The Spanish and the Sicilian Constitutions of 1812 have been justly criticized as unskilful attempts of minorities to graft foreign models upon native traditions of obsolete or anachronistic feudal Parliaments. Yet the authors of both aimed in part at preserving by new methods some of the changes begun and abandoned by eighteenth-century monarchs, and they used in each case the name of a King who for different reasons could not openly repudiate them. Many who doubted the wisdom of their methods had sympathy for their reforming projects. The Constitution of Sicily was based avowedly on the English model; it has naturally attracted more attention in England and is still worth investigating afresh. That of Cadiz, though deriving almost surreptitiously from the French Constitution of 1791, was also produced in a sense under English auspices. The Cortes were summoned under English pressure, and were protected by English armed forces. Their doings have been described mostly in relation to the military and diplomatic history of the period; but the conflict of French and English influences in Cadiz deserves a short investigation: the material is abundant, both contemporary and later.

This article considers how and why the campaign to reform manners spread from England to Ireland in the 1690s. Together with the links and resemblances between the English and Irish campaigns, the distinctive aspects of the latter are discussed. Important to the Irish activity were the shock of the catholic revanche of 1685–90; the powerful tradition of providential explanation for the recurrent crises; the tense and increasingly competitive relations between the Church of Ireland and the Presbyterians; the rapid growth of Dublin (the main centre for reforming activity) and its attendant social and economic difficulties; and the sense of cultural difference between protestants and catholics. The campaign included an assault on heterodox ideas, notably those of Toland and Molesworth, and paralleled the retributive measures taken against the Irish catholics in the same period.

According to the textbook version of history, the Enlightenment played a crucial role in the creation of the modern, liberal democracies of the West. Ever since this view – which we might describe as the modernization thesis – was first formulated by Peter Gay, it has been repeatedly criticized as misguided: a myth. Yet, as this paper shows, it continues to survive in postwar historiography, in particular in the Anglophone world. Indeed, Gay's most important and influential successors – historians such as Robert Darnton and Roy Porter – all ended up defending the idea that the Enlightenment was a major force in the creation of modern democratic values and institutions. More recently, Jonathan Israel's trilogy on the Enlightenment has revived the modernization thesis, albeit in a dramatic new form. Yet, even Israel's work, as its critical reception highlights, does not convincingly demonstrate that the Enlightenment, as an intellectual movement, contributed in any meaningful way to the creation of modern political culture. This conclusion raises a new question: if the Enlightenment did not create our modern democracies, then what did it do? In answer to that question, this paper suggests that we should take more seriously the writings of enlightened monarchists like Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger. Studying the Enlightenment might not allow us to understand why democratic political culture came into being. But, as Boulanger's work underscores, it might throw light on an equally important problem: why democracy came so late in the day.

This article examines surviving notes from interviews conducted by Michael Young and Peter Willmott in the London Borough of Bethnal Green and the Essex ‘overspill’ estate of ‘Greenleigh’ (Debden) in the mid-1950s to ask how far they support the central arguments about kinship, community, and place advanced in their classic 1957 book Family and kinship in East London. These interviews are used to suggest that Young and Willmott's powerful a priori models about ‘community’ and working-class kinship, and their strong political investment in the idea of a decentralized social democracy based on self-servicing, working-class communities, led them to discount testimony which ran counter to their assumptions as ‘aberrant’ or ‘exceptional’. Though it is difficult to draw strong conclusions from thirty-seven interviews, it is suggested that the snippets of personal testimony that survive in Michael Young's papers reinforce the arguments of historians who seek to question cataclysmic accounts of the consequences of working-class suburbanization in the mid-twentieth century. Culture and lifestyle changed much less with the move out to suburban Essex than Family and kinship would suggest, partly because Bethnal Green's family and neighbourhood networks were considerably less cohesive than they claimed.

Governors always seek to monitor the flow of information and guide its release. Secrecy and tactical publicity are valued aspects of government, boosting authority but also marking limits of participation by restricting access to official words and their written expression. Close attention is given to two ubiquitous institutions in early modern London, guilds and vestries (material illustrating city government is also introduced). A distinction is drawn between concealed information and policy communicated to the people. Attention is given thus to the regulation of meetings, chests and keys, and the selective discharge of information. Secrecy gave rise to vocabularies of ‘public’ and ‘private’. It was a code (a form of protection), but in languages of ‘private’ and ‘public’ as they were used in specific contexts studied here, it also depicted the use of space, the distribution of authority, and the limits of access and participation. The study of secrecy and partial publicity adds another dimension to our knowledge of the formation of opinion, perceptions of authority were partly formed by this enclosure of information, secrecy spawned speculation. It also provides a linguistic indication of the nature of government in institutions which mouthed fraternal tunes while remaining obsessed with formality and secrecy.

