On 31 March 1939, Britain, breaking with hitherto steadfastly pursued policy, declared her commitment to the defence of Poland in the event of a German attack. This gesture was a dramatic change in Britain's foreign policy, not merely in relation to one East European state, but more notably in relation to Europe as a whole. Not surprisingly, the declaration has been the focal point of historical attention, although the events following have received less attention. The crisis days of March 1939 saw a chain of events, not necessarily of the same origin or character but which in sum total caused disquiet in European capitals, most clearly in London. Because of this it is easy to over-look the long-term nature of some of the events which culminated in March 1939 and thus, in consequence, to overestimate the effect of the British guarantee upon Polish foreign policy.

Scholars, journalists, and government officials have tried to understand al-Qa'ida and its predecessor, Maktab al-Khidamat, since the early 1980s. These efforts increased significantly after the 11 September 2001 attacks against the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon. Yet, despite this attention, questions remain unanswered. What factors have influenced al-Qa'ida leaders over time as they have made and executed strategic decisions? How have they defined their relationship with affiliated groups in the context of these decisions? This present article utilizes private al-Qa'ida documents, captured by United States Navy Seals during a raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, and recently released to the public, to answer these questions. In doing so, it casts doubt on some of the conventional explanations for al-Qa'ida's trajectory between 2004 and 2013.

Violence in early modern Europe, 1500–1800. By Julius R. Ruff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xii+269. ISBN 0-521-59119-8. £13.95.

The London mob: violence and disorder in eighteenth-century England. By Robert Shoemaker. London: Hambledon and London, 2004. Pp. xvi+393. ISBN 1-85285-389-1. £25.00.

Outlaws and highwaymen: the cult of the robber in England from the middle ages to the nineteenth century. By Gillian Spraggs. London: Pimlico, 2001. Pp. x+372. ISBN 0-7126-6479-3. £12.50.

The duel in early modern England: civility, politeness and honour. By Markku Peltonen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. x+355. ISBN 0-521-82062-6. £45.00.

Swordsmen: the martial ethos in the three kingdoms. By Roger B. Manning. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi+272. ISBN 0-19-926121-0. £47.00.

Rebellion, community and custom in early modern Germany. By Norbert Schindler, translated by Pamela E. Selwyn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xiv+311. ISBN 0-521-65010-0. £55.00.

The history of violence appears to hold a particular fascination for scholars of the early modern period. This is not least because it is so often deemed integral to the differences between modern and pre-modern culture and politics, despite the fact that this particular difference is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain. The progressive decline and containment of violence – or at least certain forms of violence – has been central to narratives of state formation, the transition from courtesy to civility, a shift from aristocratic to bourgeois cultural hegemony, and the ‘civilizing process’ first theorized by Norbert Elias. Despite Michel Foucault's complication (if not rejection) of their teleological assumptions, such celebratory accounts of modernization have proved remarkably tenacious, albeit in a fragmented fashion. As the selection of books under review here illustrates, with the exception of Manning and, most notably, Peltonen, current scholarship is more likely to uphold, or to modify subtly, rather than to reject entrenched views of a gradual abeyance of violence in early modern Europe in response to imperatives of civility and politeness and to emergent state control.

This article focuses on a copper still transported from London to the Mesopotamia estate in Jamaica and used to convert waste sugar products into rum, one of the many New World intoxicants which transformed British consumption patterns in the early modern period. Much has been written about the consumer revolution which allowed these commodities to be absorbed into everyday lives but less interest has been shown in the producer revolution needed to get the goods to market. The labour, skills, and materials embodied in the production and use of the copper still highlight how slave production of rum was integrated into a steadily advancing industrial capitalism linking dispersed sites and workers on both sides of the Atlantic. Rum production was a collaborative effort in which Caribbean plantations were inextricably chained to the local, regional, and international economies, and it involved adaptations in skills, tools, and techniques which were incorporated into Britain's long, slow industrial revolution.

