In August 1971, President Nixon ended the convertibility of the dollar into gold, so precipitating a crisis in the Bretton Woods system which was not successfully resolved by the Smithsonian agreement in December 1971. The pound was soon free to float and the role of sterling as a reserve currency was seriously weakened. The members of the European Economic Community attempted to create stability between their own currencies, which left the British government in a dilemma about whether to join the European monetary experiment to complement membership of the Community. The address considers the tensions and difficulties facing the Conservative and Labour governments of the 1970s, and the response of the Thatcher government after 1979. The trade-off in the ‘trilemma’ between the three variables of exchange rates, capital movements and domestic monetary policy changed in a major way.

What could or should be visually represented was a contested issue across the medieval Christian and Islamic world around the year 800. This article examines how Islamic, Byzantine, Carolingian and Palestinian Christian attitudes toward representation were expressed, and differed, across the seventh and eighth centuries. Islamic prohibitions against representing human figures were not universally recognised, but were particularly – if sometimes erratically – focused on mosque decoration. Byzantine ‘iconoclasm’ – more properly called iconomachy – was far less destructive than its later offshoots in France and England, and resulted in a highly nuanced re-definition of what representation meant in the Orthodox church. Carolingian attitudes toward images were on the whole far less passionate than either Islamic or Orthodox views, but certain members of the elite had strong views, which resulted in particular visual expressions. Palestinian Christians, living under Islamic rule, modulated their attitudes toward images to conform with local social beliefs. Particularly in areas under Orthodox or Islamic control, then, representation mattered greatly around the year 800, and this article examines how and why this impacted on local production.

It is commonly understood the old monastic order in England confronted the King's Reformation unreformed: the houses of the Benedictines, Cistercians and Cluniacs were seemingly untouched by the spirit of renewal that charged continental congregations in the conciliar era, and their conventional patterns of observant life persisted in the face of a fast-changing world beyond the precinct walls. This paper reexamines this view. There was no formal process of congregational reform in England and the effectiveness of the order's governing bodies faltered over the course of the fifteenth century. Yet the responsiveness of the monks to contemporary trends in learning and teaching and in patterns of personal and corporate devotion may be traced in many of their manuscript records. This is indicative, certainly, of the lively engagement of individual brethren but in a number of instances it can be read as part of a collective impulse for reform that animated the house as a whole, and perhaps even networks of houses. It was an impulse that owed much to a generation of (generally, graduate) monks that rose to prominence against the background of the great church councils; their influence allowed it to flourish, albeit briefly, in the triennial sessions of the Benedictine chapters. Their interest in humanism passed to the next generation of superiors, some of whom appear to have transformed their conventual curricula. Their pioneering work perhaps also stimulated a refined conception of the monastic profession which blossomed in the half-century before the suppressions, one suffused with a sharp, one might say, antiquarian sense of the heritage of early English monasticism, and the scholarly calibre and spiritual purity of its celebrated fathers. The energy that emanated from a number of these houses in the reigns of Henry VII and his son attracted like-minded seculars into collaborations that were not necessarily claustral in focus but certainly reformist in tone. Of course, such extra-mural interest and interaction did little to defend the monastic redoubt from the assault of the Cromwellian commissioners.

William Cecil, Lord Burghley, is not usually characterised as a courtier. He has traditionally been cast as a grave, hard-working statesman. Historians today recognise that almost every Elizabethan politician of national stature was, to a certain extent, a courtier. However, the epithet ‘courtly’ is still largely reserved for the self-styled chevaliers of Elizabeth's entourage. The courtliness of men such as Burghley, whose public persona was based predominantly on ‘civil’ rather than chivalric values, is rarely acknowledged. Yet Balthazar Castiglione's celebrated dialogue, Il libro del cortegiano, explored civil and martial ideals of courtly conduct. Burghley can be (and was) depicted as a model Castiglionean courtier. His friends and early biographers credited him with il Cortegiano's signature characteristic, sprezzatura. They also emphasised his social versatility – another attribute associated with il Cortegiano. Moreover, Burghley shared Castiglione's monarchocentric political agenda. He served his commonwealth by cultivating a personal relationship with his prince. This relationship licensed him to counsel Elizabeth, encouraging her to rule wisely and virtuously. He thus embraced the Castiglionean paradigm whereby public service was identified with personal service to a particular monarch. Burghley's adoption of this paradigm has arguably been overlooked as a result of the historiographical climate of the past twenty years. Patrick Collinson's enormously influential concept of monarchical republicanism has encouraged historians to conceptualise Burghley as a republican who happened to live in a monarchy. This may have obscured his approximation to Castiglione's ideal courtier, who was specifically designed to operate in a monarchical context.