In January 1937 the government of the USSR conducted its first population census in eleven years. This article, which is based on the archives of the census organizations and on reports from some local offices for the registration of births, marriages and deaths, describes the campaign of data collection, the questions that were asked (including, for the first and last time, a question about the respondent's religion) and the response which people give to this personal contact with their rulers. The information gathered was exceptionally thorough and complete. Crucially, however, the census was entirely suppressed, and the officials responsible for organizing it promptly arrested and executed. The reasons for doing this – which largely centred on the sensitivity of evidence of high mortality during the famine of 1932–3 – are discussed, as are the potential implications of the suppression of such information. Finally, the article questions how complete any statistics about famine mortality in this period can be, and calls for a discussion of the broader questions of memory and loss which underlie the bare statistics of death.

Critical research into the motivation and content of Liberal social policies before 1914 has qualified much of the credit the party's accomplishments originally received. Yet such qualifications may go too far and in the struggle to do justice to all the facts, historical accuracy may suffer both from tendencies to look for dominant motifs or patterns, and from the temptation to emphasize the ‘real’ empirical nature of politics, so losing sight of all purposes and patterns – especially value-patterns. For example, the emphasis upon nineteenth century administrative development may certainly correct the previously overdrawn distinction between, firstly, individualism and the negative state, and secondly, collectivism and the positive state, but if such emphasis is carried too far it may appear that the social reforms passed after 1906 were no more than the logical continuation of a legislative trend already well-established. It may appear through the simple cataloguing of administrative growth, in conjunction with the attention focused on the rise of the Labour movement and the ensuing attempt to place both in a long-term historical perspective, that the Liberal party was largely the passive instrument of movements and ideas which passed around and about the party, rather than through and within it; and, this being so, that interpretations such as those of Laski, dating the emergence of ‘fundamental’ party divisions from post-1914, may be too easily accepted.

How the First World War has come to be remembered has, over the past two decades, become a major concern for British historians, eclipsing earlier scholarly preoccupations with war guilt and its political consequences, the impact of the war on social structure and the status of women, and the conflict's role in the rise of the modernist aesthetic. This article surveys both scholarship on the cultural legacy of the First World War in Britain and the debates about how the memory of this war – the ‘Great War’ – has either retarded its consideration ‘as history’ or spurred new, if not always entirely successful, modes of inquiry into the relationships among war, society, and culture. The article argues that memory of the Great War must itself be treated as history; that the meaning of that memory should be placed within the context of the changing events, ideas, and identities of the entire twentieth century; and that more scholarly attention needs to be directed at the popular reception of representations of the Great War by the population at large, and at the power of the various forms of media by which those representations have been conveyed to their audience and have thereby shaped memory of the conflict.

This article recovers Buckinghamshire county council's proposal to build a monorail city for 250,000 residents during the 1960s. The project was eventually taken over by Whitehall, which proceeded to establish Britain's largest new town of Milton Keynes instead, but from 1962 to 1968 local officials pursued their monorail metropolis. By telling the story of ‘North Bucks New City’, the article develops a series of claims. First, the proposal should be understood not as the eccentric creation of a single British county, but rather as one iteration of larger state efforts to manage the densities and distributions of growing populations. Second, while the 1960s witnessed the automobile's decisive triumph as a means of personal mobility in Britain, that very triumph ironically generated critiques of the car and quests for alternatives. Third, the monorail was part of a complex social vision that anticipated – and, in part through the facilitation of recreational shopping, sought to alleviate – a crisis of delinquency expected to result from a world of automation and affluence. Fourth, despite its ‘futuristic’ monorail, the plan ultimately represented an effort by experts and the state to manage social change along congenial lines. Fifth, the proposal advanced a nationalist urbanism, promising renewed global stature for post-imperial Britain by building upon its long urban history. Finally, the article concludes by arguing that this unrealized vision points to the limitations of ‘modernism’ in the history of urban planning, and to the problems of teleology in the history of the 1960s.

