bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Loyal Brotherhood and the Cocoa Tree: The London Organization of the Tory Party, 1727–1760
Authors: Colley Linda J.
Published: June 2009

In the light of previous historiography any reference to tory organization in the mid-eighteenth century is likely to seem a contradiction in terms. In the Enid Muir Lecture of 1954, Sir Lewis Namier argued that by the 1750s ‘tory’ had become effectively redundant as a party name: that the term could no longer be used to describe a particular set of political beliefs, nor applied to any recognized group within parliament; that those few individual M.P.'s who still called themselves tories should more properly be regarded as independent country gentlemen: ‘a nationwide group without a leader or programme or deeper coherence’. As Namier went on to remark, hardly any political correspondence between leading tories has survived for the period after 1715. The consequent temptation for historians to rely either on the ill-informed and frequently contemptuous assessments of the tory party supplied by whig observers, or to assume that the lack of any easily available evidence presupposes a concomitant paucity of tory organization, has usually proved irresistible.
Parties, Members and Voters after 1867: A Local Study
Authors: Garrard John A.
Published: June 2009

This article is a byproduct of a large-scale research project on the politics of Salford since 1830. In a sense, it shows what can happen to an historian when working amongst political scientists, for the article attempts to apply a few of the latter's concerns, and ways of looking at the world, to a specific historical situation. Though the raw material for the article is almostentirely historical, I hope that its themes will be of interest to people in both disciplines.
Liberal Politics and the Grey Conspiracy of 1921
Authors: Bentley Michael
Published: June 2009

The possibility of Viscount Grey's return to active political life after his resignation from the Foreign Office in 1916 is one which historians have treated with understandable scepticism. Grey's well-documented distaste for political intrigue, his love of things pastoral and aesthetic, his failing health in general and eyesight in particular and hispatent joy at being released from office in 1916 lend force to the thoughtthat he was never likely to be brought back to the world of politics. ‘[H]e was always too blind and often too ill to lead a party, or to aspire to office,’ his friend and biographer G. M. Trevelyan wrote a few years after Grey's death; and more recendy Professor Robbins, whilst he concedes that there was a political dimension within Grey's make-up which Trevelyan was wont to ignore, likewise examines the period after 1916 rather dismissively. One consequence of this view of Grey's political biography has been the neglect of what has been seen to be an attempt on the part of some Liberals to remove Asquith from the leadership of the Liberal party in 1921 and to substitute Grey. The assumption has been that because Grey personally was likely to have been a poor conspirator, conspiracies involving him must have been unpromising or trivial. It is, on the contrary, the point of this article to suggest that the Grey conspiracy of 1921 should be seen as a significant development in the three-party situation which characterized post-war politics; and to argue that the conspiracy had little to do with Grey and a great deal to do with other politicians, of diverse background, party affiliation, position and ambition, who were looking for a new way to obtain some purchase on the politics of the centre.
The Earl of Tyrconnel and James II's Irish Policy, 1685–1688
Authors: Miller John
Published: June 2009

The wars in Ireland in 1689–91 have attracted considerable attention from historians, most recently in the fine study by Dr Simms, but what happened in Ireland while James II was still on the English throne has been comparatively neglected. One major reason is that evidence on this period is patchy and often unreliable. Of the state papers, the last letter in the Public Record Office from one of James's chief governors is dated 31 August 1686, although the second earl of Clarendon's own copies of his letters while lord lieutenant continue until his return to England early in 1687. Only a handful of Tyrconnel's letters from this period survive. Copies of Irish letters sent by James and his secretary of state, the earl of Sunderland, can be found in the secretaries' letter books, but copies of their more confidential letters were not entered. Sunderland was careful to destroy incriminating material at the Revolution, so much of what survives is routine and innocuous. For the rest, the Ormond papers, a mine of information for half a century of Irish history, peter out after 1686. Thomas Sheridan's ‘Narrative’ is well informed and, I think basically reliable, but its usefulness is reduced by its imprecise chronology. Strict control of the press in 1685–8 ensured that few pamphlets of Irish interest were published, while few of those produced after 1688 have much other than polemic to offer the historian of James's reign.
The Politics of Conquest: the British in Western Kenya, 1894–1908
Authors: Lonsdale J. M.
Published: June 2009

This is a study of a colonial situation in its making, at ground level. It offers an analysis of a forcible process of political accumulation, the means whereby their British conquerors came to terms with the peoples of western Kenya, and a prerequisite for the pursuit of capital accumulation, the appropriation of economic resources from the native peoples of Kenya to the benefit of its British colonists. The case of western Kenya offers no paradigm for the European occupation of the rest of the African continent. Nor can any other case. The relative weights of subjugation and accommodation, of rupture and continuity within conquest – of such great influence on the structure and texture of the colonial era which followed – were governed by too many variables. Brief mention of only four of them will be enough to indicate some of the pitfalls of generalization, even generalization about difference.
‘Unhallowed Wedlocks’: the Regulation of Marriage during the English Revolution
Authors: Durston Chris
Published: June 2009

