Early in 1644, the more active and radical men in the House of Commons decided that if the war against the king was to achieve anything, firm action was needed to defeat him. Parliament needed a centralized executive to run the war effort efficiently. When Scotland became Parliament's ally, this executive had to be a joint body, representing the Scottish Estates as well as both English Houses of Parliament. The result was the Committee of both Kingdoms, planned earlier by the Commons' moderate leader John Pym, who had begun to see, towards the end of 1643, that peace negotiations were getting nowhere and that Parliament would have to defeat the king in order to gain the concessions for which it had begun the war.1

Several British statesmen have also been historians: Clarendon, Russell, Rosebery, Churchill—and Charles James Fox, although he produced only one volume. His History of the early part of the Reign of James II is a fragment of what might have been a much larger work; it was published posthumously, with a preface by his nephew Lord Holland, in 1808. Although it was given a mixed reception by the critics, it was regarded for several decades as something of a classic. It was translated into French, German, and Dutch; and was republished several times in England during the nineteenth century (most recently as a threepenny paperback in Cassell's National Library in 1888).

One of the best-known remarks of the nineteenth century, and probably the one most often repeated by contemporary politicians, was the Duke of Wellington's challenge to the Whig reformers in 1831, ‘How is the King's government to be carried on?’ In their difficulties in the late 1830s the Whigs found the question more pertinent than they had allowed during the debates on the Reform Bill.

If anyone could be claimed the father of the school for the scientific study of Indian defence policy it would undoubtedly be Sir Charles Metcalfe MacGregor. With the re-opening of the Central Asian Question in the early 1860s, it became MacGregor's mission in life completely to recast the Indian defence structure and it counter-insurrectionary role to enable it to undertake large-scale offensive operations against a major European military power. Almost single-handedly, he began to create the machinery within the Indian Army establishment—the special departments, professional institutes, journals and literature—to stimulate a greater awareness of the special and peculiar nature of Indian defence problems that this new role involved, and to encourage an iconoclastic re-examination of prevailing defence assumptions. From MacGregor's groundwork there was logically bound to arise a sense of Indian Army professionalism separate and distinct from that of Great Britain, and the beginnings of the belief that obligations of national defence are inseparable from nationhood. It was MacGregor who first appreciated on the basis of systematic and scientific study that India constituted a vast manpower reservoir, greater than that of Ireland and Egypt together, upon which Britain relied for the prosecution of her imperial, military and foreign policies in the East; that the North-West Frontier presented the only strategic boundary that Britain had to defend; and that the geo-strategic and demographic facts of her existence had made India potentially a great military power bound to adopt a ‵Continental′ military policy and defence structure in many respects parallel to those of the major European military powers.

There can be few fields in modern English history in which the historian is so frustrated by lack of evidence as in the study of elections between the introduction of the secret ballot and the coming of the opinion polls. For threequarters of a century after the Ballot Act was passed there is no precise quantitative evidence relating to movements of opinion or the voting behaviour of different groups within the electorate. We cannot even hope for conclusive evidence of what, in general terms, the determinants of voting behaviour were in this period; how to balance the importance of the national party competition and of local pressures; of the ‘image’ and the leadership of the parties and their programmes; of class loyalties and religious loyalties; of electoral persuasion and the fluctuations of a still unmanaged economy. These questions are strictly unanswerable, for there are no pollbooks from which we can deduce the opinions of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century electors, and they are beyond the reach of questionnaires. The only statistics we possess are the bare figures for votes cast for each party in contested elections, and the number of registered electors in each constituency (from which we can calculate the percentage of voters who went to the poll).

The British ‘New Imperialism’ has frequently been described as a monolith, generated in the opinion of Hobson and others by the search for capital outlets and markets, or in Schumpeter's analysis by the residue of feudalism.2 These mechanistic interpretations allow little importance to mediating philosophies or institutions, to anti-imperialist convictions or inner divisiveness, or to conditions in indigenous societies. Views of the uniqueness of the New Imperialism, and also of imperial expansion being simply determined, were powerfully challenged by Professor Gallagher and Dr Robinson in their article, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’.3

At the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 the Polish state was reconstituted as a result of the German defeat in the Great War, and the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires. In the years that followed, Poland refused to come to terms with her neighbours and sought a guarantee for her future safety in a close attachment to Britain and France; a course of action which ultimately led to renewed subjugation, under the hand of each of her neighbours in turn. It is with the first years of this course that we are here concerned.