The Scot Adam Blackwood (1539–1613), often cited though seemingly no longer much read, studied in Paris under two of the leading humanist scholars of his time, their influence upon his thinking being profound. A staunch supporter and protégé of Mary, queen of Scots, he published in 1575 the first of his political tracts, the De coniunctione religionis et imperii, in which he argued for stability in religion as the necessary underpinning of political order, and against resistance to the monarch, seen as divinely authorized and the sole law-giver. Six years later he produced his Pro regibus apologia, a rebuttal of George Buchanan's De jure regni apud Scotos. Polemical in tone, this work of Blackwood's nevertheless developed further his view of the monarch as the principle of unity and cohesion necessary to the existence of any body politic. In both of these works he deployed a sophisticated array of legal and philosophical arguments whilst pursuing ultimately irenic purposes. But Mary Stewart's execution in 1587 drew from him a diatribe against Elizabeth I where such purposes succumbed to his outraged sensibilities and his combative rhetorical style.

Recent work on the records of civil litigation in the central courts of Westminster has refined and extended our knowledge of levels of litigation and the types of dispute pursued at law in early modern England. This article discusses two interrelated business disputes at the port of Whitehaven in the first half of the eighteenth century pursued by two of its prominent merchants, both frequent litigants in a period when litigation overall was declining, and suggests some reasons for that decline. It matches the formal court records of King's Bench, Common Pleas, and Chancery with some illuminating, often acerbic, private correspondence, thereby exploring the process and background of litigation, and demonstrating how a third party could influence the conduct and direction of the disputes, while himself remaining almost invisible in the formal legal record.

The enactment of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy in 1790, which profoundly reformed the Catholic Church in France, has rightly been regarded as a major turning point in the French Revolution. Its implementation caused a substantial schism, not simply within the clergy, but also among the laity, with devastating consequences for the prevailing political consensus. Yet while a good deal of research has been devoted to an exploration of clerical responses to the crisis, rather less is known about lay reactions. By analysing turnout in the episcopal elections of 1790–1, which appointed new bishops to no less than eighty of the eighty-three departmental dioceses, this article illuminates the attitudes of wealthy notables who dominated the electoral assemblies. The study that follows also examines the operation of the electoral system and the characteristics of the priests who emerged victorious from the polls. On account of their modest social origins, and their endorsement of the unfolding revolutionary process, these prelates became known as ‘citizen bishops’.

The Social Democratic Federation (SDF) was the major representative of Second International socialism on British soil. As a socialist organization it is usually viewed through the distorting prism of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. This article sets out to analyse the organization's strategy in its proper context – that of the struggle to transform Victorian and Edwardian Britain into the co-operative commonwealth. SDF views on the nature of revolution and what members called ‘palliative’ reforms are considered, as are their views on the character of the British state, the nature of democracy, the role of parliament, and the potential for violence at times of change. For them, the transition to socialism would be effected by well-fed, organized workers with a degree of education and culture, and their social reforms were designed to bring this revolutionary class into being. Campaigns against unemployment, work on school boards, boards of guardians, and local councils are found to have been conducted both as ends in themselves, and as a part of a grander strategy for the attainment of socialism. The SDF was a ‘parliamentary revolutionary party’ which sought to use reforms constructively in order to bring about the transformation of British society.

Drawing upon recently published research and previously unseen archival sources, the article provides a new explanation of the British conquest of Burma in 1885. Previous explanations have attributed British motives for conquest to either the need to defend the eastern borders of Britain's Indian empire from French expansion in mainland south-east Asia, or the desire to open Burma and China to British trade and investment at a time of perceived economic depression. The article contends that while French expansionism certainly loomed large in the British decision to invade, commercial interests and considerations were pivotal in persuading the British government of the French threat. In particular, the role of London-based ‘gentlemanly capitalists’ in shaping government policy is emphasized and explored. In the process, new insights into the methods and strategies of City financiers are revealed. Besides contributing to the debate surrounding the ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ thesis of Cain and Hopkins, the article also evaluates the importance of socio-economic conditions in Burma itself as a factor which stimulated British expansion.