Most seventeenth-century English historians and analysts of periods of revolutionary activity, have viewed events in England between 1640 and 1660 as, at most, a failed political revolution which, while it may have temporarily transformed the political institutions of the English state, had little lasting impact on the everyday lives of its inhabitants. Repeated emphasis of this fact, however, has tended to obscure another important aspect of these years – the concerted efforts of successive puritan governments during the 1640s and 1650s to make substantial alterations in the accepted cultural norms of seventeenth-century English society. More recently this latter point has been highlighted in the work of historians like John Morrill, who has investigated the attempt to impose an alien presbyterian religious system on the country, and David Underdown, who has described puritan efforts to regularize and restrict the more unruly elements of rural popular culture. They have shown that, although such reformist initiatives were unpopular and often resisted, they nevertheless represented a determined thrust for cultural change, and in the short term were seen by many as a real intrusion and a serious threat to traditional practice.
Policing the Cold War: The Emergence of New Police Structures in Europe 1946–1953
Authors: Jenkins Philip
Published: June 2009

We have recently been reminded of the existence of a ‘missing dimension’ in national security affairs, namely the whole question of secret intelligence and clandestine operations. It can also be suggested that the question of internal security has traditionally represented another gap, though one that occurs for very different reasons. Traditionally, secret intelligence was often unavailable as a subject for comment or academic study precisely because of its secrecy. Internal security included some areas of sensitive political surveillance that fell into the same category; but continued across the spectrum to regular uniformed police work, a subject apparently too mundane and obvious for inclusion in accounts of political history. Police of all categories belong, it seems, to social rather than political history – the world of ‘history with the politics left out’.
Women and Politics in Early Tudor England
Authors: Harris Barbara J.
Published: June 2009

Political historians working on the early Tudor period have traditionally concentrated on institutions – monarchy, council, parliament, courts, and administrative bodies – that excluded women. The very definition of politics underlying the dominant historiography has thus made it seem both natural and inevitable to write history as if the world of high politics, the world that really counted, were exclusively male.
Revolution as Vendetta: Patriotism in Piedmont, 1794–1821
Authors: Broers Michael
Published: June 2009

It is an irony that so much of the major historiography of the revolutionary era outside France has succeeded – often unintentionally – in reducing the role of the patriots to a marginal one, peripheral to the impact of the French revolution on western Europe and devoid of importance for the policies of successive French regimes. There have been two main reasons for this, although many recent works have begun to dispel this image. The first has been an exaggerated concentration on the ideology of the ‘Jacobins’, which inevitably reduces the study of patriotism to that of a handful of powerless intellectual cliques, most of whose adherents were, indeed, swept away by the advent of the Consulate in 1799 and were seldom taken seriously by the French before then. These men were far from central to the history of the period, and the undue attention they have received from ideologically motivated historians has been properly criticized. However, the critics themselves have often compounded the misconception surrounding the phenomenon of patriotism, exactly because they have adopted the narrow conception of patriotism inherited from their opponents, the shared acceptance of a definition of the patriots as an intellectual clique. By concentrating on the ideas of a minority, this approach simply leaves out too many people, and fails to encompass the phenomenon of practical, political collaboration with the French, something quite different from an ideological commitment to the French revolution.
Rivalry between Germany and Italy in Croatia, 1942–1943
Authors: Trifković Srdjan
Published: June 2009

The Independent State of Croatia(Nezavisna Država Hrvatska,NDH),which came into being during Hitler'sBlitzkriegagainst Yugoslavia in April 1941, was nominally included in the Italian sphere of influence in the Balkans. It soon turned into an uneasy condominium, however, between its formal Italian mentors and the Germans. Italian influence was largely symbolic, while German officers, experts of all profiles, businessmen and officials were prominent in Zagreb from the outset. Mussolini was deeply mistrustful of German intentions, and suspected that Germany sought a leading role in Croatia in spite of Hitler's assurances to the contrary. Nevertheless, the Italians could not devise a strategy to bring their nominal Croatian protégés to heel.

While there is no evidence of a German ‘grand design’ to undermine Italy's aspìrations in the Balkans, it is certain that the Germans never intended to give up their leading role in the economic sphere. By early 1942 they secured control over all key natural resources of the NDH and most of its industrial capacity, often acting behind their Italian partners' backs in pursuit of their objectives.

Also in 1942 theWehrmachtmade a strong bid to bring Croatian armed forces under its command and control. While this caused some intra-German disputes, and was resisted by the foreign ministry, it proved ultimately successful due to the rise of insurgency which threatened strategic interests of the Axis. Again, Italian claims to precedence were disregarded.

