bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The King, the Parliament, and the Localities during the English Civil War
Authors: Hughes Ann
Published: February 2004

Debate over the nature of central-local relationships has played an important part in recent discussion of the origins and course of the English Civil War. It is an oversimplification, but not a caricature, to say that two distinct sets of views are current. The first, and in many ways the most consistent and coherent, arguments are those found in the work of the local historians who have developed the idea of the county community as the most important focus for the activities of the provincial gentry and, in more general form, in Morrill'sThe Revolt of the Provincesand Hutton'sThe Royalist War Effort. In this work a clear separation is seen between local and national issues or preoccupations. The majority of the county gentry, and still more the ranks below them, were ill informed about national developments and concerned with the activities of central government mainly as they affected the stability of their local communities. Only a small minority of activists were genuinely committed to the Royalist or the Parliamentarian side in the Civil War; the most characteristic provincial response to the divisions of 1642 was reluctance to become involved, as shown both in widespread neutralism among individuals and in collective attempts at local pacification. Gradually the whole of England was drawn, willy-nilly, into the war, but allegiance was determined largely by contingent military factors: the proximity of London or of the king's army or the relative effectiveness of the small numbers of local partisans.
The History of British Political Thought: The Creation of a Center
Authors: Pocock J. G. A.
Published: February 2004

A Center for the History of British Political Thought has been established at the Folger Shakespeare Library and will be conducting a series of seminars aimed at covering what is conventionally demarcated as the early modern period: the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. No comprehensive history of British political thought in this period has to our knowledge been written, and it is an open question of what it should consist and what its organizing themes should be. The purpose of this article is to present a speculative inquiry into its conceptual scope.

The scope and meaning of the word “British” is fundamental to our inquiry. The core component is surely England, and both the weight of literature and the tradition of study render it inescapable that English will be the language and the dominant culture with which most of our program will be concerned. It will be necessary nonetheless to recognize the autonomy of Scottish political culture and its literature and of the cultures formed by English hegemony, whose political thought must be studied both before and after their assertions of independence.

We must further examine what is to be meant by the term “political thought.” A considerable methodological literature has marked the rise in the last two decades of what has been called the “new history” of political thought. This inquiry has become less an adjunct to the practice of political theory and more a history of the terms of discourse in which debate about politics has been carried on.
Sir William Brereton and England's Wars of Religion
Authors: Morrill John
Published: February 2004

Historians have begun to rediscover the Puritan Revolution. A number of recent studies concentrating on the Long Parliament, on particular counties, or on clusters of religious ideas have found religious divisions at the heart of the collapse of early Stuart government. This article tries to consolidate this trend by looking at the behavior of one prominent individual. If it was indeed religious conviction that drove active minorities to take up arms, then it is essential to find men who have left enough evidence of a sufficiently intimate kind to permit us to pry into the feelings and longings that determined their particular responses to the developing crisis in church and state. While it is hoped that such a case study can help to clarify general issues, it is obviously not possible to claim that one case study demonstrates any particular theory of allegiance. This article presents an instance of a general theory and no more.

The subject of the first part of this article is Sir William Brereton (1604–61) of Handforth in Cheshire, who will be examined as a Puritan magistrate in the 1630s, as a Parliamentarian activist in the early 1640s, as a county boss in the war years, and as an increasingly disillusioned “honest radical” from 1646 and especially from 1653. He is probably better documented in the public records than all but twenty or so M.P.s in the Long Parliament, and his fifteen hundred extant letters plus a collection of private papers and travel journals from the 1630s make him probably the best documented of all county bosses, at least down to 1646.
Communicating an English Revolution to the Colonies, 1688–1689
Authors: Steele Ian K.
Published: February 2004

TheAmericaof Boston, bound from its home port to London in December of 1688, began taking soundings that were political as well as nautical as it approached England. Two weeks before an English port was reached, the first news was heard from a shipmaster returning from Barbados, who shared what he had heard earlier from an English vessel out of Galloway. The passengers of theAmericawere told that William of Orange had landed at Torbay early in November, that the prince had taken England, and that King James was dead. The truth, the guess, and the false rumor all came aboard with equal credibility. They were only four days from port before they learned that the king was not dead, though the source was a five-week-old report from the Canary Islands. The occupants of theAmericacould still be buffeted by strange and disturbing tales when they were only one day from Dover. The master of a pink that was two weeks out of Liverpool gave the date of the prince's landing as three weeks later than the event, gave William's force as an astounding 50,000 men and 600 ships, and told the apprehensive colonials that the drowned bodies of Englishmen were being found tied back-to-back and that French men-of-war were cruising with commissions from King James II. All this worrisome “news” proved erroneous but accompanied an account that would prove correct, that the king was not dead but had fled to France.
The Waltham Black Act and Jacobitism
Authors: Cruickshanks Eveline , Erskine-Hill Howard
Published: February 2004