The Polish Brethren, usually known as Socinians, were perhaps the most infamous Christian sect belonging to the so-called ‘Radical Reformation’. Renowned for their anti-Trinitarian beliefs and their rationalistic approach towards religion, the Brethren also discussed theological-political concepts such as the legitimacy of magistracy and warfare. Relevant literature on the Brethren's socio-political views underestimates their participation in contemporary debates on the ius belli, describing them as pacifists who generally opposed politics and violence until the 1650s, when some of them began defending a more conventional approach towards magistracy and warfare. This article proves that this shift toward a more standard Protestant position occurred as early as the 1620s, when Johannes Crell and Jonas Szlichtyng, two of the most prominent spokespersons among the Brethren, reconciled politics and the Brethren's faith in their writings. The article highlights how the historical situation of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth urged them to revise their views on magistracy and warfare, and it argues that they were assisted in this by their education in European universities, especially the Lutheran Academy of Altdorf near Nuremberg, which provided them with different perspectives on the legitimacy of defensive warfare.

In their published memoirs of the Peninsular War, a surprising number of British officers mentioned visits to Portuguese convents and openly confessed to having flirted with the sisters – occasionally to the point of outright seduction – and abandoned them when the regiment moved on. This seems like a very negative self-fashioning to modern readers, but can best be understood in the context of the political and cultural climate in which these memoirs were produced. This article argues that officers' descriptions of convent visiting and their professions of sympathy for cloistered women revealed the influence of gothic, erotic, romantic, and travel literature on military life writing. Their depiction of nuns differed from nuns’ portrayal by common soldiers due to its infusion with masculine ideals of chivalry and sensibility. Elite memoirists saw no need to justify their abandonment of nuns because they viewed it in light of other literary accounts of soldiers who broke nuns’ hearts. At the same time, they contrasted themselves with the barbarism of the French, believing themselves to be far more compassionate and tolerant of Catholic strictures. Officers’ portrayals of Portuguese sisters can thus also be seen as an expression of Britons’ sense of their relationship with Portugal in the war.

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 essay argues that contemporary Taiwan, as a democratic, functionally independent polity, constitutes the crucial exception to disavowals by the Republic of China (ROC) and People’s Republic of China (PRC) of imperialist claims and ambitions. As such, it explores how the ideal of a single China spanning the Taiwan Strait (‘one China’) depends on the erasure of a (proto-) national Taiwanese identity, and possibly the suppression of the people who claim it. ‘One China’ narratives seek to naturalize Taiwan’s absorption into the ROC in the 1940s and its potential future annexation by the PRC, hiding the pressures placed on Taiwanese people today to give up their hard-fought democracy, as well as the bloodshed that would be involved in any military conquest.

From the Second Anglo-Dutch War to the fall of the United Provinces (c. 1670–1795), dozens of English writers published accounts of their travels across the North Sea. The English and the Dutch were bound by centuries of intellectual, political, and cultural interaction. Factors like a shared confession and similar economic structures meant that Anglo-Dutch relations were uniquely intimate, and this close relationship allowed a nuanced and complex exploration of political ideas. This article recreates one of those ideas that was repeated so often in English travel writing: that the Dutch Republic was free. This freedom was presented as a Faustian pact. In practice, the Dutch state guaranteed many freedoms that the English lauded, such as the right to property, to government accountability, and to efficient justice. However, English writers disdained the theories that underpinned these freedoms, which were viewed as egalitarian and republican. It was argued that these suspect doctrines led the United Provinces down the path to licentiousness, luxury, and decline. Paradoxically, therefore, the nature of Dutch freedom determined both the country’s rise and its fall.

In 1976, the Committee of Safety of Medicines (CSM) in Britain authorized the contraceptive injectable Depo-Provera (DP) for short-term use and for two main reasons only: if a woman had received a rubella vaccine or if her partner had just undergone a vasectomy. Although officially authorized on restricted grounds only, the drug appears to have been widely prescribed by doctors of the Domiciliary Family Planning Services (DFPS). This article takes the prescription of DP in the DFPS of Haringey, a multiracial neighbourhood in London, and Glasgow as a comparative case-study to explore the intersections of medical authority, race, and class. Drawing on the archives of the Wellcome Collection, London, and the NHS Archives of the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, we show that the DFPS offered the ideal setting to test and prescribe Depo-Provera widely. In the hands of the medical profession, the drug at times became a tool of violence towards women from disadvantaged backgrounds. In doing so, we contribute to the wider, global history of DP, and illustrate how racist, classist, and ableist prejudices could shape family planning services in the British context.