The most serious dispute between Italy and Germany in the NDH concerned large joint antiinsurgency operations in the first half of 1943, and the Italians' refusal to give up their links with theČetniks.The breakdown of Italo-German military co-operation in the NDH reflected a deeper malaise of the intra-Axis relationship. It was founded upon different assumptions and objectives, but such differences remained unstated. The rivalry between Germany and Italy in Croatia vividly reflected this deeper schism between the ultimate objectives of Mussolini and his brutal Teutonic friend.
Dating the digression in Milton'sHistory of Britain
Authors: von Maltzahn Nicholas
Published: June 2009

I should first thank Professor Woolrych for his attention to my book, and also for his generous conduct in anticipating debate over his views. In particular I am grateful for his correction of a historical point on which my book proves in error: the readmission of conformist members in the first weeks of the Rump Parliament did not much extend to secluded members, and thus the backsliding of the revolutionaries after Pride's Purge and the king's trial may have been less troubling to Milton than I supposed. On this point I had mistaken Underdown and Worden's description of the revolutionaries' compromise, and had partially misunderstood their conclusion that ‘the damage to the revolutionary cause…had already been done by the end of February’. Here Woolrych now shows me wrong. But although this changes the balance it does not change the substance of my argument about Milton's stern note in theHistory. For as Woolrych renews the issue of the dating of the Digression from Milton'sHistory, he again misreads that text and its context in the larger work. He believes it an expression of despair, and thinks such despair on Milton's part could only be occasioned by the national apostasy at the Restoration. But Milton, both in the contemporaryTenure of Kings and Magistrates(1649) as well as in later tracts, proves much less sanguine about English hopes than even the passages Woolrych cites will support. The Presbyterians, whom theTenureattacks in the same terms as the Digression, were not the only problem faced by the ‘uprighter sort’ of magistrates and those ‘people, though in number less by many, in whom faction least hath prevaild above the Law of nature and right reason’.
Recasting Utopia: Montesquieu, Rousseau and the Polish constitution of 3 May 1791
Authors: Lukowski Jerzy
Published: June 2009

Between the sixteenth and eighteengh centuries, the nobility of the Polish–Lithuanian commonwealth had developed an ideology of extreme individualism and libertarianism, within a correspondingly weak and decentralized state structure. The first partition of 1772 starkly revealed the weaknesses of the Polish polity, but any hopes of major political overhaul were frustrated by the dead hand of Russian ambassadorial policing. The war of 1787–92 with Turkey proved a temporary distraction for Russia, which the Polish parliament of 1788–92 showed itself only partly capable of exploiting. Factional conflicts and a wary conservatism hampered reforms: the ideas of Montesquieu and Rousseau, which closely complemented so many aspects of traditional Polish noble ideology, seemed to offer the most acceptable way forward, culminating in the constitution of 3 May 1791, a compromise between enlightened idealism and political pragmatism.
Gerrard Winstanley and the Digger movement in Walton and Cobham
Authors: Gurney John
Published: June 2009

There has been disagreement among historians about the nature of the local response to the Diggers in Surrey, and about the relative importance of popular hostility and gentry-led opposition in the defeat of the Digger movement. It is argued here that a distinction must be made between the Diggers' reception in Walton and their treatment in Cobham: popular opposition was much in evidence in Walton, where the Diggers were treated as outsiders, but the response of Cobham's inhabitants was more ambivalent: some of Winstanley's most active fellow Diggers were Cobham inhabitants, and in this parish it was the local gentry who took the lead in the campaign against them. It is argued that the existence of a degree of local support for Winstanley was in part a reflection of Cobham's long tradition of landlord/tenant conflict, of the absence of a settled minister during the 1640s, and of the hardships experienced in the area in the aftermath of civil war.
The Army, Politics and Public Order in Directorial Provence, 1795–1800
Authors: Devlin Jonathan D.
Published: June 2009

Under the French Directory the line army was called into many parts of France to protect law and order and to shore up the regime. The authors of regional studies in the period have alluded to military presence but have failed to draw general inferences about the importance of military policing. The political ambitions of commanders-in-chief of fighting armies after the fall of Robespierre and the nature and history of operations have long been the subject of historical research, but no-one has yet investigated the nature of relations between civil and military authorities in any part of the interior that was not a war zone. The line army had been used in a policing role during the old regime and the early years of the revolution, but the advent of war in 1792 removed it to the frontiers. This suited revolutionary governments which were uncertain of its loyalty and uneasy about the reduction of discipline. In 1793 and 1794 revolutionary order was imposed instead by an increasingly centralized network of civilian elites and militias – revolutionary armies, committees, tribunals and representatives on mission – which operated by means of intimidation and civic denunciation. The dismantling of this apparatus of Terror in the year III (late 1794/5) in favour of a liberal constitution which breathed new life into the elective institutions of local government unleashed an anarchy of frustrated aspirations and hatreds born out of the turbulence of the revolutionary experience. Individuals and factions vied for control of local judicial and executive positions in order to make up revolutionary losses and to keep out their enemies.
Malthus on the Prospects for the Labouring Poor
Authors: Wrigley E. A.
Published: June 2009

