Peace with Spain was debated by Elizabeth I's government from 1598, when France and Spain made peace by signing the Treaty of Vervins. Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex was zealously hostile to accommodation with Spain, while other privy councillors argued in favour of peace. Arguments for and against peace were, however, also articulated in wider contexts, in particular in a series of manuscript treatises, and also in printed tracts from the Netherlands, which appeared in English translation in the late 1590s. This article explores ways that ideas of war and peace were disseminated in manuscript and printed media outside the privy council and court. It is argued that disagreement about the direction of the war reveals differing contemporary responses to the legitimacy of the Dutch abjuration of Spanish sovereignty and the polity of the United Provinces, which have implications for our understanding of political mentalities in late Elizabethan England.

Work on the ‘county community’ during the English Civil War, and tensions between centre and periphery, has focused exclusively upon forms of political and cultural representation. However, this article argues that local communities also sought to achieve agency within the wider war effort by lobbying for military representation. In return for financial contributions, supporters wanted an ‘interest’ in the units they raised, mainly through control over the nomination of officers. The history of the army of the earl of Essex between June and December 1642 indicates the financial consequences of neglecting such military representation. Its structure dissolved particularist interests, orientating the army towards the pursuit of a national strategy, but this gave local supporters no confidence that their concerns were being represented. The result was an assertion of localism, a decline in donations, and a financial crisis within the army.

In studies of English artistic culture of the first half of the eighteenth century, the notion of art-historical consciousness has attracted little attention, in contrast to an immense interest in issues of picture consumption and taste. This article provides a new perspective on the rise of art-historical consciousness by examining publications associated with the Raphael Cartoons, then at Hampton Court. Through a wide range of engraved reproductions and written commentaries, the Cartoons not only came to be the most visible Old Master paintings in England in the period, but also became central to an on-going process whereby ideas about painting were formulated in terms of artistic standards and historical development. The Cartoons publications illustrate a trend in which works of art formerly enjoyed privately by royal or aristocratic collectors became increasingly accessible to wider audiences. In consequence, ideas associated with these works penetrated diverse levels of society and art-historical consciousness assumed a public value.

This article re-examines the concept of the fiscal-military state in the context of the British armed forces during the Seven Years War (1756–63). This war, characteristic of British warfare during the eighteenth century, demonstrates that British victory depended on the state caring about the wellbeing of its troops, as well as being perceived to care. At the practical level, disease among troops led to manpower shortages and hence likely defeat, especially during sieges and colonial campaigns. During the 1762–3 Portuguese campaign, disease was regarded as a sign of ill-discipline, and jeopardized military and political alliances. At Havana in 1762, the fear, reports, and actual outbreaks of disease threatened American colonial support and recruitment for British campaigns. Throughout the controversial campaigns in the German states, disease was interpreted as a symptom of bad governance, and used in partisan criticisms concerning the conduct of the war. Military victory was not only about strategy, command, and technology, but nor was it solely a question of money. Manpower could not simply be bought, but needed to be nurtured in the long term through a demonstration that the British state cared about the welfare of its armies.

While recent research in the English context on the so-called ‘economy of makeshifts’ has demonstrated the importance of alternative welfare options outside of the poor law, less work has been conducted on the situation in larger towns and cities. This article seeks to remedy this imbalance by examining the different welfare systems available in one city, Oxford, during the early nineteenth century. Poor law provision in the city, while extensive, was significantly less per capita than in rural parts of Oxfordshire. There was a high degree of charitable provision, not only from the continued survival of endowed charity, but also from the creation of newer subscription charities. The contribution made by charity to medical provision for the poor was especially significant, as was the role of emergency subscriptions in alleviating short-term economic and other crises. With such a varied range of assistance, traditional assumptions concerning the importance of the poor law in urban areas may require revision, with implications not only for the scale and measurement of poverty, but also for the ways in which both poor and wealthy alike managed and negotiated the supply of welfare.

