This article examines the ways in which debates on ecclesiology in the Church of England served as a venue for the examination of political precept. It argues in particular that polemical sources – whether sermons, pamphlets, or longer works – reveal that discussion of conformity, the nature of the church, and its doctrine and discipline led to a broader examination of law, sovereignty, parliament, and the political costs of religious discord. Underlying the dispute was a fundamental tension over civil and sacred authority, and the relationship between politics – the realm of human custom and history – and doctrine – the realm of the divine and immemorial. The article offers a number of revisions to current discussions of the history of political thought, while pointing to the importance of religious discourse for our understanding of the political tensions that existed in the years prior to the English civil war.

Recent historiography has argued that the British ecclesiastical policies of James VI and I sought ‘congruity’ between the different churches in Scotland, England, and Ireland, rather than British ecclesiastical union or the anglicanization of all the churches. It is argued here that the asymmetry of the changes he sought in Scotland and England has been underplayed and that this has masked his choice of a fundamentally Anglican model for the British churches. Through allowing the archbishop of Canterbury to interfere in Scottish ecclesiastical affairs, undermining the presbyterian system, promoting episcopal power and liturgical reform, anglicanization of the Church of Scotland was the goal of James VI and I, and one which he pursued until his death. The motivation for King James's persistent desire for the fulfilment of this policy is to be found in his rapid assimilation to the Church of England after 1603 and, moreover, in his goal of the reunification of Christendom as a whole, on the Anglican model.

Ireland's status as a kingdom or as a colony continues to influence the historiographical debate about the country's relationship with the wider world during the early modern period. Interest in the continent is almost exclusively focused on exiles and migrants, rather than on diplomatic developments. Yet during the 1640s confederate Catholics in Ireland pursued an independent foreign policy, maintaining resident agents abroad, and receiving diplomats in Kilkenny. Following the execution of Charles I in 1649, they sought foreign assistance in their struggle against Oliver Cromwell. In alliance with the exiled House of Stuart, Irish Catholics looked to Charles IV, duke of Lorraine, as a potential saviour. For three years the duke encouraged negotiations in Galway, Paris, and Brussels. He despatched vital military supplies to Ireland, and attempted on at least one occasion to transport troops there from the Low Countries. Although his intervention ultimately failed to turn the tide of the war in Ireland, the English parliamentarians nevertheless believed he posed a serious threat. This detailed study of the duke's role, in the international struggle for Ireland during the early 1650s, largely ignored until now, helps to place the crises of the three Stuart kingdoms in their broader European context.

This article seeks to re-examine the intellectual context of commercial policy and regulation in seventeenth-century England. It questions a common assumption about so-called ‘mercantilist’ writers: that they saw trade as in some way finite and therefore won by one nation at the expense of another. Instead, it proposes that the often belligerent attitude of the ‘mercantilists’ towards trade was rooted in an understanding of the nature of international commerce as both communication and competition. Although writers acknowledged the mutual aspect of trade, they did not see this exchange as automatically equal, but saw it as possible for one party to exploit the other. This situation demanded state action to protect national trading interests in the disputed area of commerce, and thus this ‘discourse of trade’ was linked to political and juridical discourses about international relations. The article shows how this understanding of trade influenced debates about commercial governance in the critical middle decades of the seventeenth century, culminating in the attempt to create a national monopoly through the navigation acts, ‘securing sovereignty’ over the nation's trade. The second half of this article examines this in more detail with reference to the ideas of a prominent defender of the 1651 Navigation Act: Benjamin Worsley.

This article explores the rural poor relief system of colonial South Carolina. It finds that poor relief was substantially more generous and more readily available in rural areas of South Carolina than elsewhere in British North America, or indeed in the entire Anglophone world. It suggests that this was because elite vestrymen had deep-seated concerns about the position of the white poor in a society that was dominated by African slavery. Generous relief of adult paupers was therefore a public demonstration of the privileges of race to which all whites were entitled. Elites in rural South Carolina also made considerable efforts to provide a free education for pauper children that would inculcate industry and usefulness among those who might become future public burdens. The serious attention paid to the situation of the white poor in colonial South Carolina was therefore part of an effort to ensure the unity of white society by overcoming the divisions of class.