In the penultimate chapter of St Matthew's gospel, immediately before the account of the betrayal by Judas, the story is told of a visit which Jesus paid to the house of Simon the leper. As he sat eating a woman came and poured a precious ointment over his head. The disciples were indignant, saying, in the words of King James's bible, ‘To what purpose is this waste? For this ointment might have been sold for much, and given to the poor. When Jesus understood it, he said unto them, why trouble ye the woman for she hath wrought a good work upon me? For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always’.
Hiding history: the Allies, the Resistance and the others in Occupied Italy 1943–1945
Authors: Absalom Roger
Published: June 2009

Of the almost 80,000 prisoners-of-war held by Italy at the time of the Armistice with the Allies of 8 September 1943, more than half succeeded in escaping and almost 18,000 were not recaptured, largely due to the help offered spontaneously by Italian civilians. The records of the Allied Screening Commission preserved in Washington, and other official papers available in England, South Africa and Australia, complemented by oral history fieldwork among former escapers and their Italian helpers, reveal an Anglo-Italian epic of anti-heroism, whose protagonists nevertheless displayed great courage, ingenuity, perseverance and humanity.

Exploration of this neglected but critical dimension of the secret history of the years of occupation and resistance between 1943 and 1945 throws new light upon the characteristics and the long-term potential of a submerged nation of peasants, charcoal-burners and shepherds. The article is an attempt to historicise their expression of an often overlooked but universal peasant culture of survival, far deeper at the time than political commitment, but not without ultimate political importance.
Labour repression in the American South: corporation, state, and race in Alabama's coal fields, 1917–1921
Authors: Feldman Glenn
Published: June 2009

This article is a case study of labour strife in the Alabama coal fields from 1917 to 1921. It speaks to the broader issue of labour repression in the American South by examining the patterns of repression in one industry and in one state. Several revisionist works have been written recently refuting the alleged distinctiveness of the South on the labour issue. This article supplies evidence for a surprising degree of labour militancy; the type of militancy that has been used to buttress revisionist interpretations of the similarity of southern labour to that of other American regions. In this study, however, labour militancy is understood more as a function of the desperation of southern workers confronted with distinctive issues and degrees of racial acrimony, communal antipathy toward labour, and the advantageous position of southern coal operators vis-a-vis their northern counterparts. In the face of overwhelming odds of governmental, business, press, religious, communal, and legal opposition, Alabama coal miners mounted a militant, prolonged, and biracial protest against what have been described as the worst conditions in the United States at that time.
Illusions of Grandeur and Reform at the Jacobean Court: Cranfield and the Ordnance
Authors: Young Michael B.
Published: June 2009

Several administrative reforms in the reign of James I are commonly associated with the name of Lionel Cranfield. One such reform is supposed to have occurred in the ordnanceoffice in 1620, though curiously little is known about it. The two principal accounts of the ordnance project are contained in the well-known studies of Cranfield by R. H. Tawney and Menna Prestwich.1 From these two accounts it is possible to glean only a few apparent facts; and these can be stated briefly as follows. The ordnance project is alleged to have been carried out by a special commission appointed in November of 1618 or 1619. Although several officers of the ordnance were included on this commission, they apparently offered no resistance to the reform of their own office. And, finally, the recommendations of the commission are assumed to have been implemented with the result that in 1621 King James was able to report to parliament that ordnance expenditure had been reduced from £34,000 to £14,000 annually.2 The first objective of the present article is to show that all of these assumptions about the ordnance reform of 1620 are mistaken. The second objective is to provide a new account of the ordnance project that is more consistent with the existing evidence. A final objective is to shed new light on the career and impeachment of Lionel Cranfield. Cranfield's career lends itself quite naturally to heroic narrative. His attempt to stave off financial disaster by reforming many departments, including the household, navy, and wardrobe, has the appearance of a Herculean undertaking.
The Scottish Office and The Special Areas in the 1930s
Authors: Campbell R. H.
Published: June 2009

In 1934 two commissioners (for England and Wales and for Scotland) were appoineted to tackle the problems caused by high and Persistent unemploed in areas dependent on a narrow and depressed range of industriues. These Statutory Special Areas were only some of the most depressed parts of the country, in scotland largely west-central Scotaland but excluding Glasgow. defects in the policies adopted, and in their implementation by the commissioners, are well known, especially their alleged failure to encourage adequatelythe newindustrial development the special Areas needed. Certainly the powers and the financial provision given tio the commissioners in 1934 were slight, but they were increased in new legislation in 1937 and had little time to become effective before the outbreak of war. In addition, lack of success, especially in the end towards which the policies were directed as much as because of their own inadequacy or insufficiency. the end, justifiable in the conditions of the 1930s, was to releive unemployement, not to encourage a distinctive policy of regional industrial diversification. The Report of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population Suggested a new direction in 1940, but its views were applied as part of an overall strategy only in the 1960s. A comment of 1952 may be applied from the pre-war years throughout the 1950s. Only the name of the special Areas had been changed.
The Genesis of the Anglo-American Committee on Palestine, November 1945: a case study in the Assertion of American Hegemony
Authors: Cohen Michael J.
Published: June 2009

