The years between 1890 and 1914 saw several prominent studies from statesmen-administrators comparing British India with the Roman empire. These were not the self-congratulatory comparisons of earlier decades, but serious comparative studies aimed at learning practical lessons from Rome's successes and failures. To gain a clearer picture of the significance of these analogies and how they were used, the Indian Civil Service (ICS) examination papers from the same period are analysed. It is argued that, following a move in 1892 to make the ICS a fully graduate service, the Civil Service commissioners showed a sustained interest in asking candidates to compare India (and the wider British empire) with the empires of Rome and Greece. Rome was considered particularly relevant for the directly ruled parts of the empire, with a focus on provincial administration and frontier defence, while Athens was preferred for questions of colonial federation. In the final section, the spread of subjects and weighting of marks within the examination are considered. It is argued that a series of changes post-1892 were designed to favour candidates who had studied Classics at university enabling them to obtain a higher proportion of the overall marks than those specializing in other subjects.

This article investigates the complex entanglement of neutrality and displacement in Hong Kong and Macau with a focus on the impact of and responses to an unprecedented influx of refugees during the Second World War. Displaced persons were of central importance in shaping the ambiguous experience of neutrality before Hong Kong's occupation by Japan in late 1941 and until the end of the war in Macau. Building on Elizabeth Sinn's conceptualization of Hong Kong as an ‘in-between place’, this article considers these two foreign-ruled territories as ‘in-between places’ where multi-layered transborder flows developed in an ‘in-between time’ of neutrality. Highlighting similarities and connections between Hong Kong and Macau, it argues that neutrality was shaped by the movement of refugees and that refugees often experienced neutrality differently depending on perceptions of race, class, and nationality. The presence of diverse communities of refugees shaped multiple dimensions of urban life, with colonial concerns for spatial order and social control co-existing with humanitarian co-operation. The discourses and practices around refugees are an important precedent to understanding post-war refugeedom in these territories.

Founded in support of Dwight D. Eisenhower's 1952 presidential candidacy, Citizens for Eisenhower took on an ambitious mission to revitalize the Republican party by expanding its activist ranks and by supporting the moderation of its conservative policy agenda. The organization proved unable to sustain the impressive momentum that it achieved during the 1952 campaign, however, instead helping to fuel factional opposition that informed the intraparty upsurge of conservatism during the 1950s and afterwards. The Eisenhower administration's efforts to encourage Citizens activists to join the party were flawed, and existing Republican activists often viewed such newcomers with hostility. More significantly, despite recruitment initiatives, in most cases activism in support of Eisenhower did not translate into enthusiasm for the party cause. The history of Citizens for Eisenhower therefore demonstrates the seriousness of Eisenhower's interests as president in boosting the Republican party's fortunes, but also the shortcomings of ‘amateur’ political activity in support of the party cause. It also sheds light on goals and activities of this era's moderate Republicans, together with their role in fostering the conservative resurgence that characterized the post-Eisenhower Republican party.

This article examines the life of Lady Elizabeth Anson (1725–60), daughter of Philip Yorke, 1st earl of Hardwicke, and the wife of Admiral George Lord Anson, first lord of the admiralty. Using a sample of her letters, this article argues that Lady Anson engaged with letter-writing as an inherently political activity. Previous studies of Lady Anson’s correspondence have emphasized her role in the Yorkes’ political network, but this article foregrounds her marriage to Lord Anson and her life at the admiralty. In a marriage shaped by the strains of naval service, Lady Anson used her talents as a letter-writer to establish a role for herself as her husband’s political partner. Building on the work of Elaine Chalus, Judith Lewis, and Sarah Richardson, this article explores the ways in which Lady Anson used letters to disseminate intelligence and negotiate patronage. It examines her friendship with the powerful admiralty secretary, John Cleveland, and considers the ways in which her physical proximity to the admiralty office gave her privileged access to the inner workings of the Royal Navy. Consequently, her writing provides important insights into the ways in which elite women could use letters to establish their own political authority.

Historians have in recent years used several approaches to explain the first Reform Act. Michael Brock's elegant account sets the whole Reform crisis in its political context. D. C. Moore has attempted a ‘sociological’ explanation of ministers’ intentions, while John Milton-Smith has offered a more traditional analysis of their private papers. This emphasis on the men who framed and steered the measure through parliament perhaps obscures the role of the ordinary members in whose hands its fate rested. Like the ministers, the backbenchers also suffered intense periods of indecision, soul-searching and calculation based on a confused mixture of pragmatism and principle. This is especially true of the moderates, the men of the parliamentary centre, who provided the vital votes for the government's hair-breadth majority on the second reading in February 1831, but who deserted them to support General Gascoyne's motion a few days later. Only fifteen M.P.s voted both for the Bill and for Gascoyne's motion, thus locating themselves - at least temporarily - at the very centre of the political spectrum.

Milner's entry into the War Cabinet in December 1916 is generally treated as one of the most surprising events of the whole strange crisis. Lord Beaverbrook found it ‘most startling’, and believed Milner to be ‘as much surprised as anyone…’. Beaverbrook's account of the events which brought about the downfall of Asquith has never been seriously challenged, but, as Lloyd George pointed out, it is a story told from his own and Bonar Law's point of view; it is an intimate view of the crisis, but a narrow one. And when it came time to make the appointments to the new government Beaverbook found himself ‘translated to the extreme circumference’. Naturally, then, Milner's promotion would appear ‘most startling’. But Milner was neither surprised nor startled: ‘My own disposition is strongly against being in the Government at all’, Milner wrote to Lady Edward Cecil on the evening of Friday, 8 December, ‘most strongly against being in it unless I am part of the Supreme Direction.’ A few hours later he was part of the ‘Supreme Direction’.

