During the nineteenth century, the Muslim Mediterranean became a locus of competing imperial projects led by the Ottomans and European powers. This article examines how the migration of people and ideas across North Africa and Asia complicated processes of imperial consolidation and exposed the ways in which North Africa, Europe, and Asia were connected through trans-imperial influences that often undermined the jurisdictional sovereignty of imperial states. It demonstrates that cross-border migrations and cultural transfers both frustrated and abetted imperial projects while allowing for the imagining of new types of solidarities that transcended national and imperial categorizations. In analysing these factors, this article argues for a rethinking of the metropole–periphery relationship by highlighting the important role print and trans-imperial networks played in shaping the Mediterranean region.

This article is a reminder that the concept of ‘annihilation of space’ or ‘spatial compression’, often used as a shorthand for referring to the cultural or economic consequences of industrial mobility, has a long intellectual history. The concept thus comes loaded with a specific outlook on the experience of modernity, which is – I argue – unsuitable for any cultural or social history of space. This article outlines the etymology of the concept and shows: first, that the historical phenomena it pretends to describe are too complex for such a simplistic signpost; and, second, that the term is never a neutral descriptor but always an engagement with a form of historical and cultural mediation on the nature of modernity in relation to space. In both cases this term obfuscates more than it reveals. As a counter-example, I look at the effect of the railways on popular representations of space and conclude that postmodern geography is a relative dead end for historians interested in the social and cultural history of space.

‘The Irish are out in force’: it was a rainy summer day on the fields of the Somme, and they were very young, in their early teens, in fact. However, this was not 1916, but 2016, when the centenary of one of the bloodiest battles in history attracted an international crowd, including large contingents of school children from the Republic. In contrast to the 50th anniversary, which, in 1966, had been a ‘Unionist’ commemoration – claimed by the Northern Irish loyalists as their own, while the survivors of the Southern veterans kept their heads down and suppressed this part of their past – in 2016, the conflict was widely construed as an inclusive experience, which saw men and women giving their lives ‘for Ireland’ even when fighting ‘for King and Empire’. A generation ago this would have shocked traditional nationalists, who regarded the Great War as an ‘English’ one, in contrast to the Easter Rising and the subsequent War of Independence. However, European integration and the Peace Process gradually brought about a different mindset. Among historians, it was the late Keith Jeffery who spearheaded the revision of our perception of Ireland's standing in the war. This reassessment was further developed in 2008, with John Horne's editing Our war, a volume jointly published by RTÉ (the Irish broadcasting company) and the Royal Irish Academy, in which ten of the leading historians of the period – including Keith Jeffery, Paul Bew, David Fitzpatrick, and Catriona Pennell – presented Ireland as a protagonist, rather than merely a victim of British imperialism. By 2016, this new understanding had largely reshaped both government and public perceptions, with ‘the emergence of a more tolerant and flexible sense of Irish identity’. This has been confirmed by the largely consensual nature of the war centenary commemorations. While Dublin took the initiative, Northern Ireland's Sinn Féin leaders were ready to follow suit with the then deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, Martin McGuinness, visiting the battlefield of the Western Front to honour the memory of the Irish dead, and the Speaker of the Belfast Assembly, Mitchel McLaughlin, and his party colleague, Elisha McCallion, the mayor of Derry and Strabane, laying wreaths at the local war memorials.

In the late nineteenth century, as Japanese scholars, traders, and labourers began to cross the Pacific Ocean in ever greater numbers, Tokyo-based intellectuals started to think about the significance of the ocean for the upcoming century. One prominent articulation of this ‘Pacific age’ was the result of an intellectual dialogue between a young Japanese student, Inagaki Manjirō (1861–1908), and his Cambridge professor, John Robert Seeley (1834–95). Traditionally framed as a relationship of ‘influence’ from teacher to pupil, and thus from West to East, the emergence of the ‘Pacific age’ was in fact the result of a sophisticated modulation of ideas from Seeley's The expansion of England (1883) into the rapidly changing politics of early 1890s Japan. This article traces that modulation in Inagaki's published works between 1890, when he graduated from Cambridge, and 1895, when Japan defeated China in the First Sino-Japanese War. It argues that Seeley's analyses, in Inagaki's hands, gave a significant impetus to existing expansionist visions in Japan, and thus constitute one example of late nineteenth-century history being written in the discursive space between Europe and East Asia.

One of the difficult and important decisions which confronted Napoleon during his last days in Paris concerned the use of his fleet. Strategically there was overwhelming argument for its immediate and energetic employment. On land, Austria was starting the war with large advantages; in numbers, in preparation, in position, in geographical facilities of every kind. But on sea, she was nowhere. Never a formidable naval power, her small fleet was at the moment in a condition of more than ordinary decrepitude. That of France, on the contrary, had recently been raised by the Emperor to a size and efficiency which had attracted the uneasy attention of the British admiralty. Obviously, therefore, if Italy were indeed to be freed to the Adriatic, it was of the first importance that France should assert and use to the full her maritime superiority in the Adriatic. Only so could the famous Quadrilateral be taken in the rear, and Austria made conscious of her one geographical disadvantage: the inadequacy of her railway communications with her front. The Emperor had accordingly given detailed instructions for the sending of such a fleet, prepared to effect a landing at Venice. But now at the last moment the threatening attitude of England caused him to countermand them. For the Derby government not only dispatched a formidable fleet itself to the Mediterranean, but proceeded to advance an urgent request for the neutralization of the Adriatic. ‘Before the Emperor leaves Paris,’ wrote Malmesbury to Cowley on 2 May, ‘make a great effort to keep us out of the war by obtaining his consent to neutralise the Adriatic.’