The Anglo-American Committee, whose appointment was announced on 13 November 1945, had its origins in a purely British initiative: an ad hoc, spur-of-the-moment attempt to associate the United States responsibly with British policy in Palestine. However, this committee did not succeed, any more than had its many predecessors, in finding a solution to the Palestine problem palatable to all parties. Nor did it bring relief to the mass of refugees wasting away in displaced-persons camps in Europe. Its vigorous rejection of partition was shortly to be brushed aside by a different kind of logic, that of force majeure.
Radicalism and the Victorian Working Class: the Case of Samuel Bamford
Authors: Hewitt Martin
Published: June 2009

Samuel Bamford has an ambivalent status in the canon of nineteenth-century labour history. The unparalleled view of working-class life at the turn of the nineteenth century provided by his autobiographical volumes Early days and Passages in the life of a radical, have made him, according to E. P. Thompson, ‘the greatest chronicler of 19th century radicalism’, and ‘essential reading for any Englishman’ These books have been described as two of ‘the minor classics of Victorian literature’ All modern studies of the radicalism of the first two decades of the nineteenth century rely to some degree on his colourful reminiscences of the period. Yet after his prominent role in the events leading up to Peterloo, Bamford's career, not least its virulent anti-chartism, have tainted him with reformism, and left him to be invoked as an example of the weaknesses and limitations of early nineteenth-century working-class political assertion. Hence, in contrast to Thompson, John Belchem has talked about ‘the well-thumbed autobiographies of certain “respectable” and unrepresentative working class radicals’ and the ‘apostasy’ of the ‘renegade Samuel Bamford’. In the context of the 1840s John Walton describes him as a ‘former radical’, and Martha Vicinus has portrayed him as one of a group whose ‘works are largely inoffensive portrayals of established values’.
Politics, Patronage and Newtonianism: the Cambridge Example
Authors: Gascoigne John
Published: June 2009

Oxford has never quite recovered from Matthew Arnold's description of his belovedalma materas a ‘home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs, and unpopular names and impossible loyalties’. 1 While in popular stereotype Oxford is associated with such movements as the laudians, the Jacobites and the tractarians, Cambridge, by contrast, is seen as the home of more radical and reformist creeds: the puritans, the latitudinarians and the academic reformers of the nineteenth century. Consequently, we are predisposed to think it unremarkable that in the early eighteenth century Cambridge almost totally shed the last vestiges of the scholastic academic order which had its origins in the Tiigh middle ages and, in its place, adopted a style of education which, in its overriding emphasis on mathematics, departed significantly from the curriculum offered at Oxford.
J. S. Mill and Irish Land: a Reassessment
Authors: Kinzer Bruce L.
Published: June 2009

Lynn Zastoupil, in his article ‘Moral Government: J. S. Mill on Ireland’, (Historical Journal, 26, 3 (Sept. 1983)), has made an important contribution to our understanding of the sources and character of Mill's views on Ireland. He is right to suggest that insufficient attention has been paid to the lengthy series of Morning Chronicle leaders written by Mill in response to the Famine. No less instructive is his emphasis on the centrality of moral regeneration to Mill's political and ethical enterprise. Ably analysing the evolution of Mill's opinions on Ireland between the 1840s and late 1860s, Mr Zastoupil effectively demonstrates the way in which Mill's changing position on the issue was at each stage informed by a fundamental moral purpose. What his article does not fully convey, however, is the extent to which the expression of that purpose was shaped and conditioned not only by Mill's assessment of Irish circumstances at any particular time, but also by a certain tension and ambivalence in his attitude towards Ireland and her people.
Military Recruiting and the British Labour Force during the First World War
Authors: Dewey P. E.
Published: June 2009

During the First World War, Britain was obliged for the first time for over a century to raise a mass army. Initially, this seemed to raise no insuperable problem; by the end of 1914, slightly over one million men had enlisted. Thereafter, however, civilian enthusiasm waned, and the government had to employ other means to stimulate the flow of recruits – alteration of the military service age limits and, later, the introduction of compulsory military service. Taken together, voluntary recruiting and conscription permitted the raising and maintenance of a mass army. By the time of the armistice on 11 November t 1918, almost five million men had entered the army, and a further half million had entered the two other services.
The Working Class and State ‘Welfare’ in Britain, 1880–1914
Authors: Thane Pat
Published: June 2009

