Though much has been written about Wyatt's rebellion, it remains controversial. There is, first of all, lively debate about the rebels' motives in rising against Mary Tudor in January and February 1554. It is generally agreed that some rebels wished only to force changes in royal policy, while others sought to replace the queen with her sister Elizabeth and Edward Courtenay, the earl of Devon. But, while D. M. Loades and his adherents contend that the rising was caused almost entirely by opposition to Mary's proposed marriage to Prince Philip of Spain, others argue – to varying degrees – that religion was significant and that many rebels were protestants seeking to thwart a catholic restoration.

The successes and failures of British foreign policy from the end of the American war of independence until the outbreak of the conflict with revolutionary France will be familiar, at least in outline, to many students of late-eighteenth-century history. In 1783 Britain was widely regarded as having been reduced to the status of a second-rank power. British ministers, and especially Pitt the Younger and his first foreign secretary, the marquess of Carmarthen, sought a European alliance to end their country's isolation and vulnerability. The Anglo-French commercial treaty of 1786, the product of French rather than British pressure, was of little help in this respect, as it never developed beyond a limited trade agreement. Negotiations for similar reciprocal commercial concessions with other powers all proved fruitless. In 1787 and 1788, however, political and military arrangements were concluded with the Dutch and the Prussians after Prussian troops – with British encouragement and support – had intervened in the United Provinces to secure the position of the house of Orange and to crush the pro-French ‘Patriot’ party. Fortified by this new British – Prussian – Dutch connexion, or Triple Alliance as it was called, Pitt's government was able to exert considerable influence in Europe and farther afield. In 1788, when the Swedes attacked Russia, which was already at war with the Turks, Denmark, in accordance with its treaty obligations to Russia, invaded Sweden. The British and Prussians threatened the Danes and forced them to withdraw. A few months later, in April 1789, renewed Anglo-Prussian pressure compelled Denmark to maintain a strict neutrality in the continuing Russo-Swedish conflict. In 1790 the British were just as successful in a confrontation with Spain over the Nootka Sound in North America. Only when the government backed down during the dispute with Russia over possession of the Turkish fortress of Ochakov on the Black Sea coast, were the limits of British power fully exposed.

This paper is a study of the relationship between economic culture and trade union economic subculture during the years in which both the Victorian trade union movement and the classical economists' view of it reached their maturity. This period represented a turning point in the history of the movement, which achieved a full institutionalization and legitimation. The Webbs, and a historiographic tradition since them, maintained that these results were obtained at the price of a complete submission to the ideological hegemony of the bourgeoisie. In the 1960s R. V. Clements challenged this view and argued that such a subordination had never taken place, and that trade unionists had managed to keep their independent views – especially at the level of economic thought. Recent discussions have been content to stress the sound and ‘aseptic’ pragmatism of the working men, and the abstruse dogmatism of the economists. A footnote quoting Clements' article seems to be all that readers can reasonably ask for. The possibility of an alternative interpretation – namely, that classical economics could actually be useful to trade union strategies and interests – has not yet been sufficiently considered. The aim of this paper is to argue that there is much evidence in support of such an interpretation.

For many years a consensus among historians of the Edwardian age drew a contrast between the essentially stable, liberal society of the late Victorian years, when discussion, compromise and orderly behaviour were the norm, and an Edwardian society in which tacit conventions governing the conduct of those involved in social and political movements began to be rejected – by Pankhurst feminists, Ulster Unionists, trade union militants and syndicalists. This period of crisis was so described in 1935 by Edward Dangerfield in the The strange death of liberal England, a brilliantly evocative title which, despite the lack of precision contained in the argument presented in his book, exercised an enduring influence on subsequent interpretations of British social and political history before 1914. G. D. H. Cole and Raymond Postgate reinforced this interpretation of a society in crisis, and not until Dr Henry Pelling's Politics and society in late Victorian Britain appeared in 1968 was the notion firmly rejected. There he denied that the convergence of the Irish conflict over home rule, the violence of the militant suffragettes, and unprecedented labour unrest signified either connexions or a common fundamental cause. The re-printing of Dangerfield's book in 1980 (and Pelling's in 1979) has been followed by renewed interest in these competitive hypotheses, and has led historians to re-examine the Edwardian age.

There is one major gap in the historiography of British strategic policy during the interwar years. Historians have not examined that policy of the 1920s as if it was a coherent topic in its own right. Although writers like Brian Bond, James Neidpath, Stephen Roskill and Malcolm Smith have elucidated aspects of that matter, such as the development of the Singapore base or of the policies of the fighting services, they have still treated each such issue and department in isolation from the rest. Even those scholars like Correlli Barnett and N. H. Gibbs who have sought to examine strategic policy in the interwar years as a whole, have primarily seen the strategic decisions of the 1920s not as an autonomous historical subject but rather as a prelude to Britain's position in the 1930s. Consequently, historians have made these decisions seem inexplicable and unconnected, by removing them from the context of their time and of strategic policy. This approach has led writers to misconstrue the evolution of strategic policy during the 1920s. They have done so because of their assumptions about that issue. They have not recognized these assumptions as being such, but have treated them instead as a bedrock of self-evident fact. Yet when these assumptions are examined, they can be demonstrated to be false.