Interest in the origin of Walpole's Black Act (9 Geo. 1, c. 22), or the Waltham Black Act, as it was actually called, has arisen from work by Pat Rogers and E. P. Thompson. It was an act of exceptional severity, making no less than some fifty new offenses capital, and its origins have been debated by legal as well as by political historians. While Rogers stressed the criminality of the Blacks, Thompson set the act in a sociohistorical context, suggesting that its importance was in assisting the placemen of the Hanoverian establishment and Walpole's administration to a stronger hold on lands in the Black areas, at the expense of older and smaller gentry and the usage rights of yeomen farmers, tenantry, and the poor. In Thompson's argument the Black Act has exemplary significance for the tendency of greater Whig land owners toward more efficiently exploitative procedures, backed by ferocious legislation. The involvement in Blacking of Alexander Pope's kinsmen Charles and Michael Rackett, stressed by both Rogers and Thompson, constituted a point of additional interest.

The difference between Rogers and Thompson over whether Pope felt shame at his relatives' predicament turns in part on the political dimension of Blacking. Aside from the politics of conflict over land usage, Thompson rejected a link between the Blacks and the Jacobites, even though the act was introduced in the midst of legislation against the Atterbury conspiracy.
The Transportation of Scottish Criminals to America during the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Ekirch A. Roger
Published: February 2004

In the last few years there has been a growth of interest in the history of crime and law enforcement in early modern Scotland. Recent studies by Stephen Davies, Bruce Lenman, and Geoffrey Parker have described the intricate operation of the country's criminal justice system. Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to the role played by transportation. During the eighteenth century, banishing criminals to the American colonies became the most common punishment employed by higher courts. By providing a merciful alternative to the death penalty without putting the public at serious risk, transportation carried enormous appeal. An attorney in Edinburgh commented, “In many cases it is absolutely necessary for the safety of the state, and the good order of society, that the country should be rid of certain criminals.” This article seeks to explore the nature of Scottish transportation, from its growing popularity in the early 1700s to its demise in 1775, a result of the American Revolution. Questions basic to an understanding of this punishment and its operation remain unanswered. How often was it utilized by courts? How many offenders were exiled during the century? What sorts of crimes had they committed? By what means were they transported to America? How did Scottish procedure differ from the system employed in England? Answers to these questions, besides shedding new light on the internal mechanics of transportation, should open a valuable window onto the Scottish criminal justice system.
What Do We Mean by “Anglo-Saxon” and “Anglo-Saxons”?
Authors: Reynolds Susan
Published: February 2004

The immediate answer to the question posed in the title is given with characteristic dry clarity by James Murray in that great work of English history the Oxford English Dictionary. Murray's first definition is “English Saxon, Saxon of England: orig. a collective name for the Saxons of Britain as distinct from the ‘Old Saxons’ of the continent. Hence, properly applied to the Saxons (or Wessex, Essex, Middlesex, Sussex, and perhaps Kent), as distinct from the Angles.” After explaining that, “in this Dictionary, the language of England before 1100 is called, as a whole, ‘Old English,’”Murray then goes on to say that the adjective “Anglo-Saxon” is “extended to the entire Old English people and language before the Norman Conquest.” Neither he nor the Supplement mentions explicitly the almost purely chronological use of “Anglo-Saxon” to describe the whole period of English history between 400 and 1066 that is now current, but it is easy to see how this has derived from the usage they expound.

What the original edition goes on to do, moreover, is to give an account of a wider use of the word that beautifully encapsulates the beliefs about culture and descent that lie behind it. The expression “Anglo-Saxon,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was then—that is, in the late nineteenth century—used “rhetorically for English in its wider or ethnological sense, in order to avoid the later historical restriction of ‘English’ as distinct from Scotch, or the modern political restriction of ‘English’ as opposed to American of the United States; thus applied to (1) all persons of Teutonic descent (or who reckon themselves such) in Britain, whether of English, Scotch, or Irish birth; (2) all of this descent in the world, whether subjects of Great Britain or of the United States.”
The English Middle Class and the Ideological Significance of Radicalism, 1760–1886
Authors: Nicholls David
Published: February 2004

The noun “radical” as applied to reformers who held advanced views came into general use in the early nineteenth century. It was at first used in a derogatory sense, denoting, as Walter Scott wrote in 1819, “a set of blackguards.” However, it was taken up by the subjects of the intended abuse and quickly acquired a certain respectability—so much so that by 1830 one middle-class radical was recording that “the term Radical once employed as a name of low reproach, has found its way into high places, and is gone forth as the title of a class who glory in their designation.” Reformers from across the political spectrum were soon being designated “radical,” as can be seen from the application of the term to individuals as diverse in outlook as Lord Durham, Richard Oastler, and Bronterre O'Brien.