This article re-evaluates the role and importance of the thirteenth earl of Eglinton as president of the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights (NAVSR). Departing from the established historiography, which depicts his career as a romantic absurdity because of his organization of a medieval tournament in 1839, it shows Eglinton to have been a political figure of substance, who played a significant role in public life during the mid-Victorian era. The article emphasizes the importance of ‘administrative devolution’ as a feature of long-term Conservative political thought and points to activities of Eglinton and his circle as an example of the need to give more weight to the importance of Conservatives in modern Scottish history.

The resignation in May 1730 of Charles, second Viscount Townshend (1674–1738), as Secretary of State for the Northern Department, is an event that has attracted little attention. Aware of Sir Robert Walpole's determination to get rid of Townshend, scholars have tended to treat Walpole's success as inevitable. The major study of British political history in these years, that contained within Professor Plumb's valuable biography of Walpole, is disappointingly brief in its treatment of the crisis. This reflects the general tendency of the work to concentrate on domestic politics and to devote less attention to the interrelationship between them and foreign policy. As a result Plumb's treatment of Townshend's departure is less probing and comprehensive than most of his book. The failure of scholars to study the ministerial crisis of 1729–30is far from exceptional, for the years of Walpole's ascendancy have escaped the same degree of scrutiny by political historians that has marked the reigns of Anne and George III. A host of major figures lack scholarly biographies: George II; William Stanhope, who succeeded Townshend and was ennobled as Lord Harrington in 1730; the earl of Chesterfield, Townshend's principal supporter in the ministry in 1729–30; William Pulteney, the leader of the opposition Whigs; Lord Wilmington, the duke of Dorset and George Dodington, ministerial opponents of Walpole; and Queen Caroline.

The debate about the political allegiance of Pius XII and the Vatican during the Second World War remains unresolved. As more documents become available, they enable historians, detractors and defenders alike, to develop a more nuanced view on this contentious issue. Files recently released by The National Archives1 come within this category. They reveal that during the Second World War the British government systematically intercepted, monitored, and recorded in detail the financial transactions listed in the bank statements of the main financial agencies of the State of Vatican City from 1941 to 1943. These documents provide a detailed, if occasionally incomplete, day by day and month by month record of the Vatican's sources of income, expenditure priorities, investment strategies, and movements of money throughout its global network under the difficult wartime conditions of foreign exchange controls, blocked sterling and dollar accounts, Freezing Orders, and Trading with the Enemy restrictions imposed by the belligerent parties. This article examines the light they shed on Vatican finances throughout that period and what new insights they provide into the role of Pius XII and the Vatican during the Second World War, and, in particular, into the question of where their sympathies lay throughout the duration of that conflict.

This article examines the forces that shaped the responses of the urban commons to the Reformation in Augsburg. Developing work by Blickle and others, it considers the extent to which traditional communal ideals were reflected in measures to construct a system of ‘sacral corporatism’. An examination of the attitudes of guildsmen towards communal values and institutions shows variation in their views, even on such basic points as the identification and imposition of the ‘common good’. Case studies show how predominantly poor weavers were attracted to the call to enforce communal principles as a means of defending their status and incomes. To this end they welcomed evangelical teaching, for it provided scriptural and ethical endorsements of corporate action. In contrast, members of the butchers' guild, who were involved in a capital intensive occupation, resisted communal restraints on their freedom to trade and make profits. The butchers' opposition to the Reformation rested more on their rejection of ‘sacral corporatism’, as advocated by reformers in Augsburg, than on support for Catholicism. Augsburg shows the significance of communal values in the urban Reformation, but it demonstrates that these were neither static nor uniformly accepted. On the contrary they were themselves the subject of dispute.

