The focus of this article is upon the extensive debate in France that surrounded the concept, content and application of the rights of man in the years between 1789 and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. Beginning with a detailed analysis of the discussion that surrounded the formulation of the Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen attention turns to two broad strands of criticism directed at the discourse of rights: that articulated by the defenders of counter-revolution (most notably Montlosier, Rivarol and de Bonald) and that associated with the idéologues (Daunou, Roederer and de Tracy). Amongst the former rights were associated not only with a new species of revolutionary government but also with the political, social and moral disintegration of France itself; for the latter, emphasis, via the logic of utilitarianism, fell upon seeking to deprive the language of rights of its radical dimensions and implications. It was left to Benjamin Constant to point out the possible contradictions between the claims of utility and those of rights.

‘For the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead.’ Peter Laslett's remark of 1956 is well known. His lament was echoed in 1962 in Bernard Crick's extended plea In defence of politics. They surveyed a wasteland laid bare by a sociology which announced the exhaustion of political ideals, and a philosophy, logical positivism, which declared that nothing significant could be said about ethics or politics. According to Laslett, one of the original culprits of the former kind was Karl Mannheim, because he had taught that all thinking and all knowing were sociologically determined.

The mutual antipathy which arose between Ramsay MacDonald and Arthur Henderson during the First World War is often acknowledged to the point of exaggeration. Historians have however done little more than to note its presence and attempt to minimize its importance to the party's development; they have rarely sought to investigate its causes. During the war the strains in their relationship lay not in any long-standing personal mistrust and cannot be explained by Henderson's acceptance of office in the Asquith and Lloyd George coalitions or MacDonald's unremitting opposition to government policy. They lay in the fact that both men believed the other to have abandoned the Labour party in its hour of crisis. That crisis occurred between August and October 1914 in the first instance and this article will argue that the debate over the future of the Labour party and of the trade union movement which occurred during that period, rather than concern for the fate of the nation, determined the decisions taken by MacDonald and Henderson, by the parliamentary Labour party (P.L.P.), and by the wider Labour movement in the first months of war.

On 2 July 1681 the earl of Shaftesbury was arrested and sent to the Tower, charged with high treason. As a peer he was entitled to be tried by his fellow peers, but before this could happen he would have to be indicted by a grand jury of commoners. Since an indictment could only be presented by a jury from the county in which the alleged offence had been committed, this meant that unless evidence from elsewhere were forthcoming the bill would have to be preferred in London. This created severe problems for the prosecution, because the London sheriffs were intransigent whigs who had flagrantly been packing the jury panels with like-minded supporters. Shaftesbury's fate would depend on whether the judges were entitled to remove such persons and replace them with others of a different persuasion.

Anyone who studies eighteenth-century British politics soon becomes aware of a lack of definite form in the major institutions of government. Contemporaries, although equally aware of this imprecision, did not consider that it detracted from the utility of the constitution. On the contrary the vagaries of the system were often cited as its chief asset, permitting such apparently irreconcilable elements as parliamentary supremacy and a royal executive to exist together in balanced harmony. Burke, the constitution's most eloquent defender, called this quality of comprehensiveness a ‘unity in so great a diversity of its parts’, and believed that such unity was capable of sheltering both prescriptive rights and necessary adaptations in society. But the quality which men of the eighteenth century were agreed to admire has been viewed less sympathetically by later writers, intent on clarifying points which contemporaries preferred to leave open. The whig historians of the nineteenth century attempted to cut through difficulties by treating as unworthy of consideration in the eighteenth-century scene those features which did not survive in the era of reform. The misinterpretations which thereby arose brought about a necessary reaction in the present century, especially from the late Sir Lewis Namier whose research revealed the Georgian scene as having a more traditional structure of politics and society than was previously supposed. But Namier's own work too paid disproportionate attention to parts of the scene at the expense of others, though he undoubtedly did so because the difficulty of dislodging a well-established whig orthodoxy led him to overstate his case.

Applied to Britain and the First Partition, Campbell's “unwept” is perhaps misleading. Through five generations, despite much European slandering of the Poles, Britain always condemned Dismemberment. In 1772, when three Great Powers completed that “suicide of the old Europe” which the seizure of Silesia had begun, Burke styled their operations “fatal to the rights of mankind.” In the language of diplomacy, Suffolk's “disagreeable” sounds hardly less emphatic. The First Partition, we must remember, was a blow to France, struck by the group to which Britain looked for allies against the natural enemy. Yet our minister in Poland spoke unequivocally of “all this mischief,” and ascribed it to Frederick, the Satan of those behind the scenes. Voltaire, to whom the persecuting Poles were as odious as the persecuting French, sent Catherine the most ambiguous of congratulations. His heroine, he declared, had undertaken a task more useful and noble even than the expulsion of the Turks—that of destroying anarchy in Poland “en rendant a chacun ce que chacun croît lui appartenir, et en commençant par elle-même.” But Suffolk's official utterance was more pungent still. “Le Roi,” he replied to the ministers of the partitioning Powers,” veut bien supposer que les trois cours sont convaincues de la justice de leurs preventions respectives.”