This eclecticism has led historians to pronounce the concept useless as a tool of historical analysis. If any tradition at all emerges from studies of English radicalism, then it is a tradition of liberal humanitarianism, a pattern of reform that is nonclass and nonideological. At best “radical” retains its original adjectival power of describing a root-and-branch reformer, an individual who worked to change quite substantially existing economic, political, or social structures by word or deed. But the evident contradictions and discontinuities in the so-called “radical tradition” have made historians balk at making further claims than these. This essay, however, is a provisional attempt to shift the focus away from the personalities and the specificities of reform movements in their peculiar conjunctural moments to the operation of radicalism as a powerful ideology that, far from being nonclass and nonideological and despite (or even possibly because of) its internal contradictions, has profoundly influenced class development and class relations.
The Great Whigs and Parliamentary Reform, 1809–1830
Authors: Wasson Ellis Archer
Published: February 2004

The genesis of the Reform Act of 1832 is still not fully understood. It has become fashionable for historians to direct their attention toward two groups of Whigs who are seen as the ultimate arbiters of policy. The first, men of high visibility such as Lords Grey and Holland, was certainly of importance. The Reform Bill prime minister was the most brilliant political tactician the Whigs had produced since Walpole. But the senior leaders of the 1830s were already becoming rather antiquated in their ideas, and men of their type and generation were generally very moderate reformers. The other group to whom historians attribute the progressive elements of Whiggism, the Edinburgh Reviewers and especially Henry Brougham, are seen as the “new men,” the radicalizers and educators of Whiggery. Yet Brougham, for example, frequently worked against the efforts of advanced Whigs to unify and strengthen the party. Indeed, he actually regretted the liberal nature of the Reform Bill. The “new men” who might have played such a role in the House of Commons, Romilly, Horner, and Whitbread, were dead by 1818, the victims of disease and madness. Mackintosh and Macaulay contributed to the party's articulation of principles but did not shape them in the 1810s and 1820s.

No peaceful steps could have been taken toward actual constitutional change without the acquiescence, indeed the active cooperation, of the great Whig magnates. No Whig government could hope to survive for long or call itself Whig without support from the great families, most of them cousins by blood or marriage, whose surnames and titles were inextricably bound up with mythology anchored in the events of 1688–89.
Labour, the Left, and the British General Election of 1945
Authors: McCulloch Gary
Published: February 2004

The victory of the Labour party in the British general election of July 1945 was preeminently a triumph of Left over Right. Labour won 393 seats, while the Conservatives, despite the prestige associated with their wartime leader Winston Churchill, won only 213. As the election results came in over the radio on July 26, the veteran Labour M.P. James Chuter Ede “began to wonder if I should wake up to find it all a dream.” By the end of the day, he was moved to record that the outcome of the election was “as great as 1906 … one of the unique occasions in British history—a Red Letter day in the best sense of that word.” At the same time, however, the election was of crucial importance in the development of the Left itself, especially with regard to the relationship between the Labour party and the Left as a whole.

I Labour's decisive election victory has commonly been interpreted as the climax of a long and gradual rise to power. The historian Charles Mowat was quick to point out that its success was “the culmination of a political movement now more than sixty years old.” The historic mission of the Labour party, its “fifty years' march” from tiny pressure group to majority government, was the subject of several Whiggish treatises in the following few years. Over the last decade, moreover, the increasing recent difficulties of the Labour party have tended to highlight the comparative steadiness of its earlier growth, although they have also stimulated greater attention to the early causes of later conflicts.
Eighteenth-Century Science and Radical Social Theory: The Case of Joseph Priestley's Scientific Liberalism
Authors: Kramnick Isaac
Published: February 2004

In 1794 Joseph Priestley fled England and the church-and-king sentiment that had set ablaze his Birmingham house and laboratory in 1791. His flight to America was noted by the United Irishmen with a public letter. This most radical group in the entire camp of English sympathizers with the French Revolution not only lamented English repression but also offered a marvelous hymn to the tripartite linkage of America, useful science, and radical change.

