There are certain moments in history when major events, individual experience, and ideology coincide to such a remarkable extent that historians have to pause and look up from their patient plotting of the vagaries of humanity. One such moment was the summer of 1940 in France.

This article provides a conceptual framework that fills a critical gap at the intersection of Chinese art and cultural history. It focuses on the Yongzheng emperor's ‘Illustrated Inventory of Ancient Playthings’ (Guwantu) and its significance within the context of the collecting and courtly elite culture of the High Qing. Through a comprehensive examination of scroll B/C.8–V&A of the Guwantu itself, as well as the relevant source material, this study elucidates the dynamics that shaped the connections between artist, collector and object in the context of the scroll. Furthermore, this contribution throws light on the multiple entangled relationships that underpinned imperial collecting practices of the period, ultimately offering new insights into the socio-cultural milieu of collectors and connoisseurs in early eighteenth-century China.

Studies of slavery increasingly refer to ‘enslaved people’ rather than ‘slaves’, and, to a lesser extent, to ‘enslavers’ rather than ‘slave owners’. This trend began with scholarship in the United States on plantation slavery but has spread to other academic publications. Yet ‘slave’ continues to be widely used, indicating not everyone is aware of the change or agrees with it. Despite this, few historians have justified their terminology. After surveying the extent of the preference for ‘enslaved person’, I discuss arguments for and against it. Supporters of using ‘enslaved person’ argue that this term emphasises that a person was forced into slavery – but this emphasis means it is less able to accommodate early medieval cases where people sold themselves into slavery. The accompanying preference for ‘enslaver’ over ‘master’ obscures dynamics of ownership and manumission. In addition, ‘enslaved people’ and ‘enslaver’ do not necessarily bring us away from the perspective of slaveholders to the perspective of slaves. Nor are they essential for readers to appreciate the humanity of slaves. Overall, historians should use this issue as an opportunity to reflect on the extent to which scholarship of transatlantic slavery should set the terms of debate for slavery studies in general.

The summer of 1540 in England witnessed an event which proved a turning-point in the history of the country. The fall of Thomas Cromwell Earl of Essex was the outcome of a long struggle between Gardiner and Cromwell, the two servants of Cardinal Wolsey who after their master's death led rival factions in the Council. As one result of the crisis a reconciliation with Rome was expected by foreign observers, a step that would have left the Emperor and the French King free to form independent alliances with England. At home those who dared not contemplate such a reconciliation could at least prevent the further spread of new doctrines by enforcing the doctrine of the Six Articles. But all who welcomed Cromwell's fall as the signal for a religious revolution were soon to realise that there was a king in England who would be head both of State and Church.

Although the history of the reign of Henry III. has often been written, I venture to think that some generalisations about it have been too readily accepted and that this is especially the case with respect to the king's minority. Too much importance has been attached to the monastic chronicles, and too little to the testimony of official records. In the first part of this paper I narrate briefly a few of the chief incidents of the regency of the earl Marshal with a view to showing what part the great men of the realm played in the war. I also endeavour to show the importance of the offices of castellan and sheriff, and to explain the government's policy with respect to them on the king's accession. In another part of this paper I hope to be allowed to deal with the difficulties concerning the surrender of the castles into the king's hands and those concerning the termination of the minority itself.

In a mood of understandable frustration, the British minister in Bangkok sent a telegram to the head of the Far Eastern department of the Foreign Office in June 1941, referring to the tedious economic discussions he was conducting with the Thai government, saying:

I am disturbed by the contradictory tone of the telegrams sent to me from His Majesty's Foreign Office … Some of them breathe that broad and statesmanlike spirit which I have learnt to respect and admire over a period of nearly forty years. Others strike a shrill and petulant note which is new to me … I have an uneasy feeling that you people in Downing Street live in an ivory tower as regards Thailand …

