The two decades of French rule in the German-speaking Rhineland at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the dramatic imposition of the sovereign state on a region previously noted for its absence. The successful integration of the new territories into the Republic and Empire depended upon the response of Rhenish elites to the transformation of local government from an accumulation of historical privileges into the lowest administrative tier of the state. Napoleon, more than his revolutionary predecessors, recognized the importance of ‘rallying’ the ‘notables’ in what was a politically inclusive and socially exclusive process. This policy was successful insofar as elites did, in general, rally. Their motivation varied, and the commitment was rarely unconditional. Rhenish notables, long adept at exploiting Old Regime institutions to preserve particular privileges, abused Napoleonic institutions, in order to protect clients and preserve their social position. This helped widen the gulf between the mainly urban notables and the rest of the predominantly rural population, which had fewer legal and institutionalized opportunities for asserting its interests directly. This system of rule proved suited to Rhenish conditions until the rise of party politics in the second half of the nineteenth century.

The Suez crisis is widely believed to have contributed significantly to Britain's decline as a world power. Eden's miscalculation of American reaction to the attack on Egypt was damaging to Britain's reputation and fatal to his career. However, his actions were contrary to received wisdom in Whitehall. The crisis merely confirmed Britain's dependence on the United States and had no lasting impact on Anglo-American relations. Britain's relationship with its informal and formal empire was already changing before 1956, and the turn from the commonwealth to Europe owed little to Suez. Examination of policy reviews in Whitehall before and after the Suez crisis shows that the Foreign Office, Commonwealth Relations Office, and Colonial Office were slow to accept the need for change in Britain's world role. Insofar as they did from 1959 it was because of Treasury arguments about the effect of high defence expenditure on the economy, and slow growth of the United Kingdom's population compared with the United States, the European Economic Community, and the Soviet Union.

In a recent contribution to the debate over the operational significance of the Old Poor Law, Peter Solar has argued that ‘the local financing of poor relief gave English property owners, individually and collectively, a direct pecuniary interest in ensuring that the parish's demographic and economic development was balanced’. His survey of the implications of the attempt to maintain this equilibrium, however, fails to take account of the social and political relationships between rate-payers, rate-receivers, and parish officers. In seeking to integrate considerations of power into the analysis of the relief of the poor, by contrast, this paper locates social welfare provision in the context of the authority structures of several parishes in Holland Fen (Lincolnshire) over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It emphasizes the role of the parish vestry in regulating and relieving the poor; demonstrates the extraordinary scale of poor relief in the local context; and argues that even in the open parishes of the Lincolnshire fenland, hostility to poor migrants could be marked, resulting even in the prohibition of the marriages of the poor. The politics of the poor rate implied the exclusion of poor strangers in the interests of relieving the ancient settled poor.

In the constitutional evolution of eighteenth-century Britain a major problem was the resolution of the tensions which arose between the executive powers vested in the Crown and the legislative supremacy of Parliament. Although the seventeenth-century conflicts of Crown and Parliament had settled the question of ultimate supremacy in favour of Parliament, eighteenth-century politics, by common consent, were confined to the level where a balance of power could be seen to operate, in which king, Lords, and Commons exercised agreed functions and powers and where the ultimate weapon—parliamentary supremacy—need not be used. The independence of the Crown—however it may have operated in practice—was a cardinal doctrine of the ‘mixed and balanced’ constitution. Although this doctrine was usually invoked to support the right of the king to choose his own ministers, it gave an important constitutional role to the Civil List, for by supplying the Crown with a financial provision not subject to parliamentary control the Civil List served the pur-pose of supporting the independence and the ‘influence’ of the Crown. The uncontrolled expenditure of the Civil List, with its large number of attractive places, pensions, and other benefits, was an important part of that ‘influence’ which some considered necessary for the effective exercise of executive power and which others decried as a threat to the independence of Parliament. The disputes and jealousies created by the Civil List developed in the reigns of George I and George II and came to a climax in the reign of George III. The result was an alteration of the constitutional foundation of the Civil List which further weakened the doctrine of the independence of the Crown and which marked an important step in the evolution of parliamentary government.

The history of fascism in Italy has been extensively covered while fascist Italy's role in colonies before the war, and occupied areas during it, have only been touched upon. There has been little or no coming to terms with fascist crimes comparable to the French concern with Vichy or even the Japanese recognition of its wartime and pre-war responsibilities. This article uses Italy's internment policy in Africa before the war and in the Balkans and Italy during the war to illustrate the repression of historical memory. On the one hand, foreign Jews were interned to protect them from deportation by German, Croatian or Vichy French forces. The reasons were political and humanitarian. On the other, Balkan civilians were interned in conditions that led to the death of thousands. Similar and worse policies had been carried out in Africa before the war. There is some excellent specialist work on Africa which is not part of general knowledge; the Balkans have not even been covered by specialists. This article puts forward some explanations for the repression of the recent past.

