By reconstructing the multiple contexts that prompted the production, in 1601, of a single tract, this article evokes and analyses the febrile political atmosphere of the Elizabethan fin de siècle, produced by the spectre of regime change consequent upon the death of the queen, and by the visible connections between central elements in the regime and certain Catholic loyalists involved in the notorious Archpriest Controversy. Certain men, most notably Sir Francis Hastings, who were used to regarding themselves as insiders and believed that they were some of the Protestant state's most trusted agents in the struggle against popery, now found themselves typed as ‘puritans’ and thus, at least potentially, on the outs with a regime engaged in a (to them) extraordinarily dangerous flirtation with allegedly ‘loyal’ papists. Adopting the politique hermeneutic mode of the Jesuit Robert Parsons, Hastings all but outed the guilty men and did so via a thoroughly self-conscious exercise in public politics. Throughout, the full range of contemporary media was in play, with printed polemic framing parliamentary debate, that debate in turn feeding into the pamphlet press, which prompted yet more rumours, in London and on the continent, before provoking the state's recourse to those ultimate forms of official publicity, a royal proclamation, treason trials, and the gruesome performativity of the scaffold.

Beyond charters, printed propaganda, and cosmographies, aspiring statesmen in Jacobean England engaged with Native Americans in commonplace books, poetry, court masques, and political debate. Rather than representing a remote ‘other’, this article contends that barristers and students of the law were fascinated by the perceived savagery of indigenous peoples because it allowed them to explore, interrogate, and define their own civility. The result was a cross-over between developing English articulations of their own behaviour and political responsibilities, and a rising enthusiasm for colonizing America. With their Whitehall masques and passionate pleas in parliament on behalf of Virginia and Virginian tobacco, members of the Inns engaged in a subversive wit culture that reconciled the exotic with the language of duty and good conduct, and helped turn colonization into a recognizable – and, for the first time, fashionable – element of early seventeenth-century political culture. By considering written discourse alongside tobacco smoking and court masques, this article contends that a broad approach to the socio-cultural world of Jacobean politics reveals some ways through which gentlemen consciously projected their civil state as one that might be strengthened, rather than weakened, by turning to America as a viable theatre for political involvement.

The requirement to proclaim Richard Cromwell lord protector in September 1658 forced town leaders to engage with an unstable political context through the production of a large-scale public event. This article examines the ceremonies used in a range of provincial towns to offer a new perspective on urban culture in 1650s England. By analysing both contemporary print and the records of civic government, it reveals how urban inhabitants could maintain a variety of performative responses to state directive whilst approaching the moment of succession actively and pragmatically to confront issues specific to their respective locales. Crucially, there was no standard ritual experience and civic authorities remained relatively free to modify existing codes and apply them in the way/s that made most sense to their particular situation. In addition to confirming the essentially ambiguous nature of ceremonial expectation in this context, the findings presented in this article complicate our understanding of urban government during the last months of the protectorate by emphasizing the capacity for towns of varied religious and/or political complexion to use public ritual to further corporate interests and negotiate a range of specific concerns in both a national and a local framework.

Recent historians have highlighted the importance of the web of illicit commercial transactions which connected competing imperial networks to create an integrated Atlantic economy but have paid little attention to how co-operation worked across borders. Of necessity, participants acted without the legal institutions which are often afforded a central role in narratives of modernization. In the case of Jamaica, a hub of illicit trade, most merchants found it difficult to survive in this high-risk environment but members of the Sephardic diaspora, a traditional, communitarian group, had competitive advantages which they exploited with vigour. They did not rely on innate attributes of kinship, ethnicity, or religion. They closed entry and built on a favourable historical and geographical legacy to cultivate attributes which maintained high levels of social discipline with credible rewards and punishments which were reinforced by their outsider status. Their competitive advantages did stimulate retaliation but also allowed the Sephardim to combine with the Christian elite to capture rent-seeking opportunities. Far from falling away as modernization gained pace, the Sephardic diaspora survived and flourished by constructing the strong private-order institutions needed in large swathes of the economy where neither impersonal corporations, nor state enforcement mechanisms, were able to manage risk.

This article explores the locally specific (re)construction of a biblical figure, the Apostle St Paul, in India, to unravel the entanglement of religion with British imperial ideology on the one hand, and to understand the dynamics of colonial conversion on the other. Over the nineteenth century, evangelical pamphlets and periodicals heralded St Paul as the ideal missionary, who championed conversion to Christianity but within an imperial context: that of the first-century Roman Mediterranean. Through an examination of missionary discourses, along with a study of Indian (Hindu and Islamic) intellectual engagement with Christianity including Bengali convert narratives, this article studies St Paul as a reference point for understanding the contours of ‘vernacular Christianity’ in nineteenth-century India. Drawing upon colonial Christian publications mainly from Bengal, the article focuses on the multiple reconfigurations of Paul: as a crucial mascot of Anglican Protestantism, as a justification of British imperialism, as an ideological resource for anti-imperial sentiments, and as a theological inspiration for Hindu reform and revivalist organization.