The Emigration of Dr. Priestley will form a striking historical fact, by which alone future ages will learn to estimate truly the temper of the present times. … But be cheerful, dear Sir, you are going to a happier world, the world of Washington and Franklin. In idea we accompany you.… We also look to the new age when man shall become more precious than fine gold, and when his ambition shall be to subdue the elements, not to subjugate his fellow creatures, to make fire, water, earth, and air obey his bidding, but to leave the pure ethereal mind, as the sole thing in nature free and invincible…. The attention of a whole scientific people [here] is bent to multiplying the means and instruments of destruction … but you are going to a country where science is turned to better use.

The relationship between science and progressive politics was by no means one-way. Just as science would ameliorate the human condition, so a progressive politics would encourage scientific advances.
“For a King not to be bountiful were a fault”: Perspectives on Court Patronage in Early Stuart England
Authors: Peck Linda Levy
Published: February 2004

In an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of the work of William Dobson entitled “The Royalists at War,” one portrait among the Cavalier soldiers and commanders was that of Sir Thomas Aylesbury. Aylesbury holds in his hand a document that begins, “To the King's most Excellent Majesty The Humble Petition.” By posing in his official black robes that evoke the solemnity of the law and by giving the petition prominence, Aylesbury celebrates his position as a master of requests. As a master of requests even at Oxford in the 1640s, it was his role to present petitions to the king asking for redress of grievances or for personal advancement, in short, asking for royal bounty. As Dobson's portrait signifies, such petitions were not merely the seedy clamorings of early Stuart courtiers but an open and important link between the monarch and the subject, one suitable for commemoration in portraiture. The painting makes concrete, even in the midst of civil war, the king's traditional role as guarantor of justice and giver of favor. While the king's promise of justice goes back to early Anglo-Saxon dooms and tenth-century coronation oaths, his giving of largesse had expanded with the Renaissance monarchy of the Tudors.

Historians of early modern Europe have become interested in court patronage as they have analyzed politics and political elites. From the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, from the work of MacFarlane to Namier, the study of relationships between patrons and clients has been at the forefront of modern historiography.
A “Religious Society under Heaven”: John Wesley and the Identity of Methodism
Authors: Dreyer Frederick
Published: February 2004

Methodism figures as a kind of puzzle in the history of eighteenth-century England. Even writers who are not unsympathetic to John Wesley sometimes find his thought incoherent and confused. “The truth should be faced,” writes Frank Baker, “that Wesley (like most of us) was a bundle of contradictions.” Albert Outler celebrates Wesley's merits not as a thinker but as a popularizer of other men's doctrines. His Wesley was “by talent and intent, afolk-theologian: an eclectic who had mastered the secret of plastic synthesis, simple profundity, the common touch.” One man's eclecticism, however, is another man's humbug. The very qualities that Outler admires are those that E. P. Thompson condemns inThe Making of the English Working Class. Here Methodist theology is dismissed as “opportunist, anti-intellectual, and otiose.” Wesley “appears to have dispensed with the best and selected unhesitatingly the worst elements of Puritanism.” In doctrinal terms Methodism was not a plastic synthesis but “a mule.” What offends Thompson is not so much Wesley's incoherence as the social ambivalence of the movement that he had created. In class terms Methodism was, Thompson says, “hermaphroditic.” It attracted both masters and men. It catered to hostile social interests. It served a “dual role, as the religion of both the exploiters and the exploited.” The belief that Methodism is socially incomprehensible and perhaps in some sense socially illegitimate is not original with Thompson. Early statements of this assumption can be found in Richard Niebuhr'sThe Social Sources of Denominationalismand in John and Barbara Hammond's The Town Labourer.
Hannah More Meets Simple Simon: Tracts, Chapbooks, and Popular Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century England
Authors: Pedersen Susan
Published: February 2004

During the winter of scarcity of 1794, Hannah More wrote “a few moral stories,” drew up a plan for publication and distribution, and sent the package around to her evangelical and bluestocking friends. Their response was enthusiastic; even Horace Walpole abandoned his usual teasing to write back, “I will never more complain of your silence; for I am perfectly convinced that you have no idle, no unemployed moments. Your indefatigable benevolence is incessantly occupied in good works; and your head and your heart make the utmost use of the excellent qualities of both…. Thank you a thousand times for your most ingenious plan; may great success reward you!” Walpole then sent off copies of the plan to the duchess of Gloucester and other aristocratic friends. Following Wilberforce's example, such wealthy philanthropists subscribed over 1,000 pounds to support the project during its first year. Henry Thornton agreed to act as treasurer and Zachary Macaulay as agent, and the ball was rolling.