During the years immediately preceding the French Revolution Germany presented a curious spectacle of political decrepitude and intellectual rejuvenescence. The Holy Roman Empire, of which Voltaire caustically remarked that it was neither holy nor Roman nor an Empire, was afflicted with creeping paralysis. Its wheels continued to revolve; but the machinery was rusty and the output was small. ‘No Curtius,’ remarked Justus Möser, ‘leaps into the abyss for the preservation of the Imperial system.’ The prolonged duel between Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa destroyed whatever shadowy sentiment of unity had survived the wars of religion, and the short but stormy reign of Joseph II revealed to the world that the Imperial dignity had sunk into the tool and plaything of the house of Hapsburg. The Fürstenbund formally registered the emergence of a rival claimant for the hegemony of central Europe. But the springtime of Prussian greatness was merely the reflection of her ruler's dazzling personality. Mirabeau, who knew them both, described Frederick as all mind and his nephew all body. His death left Germany without a leader or a hero. Among the countless rulers who owed a nominal allegiance to the Emperor a few men of capacity and conscience, such as Ferdinand of Brunswick, Karl August of Weimar and Karl Friedrich of Baden, could be found; but the general level of character and intellect was low, and the scandals of courts and courtiers provoked disgust and indignation. The most docile people in Europe watched with impotent despair the orgies of the last Elector of Bavaria, the capricious tyranny of Karl Eugen of Württemberg, the insanity of Duke Karl of Zweibrücken, and the Byzantine decadence of the ecclesiastical Electors on the Rhine. On the eve of the Revolution the larger part of Germany was poor, ignorant, ill-governed and discontented.

In Vol. XL of the ‘Camden Miscellany,’ published by this Society, there appears the text of the charter granted, to the city of Salisbury in the year 1656, under circumstances which are described by the late Dr. S. R. Gardiner in his ‘History of the Protectorate,’ as well as by the Director of the Society, on whom devolved the task of editing the transcript which had been made for Dr. Gardiner from the city muniments.

Among the many unexplored fields in the history of the Outer Empire, the British settlements on the West African coast, until the last twenty years of the eighteenth century, have been the most neglected. The main course of English relations with that coast from earliest times to the end of the nineteenth century has been told in an admirable survey by Sir Charles Lucas, and several histories of the Gold Coast exist. None of these sources, however, have provided more than an outline sketch of the English settlements in West Africa, and the method of government and organisation by which they were maintained in the eighteenth century has not been examined. The most recent history of the Gold Coast, published in 1910 by Mr. Walton Claridge, is mainly occupied with nineteenth-century history, and no attempt is made by him to give anything but a cursory description of government in the previous century. Many other surveys of European progress in Africa have been written, but in all of them the treatment of the eighteenth century is slight. It is easy to account for this neglect. The story of the coast is bound up with the most discreditable of undertakings that mark the expansion of the Empire—the negro slave [trade—and Lecky's brief account of the English relations with West Africa would not encourage research into a subject so humiliating to national pride.

The Whig interpretations of the English Constitution based on the doctrine of executive responsibility to Parliament, as established by the Revolution of 1688 and Locke's vindication of that event, were crystallised and defined by eighteenth-century political practice, eulogised and expounded by Montesquieu and Blackstone, and asserted and elaborated by Junius and Burke. But they were subjected to criticism at least two decades before the Revolution in France stimulated political speculation and inspired demands for reform. Long before the outburst of reforming enthusiasm expressed in the activities of the Revolution Society, the London Corresponding Society and the Society of Friends of the People, which was kindled by the opening episodes of the French Revolution, there was in England a well-established movement for parliamentary reform.

Montesquieu's misunderstanding of the British constitution has long been notorious among students of political history and theory. In so far as his error influenced the French constitution of 1791 and the American constitution of 1788, it must be accounted one of the most significant—and expensive–scholarly howlers of all time. Somewhat different, because it is avowedly normative whereas Montesquieu's purports to be descriptive, is Harrington's doctrine of separation.