The years 1920–5 constituted a pivotal phase in the development of twentieth-century British politics. At the same time, Ireland continued to be a potentially explosive issue despite the signing of the 1921 treaty. This was so because the agreement failed to resolve the dispute at the heart of the Irish question: namely, whether or not Ireland would be a united or a divided nation. This problem was particularly acute for the Conservative party, as it could revive splits between former Coalitionists and die-hards and, further, would hinder efforts aimed at winning over Liberal votes during the crucial 1924 general election. When Labour's first government was unwillingly forced to confront the Irish problem, Stanley Baldwin and his Conservative colleagues worked to contain the quarrel between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland. Only by doing so could they then concentrate on other issues which were more likely to attract support for the tories and, further, to ensure that their party and Labour would dominate British politics to the exclusion of the Liberals.

This article examines the impact on German urban society of the allied air raids during the Second World War. It rejects the oft-made assertion that the bombing strengthened the ‘community of fate’ on the German home front, arguing that this is an invention of Nazi propaganda which has been absorbed uncritically by subsequent scholars. Instead, it contends that the bombing brought to the surface many social and cultural tensions within German society and led to a widespread process of atomization and dissolution of community ties. The local authorities were quickly overwhelmed by the scale of the bombing and Nazi party propaganda singularly failed to have any impact on the population.

The special operations executive (SOE) has been the subject of controversy among historians, who disagree over its contribution to the British war effort. Recent releases of SOE documents to the PRO make possible the re-examination of SOE's effectiveness in stimulating resistance in particular countries, for example Poland, the focus of this case study. Colin Gubbins, the key figure in the history of SOE, was brought into the organization in autumn 1940 specifically so he could co-ordinate the aid to the Polish resistance. But the level of supplies dropped by the RAF for the Polish resistance was disappointing. The chiefs of staff relegated the Polish resistance to a secondary role of sabotage and subversion and stressed that they could not prevent a Polish uprising from being overwhelmed by the Nazis. SOE, which had responsibility for British liaison with the Polish resistance, failed to convey this decision to the Poles with sufficient emphasis, and the Polish home army launched the Warsaw uprising unaware of the enormous difficulties in the way of supplying their capital from the air. Churchill, the earl of Selborne, and some SOE officers sought vigorously to provide the Poles with the maximum possible level of supplies. After the first ten days Gubbins himself played a surprisingly small part in supporting the Poles. Disheartened, Gubbins bitterly predicted that Britain would abandon Poland after the war. Overall, SOE's contribution to Polish resistance did more harm than good.

Royalists of the Civil War period readily employed the English legal system to recover lost estates, even at the nadir of their political fortunes, namely the years just after the king's defeat. Rather than accept the verdict of a war lost, royalist and Catholic ‘delinquents’ successfully sought their own verdicts at law against former tenants for rents on lands that had been confiscated by parliament. The radical MPs staffing the Indemnity Committee respected the principles of due process of law and, ironically, given the fact that the committee's purpose was to protect parliament's supporters, upheld royalist claims to confiscated lands, thereby assisting the law courts in thwarting parliament's plan to repay war debts with rents collected from losers' property. So pervasive was the legalistic mindset in both the courts and the Indemnity Committee that royalists received favourable rulings against many on the winning side of the conflict, including famous leaders such as Sir William Brereton.

In my article in The Historical Journal, 40 (1997) pp. 435–61 I concluded, primarily on the evidence collected by the Independent Labour Party's (ILP) investigator David Murray, that Bob Smillie, a volunteer with the ILP's contingent in the Spanish Civil War, had died of appendicitis. However, he had been the victim of an appalling degree of neglect by the prison authorities in Valencia. I also concluded that the ILP leadership had deliberately prevented Smillie's death from becoming a matter of political debate. The account by Georges Kopp presented by John Newsinger in The Historical Journal, 41 (1998), pp. 575–8 suggests a very different story: that the appendicitis was ‘imaginary’ and that Smillie was, in fact, kicked to death by his Communist interrogators for refusing to co-operate. Does Kopp's evidence necessitate a rethink of the Smillie case? I do not think so, and I believe that there are serious doubts surrounding both the nature of this evidence and the version of events that it presents.