This article examines the role that Ireland and Irish people played in the geographical construction of British colonial rule in India during the nineteenth century. It argues that as an important sub-imperial centre, Ireland not only supplied the empire with key personnel, but also functioned as an important reference point for scientific practice, new legislation, and systems of government. Occupying integral roles within the information systems of the colonial state, Irish people provided much of the intellectual capital around which British rule in India was constructed. These individuals were part of nineteenth-century Irish professional personnel networks that viewed the empire as a legitimate sphere for work and as an arena in which they could prosper. Through involvement and deployment of expertise in areas such as surveying and geological research in India, Irishmen and Irish institutions were able to act decisively in the development of colonial knowledge. The relationships mapped in this article centre the Irish within the imperial web of connections and global exchange of ideas, technologies, and practices during the long nineteenth century, thereby making a contribution towards uncovering Ireland's multi-directional involvement in the British empire and reassessing the challenges that this presents to existing British, Irish, and imperial historiography.

This article considers the changing ways in which French political elites understood imperial obligation in the interwar years. It suggests that the economics of imperial rule and disputes over what could and should be done to develop colonial economies provide the key to understanding both the failure of interwar colonial reforms and the irreversible decline in France's grip over its colonies. In making this case, the article investigates four related colonial policy debates, all variously linked to changing conceptualizations of economic obligation among France's law-makers. The first concerns Albert Sarraut's 1921 empire development plan. The second reviews discussions over the respective obligations of the state and private financiers in regenerating colonial economies during the depression years of the early 1930s. The third debate reassesses policymakers' disputes over colonial industrialization. Finally, the article revisits the apparent failure of the investigative studies of economic and labour reforms conceived by the left-leaning Popular Front in 1936–8. The point is to highlight the extent to which senior political figures clashed over concepts of ‘colonial obligation’ viewed less in the cultural terms of ‘civilizing mission’ than in the material sense of economic outlay.

The Italian experience of being bombed has been neglected in the historiography of the Second World War, especially in English. This marginalization is not justified by the record of events; according to official estimates, Italian civilian victims of bombing numbered around 60,000. The reaction of the Italian population to air raids was carefully evaluated and discussed by the Allies, who decided to hit civilians living near industrial areas with a view to testing their psychological resistance. The article focuses on the civilians' reactions to death coming from the sky, by examining their response to both Anglo-American and Fascist propaganda, and to the experience of the raids at different stages of the war. It analyses the ways in which civilians coped with the collapse of state defences (including the creation of legends and the spreading of rumours independent of state propaganda), and the psychologically complex and shifting response to bombers who introduced themselves as liberators. The research presented is based on archival sources, particularly prefects' reports from different parts of Italy to the Ministry of Interior, on both Anglo-American and Fascist propaganda, newspaper articles, and civilians' diaries.

This review considers how historians have approached the role of ideas in understanding the beginnings of early British abolitionism. It pays particular attention to the work of Eric Williams, Roger Anstey, David Brion Davis, and, most recently, Christopher Leslie Brown. It uses Brown's Moral capital as a point of departure for offering an alternative approach to the role of ideology in early British abolition and about its operation generally.

Christian ideals of manliness were articulated by writers across the religious spectrum throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At their heart was the shared ideal of the imitation of Christ, an all-encompassing Christian ideal of personhood. Whilst non-partisanship was itself an important ideal, theological differences and disagreements over the strictness of ideals led to accusations that some Christians, attacked as ‘moralists’ or ‘enthusiasts’, undermined or neglected ideals of manliness. At the same time, there were attempts to associate Christian ideals of manliness exclusively with the emerging ‘Evangelical’ party. In the historiography of masculinity in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, Christian ideals have often been marginalized, and, when considered, they have tended to be misconstrued by the adoption of church-party approaches. This review offers a detailed critique of Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall's account of Evangelical ideals of manliness in Family fortunes: men and women of the English middle class, 1780–1850 (1987; rev. edn, 2002). Their notion of distinctive ‘Evangelical’ ideals of manliness does not withstand scrutiny, and the key concepts associated with them, including ‘domesticity’, ‘the calling’, ‘the world’, ‘public’, and ‘private’, demand revision. At the same time, they gave insufficient consideration to ‘solitude’ and ‘charity’.