In the spring and summer of 1942 the German military forces in north Africa and southern Russia made significant advances. In June the German army reached EI Alamein, only seventy miles west of Alexandria, while in August the German army reached the outskirts of Stalingrad. As a result of these German advances, Britain, which was the allied country with primary responsibility for defending the Middle East against the Axis powers, became concerned about the possibility that the German air force might attempt to bomb the oilfields and oil refineries in the Middle East in order to deny the oil in that area to the allied governments. Britain was also alarmed about the possibility that, instead of bombing the oil installations, the Germans might attempt to capture them intact in order to utilize the oil for their war machine. In 1942 total Middle Eastern oil production constituted only about six per cent of total world oil production. However, all Middle Eastern oil was refined locally - about two-thirds at Abadan in Iran - and played a vital role in the conduct of British military operations in the Middle East and southeast Asia.1 In 1942 Britain had troops stationed in Iran, Iraq, Egypt, and Bahrain, the four main Middle Eastern oil-producing nations, and thus was well placed to defend and, if necessary, to destroy the oil facilities in those countries. However, at this time Sa'udi Arabia, the remaining Middle Eastern oil producing nation, was a neutral power with no British or American troops stationed on its territory. As a result of Sa'udi neutrality it was difficult for Britain to defend the Sa'udi oilfields against German air attack. It was also difficult for Britain to make the necessary preparations to destroy the Sa'udi oilfields in the event that the German army advanced into the Arabian peninsula. The purpose of this communication will be to discuss the manner in which the British government attempted to deal with these problems. It will also discuss the reaction of the United States government and the American-owned oil company in Sa'udi Arabia to this situation.

The author and politician Morgan Philips Price (1885–1976) is best remembered today as a sympathetic eye-witness to the Russian Revolution and commentator on events in Soviet Russia throughout his long life. Less well known are his activities in Germany, to which he travelled in 1918 to observe the course of the November Revolution and better communicate his favourable view of Bolshevik Russia to Western Europe, and where he remained until 1924. In the summer of 1919, Price was arrested and held without trial in Berlin's Moabit prison, an incident which he later insisted was instigated by the British authorities. This article examines the extensive files on Price kept by the British security services in order to verify this interpretation of his arrest. In so doing, it will argue that a consideration of the case not only sheds light on an interesting aspect of Price's biography but also reveals much about the prevailing mind-set amongst some leading British military officers, security personnel, and politicians, and the methods by which they sought to neutralize perceived ‘revolutionary’ threats in the months after the First World War.

Frederick II's writings have conventionally been viewed either as political tools or as means of public self-fashioning – part of his campaign to raise the status of Prussia from middling principality to great power. This article, by contrast, argues that Frederick's works must also be taken seriously on their own terms, and interpreted against the background of Enlightenment philosophy. Frederick's notions of kingship and state service were not governed mostly by a principle of pure morality or ‘humanitarianism’, as argued influentially by Friedrich Meinecke. On the contrary, the king's views were part and parcel of an eighteenth-century vision of modern kingship in commercial society, based on the benign pursuit of self-love and luxury. A close analysis of Frederick's writings demonstrates that authorial labour was integral to his political agency, publicly placing constraints on what could be perceived as legitimate conduct, rather than mere intellectual window-dressing or an Enlightened pastime in irresolvable tension with his politics.

The conservative tradition in America. By Charles W. Dunn and J. David Woodard. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 1996. Pp. ix+199. ISBN 0-8476-8167-X. $14.95.

Hoods and shirts: the extreme right in Pennsylvania, 1925–1950. By Philip Jenkins. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Pp. 343. ISBN 0-8078-2316-3. $29.95.

From demagogue to Dixiecrat: Horace Wilkinson and the politics of race. By Glenn Feldman. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, Inc., 1995. Pp. xviii+311. ISBN 0-8191-9783-1. $32.50.

From George Wallace to Newt Gingrich: race in the conservative counterrevolution, 1963–1994. By Dan T. Carter. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Pp. xv+134. ISBN 0-8071-2118-5. £21.95.

According to political scientists Charles W. Dunn and David Woodward in The conservative tradition in America, the dramatic Republican gains in the 1994 elections exemplified the eclilse of New Deal liberalism by a resurgent conservatism, a politcal shift that began in the late 1960s and which Ronald Reagan's victory in the 1980 fortified. In their short survey the authors investigate the intellectual roots of modern conservatism and attempt to define and explain the recent manifestation of this heritage. The three other recent works reviewed here provide a larger historical context, which Dunn and Woodward ignore, for understanding conservatism and right extremism in America.

Modern historians of the Jamaica rebellion of October 1865 have attached much causal importance to a document of 14 June the same year, known as ‘the Queen's Letter’. This was the official response to a petition in which ‘certain poor people’ of St Ann's parish in the island had naively asked their sovereign for ‘a quantity of land’ and other means of relief from distress. Drafted by Henry Taylor, clerk and senior clerk in the West India department, of the colonial office since the mid-1820s, and approved by permanent under-secretary Sir Frederic Rogers and secretary of state Edward Cardwell, it has acquired an unmitigatedly bad reputation. It is not merely that it was naturally based on the knowledge that no imperial funds or other competence existed or could exist for relieving the consequences even of admittedly bad seasons in colonies (or at home), but rather that it thrust austere advice upon the suffering petitioners. Any labouring population, it stated, whether in Jamaica or England, could provide against adversity only by ‘industry and prudence’: above all, by undertaking – what was understood to be notoriously lacking amongst creoles – regular work for wages. Even the most sympathetic critics have considered this to be ‘harsh’ and ‘callous’. One writes that it reflected the sentiments of an imperial bureaucracy whose expectations had been influenced by the remarkable changes in English society, whose attitudes were governed by evangelical propriety, and whose notions of progress were inextricably tied to productivity, trade figures, accumulating property, and the refinements which these entailed.