This review suggests that recent historiography on nationalism can help us to see that the English Civil War was, in part, a conflict about national identity and ethnic difference. It argues that, even before the war began, the supporters of the parliament were associated with a narrowly intolerant strain of Englishness, and that this helps to explain why the Celtic peoples of Wales and Cornwall rallied to the king. During 1642–4, parliament's close links with the Scots – together with the presence of many foreign mercenaries in the roundhead armies – prevented the identification of parliament's cause with that of England itself from becoming absolute. Following the creation of the New Model Army, however – an army from which ‘strangers’ of all sorts were deliberately excluded – relations between the Scots and parliament rapidly deteriorated, and it became possible for the parliamentarians to make an unequivocal appeal to English patriotic sentiment. The defeat of the king – and of the Welsh and Cornish troops who had done much to sustain his cause – was the result.

Recent work on the Enlightenment continues to bear out the importance of context in shaping both what is written and how it is read. In the case of the French Revolution, largely thanks to the work of Robert Darnton, studies have come to focus on how, if at all, different layers and styles of dissidence helped to bring down the French monarchy. But not all writing has, or need be suspected of, such an obvious or immediate outcome. This period, for instance, sees the birth of ‘philosophical’ history, as John Pocock and others have made us aware. Here again, contexts and individual experience shape what is studied and written, but it is clear that the project common to the best-selling work of, for instance, Gibbon, Hume and Robertson was to explain how civil society emerged and thrived. This inquiry, and what it says about the separate states and common principles of Europe then and now, is unfinished business; so, too, is determining what historical knowing is, and cannot be. What the eighteenth century undeniably saw, even from the slightly educated, was a growing appetite for understanding and for improvement: these have proved necessary, if not sufficient, conditions for modernity.

Australian public debate in the 1990s was dominated by issues surrounding the ‘impending’ republic. At the same time, Australian historiography experienced a return in the attention of historians to Australia's relations and ties with Great Britain, paralleling the increasing interest of Australians in severing the remaining constitutional links with the United Kingdom. Australian ‘Britishness’ has, unarguably, been a common theme in many contemporary histories. In subjects ranging from war, ‘dedominionization’, and republicanism, historians have noted with interest the challenges in history which have faced the imperial connection in Australia. This paper reviews the exploration of Britishness in recent historiography, and pays particular attention to a few key publications.

This review provides an overview and critique of recent scholarship on German National Socialism. It focuses on four problems through which historians have recently challenged the Marxist scholarship that played a significant role in shaping debates on Nazism in the sixties and seventies : the composition of the Nazi electorate, the Nazi ‘racial state’, Nazi social policy, and the Holocaust. Although acknowledging the importance of such themes in recent work as the Nazi regime's racism, anti-Semitism, and modernity, the review maintains that the key issue in Marxist scholarship, the polarization between left and right during the interwar period in Europe, provides the essential context for understanding the Nazi regime's ideological extremes and racial practices. To make its case, it explores four examples of the left's influence, the German left's relative cohesion as political and social movements, its place in the discourse of ‘racial hygiene’, its role in debates on the ‘standard of living’, and finally, its relevance to Nazi expansionism and the ‘Final Solution’.

L'ordine è già stato eseguito: Roma, le Fosse Ardeatine, la memoria. By Alessandro Portelli. Rome: Donzelli, 1999. Pp. vii+448. ISBN 88-7989-457-9. L.50.000.