In the vibrant current debate about European empires and their ideologies, one basic dichotomy still tends to be overlooked: that between, on the one hand, the plurality of modern empires of colonisation, commerce and settlement; and, on the other, the traditional claim to single and undivided imperium so long embodied in the Roman Empire and its successor, the Holy Roman Empire, or (First) Reich. This paper examines the tensions between the two, as manifested in the theory and practice of Habsburg imperial rule. The Habsburgs, emperors of the Reich almost continuously through its last centuries, sought to build their own power-base within and beyond it. The first half of the paper examines how by the eighteenth century their ‘Monarchy’, subsisting alongside the Reich, dealt with the associated legacy of empire. After the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 the Habsburgs could pursue a free-standing Austrian ‘imperialism’, but it rested on an uneasy combination of old and new elements and was correspondingly vulnerable to challenge from abroad and censure at home. The second half of the article charts this aspect of Habsburg government through an age of international imperialism and its contribution to the collapse of the Dual Monarchy in 1918.

The bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act in 1807 prompted a remarkable wave of public commemorations across Britain. In contrast to the low-key events of 1907, 2007 saw a sustained and nation-wide urge to commemorate, publicise and discuss the Atlantic slave trade and its abolition. Government interest proved an important influence, and was reflected in a lively educational debate (resulting in changes to the National Curriculum.) This political interest may have stemmed from the parallel debate about modern human trafficking, and contemporary slave systems. Equally, the availability of funding (from the Heritage Lottery Fund) may have persuaded a host of institutions to devise exhibitions, displays and debates about events of 1807. Perhaps the most striking forms of commemoration were in broadcasting and publishing: the BBC was especially active. There were few regions or localities which remained unaffected by the year's commemorations.

But why was there such interest? Was 1807, with the outlawing of an unquestioned evil, seen as a moment of national virtue? But if so, how are we to recall the role played by the British in the perfection of Atlantic slavery and the slave trade? The lively debates in 2007, from major national institutions to small local gatherings, revealed the problematic nature of abolition itself. After all, slavery survived, and even the slave trade continued after 1807. So what was important about 1807? The commemorations of 2007 raised public awareness about an important transformation in the British past; it also exposed those intellectual and political complexities about the ending of the Atlantic slave trade which have proved so fascinating to academic historians.

Cultural factors have often been invoked to explain parliament's decision in 1807 to outlaw slave carrying by British subjects but they have only infrequently been cited in efforts to explain why the Atlantic slave trade itself became so large in the three centuries preceding 1807. This paper seeks to redress this imbalance by looking at ways in which inter-cultural dialogue between Africans and Europeans and related adjustments in social values and adaptations of African institutional arrangements may contribute to improving our understanding of the huge growth in market transactions in enslaved people in Atlantic Africa before 1807. In exploring such issues, the paper draws on important theoretical insights from new institutional economics, notably the work of Douglass North. It also attempts to show how institutionally and culturally based developments in transatlantic slave trafficking, the largest arena of cross-cultural exchange in the Atlantic world before 1850, may themselves help to promote understanding of the much broader historical processes that underpin economic change and the creation of the modern world.

This paper explores the place of domestic slaves in British families resident in India, c. 1780–1830, and the ways in which the presence of slaves within these Anglo-Indian households challenged British understandings of slavery as a practice. Drawing upon probate data, private correspondence and the Parliamentary Papers, it suggests that the history of slavery in the British empire must be situated within wider histories of family, household and kin. Located within the family and often conflated with servants, domestic slaves in Anglo-India came to be seen as dependent female subordinates whose gender and status placed them outside the emerging politics of emancipation.