Although the field of peasant and rural studies has done much to redeem the reputation of peasants in general, historians generally continue to consider the Italian rural population in the early nineteenth century largely extraneous to the story of national unification. However, police reports, court records, and chroniclers from Bologna provide descriptions of collective action that suggest a complex pattern of interaction with both local authorities and the shifting political context. While it remains true that with few exceptions rural communities had little to do with the Risorgimento directly, already during the Revolutionary and Restoration eras they engaged in collective action that reflected independent initiative in engaging with various types of authority rather than political ignorance or blind adherence to religion.

The popular movement for parliamentary reform after 1830 managed to sustain its campaign for over eighteen months. The popular movement itself has largely been studied at a local level, and undoubtedly local contexts were influential in conditioning responses to reform. Reformers, however, predominantly represented themselves as patriots involved in a pan-British struggle, and this was a key factor in sustaining the mobilization. This article explores the reform movement on its own terms in one ‘national’ context, that of Scotland. If the immediate political context of reform was a spur to unity, the languages and strategies of reformers provided the real glue. Scottish reformers represented themselves as patriots involved in a ‘national movement’ and this article will analyse how the reform movement could act as a solvent for apparently conflicting aspects of Scottish and British national identities. It will argue that reformers deployed a language of ‘unionist-nationalism’ – which coupled demands for greater access to the British constitution with appeals to popular understandings of Scottish history – to call for reform, mobilize support, and maintain the unity of the movement.

This article investigates the attempt by Russian theatre people to ‘professionalize’ their vocation during the late tsarist period. It argues that theatrical professionalization differed from standard paradigms because fundamentally it was designed to address material impoverishment, rather than to protect existing occupational privileges. Theatre people believed that ‘professional’ status would defend them from the effects of the burgeoning commercial entertainment market. Thus they represented the gradual ‘democratization’ of the professional ideal, its diffusion amongst occupational groups not traditionally classified as ‘professions’. From 1894, a national regulatory association, the Russian Theatre Society, represented theatre people's interests and persuaded the government to subsidize its activities. Yet the boundaries between state involvement and self-regulation were never clearly defined, creating an underlying tension within the Society about the extent of its relations with the state, a problem that was exposed during the 1905 revolution.

This article examines the role of the British popular press in the campaign against venereal diseases during the Second World War. Concern about the rapidly rising incidence of syphilis and gonorrhoea prompted the Ministry of Health to ask the press to carry a series of informative advertisements about VD, but the Newspaper Proprietors' Association refused to publish them until they had been made less explicit. A major controversy erupted in Fleet Street as the two most popular dailies, the Mirror and the Express, took opposing views about the suitability of ‘family newspapers’ educating the public about sexual health. While the Express refused to print even the edited VD advertisements, the Mirror broke away from the popular press's tradition of evasiveness on this issue and discussed the problem in unusual detail. The Mirror's bold approach won widespread public support, with investigations by Mass-Observation and the Wartime Social Survey finding that information about VD was, in general, gratefully received by a public hungry for more knowledge about sex. Although many editors continued to treat the subject very cautiously, the article argues that the campaigns run by the Mirror and the Ministry of Health marked an important moment in the public discussion of sex and encouraged the belief that all citizens should be sexually informed.

This article departs from traditional writing on British economic warfare against the Axis during the Second World War by highlighting the efforts made by the British government to evade German ‘counter-blockade’ measures and secure access to European sources of supply. It does so by examining British efforts to obtain Swiss industrial equipment and manufactures after June 1940, when German military success effectively severed normal communications between the two countries. In practical terms, Britain's smuggling operations were enormously successful. Some £1.8m worth of Swiss contraband reached British hands by October 1944. They also, however, exercised considerable influence over the development of Anglo-Swiss relations and Switzerland's relations with its neighbours. In illuminating the scale of Britain's commercial interest in Switzerland after June 1940, the article lends weight to new writing on the Second World War, which emphasizes the neutrals' importance to the war economies and political ambitions of the two belligerent camps.

How the First World War has come to be remembered has, over the past two decades, become a major concern for British historians, eclipsing earlier scholarly preoccupations with war guilt and its political consequences, the impact of the war on social structure and the status of women, and the conflict's role in the rise of the modernist aesthetic. This article surveys both scholarship on the cultural legacy of the First World War in Britain and the debates about how the memory of this war – the ‘Great War’ – has either retarded its consideration ‘as history’ or spurred new, if not always entirely successful, modes of inquiry into the relationships among war, society, and culture. The article argues that memory of the Great War must itself be treated as history; that the meaning of that memory should be placed within the context of the changing events, ideas, and identities of the entire twentieth century; and that more scholarly attention needs to be directed at the popular reception of representations of the Great War by the population at large, and at the power of the various forms of media by which those representations have been conveyed to their audience and have thereby shaped memory of the conflict.

