Henry Bennet, earl of Arlington, is a neglected statesman. A sometime diplomat, he was Charles II's longest-serving secretary of state, held the highest household office for ten years, and married his daughter to a royal bastard. It is, however, his artistic patronage that has most conspicuously been overlooked and, consequently, its political significance underestimated. Informed by his experiences abroad, he appreciated the power of the arts to influence and impress and used the cultural mediation of the English diplomatic network in his control to help skilfully fashion his domestic political identity. Through judicious display of architecture, paintings, sculpture, and furniture, Arlington created a cultural world that confirmed both his close relationship with Charles II and his dominance of foreign affairs. Even after he resigned as secretary of state in 1674, Arlington continued to deploy artistic patronage for political ends: as lord chamberlain, he controlled the largest government department and was formally responsible for fashioning the royal image. This article reconsiders Arlington's contributions as a statesman through his considered use of material consumption and artistic patronage and thereby illuminates corners of cultural practice which are situated firmly in the political sphere.

This review assesses scholarly attempts to synthesize various forms of Scottish philosophy in the context of eighteenth-century America. It suggests potential new directions for the study of Scottish Enlightenment ethical theories on the western side of the Atlantic, and then examines scholarship on a separate and neglected Scottish influence in American thought: an evangelical notion of religious authority that was not opposed to wider incorporation in multi-denominational political unions. The ideological basis for American independence owed much to a tense counterpoise between Scottish moral sense reasoning and Presbyterian evangelicalism, rather than to their singular and starkly binary contributions to colonial American ideology.

References to Malthus are increasingly evident in narratives of agricultural trends in development discourse at the end of the twentieth century. This article addresses the long roots of Malthusian thinking in formulating public policy, that can be traced across from Malthus's own ideas and to subsequent construction of neo-Malthusianisms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It deploys the distinction between two approaches to statistical data collection that emerge in Malthus's own time: an ‘open’ system that collects data to identify trends, and a ‘closed’ system that uses data to prove an existing model. The article uses these distinctions in order to demonstrate opposing tendencies in policy-making in both England and India, with particular reference to Indian agriculture. It shows how radical thinking about data collection as an inductive line of enquiry lost out to a deductive approach that regarded data on Indian agriculture as doomed, because of its ‘unimproved’ condition, and highlights three moments where opposing tendencies were important. The article concludes that this turn in thinking about food, land, and people continues to persist in agricultural policy-making in international development circles into the present.

Let us return to the undying fascination of Bradford and Sheffield. Like Wright before him, Temmel misses the point of my using the Bradford and Sheffield examples. Many schoolteachers often take the line that if the slowest children in their classes understand something the rest can be taken to have mastered it. In a somewhat similar way, I argued that if the Liberal party could be shown to be vastly more catholic than Vincent's definition allowed for in two large places where the structure of society was least favourable to a Right and Centre, then his overall contentions would have been brought most seriously into question. 1874 was a fair date to choose and comprehensive Liberalism was easily to be observed. Examination of the two boroughs showed that British Liberalism was much more broadly-faceted than Vincentian theory allowed; that ‘Whiggery’ was not just a family word, divorced in several respects from a doctrinal context; and that the Centre and the Radicals were in fact varied. If the Centre and Radicals flourished in those places, a fortiori they would elsewhere. The ‘slowest’ so to speak had obliged with data and so the Vincent case fell to the ground. Such an approach makes some intellectual demands upon the reader, not only logical but imaginative and factual. Nevertheless, it should not have proved too much for any able person in any serious profession.

Using Bury as a case study, this article reassesses the mechanism of the formation of political opinion in Lancashire factory towns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This subject has heretofore been dominated by sociological explanations of the 1970s and early 1980s. A re-examination of the ‘Three Lancashires’ paradigm, the socio-economic model that has underpinned most Lancashire studies for this period, demonstrates that the socio-economics of urban Lancashire were more diverse than previously thought. From this basis, the article challenges the empirical basis of one of the most enduring tenets of Lancashire politics: the deferential ‘factory politics’ model. To provide an alternative explanation, this article reasserts the importance of ‘issues’ to the debate, and underlines the contingent nature of the relationship between representative and constituents. An important strand is whether political activists integrated their plebeian rank and file into new party structures, thus neutralizing threats to status quo. This interpretation has been central to much recent revisionist history; however, this article demonstrates that the ‘rise of party’ during the mid-Victorian period was contingent upon political activists acquiescing to certain requirements of their followers.

No system of self-government at all resembling the practice of the mother country was possible in the British colonies so long as the heads of the colonial departments and the members of Governors' councils held their offices nominally during His Majesty's pleasure, but actually for life. Hence it has been generally recognised that Lord John Russell's despatch of October 16, 1839, to Governor-General Poulett Thomson, which put an end to this state of affairs, marks a stage of immense importance in the transition to Responsible Government. The Colonial Office papers in the Public Record Office show that the pronouncement of the new principle, made at a turning-point of Canadian history, originated in a decision on a minor incident in a remote and lately colonised part of the empire.

Complaints about corrupt administrative practices were endemic to the Tudor-Stuart state. During the reign of James I, however, the issue of corruption was transformed from a staple of political discourse to an issue which not only aggravated administrative problems but also undermined the crown's very legitimacy. With the impeachment in 1621 of James' lord chancellor, Francis Bacon, for accepting bribes while holding judicial office, parliament forged for itself a weapon capable not only of rooting out corruption but unpopular government ministers as well. When administrative reform was successfully undertaken by Charles I, it came too late to resurrect the credit of the court or to restore that identification of monarch and subjects which Elizabeth had brought to its apogee only decades before. Yet the problem posed by Jacobean corruption is complex. Many of the practices for which the Jacobean court stood condemned were characteristic of the early modern state, and energetic attempts to reform the administrative apparatus were, in fact, undertaken throughout the reign. What then differentiates Jacobean administration from that of Elizabeth or the Georges and what caused the critical failure of reform? Answers to these questions may be suggested by taking a close look at the findings and fate of several investigations undertaken by one reform-minded official.

Like many of his contemporaries, John Locke was concerned with the problems inherent in both the communication and the recovery of an author's meaning. Language and its proper use was of the utmost significance for him. He was in no doubt that God had granted language to man to act as ‘the great Instrument, and common Tye of Society’, but though God-given, language as man had used it had not proved an unmitigated blessing:

he that shall well consider the Errors and Obscurity, the Mistakes and Confusion, that is spread in the World by an ill use of Words, will find some reason to doubt, whether Language, as it has been employ'd, has contributed more to the improvement or hindrance of Knowledge amongst Mankind.

This article examines the controversy surrounding the sale of John Redmond's estate under the Wyndham Land Act of 1903, its impact on Redmond's political career, and divisions within Irish nationalism. As chairman of the Irish Parliamentary Party, Redmond automatically assumed the mantle of spokesman for nationalist tenant farmers. However, after inheriting his uncle's estate in 1902, his political responsibilities as a tenant representative and his personal position as a landlord were set on a collision course. Although now a landlord he chose to attend the 1902–3 Land Conference, whose report heavily influenced the Wyndham Act, as the chief tenant representative. After accepting an offer by some of his tenants to purchase their holdings just prior to the commencement of the new act, many nationalists felt that the terms were exorbitant and Redmond was castigated for setting a precedent for landlords to follow. Even though the estate was eventually sold at a lower price, allegations that Redmond had extracted an excessive price from his own tenants and doubts about his trustworthiness as a tenant representative were slow to disappear. Against this backdrop, this article offers a fresh perspective on John Redmond's political career, post-1900.