Two hundred and fifty years ago a record-keeper sat amid the boxes, the cupboards and the shelves which housed his charges, compiling ‘an account of all or most of the records in the Duchy office and how to find them’. The result was invaluable for searchers in the Duchy of Lancaster records, but lacking order and arrangement, as its author was the first to admit, it is not a systematic description of these records and it says very little about their history. There is therefore some justification for attempting a comprehensive view of these records. The rich diversity of interest which the Duchy bears is fully reflected in the range of its records. It has indeed been said that ‘what the records of the United Kingdom are at large, these records of the Duchy are in miniature’. That is a bold assertion, difficult to sustain. For one thing, the Duchy never knew the complicated processes of the royal exchequer, and it must be obvious that the Duchy could not repeat in parvo the whole pattern of the nation's life. Yet the analogy gives a hint of the records' scope, and it becomes closer if we take the Duchy records to include those of the Palatinate of Lancaster. It is true that in the Public Record Office, which contains most of the records under discussion, the two series are treated separately, and the Guide, repeating a distinction drawn in 1868 in the Deputy Keeper's Report, says that the Duchy records ‘are entirely distinct from the records of the County palatine, which, although public, are purely local, whilst the Duchy Records, though private, concern the government and jurisdiction of the entire dominion of the Duchy and embrace the County Palatine as a subordinate regality’. This statement, which the grammarian finds imperfect as an example of the chiastic construction, is equally unsatisfactory to the archivist or historian if we understand it to refer to the palatinate, and not to the administration of the modern county council. We ought no more to segregate the palatinate simply because it was an organ of public administration than we should, say, a private hundred, and the description itself recognises the county palatine as a component part of the Duchy. How the judicial records of the court of Duchy chamber were any less public than those of the chancery court in Lancashire, is not explained. The distinction, in fine, is fallacious.

On previous occasions I have chosen as the subject of my address at the annual meeting of this Society a historical theme suggested by my studies. Three historical addresses, each of which involved careful preparation, are, I venture to think, as many as a President of the Society need feel it his duty to deliver. Yet I think that I should have inflicted a fourth upon the Society if some special considerations had not combined to divert me from what is certainly the safer, and is perhaps the more profitable course. Moreover, it so happens that the period of my presidency has been a time of significant development in the organisation of historical study in this country. The history of this Society has been affected by the general movement. We have tried deliberately to adjust ourselves to it, and to take a leading part in it. I decided, therefore, to make my last appearance in the chair an occasion for a review of current developments and for some reflections upon them.

In my address last year I tried to offer some explanations for the great change of direction in Britain's territorial empire in the second half of the eighteenth century: the failure of empire over much of North America coinciding with the beginnings of great acquisitions in India. I would like now to look more closely at the American débâcle. In trying to account for it, I stressed the yawning gap between British ambitions as they developed from mid-century and any capacity to realise them in the colonies, where, in the absence of a strong imperial presence or adequate machinery to enforce metropolitan wishes, the effective working of the empire depended on the willingness of local populations to co-operate. In the 1760s the majority of the colonial elites refused to co-operate with what they regarded as new departures from the long-established constitutional conventions of the empire. British attempts to resolve the ensuing crisis by armed coercion were to be frustrated in seven years of unsuccessful war.

In 1446 the dominant faction in Bologna, bereft of a head by the murder of Annibale Bentivoglio, invited Sante, an illegitimate scion of the house, to throw up his post in the Florentine wool-trade and assume the leadership of the city. For the next sixty years Sante and his successor Giovanni II exercised an ascendancy in Bologna which entitles them to a place among the more famous despots of the Italian Renaissance. The Bentivoglio Signoria is in essentials a typical outcome of the nation and age. Constitutionally, the position of its holders was even more ambiguous than that of the majority of their contemporaries. Like the Medici, they were in law, not despots but private citizens. The system by which their ascendancy was maintained mingled terrorism with beneficence. The coming of Sante followed upon a faction fight which brought death and exile upon the rival family of Canetoli, and in the course of years fresh rivals arose to suffer a like fate.

The death, on 27 July, 1944, on his 87th birthday, as a consequence of enemy action, of Hubert Hall has deprived the Royal Historical Society of one of its most beloved members, one, too, who had perhaps the largest share in shaping its history. He died from shock, following the explosion of a flying bomb which severely damaged his house at Walderslade, near Chatham.

Spain's concern with the eastern shores of North America during the earlier part of the sixteenth century had been a peripheral one. Exploration under official and private auspices, both along the coasts and into the interior, had yielded a rich harvest of information, but, down to 1561, projected and attempted settlements and missionary enterprises alike had failed to lead to the establishment of any permanent foothold in Florida or on the coast further north. Spain was nevertheless determined, then and later, to deny the North American lands to any foreign power. But if the preservation of her monopoly rights underlay Spain's resistance to foreign intervention, her occupation of Florida from 1565 onwards and her continued concern to eliminate attempted foreign settlements there and further north in the later sixteenth century was governed by more specific and practical considerations.