Reconstructing Britain's cities to accommodate the ‘motor revolution’ was an integral part of urban renewal in the post-war decades. This article shows how opposition to urban motorways had a pivotal role in the retreat from urban modernism in the 1970s. It takes as its case-study Birmingham, Britain's premier motor city, headquarters of the motor industry, and with heavy investment in roads, including the Inner Ring, Britain's first urban motorway completed in 1971. The article traces the collapse of the motor city ideal in Birmingham sparked by controversy over car pollution at Spaghetti Junction, the growth of roads protest, and the implication of the Inner Ring in municipal corruption. In so doing, it identifies the intersection of environmental, political, and economic factors that lay behind the volte-face in urban policy and compares Birmingham with other cities which witnessed similar revolts. It argues that the 1970s in Britain saw the end of a specific engineering vision of the post-war city, centred on the car and the ‘citizen-driver’.

James II's grant of religious toleration and his invitation to the whigs to return to office dramatically changed the English political scene and created profound dilemmasfor the crown's former enemies. Although there is ambiguity in their responses, and although Locke himself remained an immovable exile, his circle offriends took advantage of these changes. This included nomination to James's proposed tolerationist parliament, an accommodation which damaged them in the actual elections to the Convention of 1689. Some took office, and in at least two cases Locke's associates published pamphlets in support of the king. By exploring the politics of the Lockean whigs a contradiction in earlier views is resolved. For whilst Richard Ashcraft has argued that Locke's circle remained unremittingly hostile to James and engaged in clandestine plotting, other sources identify the same people as among the king's ‘whig collaborators’. The chief actors in Locke's circle are Edward Clarke, Sir Walter Yonge, Richard Duke and Richard Burthogge.

Jean Mabillon's De re diplomatica, whose importance for diplomatics and the philosophy of history is well recognized, also contributed to the seventeenth-century European debate over the relationship among documents, archives, and historical or juridical proof. This article juxtaposes early works on diplomatics by Mabillon, Daniel Papebroche, and Barthélémy Germon against German ius archivi theorists including Rutger Ruland and Ahasver Fritsch to reveal two incommensurate approaches that emerged around 1700 for assessing the authority of written records. Diplomatics concentrated on comparing the material and textual features of individual documents to authentic specimens in order to separate the genuine from the spurious, whereas the ius archivi emphasized the publica fides (public faith) that documents derived from their placement in an authentic sovereign's archive. Diplomatics' emergence as a separate auxiliary science of history encouraged the erasure of archivality from the primary conditions of documentary assessment for historians, however, while the ius archivi's privileging of institutional over material criteria for authority foreshadowed European state practice and the evolution of archivistics into the twentieth century. This article investigates these competing discourses of evidence and their implications from the perspective of early modern archival practices.

This article examines the relationship between religious debate and constitutional conflict in the 1590s, focusing on the status of ecclesiastical law and the right of the church courts to impose ex officio oaths upon English subjects. It argues that Richard Cosin, a client of Archbishop Whitgift and the leading apologist for the government's use of ex officio oaths, used the issue to make a series of aggressive and controversial assertions of state power. These theoretical claims did not involve sovereignty or the powers of the monarch – the issues usually addressed by historians of political thought – but rather the much more theologically charged question of the line between public authority and private conscience. As such, Cosin and his supporters transformed the raw materials of conformity and anti-puritanism into a view of the state and its coercive powers that seemed to threaten both the common law and the Elizabethan regime's own claims that it did not make ‘windows into men's souls’.

This article seeks to analyse the extent to which the Scottish aristocracy was anglicized in the years between the union of the crowns and the national covenant. The question is one which has a bearing upon the origins of the Scottish revolution in 1637–8, and on the wider issues of elite integration in multi-state monarchies in the early modem period. Topics discussed are aristocratic education, exposure to a new court culture, office holding in England, the effects on income and expenditure of English patronage and lifestyles, changes in the honours system, and new patterns in births, marriages and deaths. The conclusions are firstly that the Scottish presence at court was such that it does not make sense to talk of an English court after 1603. Secondly, there was very little anglidzation of the Scottish aristocracy outside a handful of court families, and even these retained a strong sense of national consciousness.

The new political theology of obedience to the prince which was enthusiastically adopted by the Church of England in the 1530s was essentially founded upon Luther's new interpretation of the fourth commandment. It was mediated to an English audience by Tyndale, but his ideas were not officially adopted as early as some recent research has suggested. The founding of royal authority on the Decalogue, and thus on the ‘word of God’, was a particularly attractive feature of this doctrine, which became almost the defining feature of Henrician religion. Rival tendencies within the Church of England sought to exploit it in the pursuit of their particular agendas. Reformers strove to preserve its connections with the broader framework of Lutheran theology, with the emphasis on faith alone and the ‘word of God’, while conservatives strove to relocate it within an essentially monastic tradition of obedience, with an emphasis on good works, ceremonies, and charity. The most significant achievement was that of the Reformers, who established and played upon an equivocation between the royal supremacy and the ‘word of God’ in order to persuade the king to sanction the publication of the Bible in English as a formidable prop for his new-found dignity.