Richelieu's army: war government and society in France, 1624–1642. By David Parrott. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xxiv+599. ISBN 0-521-79209-6. £65.00.

The dynastic state and the army under Louis XIV: royal service and private interest, 1661–1701. By Guy Rowlands. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xxiv+404. ISBN 0-521-64124-1. £55.00.

The French army, 1750–1820: careers, talent, merit. By Rafe Blaufarb. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Pp. xii+227. ISBN 0-7190-6262-4. £45.00.

The people in arms: military myth and national mobilization since the French Revolution. Edited by Daniel Moran and Arthur Waldron. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xi+268. ISBN 0-521-81432. £50.00.

From revolutionaries to citizens: antimilitarism in France, 1870–1914. By Paul B. Miller. Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2002. Pp. xiii+277. ISBN 0-8223-2766-X. £13.95.

Although all the books under review are military histories, international conflict is not their central concern. They are not primarily campaign histories, nor studies of strategic or tactical innovations, nor biographies of great commanders. If they help to answer the military historian's traditional question – how is military might created and used on the battlefield – then they do so indirectly, through an exploration of how the state marshalled its resources for war, particularly in terms of manpower. This is not just a question of emphasis, or of filling in gaps in the historiography; these books mount a sustained critique on the explanatory models favoured by military historians. Military history, David Parrott suggests, too readily falls into a ‘whiggish trap’: a series of clear-sighted war leaders grasp the potential of technology in achieving the state's foreign policy objectives; technological shifts drive changes in the size and organization of armies, and consequently in the development of the state. And thus was the modern world of large, complex, disciplined organizations made. In contrast, we are offered here a selection of error-prone war leaders, constrained at every turn by the social, political, and financial realities of their day, who were intent not on ‘progress’ but on manipulating the system of which they themselves were a part, and as much for their own ends as for those of the state they served.

Making peoples: a history of the New Zealanders from Polynesian settlement to the end of the nineteenth century. By James Belich. London: Penguin, 2001. Pp. 497. ISBN 0-14-100639-0. £9.99.

Paradise reforged: a history of the New Zealanders from the 1880s to the year 2000. By James Belich. London: Allen Lane, 2002. Pp. 606. ISBN 0-7139-9172-0. £25.00.

The Enlightenment and the origins of European Australia. By John Gascoigne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xviii+233. ISBN 0-521-80343-80. £45.00.

Australian ways of death: a social and cultural history, 1840–1918. By Pat Jalland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2002. Pp. vi+378. ISBN 0-19-550754-1. £15.99.

White flour, white power: from rations to citizenship in central Australia. By Tim Rowse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xiii+255. ISBN 0-521-62457-6. £40.00.

The five books covered here might seem a random sample: antipodean oddments from the edge of a review editor's desk. Their subject matter – from ‘ways of death’ in Australia to rationing policies for indigenous Australians – is diverse, as are their approaches: a scholarly assessment of the influence of Enlightenment ideas in the Australian colonies through to a massive two-volume general history of New Zealand to 2000. Yet even in this eclectic mix there are common themes, reflecting current interests and models in the writing of history in both countries. For some time, Australia and New Zealand have been productively positioned in relation to European social change as ‘born modern’ experiments, or at least as colonies which forced or anticipated aspects of the modernity shaping metropolitan centres. There have been several phases of historiography advancing this thesis, each reflecting a desire on the part of historians ‘down under’ to relate their account to wider dynamics, or to incorporate models that redress or refute the ‘isolation’ of their history by exploring categories extending beyond the national chronicle. More recently, historians of post-colonialism have returned the interest. They have traced in the extension of colonialism many of the crucial factors shaping core elements of nineteenth-century European nationalism, even the concept of Europe itself. In complex patterns of interdependence within ‘empire’, these historians have also identified several themes of ‘modernity’: reflexive approaches to ‘self’ and identity; discursive matrices of liberal government; the application and testing of the Enlightenment project of ‘reason’ and the ‘disenchantment’ of scientific knowledge and classification.