This article uses original research in archival sources, many of them not yet exploited by scholars of the early modern book trade, to demonstrate that the confluence of a printer-publishers' political and religious ideology and his trade was possible during the reign of Charles I. A detailed case-study of the family, life, career, as well as publications of Richard Badger (1585–1641), reveals that his emergence from the late 1620s as William Laud's house printer was rooted in a complex web of locality, kinship, self-promotion, and patronage that had at its heart a religious conservatism that flowed logically and, for a time, successfully into the movement now known as Laudianism. The article offers simultaneous insights into politics and religion in the Caroline book trade, and the emergence, flourescence – and collapse – of Laud's programme for religious change.

In the late 1730s the fourth earl of Shaftesbury engaged Benjamin Martyn to write a biography of his great-grandfather, the first earl, defending his reputation against the accounts given by Gilbert Burnet and others. With the support of other members of his family a considerable body of source material (some now lost) was assembled, including a memoir of Shaftesbury by his steward Thomas Stringer and a defence of his character and actions by another former member of the household, Benjamin Wyche. Most of Martyn's Life had been written by 1740, but it was not published. After his death in 1763 the papers he had left were extensively revised by a team of historians that included Roger Flexman and Andrew Kippis. Versions of the Life were printed in 1770 and 1773 but not published. Neither the fifth nor the sixth earl had any interest in the project, but the only copy of the 1770 printing not in the hands of the Shaftesbury family was bought in 1830 by a London publisher, and after further changes made by G. W. Cooke the Life was finally published in 1836.

Most writers have taken Frederick II at his word and interpreted his sparse and generally derogatory comments about the Holy Roman Empire as indications of its low priority in Prussian policy after 1740. This article offers a reappraisal, based on a re-examination of his writings and his policy towards the Empire and its principal dynasties. Despite his distaste for the imperial constitution, Frederick swiftly appreciated its significance to his goals of security and international recognition. Certainly, relations with the imperial Estates remained secondary to diplomatic and military engagement with Austria and the other major European powers. Nonetheless, the Empire remained more than an arena in which Austro-Prussian rivalry was played out. The imperial constitution offered a means to neutralize threats to Prussia's more vulnerable provinces and a framework to constrain Habsburg ambitions, while ties to minor German dynasties offered avenues to maintain or improve relations with Europe's leading monarchies that were likewise bound within the elite kinship of the Christian old world. For this to be effective, however, Frederick had to engage in all aspects of imperial politics and not just representation in formal institutions.

The international diffusion of ideas has often been described as an abstract process. John Bowring's career offers a different insight into the practical conditions that permitted a concept, free trade, to spread across national borders. An early advocate of trade liberalization in Britain, Bowring promoted free trade policies in France, Italy, Germany, Egypt, Siam, and China between 1830 and 1860. He employed different strategies according to local political conditions, appealing to public opinion in liberal Western Europe, seeking to persuade bureaucrats and absolute rulers in Central Europe and the Middle East, and resorting to gunboats in East Asia. His career also helps to connect the rise of free trade ideas in Europe with the ‘imperialism of free trade’ in other parts of the world. Bowring upheld the same liberal ideals as Richard Cobden and other luminaries of the free trade movement. Yet unlike them, he endorsed imperial ascendancy in order to remove obstacles to global communications and spread civilization outside Europe.

The advent of conscription in Britain in 1916 was greeted with profound dismay by many in the Liberal party. At Westminster, however, a significant minority of Liberal MPs, who were members of the Liberal War Committee (LWC), were amongst the most enthusiastic advocates of compulsory service, from a surprisingly early stage in the war. It has usually been assumed that those Liberals who embraced conscription were effectively abandoning their progressive principles, and moving to another, more reactionary, political allegiance. This article argues that this was not the case. The Liberal advocates of conscription represented a range of political opinions, but all insisted that they remained Liberals, and many went to considerable lengths to reconcile their support for universal military service with their continued adherence to the Liberal creed. This article reassesses the phenomenon of Liberal support for compulsory service, examining the arguments, activities, and personnel of the LWC. It sheds new light on the vitality of Liberal principles in wartime, demonstrating that Liberal doctrine was often far more flexible than scholars have realized.

