The historiography on civil–military relations in the early years of the Weimar Republic has concentrated on issues such as the soldiers' councils, the threat of a radical left-wing uprising and the difficulties of demobilization. This article broadens the perspective on co-operation between the officer corps and the government, arguing that the collapse of the Kaiserreich provided an opportunity to remake the state. For very different reasons, liberal and socialist politicians and officers shared a community of interests in centralizing the Reich. Officers believed that a more centralized state was more effective in military and foreign policy terms. Whereas other incidents of co-operation were due to urgent necessity, the establishment of the Reichswehr Ministry showed that the new state could potentially serve the longer term agenda of the officer corps. However the plans for a centralized Reichswehr Ministry were opposed by those who held power in the federal states, particularly in southern Germany. With support from the National Assembly and the cabinet, opposition from the states was overcome. This episode in Weimar history shows that the view of antagonistic civil–military relations must be modified to take account of the ways in which the officer corps sought to exploit the possibilities opened up by the German revolution of 1918.

Current prescriptions for welfare reform and increased reliance on the voluntary sector often base their appeal on the lessons of history, in particular the apparent successes of Victorian philanthropy in combating ‘pauperism’. This article looks at how this message has become influential in the USA and the UK among the ruling parties of right and left through the particular prism of the neo-conservative appreciation of the work of Thomas Chalmers, the early nineteenth-century Scottish churchman and authority on poverty. The attraction of Chalmers, both to the Charity Organization Society then and neo-conservatives today, lies in the practical application of his idea of the ‘godly commonwealth’ in Glasgow and Edinburgh where voluntary effort, organized through the church, replaced the statutory obligations of the poor law. While Chalmers, and his followers, declared his ‘experiments’ to be great successes, modern Scottish historians have revealed these claims to be false and his efforts failures. Only by completely ignoring the evidence presented by this historiography and continuing to rely on Chalmers's own writings and earlier hagiographies can the neo-conservative approbation of Chalmers be sustained. Such wilful neglect raises questions both about their approach to history and their proposed remedies for tackling poverty today.

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.

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.

The French Revolutionary wars, 1787–1802. By T. C. W. Blanning. London: Longman, 1996. Pp. xvii+286. ISBN 0-340-56911-5. £15.99.

The wars of Napoleon. By Charles J. Esdaile. London: Longman, 1995. Pp. xii+417. ISBN 0-582-05955-0. £14.99.

The Younger Pitt: the consuming struggle. By John Ehrman. London: Constable, 1996. Pp. xv+911. ISBN 0-09-475540-x. £35.

British victory in Egypt, 1801: the end of Napoleon's conquest. By Piers Mackesy. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Pp. xii+282. ISBN 0-415-04064-7. £45.

Britain and the defeat of Napoleon, 1807–1815. By Rory Muir. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996. Pp. xiv+466. ISBN 0-300-06443-8. £29.95.

Traditional historians of war and foreign policy in Britain have often been accused – sometimes justly – of all manner of sins, among them Anglo- and Eurocentricity. There is no trace, however, of insularity in the five new publications by John Ehrman, Rory Muir, Piers Mackesy, Charles Esdaile, and T. C. W. Blanning on the struggle with Napoleon. The global sweep of that conflict, to quote Rory Muir's Britain and the defeat of Napoleon, forces the historian to address an ‘interlocking mosaic of problems’ (p. xii), spanning the Baltic to the Cape of Good Hope, and the Indian subcontinent to the Caribbean.

The Indian administration of the eighth Earl of Elgin is important and interesting for two reasons. It furnishes a perfect cross-section made in the government of India at the time when the old Company methods were being rapidly superseded by those of the new régime: and it reveals the judgments passed on that government by a widely experienced administrator of the day.

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.

The passage of Catholic emancipation in April 1829 was resisted, in the name of the inviolability of the Protestant Constitution, by a group of ‘ultra’ anti-catholics.1 The principles and personnel of this group have already been well described, 2 but its political activities have been inadequately explored. Since 1824, when they criticized Lord Liverpool's Government for dilatoriness in prosecuting O’Connell's Catholic Association, these ultras had tended to form a distinct group on the right wing of the anti-catholic Tories, and had been the most aggressive opponents of Canning's short-lived ministry in 1827. The emergence of an Irish demand for Catholic emancipation, of unprecedented force, was shown in O’Connell's victory at the County Clare by-election in July 1828 and in the ensuing months. This produced a determined resistance by the Irish anti-catholics, which had its counterpart in a British no-popery movement led by the ultras. Most of the leading ultras were peers, and the most prominent among them were the dukes of Cumberland and Newcastle, the marquess of Chandos, the earl of Winchilsea and Lords Colchester and Kenyon. For nine months before the passage of the relief bill they sought to counteract the immense fervour of the Irish Catholics by stimulating the ingrained anti-catholic feelings which had characterized the English masses since the sixteenth century. Their efforts, however, were of no avail against Wellington's decision to carry a Government emancipation measure. It is the object of this study to investigate the no-popery movement and to account for its failure.

While there seems no end to the polemics of nationalism, a critical analysis is far to seek; for which reason an account of the beginnings of the theory of nationality in the eighteenth century may be of value to the political theorist as well as of interest to the historian. We may say of its beginnings, because although nationality as a fact is in England and some other countries of Western Europe a heritage of the Middle Ages, as a theory it is much more recent in origin. In Shaw's Saint Joan, Pierre Cauchon, discussing with Warwick the popular uprising in France under the Maid, says, “If I were to give it a name I should call it—nationalism.” Mr Shaw's Bishop is nearly four centuries in advance of his age. It was not till the nineteenth century that men in general began “to call it nationalism,” and under the guidance of such as Wordsworth and Mazzini to understand in some degree what they implied when they did so. The Revolutionary upheaval and the Napoleonic dominion were necessary to rouse the nations to self-consciousness. But these events, though they may partially account for the fact, do not altogether elucidate the theory of nationality. For its veritable beginnings we must look earlier. It is a significant fact in considering the causation of the nationalistic movement that the first and possibly still the wisest of the theorists of nationality had developed his ideas long before the Revolution.