Drawing its information from different documents in Portuguese and French archives, this article examines the evolution of Portuguese colonial policies towards Islam, focusing on the special case of Mozambique. Such policies evolved from an attitude of neglect and open repression, prevalent in the early years of the colonial war that broke out in 1965, when Muslims were perceived as the main supporters of the anti-colonial guerrilla in northern Mozambique, to an approach that tried to isolate ‘African Muslims’ from foreign influences in order to align them with the Portuguese. The article analyses the latter strategy, assessing its successes and failures, and the contributions made by several of those who were involved.

The writing of ecclesiastical history is rarely disinterested, and this was especially so in eighteenth-century England. Its leading practitioner, John Jortin, wrote with a clear, determined, and dynamic purpose: to offer an effective critique of orthodoxy and its ally, persecution, and to secure civil and religious liberty in a way commensurate with maintaining an established church and liberal learning. His life and writings meditated on early eighteenth-century tendencies in thought and scholarship in a spirit that allowed often radical developments to take place. Unambiguously heterodox in tone and conclusions, Jortin's researches were drawn on by radical dissent. A scion of a Huguenot family, Jortin was a critical mediator between the culture of the Huguenot Refuge and English scholarship. He was a pioneer in the study of English literature, moving such study away from the narrowly philological methods of Richard Bentley towards more reflective literary scholarship. Above all, Jortin was determined that the Republic of Letters should be a Christian Republic; his contribution to and experience of Enlightenment substantiates J. G. A. Pocock's contention that, in England, it was largely clerical and conservative: study of Jortin in context challenges the hegemony of the Radical Enlightenment thesis that is rapidly becoming an interpretative orthodoxy.

Scholarly interest in early modern sweets has focused on the central role of these food products as markers of social distinction and conspicuous consumption in elite contexts, mainly centred on northern Europe and Italy. Less fully understood are the ways in which the increasing demand for sugar and sweets informed their production and marketing at local levels, in particular in non-courtly urban areas. This article examines the legal case against the baker Josep Cortés, accused of making and selling sponge biscuits in violation of the privilege of confectioners in late seventeenth-century Barcelona. It addresses how confectioners and bakers materially and discursively defined their products based on the use of certain ingredients, utensils, and skill. This article also illustrates a shift from a generic idea of sweetness to one which was explicitly linked to sugar in the period when sugar was becoming a semi-affordable commodity in Europe. By addressing diverse source materials including court records, printed cookbooks, handwritten recipes, and inventories, this case study exemplifies the significant material and cultural dimensions that sugar adopted during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

In the year 1582 William Camden the antiquary was about to venture into a remote country beyond the mountains, called Lancashire, ‘which’, he wrote, ‘I go unto (God speed me well) after a sort somewhat against my will…but I will proceed, in hope that God's assistance, which hitherto hath been favour-able unto me, will not now fail me'. Such qualms might well assail any professional historian who plans an expedition into Shakespeare country; for the trail is marked by his predecessors’ whitening bones and, in one case, by bones which the vultures have not finished picking clean.

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.

David Lloyd George's behaviour in the crucial week between 27 July and 3 August 1914 has commanded much scholarship and more speculation. Nearly every member of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith's Liberal cabinet, including the chancellor of the exchequer himself, has told the story of those agonizing days, by memoir, diary or letter. Yet Lloyd George's part in Britain's decision to declare war upon Germany on 4 August remains unclear; indeed it is less clear now than it seemed to be half a century ago. How could the ‘Pro-Boer’ of the days of the South African war, who had been the object of any number of dangerous personal assaults for his treasonable speeches, the enemy of the dreadnoughts, the slasher of naval estimates, indeed the man who most recently declared at the Mansion House and had asserted again in the House of Commons only six days later – the last coming on the day of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia – that powerful commercial influences in Germany and Britain were drawing the two nations so close that great arms were unnecessary, how could such a man become the supporter of intervention in a continental war on behalf of France?

Twenty years after its initial publication, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Pulitzer Prize winning monograph A midwife's tale: the life of Martha Ballard based on her diary, 1785–1812 (1990) still serves as a major benchmark in women's labour/economic history mainly because it provides scholars with a window into the life of a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century lay American rural healer not through the comments of an outsider, but through the words of the healer herself. While, on the surface, Ballard's encoded, repetitive, and quotidian diary may seem trivial and irrelevant to historians, as Ulrich notes, ‘it is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard's book lies … For her, living was to be measured in doing’ (p. 9). By piecing together ‘ordinary’ primary source material to form a meaningful, extraordinary socio-cultural narrative, Ulrich elucidates how American midwives, such as Martha Ballard, functioned within the interstices of the private and public spheres. A midwife's tale is thus not only methodologically significant, but also theoretically important: by illustrating the economic contributions that midwives made to their households and local communities, and positioning the organizational skill of multitasking as a source of female empowerment, it revises our understanding of prescribed gender roles during the early American Republic (1783–1848). Even though A midwife's tale is clearly limited in terms of time (turn-of-the-nineteenth century) and place (rural Maine), it deserves the renewed attention of historians – especially those interested in gender relations and wage-earning, the economic value of domestic labour, and women's work before industrialization.