The battle of Valle Giulia: oral history and the art of dialogue. By A. Portelli. Wisconsin: Wisconsin: University Press, 1997. Pp. xx+354. ISBN 0-299-15374-6. $21.95. [Inc. ‘The massacre at Civitella Val di Chiana (Tuscany, June 29, 1944): Myth and politics, mourning and common sense’, in The Battle of Valle Giulia, by A. Portelli, pp. 140–60.]

Operazione Via Rasella: verità e menzogna: i protagonisti raccontano. By Rosario Bentivegna (in collaboration with Cesare De Simone). Rome: Riuniti, 1996. Pp. 147. ISBN 88-359-4171-7. L.6.900.

La memoria divisa. By Giovanni Contini. Milan: Rizzoli, 1997. Pp. 275. ISBN 88-17-33027-2. L.30.000.

Anatomia di un massacro: controversia sopra una strage tedesca. By Paolo Pezzino. Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997. Pp. 243. ISBN 88-15-06054-5. L.26.000.

Processo Priebke: Le testimonianze, il memoriale. Edited by Cinzia Dal Maso. Rome: Il Mondo, 3 edn., 1996. Pp. 220. ISBN 88-8175-010-4. L.18.000.

Morte a Roma: il massacro delle Fosse Ardeatine. Nuova edizione aggiornata. By Robert Katz. Rome: Riuniti, 1996. Pp. xxiv+257. ISBN 88-359-4057-5. L.6.500.

Dossier Priebke. By Robert Katz. Milan: Rizzoli, 1996. Pp. 176. ISBN 88-17-84503-5. L.24.000.

Le radici e le ali: partigiani a Roma (and video). By Fabio Grimaldi et al. Rome: Manifestolibri, 1996. Pp. 160. ISBN 88-7285-098-3. L.29.900.

Via Rasella: leggenda e realtà della resistenza a Roma. By Aurelio Lepre. Bari: Laterza, 1996. Pp. 87. ISBN 88-420-5026-1. L.9.000.

Via Rasella, cinquant'anni di menzogne. By Pierangelo Maurizio. Rome: Maurizio edizioni, 1996. Pp. 123. L.20.000.

Storia e memoria di un massacro ordinario. Edited by Leonardo Paggi. Rome: Manifestolibri, 1996. Pp. 165. ISBN 88-7285-103-3. L.14.000.

Il linciaggio di Carretta: Roma 1944: violenza politica e ordinaria violenza. By Gabriele Ranzato. Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1997. Pp. 254. ISBN 88-428-0418-5. L.25.000.

I grandi processi. 2. Herbert Kappler. Edited by Wladimiro Settimelli. Rome: L'Unità, 1994. Pp. 191. Supplement with L'Unità.

‘Identity history is not enough’. By Eric Hobsbawm in idem, On history. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1997, pp. 266–77. ISBN 0-297-81915-1. £20.

The facts: what happened? On 23 March 1944, a column of 156 police troops from the Bolzen regiment attached to the German army were marching through the centre of occupied Rome. Between 15.45 and 15.50 a bomb exploded in the narrow street of Via Rasella killing thirty military policemen (three more were to die later) as well as at least two Italian civilians. The bomb had been placed by an official armed Gap partisan unit which had been active in Rome for some months. The German troops responded by firing indiscriminately into the houses on the street and rounding up the residents of Via Rasella. The next day, 335 people were taken to the Fosse Ardeatine Caves just outside the city and shot over a period of four and a half hours.The best account of the massacre remains that of Robert Katz, Death in Rome (London, 1967), Morte a Roma (Rome, 1996). The victims had been taken from various official and unofficial prisons, Via Rasella, and other areas. Only three had already been condemned to death (for partisan activity), 154 were under investigation by the Germany military police, and seventy-five were in custody purely because they were Jewish. Other victims were taken from Regina Coeli (Rome's prison) or selected from those picked up around Via Rasella. The next day (25 March) a German army poster appeared across Rome and in newspapers. It accused ‘criminal elements’ of planting the bomb and added that ‘The German Command … has ordered that for every German killed ten communist-Badoglian criminals will be shot. This order has already been carried out.’