Some years ago Henry Pelling offered one of his stimulating and provocative challenges to a conventional wisdom of labour history. He pointed out that it is often assumed that the significant extensions of the welfare activities of the state by the post-1906 Liberal governments were in some way associated with the growth of the organized labour movement; that they were, if not simply responses to pressure from Labour (which has rarely been seriously argued), at least supported and welcomed by a significant proportion of the working class, and therefore could be expected by Liberal politicians to increase their credit with working-class voters, perhaps sufficiently to persuade them to resist the lure of Labour.
Law and Honour Among Eighteenth-Century British Army Officers
Authors: Gilbert Arthur N.
Published: June 2009

There can be no doubt that those who joined the officers corps in the eighteenth century became members of an exclusive club with its own distinctive values. These values were imposed on all members of the corps and, as is the case with most exclusive organizations, only a very few individuals were confident or perverse enough to challenge the group standards. The officers corps had an honour code; a set of principles which was informally enforced to ensure that each member soon learned proper from improper behaviour. When there were violations of the code the subaltern officers would bring peer group sanctions to bear in the form of social and professional ostracism until the offender cleared his name by removing the blot on his honour.
Conceptions of England and its Constitution in Nineteenth-Century French Political Thought
Authors: Jennings J. R.
Published: June 2009

References to England abound in nineteenth-century French political thought and what interested French writers about England varied enormously. English education, agriculture, religion, morals, national character, social structure: all figured in their writings. Very few failed to take note of England's rapid industrial growth and commercial power. England, in the words of Eugène Buret, was ‘le pays privilégié pour les études sociales’. Few Frenchmen, however, developed an enthusiastic admiration for English philosophy in this period. Yet there was one prevailing and predominant theme in French writings about England.
The Conservative Party and the Formation of the National Government: August 1931
Authors: Ball Stuart
Published: June 2009

On 24 August 1931 the prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, tendered the resignation of the second Labour government. In its place he became the premier of an all-party ‘National’ cabinet. This included both the leader of the Conservative party, Stanley Baldwin, and the acting-leader of the Liberal party, Sir Herbert Samuel, together with a number of their senior colleagues. This temporary emergency administration went on to win a landslide majority in the general election of October 1931, and to govern for the ensuing decade. The crisis which created the National government has proved to be of enduring fascination, as a result of its intrinsic interest as the major political crisis of the inter-war period and its profound consequences for subsequent British history. However, historical attention has been principally focused upon the problems of the Labour government, the decisions of Ramsay MacDonald, and the contribution of King George V. As a result the role of the Conservative party – often portrayed as having been the sole benefactor from these events – has been either neglected for its supposed passivity or misunderstood in its mood and intention.
The Lord Lieutenancy on the Eve of the Civil Wars: The Impressment of George Plowright
Authors: Stater Victor L.
Published: June 2009

How and why did the civil wars begin? Were they the result of fortuitous circumstances – rebellion in Scotland and Ireland and financial crisis? Were they the product of an inexorable, inevitable slide which began at some indeterminate date in the 1620s (or indeed before)? Or does the answer lie somewhere between these two extremes?
The Queen's Letter of 1865 and British Policy towards Emancipation and Indentured Labour in the West Indies, 1830–1865
Authors: Knox Bruce
Published: June 2009

Modern historians of the Jamaica rebellion of October 1865 have attached much causal importance to a document of 14 June the same year, known as ‘the Queen's Letter’. This was the official response to a petition in which ‘certain poor people’ of St Ann's parish in the island had naively asked their sovereign for ‘a quantity of land’ and other means of relief from distress. Drafted by Henry Taylor, clerk and senior clerk in the West India department, of the colonial office since the mid-1820s, and approved by permanent under-secretary Sir Frederic Rogers and secretary of state Edward Cardwell, it has acquired an unmitigatedly bad reputation. It is not merely that it was naturally based on the knowledge that no imperial funds or other competence existed or could exist for relieving the consequences even of admittedly bad seasons in colonies (or at home), but rather that it thrust austere advice upon the suffering petitioners. Any labouring population, it stated, whether in Jamaica or England, could provide against adversity only by ‘industry and prudence’: above all, by undertaking – what was understood to be notoriously lacking amongst creoles – regular work for wages. Even the most sympathetic critics have considered this to be ‘harsh’ and ‘callous’. One writes that it reflected the sentiments of an imperial bureaucracy whose expectations had been influenced by the remarkable changes in English society, whose attitudes were governed by evangelical propriety, and whose notions of progress were inextricably tied to productivity, trade figures, accumulating property, and the refinements which these entailed.
Political Opposition to Stalin and the Origins of the Terror in Russia, 1932–1936
Authors: Haslam Jonathan
Published: June 2009

There are few questions as intriguing and as baffling as the reasons for the terror unleashed upon the U.S.S.R. from 1936. The purpose of this paper is to reconsider the issue in the light of further research into the social, economic and political problems faced by Stalin from 1932.
The Bawdy House Riots of 1668
Authors: Harris Tim
Published: June 2009