This article reassesses interwar French advertising through the case study of alcohol, one of the period's most widely advertised and popular products. Examining the ways in which alcoholic beverages were branded, marketed, and advertised, the article revises the historiography of French advertising in several ways. Histories of interwar French advertising have described an industry that was retarded and underdeveloped, or else slowly progressing through the application and adaptation of American practices. By contrast, this article suggests that during the period French advertising was a remarkably successful enterprise which should be analysed on its own terms rather than through the dominant paradigm of Americanization. French interwar publicity innovations, like the alcoholic beverages that utilized them, were very much ‘home grown’ phenomena. Both were firmly rooted in Belle Époque advertising traditions and contemporary French consumer patterns. Advertising did not create a new consumer culture; instead it reflected and was, in turn, shaped by the society in which it operated and the products being advertised.

This article is an exploration of Diego Rivera's visit to Detroit in 1932–3. It seeks to use his experiences, and in particular the spectacular popular reaction to the Detroit Industry murals he painted, as a prism for analysing varieties of anti-communism in Detroit in the depression era. The article argues that close relationships between private capitalists, most notably Henry Ford and a Mexican communist, expose contradictions in big business's use of anti-communism in the interwar period, and suggest that anti-communism was a more complicated phenomenon than simply a tool for the promotion of ‘free enterprise’. Moreover, by comparing the public reaction to the artists' work with their original intent, it is possible to see how members of Detroit's society unconsciously used anti-communism to sublimate broader concerns over race and ethnicity, gender, politics, and religiosity in a region in the throes of profound social change. The article seeks to highlight elements of these latent anxieties and fears in order to show how anti-communism acted as a vessel for social debate.

This article presents the full text of a hitherto unpublished letter to Hobbes, and provides details of three other items from his correspondence which have not survived. The unpublished letter is from the Oxford academic Thomas Barlow, thanking Hobbes for a copy of Hobbes's De homine; that copy also survives, and details are given of Barlow's critical annotations on it. Where the three non-extant letters are concerned, some information about them has been gleaned from entries in nineteenth-century dealers' and auctioneers' catalogues; in one case, a letter concerning telescopes from the marquess of Newcastle, those details are supplemented by other evidence, from Newcastle's household papers. Finally, some alleged items of Hobbes's correspondence are described and discounted, and two new manuscripts of known letters are listed.

This essay is a critical historiographical overview of the ongoing debate about the role of the Protestant Reformation in the process of ‘the disenchantment of the world’. It considers the development of this thesis in the work of Max Weber and subsequent scholars, its links with wider claims about the origins of modernity, and the challenges to this influential paradigm that have emerged in the last twenty-five years. Setting the literature on England within its wider European context, it explores the links between Protestantism and the transformation of assumptions about the sacred and the supernatural, and places renewed emphasis on the equivocal and ambiguous legacy left by the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Attention is also paid to the ways in which the Reformation converged with other intellectual, cultural, political, and social developments which cumulatively brought about subtle, but decisive, transformations in individual and collective mentalities. It is suggested that thinking in terms of cycles of desacralization and resacralization may help to counteract the potential distortions of a narrative that emphasizes a linear path of development.

This article reviews recent research investigating the impact of societal culture on combat performance in the western world during the first half of the twentieth century. It identifies two main strands of historiography. One group of studies has focused on societal culture's influence in shaping the form and functioning of military institutions. A second approach adopted by current scholarship has been to examine societal culture's effect on individual soldiers' resilience and motivation. The article compares and evaluates the results of this research. It concludes that, while sometimes overstressed at other factors' expense, especially combatants' common humanity and the complexity of militaries' own cultures, societal culture has proved to be a subtle yet important influence on martial performance.