Investigating the letters, diaries, and memoirs of British officers and enlisted men from the Napoleonic Wars, this article explores the hitherto neglected subject of British soldiers’ perceptions of Napoleon. Soldiers often formed mixed and ambivalent views on Napoleon. At one level, this corresponds with a range of attitudes within Britain, highlighting the important connections between soldiers and domestic culture. Yet these views also reveal what soldiers as a distinct cohort prioritized about Napoleon, and how these perceptions evolved over time. They also reveal tensions and divisions within the army itself, and shed light on British soldiers and patriotism. And finally, they add to our understanding of soldiers’ writing practices, especially their cultural context and the differences between wartime writing and memoirs. A diverse and shifting set of cultural frameworks and lived experiences shaped soldiers’ writings on Napoleon – from the Black Legend and Napoleonic Legend, to the Enlightenment and Romanticism; and from Spain and its battlefields to Restoration Paris and post-Waterloo Britain. Tracing the evolution of British soldiers’ perceptions of Napoleon from the outbreak of the Peninsular War in 1808 to the mid-nineteenth century reveals a growing admiration of Napoleon and the increasing hold of the Napoleonic Legend.

This article examines the contributions of the Miskitu people of colonial Nicaragua and Honduras to Britain's largest military intervention in interior Central America – the invasion of Spanish Nicaragua in 1780. Lacking the local skills and knowledge essential to offensive operations in the region, the expedition relied on an existing alliance with the Miskitu. Charting the evolution of this alliance, this article reveals not only the importance of indigenous manpower to colonial endeavours but also how intercultural campaigns generated powerful assumptions about martial skills and racial categorizations. These assumptions were highly vulnerable to misunderstandings that, in turn, had a profound effect on supposedly rigid European concepts of national policy, military planning, and strategic interests. The failure of British officials to appreciate the needs of their allies ended hopes of defeating the Spanish empire. But the failure also shaped understandings of the Miskitu and broader British interests in Central America. The raising of military labour was much more than the process of hiring soldiers. It was a broader process of negotiation, understanding, and misunderstanding that helped define the expansion of European empires in the new world.

This article attempts to shed new light on the character of late Victorian Liberalism by investigating its political priorities in British India. It takes as its particular focus the debates which raged between 1881 and 1883 over the Government of India Resolution on Local Self-Government. Along with the Ilbert Bill, the Resolution comprised the centrepiece of the marquis of Ripon's self-consciously Liberal programme for dismantling Lytton's Raj. When analysed in conjunction with contemporaneous Liberal discourse on English local government reform, the debates surrounding the Resolution help to clarify many of the central principles of late Victorian Liberalism. In particular, these debates emphasize the profound importance of local government reform to what one might call the Liberal project. Beyond its utility in effecting retrenchment, efficiency, and ‘sound finance’, local government reform was valued by Liberals as the best and safest means of effecting ‘political education’ among populations, in both Britain and India, with increasingly strong claims to inclusion within the body politic.

Generic fascism scholarship, which has turned strongly towards cultural political history in recent years, has focused heavily on themes of rebirth in fascist culture, but rebirth's counterpart of decline remains under-researched. After emphasizing the existence of several distinct and even mutually exclusive ideological strands in the NSB, this article shows how ideological difference was marked by narratives of decline. But they were equally used to generate a coherent political message about the contemporary state of the Netherlands. Central to their functionality as a unifying tool was party newspaper Volk en Vaderland, which served to promote a patriotic, news-focused, and peculiarly Dutch narrative of decline that overarched ideological difference. Yet more than just tying ends together, one narrative in particular served as a crucial ideological constant in the Movement, namely the Leider Anton Mussert's narrative of decline since the early modern Golden Age of the Dutch Republic, which tied traditional liberal patriotic themes into fascist discourse. Where other historians have emphasized Mussert's lack of moral and ideological leadership, the article impresses how narratives of decline functioned as moral support, and rallied NSB loyalists throughout the German occupation of the Netherlands, until Mussert's own death.

Reconstructing Britain's cities to accommodate the ‘motor revolution’ was an integral part of urban renewal in the post-war decades. This article shows how opposition to urban motorways had a pivotal role in the retreat from urban modernism in the 1970s. It takes as its case-study Birmingham, Britain's premier motor city, headquarters of the motor industry, and with heavy investment in roads, including the Inner Ring, Britain's first urban motorway completed in 1971. The article traces the collapse of the motor city ideal in Birmingham sparked by controversy over car pollution at Spaghetti Junction, the growth of roads protest, and the implication of the Inner Ring in municipal corruption. In so doing, it identifies the intersection of environmental, political, and economic factors that lay behind the volte-face in urban policy and compares Birmingham with other cities which witnessed similar revolts. It argues that the 1970s in Britain saw the end of a specific engineering vision of the post-war city, centred on the car and the ‘citizen-driver’.

Peter Hart's monograph, The IRA and its enemies: violence and community in Cork, 1916–1923, has been the subject of a rancorous debate in Ireland since its publication in 1998. In academic journals, in the press, and in the electronic media, Hart has been accused repeatedly of deliberately distorting evidence. The controversy turns on Hart's depiction of Irish revolutionary violence, and in particular upon a chapter entitled ‘Taking it out on the Protestants’, in which the IRA was portrayed as fundamentally sectarian. This article seeks to address a question that must occasionally trouble all of us: what are historical disagreements really about? To achieve a wider perspective on the Peter Hart affair it considers the famous row over historical ‘fabrication’ ignited by David Abraham's The collapse of the Weimar Republic (1981) and Keith Windschuttle's assault on Lyndall Ryan's book The Aboriginal Tasmanians (1981; 2nd edition 1996). The comparison suggests that when historians fall out over footnotes there is more involved than scholarly propriety.