This article explores how the Japanese translator-historian Murakami Naojirō created an understanding of the Japanese past that established seventeenth-century Japanese actors as equivalents to western European and overseas Chinese merchants. Creating a historical geography of the Southern Seas and the Pacific, Murakami celebrated Japan's expansionism, not only by stressing the seventeenth-century Japanese presence in South-east Asia, but also, more subtly, by identifying the existence of a progressive spirit in the Japanese individuals involved in it. His narrative strategy included implicit comparisons with the European age of expansion, whose protagonists in South-east Asia relied on the networks and services of both Japanese wakō (‘pirates’) and more complex actors such as the red seal merchant Yamada Nagamasa. The article is a case study for Japan's intellectual imperialism of the 1910s–1940s, which closely intertwined popular discourse and academic history.

Singlewomen in the European past, 1250–1800. Edited by Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania University Press, 1999. Pp. vi+352. ISBN 0-8122-1668-7.

Renaissance culture and the everyday. Edited by Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt. Philadelphia: Penn State Press, 1999. Pp. vi+366. ISBN 0-8122-1663-6.

The crimes of women in early modern Germany. By Ulinka Rublack. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Pp. ix+292. ISBN 0-19-820637-2.

This review identifies three major traditions in British landscape historiography: material/environmental, cultural, and phenomenological. The continuing vitality, methodological rigour, and popular reach of the material tradition is emphasized, notwithstanding persistent questions about the adequacy of its theoretical foundations. Its close cousin historical ecology has meanwhile developed into a broader environmental history, increasingly sensitive to ideological and institutional influences. The development of the cultural tradition, originating in art historical analysis of the ‘landscape idea’ as a culturally specific ‘way of seeing’, is traced through a rich proliferation of studies connecting landscape with memory, national identity, and governance, and through feminist, postcolonial, and history-from-below perspectives. The pervasive influence of the spatial, mobilities, and material turns is highlighted but phenomenology’s focus on experience perhaps challenges the cultural tradition’s premises more fundamentally. Although historians were slower than anthropologists and archaeologists to adopt phenomenology, medievalists and early modernists have applied it rewardingly to topics such as the settings of elite buildings, peasant landscape perceptions, and collective landscape memories. Few modernists have yet embraced phenomenology but it has great potential here given the abundant life-writing sources available. While scope remains for further convergence between research traditions, British landscape history is therefore in an exciting phase of methodological renewal.

The article traces a hitherto-neglected form of political obligation, one that resulted from national debt and relied on creditors’ self-interest. Eighteenth-century commentators argued that William III had introduced public borrowing to gain support from the people and to maintain the Revolution Settlement. This claim was first made by tories and became a staple argument of opposition authors. Around the middle of the eighteenth century, this connection between national debt and political allegiance was reassessed. Robert Wallace presented the debt as a price worth paying for the excellent British constitution, David Hume considered it as Britain's last hope to maintain the established order. In the discussions of American independence, the association of national debt with political obligation was used for divergent purposes. While Adam Smith and Richard Price utilized it to argue for a reform of empire, Thomas Paine urged the American provinces to unite under an American national debt. Drawing on authors from various political allegiances in eighteenth-century Britain, the article shows how the same idea about national debt and political obligation could be used for different purposes.

The 1896 Berliner Gewerbeausstellung was a transformative moment for city and nation alike. The exhibition announced Berlin's pre-eminence as a scientific and industrial city and bolstered an emergent German national identity. Including displays of Egypt and Germany's formal colonies also revealed Germany's competence as a colonial power. By illustrating its skill in both aggressive conquest and subtle intervention, city and nation thought themselves capable of competing with European rivals at home and abroad. However, the two visions of colonialism, cloaked in the guise of mass entertainment, have rarely been brought into conversation with one another. This article seeks to discuss this colonial–Oriental dichotomy by focusing on tensions between education and entertainment in display techniques, particularities of racial difference in ethnographic display, the use of advertising, and the insertion of new technologies. Contributing to a deeper understanding of race, empire, and modernity in the German context, the Gewerbeausstellung offers a jumping off point for further comparison to other local, regional, and international exhibitions and an avenue to explore how notions of modernity factored into formal and informal imperial arrangements. Ultimately, it sheds light on how an exhibition helped to fashion a global, imperial city at the turn of the twentieth century.