and its aftermath therefore needs to trace its origins to patterns of thought as well as shifts in affairs, and the two processes do not necessarily coincide. The second requirement for understanding the role of political thought in the Revolution is to reconstruct carefully the actual doctrines articulated and deployed. Irish historians have been reluctant to engage in this process of interpretation. Yet a more searching account of political ideas in the period has the potential to change our approach to the Revolution as a whole.

PhilipJulius, Duke of Pomerania-Wolgast, born in the year 1584, was the only son of Ernst Ludwig, of Pomerania, and Sophia Hedwig, of Brunswick. For the purpose of finishing his education before taking up the government of his country, he was sent on a grand tour through the principal States of Europe, sixteen gentlemen and servants forming his suite.

The type of economic organization known as the manor existed in the north of Gaul, including the regions which were later to be known as the Low Countries,1 in the Merovingian period and even in Roman times, but it is not till the eighth century that evidence regarding it becomes relatively abundant. The little that can be said of its structure and diffusion before the Carolingian period can only be of an introductory character. We have no evidence as to the relative proportions of large, middle-sized, and small estates, but there can be no doubt from texts of the seventh and early eighth centuries that large, indeed very large, estates existed at this period.

The first impulse to make a special study of the Treaty of Seville came from my interest in the career of that eminent diplomatist, Benjamin Keene, on whom I discoursed at some length last February. But at that time my attention was concentrated upon Keene's second mission to Spain from 1749 to 1757, and I only gave a very superficial glance at his earlier mission from 1727 to 1739. In reference to this I stated that he played an active part in bringing about the Treaty of Seville, that he was deposed at the last minute from being the sole English signatory of the treaty by the return of William Stanhope, and that he felt some chagrin because all the credit and reward for making that treaty went to his senior colleague, whereas he himself received no recognition of his services. There was no doubt about his discontent, because I found frank expression of it in his letters, but I was curious to ascertain how far this discontent was justified. The study of this minor problem led me on to consider the importance of the treaty in the history of Europe. I came to the conclusion that it was a notable landmark in the rather tangled diplomacy of the second and third decades of the eighteenth century. The tangle arose from the temporary dislocation of interstate relations in Europe from normal into abnormal grooves, and a prominent cause of that dislocation was that national interests were largely superseded or overshadowed by dynastic claims and uncertainties.