In March 1795, the Cheap Repository of Moral and Religious Tracts issued its first publications. Prominent evangelicals and gentry worked to distribute them to the rural poor, booksellers, and hawkers and among Sunday schools and charity children. During the Repository's three-year existence, the fifty or so tracts written by Hannah More were supplemented by contributions from fellow evangelicals Thornton, Macaulay, John Venn, and John Newton, the poet William Mason, More's literary friend Mrs. Chapone, her protégée Selina Mills, and her sisters Sally and Patty More and by reprints of old favorites by Isaac Watts and Justice John Fielding.
A Possession of One's Own: Women and Consumer Behavior in England, 1660–1740
Authors: Weatherill Lorna
Published: February 2004

Hall Men are born free, how is it that all Women are born slaves? As they must be if the being subjected to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary Will of Men, be the Perfect Condition of Slavery? [Mary Astell, Reflections upon Marriage (London, 1700), p. 66]

The wife ought to be subject to the husband in all things. [Hannah Woolley, The Gentlewoman's Companion or a GUIDE to the Female sex (London, 1675), p. 104]

I

Did men and women have different cultural and material values in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries? We know very little in detail about the activities of people within their homes and especially about their attitudes to the material goods that they used and that surrounded them. Virginia Woolf's complaint that she had no model to “turn about this way and that” in exploring the role of women in fiction applies equally to women's behavior as consumers, for we still do not know, as she put it, “what, in short, they did from eight in the morning till eight at night.” Did their particular roles within the household result in different material values, just as their biological and economic roles were different? We do know that power was unequally distributed within the household, although we can also demonstrate cooperation and affection between family members. We take it that the household was, in some sense, the woman's domain, but very often we cannot explore what this meant in practice. In short, was being “subjected to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary Will of Men” reflected in women's cultural values and tastes?

These are broad questions that are not easily answered, either in theory or by observation, especially as it is not easy to identify the behavior of women as distinct from that of the family and household, but they are questions worth asking to see if there are signs of behavior different enough to warrant the view that there was a subculture in which women had the chance to express themselves and their views of the world separately, especially as the daily routines of their lives were different.
English Noblemen and Their Advisers: Consultation and Collaboration in the Later Middle Ages
Authors: Rawcliffe Carole , Flower Susan
Published: February 2004

In the society of late medieval Europe, where power, wealth, and influence were derived from the ownership of land, the delegation of responsibility by the ruling elite became a matter of financial, administrative, and political necessity. Not only was it physically impossible for a great rentier to oversee personally routine points of organization on his estates, but the overwhelming litigiousness of contemporary life also made it essential for any property owner of note to engage the services of men practiced in the law. Furthermore, regular consultation with leading members of his following played a crucial part in determining the success—or even the survival—of the magnate in question. Just as an astute monarch recognized the importance of the deliberative process, making himself accessible to his ablest and most powerful subjects, so too the great lord had to involve his kinsmen and supporters in questions of policy and politics. In the right hands the seignorial council could, therefore, become a formidable weapon, sometimes even providing an alternative power structure to the government itself. A striking instance of this usurpation of authority is to be found in tenth-century Japan, where the administrative council of the dominant Fujiwara clan effectively superseded the central bureaucracy of the Heian state. Indeed, it was from the chambers of this body (known as the Mandokoro) that the real government of the country was carried out. The old framework was carefully preserved, and the great council of state continued to perform a ceremonial function, but, so far as practical control was concerned, the orders of the Fujiwara advisers took the place of imperial decrees.
The Selling of Newton: Science and Technology in Early Eighteenth-Century England
Authors: Stewart Larry
Published: February 2004

In the past decade the role of science in the early eighteenth century has come in for close scrutiny and increasing debate. There is specifically one rather large and problematic issue, that is, the relationship between science and technology in England in the first half of the eighteenth century when, it is generally agreed, the Industrial Revolution had not yet made any discernible impact. There are those historians who have insisted that the Newtonian natural philosophy had nothing whatever to do with the mechanical creations and innovations of artisans and craftsmen. This may be understandable because Newtonian science has come to be regarded as fundamentally mathematical and experimental—and not even comprehensible, except in the broadest terms, to the Augustan virtuosos. This has often created the version of science as a purely rational and cerebral activity distanced from and above technology, a science unsullied perhaps by the grime of mechanics' hands. One might speculate on the ideological origins of such a universe, but it seems that one can at least see that such a version of events is determined in part by the question that proposes a direct causal relation between cerebral science and rank technology. The argument evidently is that, if one cannot find the historical evidence that establishes a precise link between Newton's interparticulate forces and the partial vacuum of the Savery engine, then one must conclude that no relationship existed.