Traditionally, anti-standing army ideology in the 1690s and 1700s has been viewed primarily through an English prism. As a result of the unique contribution of Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun, the place of Scotland has also been examined in this regard, particularly in relation to the ‘paper war’ of 1697–9. However, Ireland also loomed larger than has previously been acknowledged within the associated debates. This was evident both in the arguments advanced and in the writers who advanced them. Several individuals with close connections to Ireland – both Anglo-Irish and English Protestants – figured prominently among the anti-standing army writers, including Robert Molesworth, John Trenchard, Sir Francis Brewster, and Henry Maxwell. That they did so requires explanation, given that the army in Ireland offered the minority Protestant ruling elite the greatest security against a Catholic Jacobite rebellion. The involvement of these men in anti-standing army debates also highlights their engagement in an Irish Protestant context with the idea of a Gothic constitution and the extent to which their writings contributed to the post-Glorious Revolution whig canon. Yet the debates also highlight the limitations of such ideology when faced with the question of Irish identity and confessional allegiance, the constitutional relationship with England, and the presence of a standing army in Ireland. One proposed solution to such limitations was political Union.

Leon Trotsky's contributions to the journal Bor'ba, published in St Petersburg between February and July 1914, have been overlooked in scholarly accounts of his biography. This paper has two aims. First, to provide an exposition of Trotsky's contributions to this journal; and, second, to explain why they have been forgotten. Three explanations are offered. First, Trotsky biographers look to Deutscher's trilogy for the main events in Trotsky's life, and he does not mention Bor'ba. Second, Trotsky himself did not refer to his work for the journal in his autobiography My Life. Finally, Stalin did not use Lenin's critique of Trotsky's participation in Bor'ba as further ammunition against Trotsky in the power struggle after Lenin's death.

In Bolton's pubs at the end of the 1930s, the research organization Mass Observation pursued answers to big abstract questions about time by studying small concrete actions. Drawing on field notes, draft manuscripts, and published works, this article sets out the different understandings and experiences of time documented by the team of investigators. Outside the ‘time-clock factory-whistle dimension of living’ and inside ‘pub-time’, individuals bought drinks for their companions, drank at the same pace, and engaged with everyone around them on an equal footing. Mass Observation presented such behaviours as proof that the pub fostered a socially harmonious, egalitarian community from a pre-industrial age. However, this article shows that the pub study's archive contains material that goes against the published findings. Observers turned in reports about authoritarian conduct, hierarchical power structures, and the intrusion of contemporary politics. Blurring the research subject and object, it was sometimes the investigators themselves who broke the spell of the pub. These moments of tension, confusion, and contradiction offer insights into the observers’ own perspectives on modern temporalities and subjective experiences of time. All the people in the pubs were caught up in a state of flux.

Scholars inquiring into Saudi–Egyptian or Hijazi–Egyptian relations, or the history of modern Saudi state formation, have been tempted to concentrate on the June 1926 attack by the tribal Ikhwan on the Egyptian Maḥmal, or pilgrimage caravan, as the key to understanding these relations. But such a courte durée, sometimes known as the événementielle approach, leaves out much rich depth. In fact, when placed within the wider time frame of the longue durée of relations between Egypt and the Hijaz, which is Arabia's western littoral region and home to Islam's holiest places, its historical significance becomes more about ending Egyptian claims of primacy in the Hijaz than achieving internal Saudi state consolidation. It is the longue durée that should command attention, for the only way that Ibn Saud could refashion to his own favour the historical connections that defined Islamic legitimacy in a political form was to cut the Gordian knot between Egypt and the Hijaz. He had to break up the Red Sea littoral system, and tie the holy places instead to the Saudi heartland of Najd. At the Red Sea's expense, the Arabian Peninsula, dominated by Saudi Arabia, became the new geo-political feature of the region.

This article explores how probation officers encouraged magistrates to hand down supervision orders for men charged with importuning via Social Enquiry Reports in the 1960s, a period characterized by a penal-welfare approach to crime and delinquent behaviour. Using nine reports on men charged with importuning, the article will show how ideals of citizenship were crucial to securing supervision. The article will consider to what extent definitions of citizenship varied depending on the offender's social class. In particular, the article will explore how ideals of citizenship were invoked to encourage supervision in circumstances where the offender already had previous convictions for importuning as well as cases where there were none. Finally, the article will consider to what extent the liberalization of the sexual offences laws in 1967 affected the way probation officers defined citizenship for homosexuals and altered the way supervision was encouraged in reports for men charged with importuning. Rounding up the above findings, the conclusion will also look at how successful probation officers were in securing supervision orders by portraying importuners as good citizens and will assess to what extent probation can be conflated with leniency and permissiveness.

Nineteenth-century Britain, it has been argued, harboured hostility to commerce and industry at the very period of greatest industrial advance. In this the schoolroom and university have been charged with particular culpability, even though it is not clear how new was the resistance to commercial studies. The following investigates the most distinguished eighteenth-century attempt to interest the English universities in the study of commerce. The episode highlights the misunderstanding and mistrust occasioned by the promotion of the Science of Trade in the mid-eighteenth century.