Holidays and festivals were traditional occasions when the young men of early modern London indulged in carnivals of misrule. One of the most striking examples of these were the ritualized attacks on brothels by apprentices, which customarily took place on Shrove Tuesday. These rituals, which often involved quite extensive destruction to property, seem to have occurred with persistent regularity, at least in the early Stuart period, there being twenty-four known Shrove Tuesday riots in the thirty-five years between 1606 and 1641. Such activities normally received moderate handling from the authorities, and only in exceptional circumstances did the courts choose to punish the rioters with heavy fines or a period of imprisonment. Contemporaries, it seems, were familiar with, and to a certain extent tolerant of this ‘ancient administration of justice at Shrovetide’ by the apprentices, as James Harrington called it. Such feats were even acclaimed in popular literature as being a sign of the virtue of London's young men. In this context, the response of the authorities to apprentice attacks on bawdy houses that occurred in Easter week of 1668 seems excessive. Here, fifteen of the ringleaders were tried for high treason, on a rather dubious interpretation of the law, and four were eventually hanged, drawn and quartered.
Women in a Men's House the Women M.P.s, 1919–1945
Authors: Harrison Brian
Published: June 2009

‘Anybody who has bred horses will tell you’, the anti-feminist M.P. Major Falle informed M.P.s in 1923, when opposing women's full admission to Cambridge University, ‘that it is folly in the extreme to put colts and fillies together’. More subtle was the argument of Lord Hugh Cecil; concerned with what we now call the ‘chemistry’ of human relationships, he claimed that only a single-sex environment produces the ‘nervous intensity’ that launches major intellectual achievement and significant shifts in national opinion. Anti-feminist faith in segregation applied also to politics. Before 1918, parliament was what social anthropologists would now call a ‘men's house’ as with the kindred London clubs and colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, women's admission to it was slow and reluctant. If women wanted to participate in public life, it was argued, they should form clubs or parliaments of their own. Unlike some anti-feminists, Cecil's desire for segregation did not lead him to oppose votes for women because he saw the elector as simply an individual in a polling-booth, but he shared the anti-feminists' idea that the M.P. ‘resembles the limb of a body’, and so should be recruited solely from men. Nobody listened; within months of getting the vote, women (even unenfranchised women between 21 and 30) became eligible for parliament, and mixed universities eventually became the norm.
Communism in Modena: the Provincial Origins of the Partito Comunista Italiano (1943–1945)
Authors: Travis D. J.
Published: June 2009

Few fields of study are as frequently subject to revision as the history of contemporary politics. This is especially true for communist movements, where new interpretations constantly rework the old. The outpouring of recent work on the Partito comunista italiano (PCI) is a case in point. The peculiarity of Italian communism and the popularity of the PCI within Italy pose intriguing problems which have attracted the attention of many political scientists. In the search for answers to these questions, most authors also end up recounting the Party's history. Unfortunately, the inspiration for these projects is rarely historical per se, but is rather ‘scientific’, intended in the outdated sense of a discipline which extracts its subject from a specific environment in order the better to study it.
‘Mother, what did policemen do when there weren't any motors?’ The law, the police and the regulation of motor traffic in England, 1900–1939
Authors: Emsley Clive
Published: June 2009

The law had always been deployed by the police to regulate traffic, but the development of motor vehicles, travelling at much greater speeds than previous road traffic, constituted a problem of a new dimension. By the early 1920s the use of the law to control motor vehicles was jamming the magistrates' courts and creating friction, hitherto unknown, between the police and the middle classes. The paper explores the way in which, and the extent to which, the criminal law was used to control the motorist in the first third of the twentieth century. It takes issue with the whiggish view of law making, which understands laws as logical remedies for readily identifiable problems; it rejects equally the idea of seeing laws as inspired by class interest. Rather the motor traffic legislation fits better with the concept of the ‘policeman state’ which, according to V. A. C. Gatrell, developed from the late nineteenth century. At the same time the paper suggests that a scapegoat – ‘the road hog’ – was created as the focus for criticism in much the same way that other criminal scapegoats have been established; the offender thus ceased to be a member of society and became an outsider, threatening respectable law-abiding citizens.
Social Change and Military Revolution in Early Modern Europe: Some Danish Evidence
Authors: Jespersen Knud J. V.
Published: June 2009

There is general agreement among scholars of military history on the main features of military developments during the transition from the middle ages to the early modern period. A brief sketch of the broad outlines of these developments may therefore suffice as a preface to an investigation of Danish knight service in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The decisive factor in the medieval army was the fully armoured, lancebearing mounted knight. The battlefield was totally dominated by the combat technique of these bands of qualifizierten Einzelkämpfern, offensive combat at close quarters. The remaining forces, in contrast, functioned merely as auxiliaries to the main arm - the heavy mounted knights.
‘Commerce and Christianity’: Providence Theory, The Missionary Movement, and the Imperialism Of Free Trade, 1842–1860
Authors: Stanley Brian
Published: June 2009