But historical associations are never quite so simple. One could easily demonstrate that the Newtonian natural philosophy was deliberately propagated among men whose interests tended to be more practical than philosophical.
Custom, Conflict, and Traditional Authority in the Gloucester Weaver Strike of 1825
Authors: Urdank Albion M.
Published: February 2004

The Gloucester weaver strike of 1825 was part of a national revival of trade-union activity following Parliament's repeal of the Combination Acts in 1824. The strike also occupied a central place in Gloucester's economic history, marking a turning point in the evolution of its woolen trade from a protoindustrial to a factory-based system. For this reason, the strike embodied in its form the transitional state of the industry, combining characteristics of preindustrial “risings” with those of modern industrial disorders. And in this anomaly lay its distinctiveness and its special interest.

Scholars have little appreciated the strike's transitional quality, however, treating it inevitably as a straightforward confrontation between capital and labor. The Hammonds and, more recently, Julia de Lacey Mann have depicted the weavers as a homogeneous social group, their strike movement as autonomous, and their conflict with the clothiers as a unitary, year-long struggle for higher wages. Such treatment, moreover, reflects widely held assumptions about the nature of class and class consciousness in the English Industrial Revolution.

This essays offers a different perspective. The strike was organized and led by master weavers whose interests could differ from those of their journeymen and apprentices. Nor was their movement completely autonomous since the deference they displayed permitted elements within the employing and governing class to manipulate them. Those engaged in such manipulation pursued the interests of their own social group, however sincerely they invoked the values of paternalism. Indeed, the dominant pattern of conflict followed a traditional vertical arrangement; a hint of modern class conflict emerged only in the strike's final phase.
Asquith's Choice: The May Coalition and the Coming of Conscription, 1915–1916
Authors: Adams R. J. Q.
Published: February 2004

The enactment into law in January 1916 of the first installment of mandatory military service in modern British history was an event whose importance few scholars dispute. While invariably considered a significant break in the British political and military tradition, recent scholarship has tended to treat the passage of the first Military Service Act as an episode that has little new to tell us about the political rivalry within the coalition cabinet presided over by Herbert Henry Asquith since May 1915. No student of the compulsory service debate can deny that he has been warned off, as Lord Beaverbrook wrote in the late 1920s that close study of the politics of conscription in the Asquith coalition would be “tedious to the last degree.” Most forbidding was the judgment of Lord Blake in his life of the Conservative leader Andrew Bonar Law: “The question of conscription would indeed be a tedious topic to pursue through all its ramifications. The endless discussions, the attitudes taken by public men at various times, the compromises, the disputes, constitute a chapter in English history to which, no doubt in years to come dull history professors will direct their duller research students.”

Many historians of the world war who have found the subject less dull than implied above have concluded that it presents a straightforward story: the implementation of conscription came about because the traditional policy of voluntarism had proven insufficient to raise an army of adequate size. The episode has been judged essentially a triumph of the Tory right wing (with the collusion of the maverick Liberal David Lloyd George) over orthodox Liberalism.
The Arguments in King's Bench in 1629 concerning the Imprisonment of John Selden and Other Members of the House of Commons
Authors: Reeve John
Published: February 2004

The demonstration in the House of Commons on March 2, 1629, by Sir John Eliot, John Selden, and several other members was an event with the most serious implications. Their protest against the Arminian movement in the English church and against the levying of Tonnage and Poundage without the consent of Parliament was in fact an appeal to the country over the head of the king's government. One is inclined to agree with Conrad Russell that this act was potentially revolutionary. Its immediate consequence was a stoppage of trade and a widespread refusal to pay customs duties, at a time of desperate royal financial need. On March 3, Eliot, Selden, and seven other members of the Commons were summoned to appear before the Privy Council, where they were later interrogated as to the meaning of their words and actions. When questioned, most of them appealed to parliamentary privilege, four (including Eliot) refusing absolutely to answer any question concerning matters in the House. Two of the delinquents, Coryton and Hayman, submitted themselves to the king and were released. The remaining seven were detained. The prosecution of these men by the Caroline regime was an important political episode too lengthy to be dealt with here in its entirety. But one aspect of these proceedings is worthy of examination in its own right. The hearings in King's Bench on the return of the prisoners' writs of habeas corpus have not received the attention and the analysis they deserve.
The Tory Newtonians: Gregory, Pitcairne, and Their Circle
Authors: Guerrini Anita
Published: February 2004