He might be regarded indeed as a representative specimen of the Teutonic type.1 He was essentially Teutonic in his whole personality, physical, as well as moral and mental; in his square, sturdy frame, his ruddy hair, his fair complexion, his plain and simple habits of life, no less than in his love of truth, and straightforwardness in deed and word. For the pure Celt he entertained a kind of natural antipathy, mingled with something like contempt, which often manifested itself in odd and amusing ways, suggestive of Dr Johnson's attitude towards the Scotch.

The history of mechanics’ institutes ‘is at once beautiful and terrible to read', Christopher Charles Cattell, the Birmingham radical republican, told the members of his Eclectic Institute in 1854. Contemporaries of the mechanics’ institute movement in the mid-nineteenth century were acutely aware of this terrible history. ‘The banquet was prepared for guests who did not come …,’ wrote Robert Elliott in 1861. J. W. Hudson referred to ‘The universal complaint that Mechanics’ Institutions are attended by persons of a higher rank than those for whom they were designed…’ The Westminster Review continued the lament, Samuel Smiles, Lloyd Jones and J. M. Ludlow joined the chorus, and later historians have followed the tune. E. P. Thompson, for example, writes: ‘After the mid-Twenties the tendency was general for the custom of artisans to give way to that of the lower middle class, and for orthodox political economy to come into the syllabus.

The opening of archives in recent years makes it possible to reassess the membership of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) before 1945. The revised aggregate figures, while not startling, suggest that revisions to established views of the effects of the General Strike, the shift to the ‘new line’ and the popular front, are in order. The party's membership was very predominantly male, tended to be young, often included a high proportion of unemployed people, and was heavily working class, with miners especially significant. Geographically, its membership was dominated for most of the period by London, Scotland, Lancashire, and South Wales. There was also a very high turnover of membership for much of the period. The reasons for this turnover, and explanations for the circumstances in which the party was best able to recruit, are discussed. Over time the party's membership did become less unrepresentative of Britain as a whole, enabling it to become an organic, if minor, part of British political life. CPGB membership patterns have similarities with those of other Western Communist parties and its predecessor organizations in Britain, showing how the CPGB reflected features of both international Communism and the British left.

Holidays and festivals were traditional occasions when the young men of early modern London indulged in carnivals of misrule. One of the most striking examples of these were the ritualized attacks on brothels by apprentices, which customarily took place on Shrove Tuesday. These rituals, which often involved quite extensive destruction to property, seem to have occurred with persistent regularity, at least in the early Stuart period, there being twenty-four known Shrove Tuesday riots in the thirty-five years between 1606 and 1641. Such activities normally received moderate handling from the authorities, and only in exceptional circumstances did the courts choose to punish the rioters with heavy fines or a period of imprisonment. Contemporaries, it seems, were familiar with, and to a certain extent tolerant of this ‘ancient administration of justice at Shrovetide’ by the apprentices, as James Harrington called it. Such feats were even acclaimed in popular literature as being a sign of the virtue of London's young men. In this context, the response of the authorities to apprentice attacks on bawdy houses that occurred in Easter week of 1668 seems excessive. Here, fifteen of the ringleaders were tried for high treason, on a rather dubious interpretation of the law, and four were eventually hanged, drawn and quartered.

Within the expanding field of global history, historians often conceive of distinct integrated ‘worlds’: discrete if permeable cultural units capable of coherent study. Some are defined exogenously through factors such as oceanic geography, others are conceived of endogenously through the cultures and identities of their adherents. In this context, this article critically assesses the recent voluminous literature on the British world: a unit increasingly distinguished from British imperial history and defined by the networks and identities of global Britishness. The article argues that the British world, while making valuable contributions to the historiography of empire and of individual nations, fails ultimately to achieve sufficiently clear definition to constitute a distinctive field of study and neglects the crucial concerns of imperial history with politics and power, while flattening time, space, and neglecting diversity. While highlighting many key concerns, other methodologies such as settler colonialism, whiteness studies, or revivified imperial history are better placed to take these on than the nebulous concept of a world. More broadly, an analysis of the British world highlights the problems inherent in attempting to define a field endogenously through a focus on identity.

Thomas Norton is one of Sir John Neale's parliamentary heroes. Neale demonstrates his importance in the ‘puritan choir’, that organized opposition party which was so active in the parliaments of 1563–66 and 1571. He and his colleagues are variously described as ‘troublesome’, ‘rebellious’, ‘hostile’, ‘nuisances’, ‘zealots’, ‘agitators’and ‘hotheads’, and Norton himself is depicted as ‘one of the most conspicuous of our ‘‘choir’’’. The result is a generally accepted portrait of a puritan agitator, tactician, and parliamentary organizer.