In February 1842 a wealthy lay congregationalist named Thomas Thompson wrote to the secretaries of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society urging them to do more to interest the young and the working classes in the cause of foreign missions. Missionary advocates were needed, insisted Thompson, who couldshewto our manufacturing population that Christianity Civilization & Commerce are only synonimous terms - that the extension of the former will do more for a World recovery - the bonding of distant nations with a Love of amity & good will & do more for the employment ofhundredsof thousands, than all the Anti Corn leaguers can ever accomplish, even were they to realise all their members so fully anticipate, & we shall thus obtain the auxiliary aid of a class of countrymen, whom we have hitherto left to the worst foes of our species.
The National Assembly and the abolition of guilds in France
Authors: Fitzsimmons Michael P.
Published: June 2009

The hesitation with which the national assembly approached the issue of guilds has long puzzled historians. After apparently abolishing them on the night of 4 August 1789, the national assembly delayed any action on guilds for eighteen months. This study examines the reasons for the tentativeness of the national assembly and the factors that ultimately led it to take action in 1791. A fear of aggravating violence in the countryside led the national assembly initially to delay action against guilds. By the time the assembly was ready to act, however, it found itself stymied by one of its own committees, which refused to bring the matter forward. The equivocation of the assembly led to unrest in towns and villages, and that unrest, along with the need of the assembly to realize the new principles it had advanced, led to a pre-emptive manoeuvre by the assembly against the obstructionist committee that resolved the anomaly of guilds in the new polity created by the national assembly.
Fabianism, permeation and Independent Labour
Authors: Bevir Mark
Published: June 2009

The leading Fabians held different versions of permeation: Shaw saw permeation in terms of weaning the Radicals away from the Liberal party, so he favoured an independent party; Webb defined permeation in terms of the giving of expert advice to a political elite without any need for a new party. These varieties of permeation can be traced in the individual and collective actions of the Fabians, and, in particular, in their attitude to the formation of the Independent Labour party (I.L.P.). The Fabians did not simply promote the I.L.P. nor did they simply oppose the I.L.P.
Conviction, Ambition and the Genesis of Sully's Économies royales
Authors: Dickerman Edmund H.
Published: June 2009

Although Maximilien de Béthune, duke of Sully (1559–1641), held many high offices under Henry IV (superintendent of finances, grand voyer, grand master of artillery, among others), he never held the realm's highest military post, constable of France. Sully once had the chance to acquire the position, he tells us in his memoirs, the famous Économies royales, but turned it down. The occasion came when Henry IV offered Sully succession to the office held by the aged duke of Montmorency if Sully and his son would convert to Catholicism (Sully's son Maximilien II was to receive Henry's illegitimate daughter Mlle de Vendôme in marriage). Sully thanked the king but claimed he already held sufficient offices and declined to convert. When pressed further, the duke agreed to consider the offer for a month, at the end of which time he informed the king that his Calvinist convictions forbade a conversion’. Henry ‘showed great regret that you remained so firm in that resolution’, Sully's secretaries wrote, ‘and told you that he saw that you no longer loved him, and that since you were more attached to the Huguenots than to him, he would speak to you no more of it…’ This, Sully wished posterity to believe, was all there was to the episode. Since historians of the duke have credited his version of the affair, his wish prevailed. A close scrutiny of the episode and its aftermath reveals, however, that Sully's account concealed far more than it revealed. Henry's offer was far more than just a great ‘temptation.’ What really happened was that Sully tried to secure the ‘great elevation’ without converting. Henry grew angry when Sully refused to yield to his will and briefly threatened him with disgrace. In the end the king acclaimed his minister's firmness of will and forgot his pique. Sully did not, however, and decided that even if his master refused to reward him sufficiently for his contributions to Henry and France, posterity would learn of them. Thus was born the idea of, and very possibly a first draft of, Sully's famous Économies royales.
Sir Horace Wilson, 1900–1935: the Making of a Mandarin
Authors: Lowe Rodney , Roberts Richard
Published: June 2009

In 1975, Max Beloff wrote an article entitled ‘The Whitehall factor: the role of the higher civil service, 1919–39’, which historians have been singularly slow to exploit. Influenced, no doubt, by the publication in the same year of the Crossman Diaries, Beloff argued that no modern political history could be complete which ignores the influence of the civil service on policy-making. ‘The anonymity of the civil service’, he argued, ‘may or may not be a valuable convention of the constitution: it is one which the historian of modern Britain accepts at his peril.’ The peril was greatest, he suggested, for the inter-war period because it was then that higher civil servants in Britain ‘probably reached the height of [their] corporate influence’. In contrast to their predecessors, they controlled a far more centralized machine whose influence had been greatly extended by increasingly interventionist policies. In contrast to their successors, they were a highly compact group – being a mere 500 in number.