In the late 1680s, Archibald Pitcairne and David Gregory became devotees of Newton's natural philosophy. In the next decade, they formed the nexus of a scientific circle composed of their students. These men emerge as a specific group from the wider circle of Newton's followers for several reasons, having to do with kinship and community relationships as well as with shared intellectual beliefs. Gregory and, through him, Pitcairne were among the first to recognize Newton's achievement in thePrincipia. From their base in Edinburgh, later extending to Oxford and Leiden, they inspired several young men, including John and James Keill, John Freind, George Cheyne, George Hepburn, and William Cockburn. Gregory has long been recognized as a central figure among Newtonians, in part owing to his copious memoranda, but Pitcairne's significance both as an intellectual and as a catalyst has been neglected by historians. When one focuses on Gregory and Pitcairne and their notebooks and correspondence, as well as their published works, a well-defined group emerges around them who shared several characteristics. Politically, they were Tories. In religion, they were High Church Anglicans who valued the episcopacy and those points of ritual and doctrine that distinguished the English church from nonconformity. With the exception of John Freind, these men were Scots and shared kinship ties as well as geographic origin in the east and northeast of Scotland. Finally, all the members of this group were at least nominally physicians. Only one of them, John Keill, probably did not practice medicine, but he too took a medical degree.
A Powerful Sympathy: Terror, the Prison, and Humanitarian Reform in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain
Authors: McGowen Randall
Published: February 2004

It is felt that men are henceforth to be held together by new ties, and separated by new barriere; for the ancient bonds will now no longer unite, nor the ancient boundaries confine. [J. S. Mill, “The Spirit of the Age” (1831)]

I

“The punishment of death shocks every mind to which it is vividly presented,” wrote Edward Gibbon Wakefield in 1832. It “overturns the most settled notions of right and wrong.” H. G. Bennet announced in Parliament in 1820 that he thought an execution “weakened the moral taste or sensibility of the people.” Such high-minded but platitudinous phrases frequently recurred in the early nineteenth-century debate over the criminal law, though historians have had a difficult time knowing what to make of them. Yet for all their vagueness such expressions do reveal a sensibility whose outline we can trace and whose influence we can measure. In drawing a connection between feeling and morality Wakefield appealed to social assumptions and values that were popular among humanitarians. Criminal law reformers proposed a new and exacting standard for the administration of justice: “Punishment,” argued James Scarlett, “ought to be consonant to the feelings and sympathies of mankind; and … those feelings ought to be enlisted on the side of the administration of justice.” They argued that the heavy reliance on the death penalty was a mistaken policy. The gallows aroused dangerous passions that signaled the existence of intractable social antagonism. They opposed such a spectacle with reforms that aimed at the promotion of a social union founded on shared feeling.
The Politics of Eighteenth-Century British History
Authors: Colley Linda
Published: February 2004

Britain's “long” eighteenth century, which began with one aristocratic revolution in 1688 and ended with another in 1832, was a pageant of success. The nation's art and architecture reached their elegant and original best. Its capital became the center of print culture, finance, fashion, and commercial creativity, the largest and most vibrant city in the Western world. The British constitution became a topic for eulogy, as much by the unenlightened and illiterate at home as by the Enlightenment literati abroad. The armed forces, fiscal system, and bureaucracy of the British state grew in efficacy and range, bringing victory in all but one of a succession of major wars. Legitimized by achievement and buttressed by massive economic and political power, Britain's landed elite kept at bay every domestic revolution except the industrial one, which only enriched it more. The American Revolution, of course, was not averted; but while this crisis embarrassed the British Empire, it did not destroy it. Even before 1776, the conquest of Canada had reduced the thirteen colonies' strategic significance, just as their profitability to the mother country had been outstripped by its Indian possessions; their final loss was made up, and more than made up, with relentless and almost contemptuous speed. Between 1780 and 1820 some 150 million men and women in India, Africa, the West Indies, Java, and the China coast succumbed to British naval power and trading imperatives.
The Crime Wave: Recent Writing on Crime and Criminal Justice in Eighteenth-Century England
Authors: Innes Joanna , Styles John
Published: February 2004

One of the most exciting and influential areas of research in eighteenth-century history over the last fifteen years has been the study of crime and the criminal law. It is the purpose of this essay to map the subject for the interested nonspecialist: to ask why historians have chosen to study it, to explain how they have come to approach it in particular ways, to describe something of what they have found, to evaluate those findings, and to suggest fruitful directions for further research. Like all maps, the one presented here is selective. The essay begins with a general analysis of the ways in which the field has developed and changed in its short life. It then proceeds to consider in more detail four areas of study: criminality, the criminal trial, punishment, and criminal legislation. This selection makes no pretense of providing an exhaustive coverage. A number of important areas have been omitted: for example, public order and policing. However, the areas covered illustrate the range of approaches, problems, and possibilities that lie within the field. The essay concludes with a discussion of the broader implications of the subject.

The Development of the Field

Before the 1960s crime was not treated seriously by eighteenth-century historians. Accounts of crime and the criminal law rarely extended beyond a few brief remarks on lawlessness, the Bloody Code, and the state of the prisons, often culled from Fielding, Hogarth, and Howard. There were exceptions, but they fell outside the mainstream of eighteenth-century history. The multiple volumes of Leon Radzinowicz's monumentalHistory of the English Criminal Law and Its Administration from 1750began to appear in 1948, but Radzinowicz worked in the Cambridge Law Faculty and the Institute of Criminology, and, as Derek Beales has pointed out, his findings were not quickly assimilated by historians.
British Society in the Eighteenth Century
Authors: Houston Robert Allan
Published: February 2004

The volume of publications on social history in the last decade has been enormous. The Royal Historical Society'sAnnual Bibliography of British Historycontains hundreds of new items each year, so many that keeping up with the latest research is almost impossible except within limited fields. The very quantity of material is a testament to the success of what has been termed the “new social history.” Taking as its focus the lives of the masses, this approach employs concepts and techniques drawn from cognate disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, and statistics to uncover the rich complexity of everyday life in the past. New interests, new methods, and a fresh look at underused primary sources: these are the hallmarks. This is not to say that it is a homogeneous “movement” since there are vigorous debates about central issues such as the use of theory and about the correct balance between quantification and traditional qualitative, intuitive approaches.

The new social history has had a profound effect on the way in which all historians deal with their subject and even on its critics. That social history has arrived as a leader in historical analysis is amply attested by G. R. Elton's recent call to political historians not to accept reduction to the status of its poor cousins. The subject's position is assured, and its achievements have been substantial. This article deals with the main areas of research in social history: population, social structure, education and literacy, women, religion, and the family.
An Empire of Goods: The Anglicization of Colonial America, 1690–1776
Authors: Breen T. H.
Published: February 2004

Just before Christmas 1721 William Moore, described in court records as “a Pedler or Petty Chapman,” arrived in the frontier community of Berwick, Maine. Had Moore bothered to purchase a peddler's license, we would probably know nothing of his visit. He was undone by success. His illicit sales drew the attention of local authorities, and they confiscated Moore's “bagg or pack of goods.” From various witnesses the magistrates learned that the man came to Berwick with “sundry goods and Merchandizes for Saile & that he has Travelled from town to town Exposeing said Goods to Sale and has Sold to Sundry persons.”

The people of Berwick welcomed Moore to their isolated community. One can almost imagine the villagers, most of them humble farmers, rushing to Phillip Hubbard's house to examine the manufactured goods that the peddler had transported from Boston. Daniel Goodwin, for example, purchased “a yard and halfe of Stuff for handcarchiefs.” Sarah Gooding could not forgo the opportunity to buy some muslin, fine thread, and black silk. She also bought “a yard and Quarter of Lase for a Cap.” Patience Hubbard saw many things that she wanted, but in the end she settled for a “pare of garters.” Her neighbor, Sarah Stone, took home a bundle of “smole trifles.” None of the purchases amounted to more than a few pennies.

Colonial American historians have understandably overlooked such trifling transactions. They have concentrated instead on the structure of specific communities, and though they have taught us much about the people who lived in villages such as Berwick, they have generally ignored the social and economic ties that connected colonists to men and women who happened to dwell in other places.
Old Wine in Old Bottles: Recent Contributions to British Foreign Policy and European International Politics, 1789–1848
Authors: Schroeder Paul W.
Published: February 2004

This review article has a conventional purpose, namely, to assess the contributions made by thirteen recent books, most by British historians, to the history of British foreign policy and the European states system during the revolutionary, Napoleonic, and post-Napoleonic eras. There is, however, a problem. None of the books is conventional diplomatic history. Almost half relate only indirectly to foreign policy, while for the remainder foreign policy constitutes only part of their subject matter. The review therefore consciously runs two risks: that of judging the books by inappropriate standards and that of drawing conclusions about current historiography in this field and period from an inappropriate sample. The reader will have to judge whether the results justify the procedure.

Geoffrey Best's War and Society in Revolutionary Europe illustrates the problem. Best clearly succeeds in his goal of going beyond the study of military organizations to the study of war itself as a “unique human interest and activity.” The book is far-ranging, delightfully written, based on wide reading, and packed with insights. It also contributes substantially to the history of international politics, mainly by demonstrating how powerful an impact armies and combat had. Yet from the political historian's standpoint there is ground for some frustration as well as for pleasure. Best's descriptions of how armies developed from the Old Regime into the nineteenth century and his analyses of the impact of war in 1792–1815 are excellent for France and Britain and adequate for Prussia and Spain.