In 1854, the Crystal Palace reopened at Sydenham. Significantly, it featured a court of natural history. Curated by the philologist and physician, Robert Gordon Latham, it was designed to provide the public with an ethnological education. Understanding Latham's project is of particular importance for broader understandings of the scientific importance of displayed peoples and mid-nineteenth-century debates on the nature of human variation. Recent scholarship has shown considerable interest in the relationship between exhibitions of foreign peoples and anthropology, particularly within the context of world fairs. Nevertheless, anthropologists are routinely claimed to have used fairs merely to display or publicly validate, rather than to make, scientific knowledge. Meanwhile, the 1850s and 1860s are often seen as having witnessed the emergence of a new ‘harder-edged’ scientific racism as, older, elastic definitions of ‘race’ were successfully overthrown by one rooted in biological difference (most commonly exemplified by the anatomist Robert Knox). By examining how Latham produced and used his museum of human types, this article proposes an alternative approach. It suggests that displayed peoples were used as ethnological specimens and that Latham's work is at a particularly significant crossroads for the mid-nineteenth-century remaking of ‘race’.

The Plowden committee on the control of public expenditure has been described as a milestone in the modernization of postwar British government. Certainly it effected major changes in both the Treasury's structure and personnel and, by securing the establishment of the public expenditure survey committee, gave subsequent governments the opportunity to plan public expenditure rationally in relation to prospective resources. Ultimately, however, the committee was a failure. The civil service was re-examined by the Fulton committee within five years and public expenditure soon escalated out of control. The Plowden committee thus represented a major lost opportunity. The time had been ripe for a fundamental political and administrative adjustment to the needs of the extended postwar state; but the committee failed to build the necessary political, parliamentary or public support for its recommendations. The reason for failure was its restricted nature as an internal enquiry with largely ineffectual ‘outside’ members, which enabled vested Treasury interests increasingly to dictate its deliberations. A more open enquiry would have stimulated and brought the best out of the ‘modernizers’ within the Treasury. The committee, therefore, proved to be not an administrative milestone but a prime example of how British institutions, under the guise of reform, have traditionally deflected criticism, truncated discussion and thereby stifled the fundamental reforms required to halt Britain's decline. In relation to welfare policy, the committee failed to examine the relative efficiency of collective provision in given policy areas, opposed contracyclical demand management and covertly sought to cap welfare expenditure. In short, it accepted the electoral necessity but not the legitimacy of the welfare state.

This article argues for a more holistic approach to understanding the Old Poor Law. Using three detailed case studies from southern England, it focuses on the dynamics of differing social groups within the parish. It also looks at the role of the law, looking beyond the statutes to the parts played by King's Bench, Quarter Sessions and individual justices and petty sessions in creating a diversity of experiences for the poor. However, it also stresses the differential access to charitable funds, common rights, and poor relief in individual communities, and the ways in which parish elites attempted to put the total available resources to what they saw as the best uses. From 1650 to 1780 these combined resources allowed a generally humane approach to the treatment of poverty and misfortune, and maintained the independence of the cottager and labourer in southern England. Only after 1780 when population rose sharply and rural employment shrank did the flexibility of combined charitable and rate-based relief founder and more drastic devices were employed to cope with basic needs. In this process the independence of the labourer and cottager was undermined, charitable sources were marginalized, and the seeds were sown for the acceptance of the New Poor Law.

Compared to the rather large corpus of modern writing on puritan political and socio-economic opinions, very little has reached print concerning early-seventeenth-century puritan views on the intellect and the proper uses of reason. Much of what does exist is concerned primarily with the question of a connexion between puritanism and the ‘rise of science’ or the development of a learned mentality more interested in discovery than in repetition. Debate over the connexion has centred on the role of puritanism as a catalytic philosophy which drove men to cast off the bonds of ancient (classical) wisdom and search God's handiwork for further clues to the identity of the Master himself and his providence for the world. Most argument has relied on parading puritans who were, or were not, supporters of scientific endeavour. The evidence has, in the main, been highly selective. There has been very little consideration of the intellectual background of puritanism as a school of thought. Most of the evidence, too, has been taken from the years of the Revolution, when the meaning of the term ‘puritan’ was very different from what it had been eighty, or even thirty, years earlier. This article seeks to correct both these problems of methodology and interpretation by considering puritanism as a set of ideas which could lead to but one intellectual conclusion. It is the contention here that the argument that puritanism offered incentive and support to the ‘new learning’ cannot be supported from the evidence drawn from an examination of early-seventeenth-century puritan writers.

This article explores some of the main bibliographical dimensions of economic literature at a time when there was much interest in economic matters but no discipline of economics. By looking at what was published in the round much economic literature is shown to be short, ephemeral, unacknowledged, polemical, and legislatively orientated. This fluidity is underscored by the uncertaintities about what constituted key works of economic literature and by the failure of attempts to make sense of that literature through dictionaries and histories. Economic literature in the period was, consequently, more unstable and uncertain than has often been acknowledged. It cannot, therefore, be simply characterized as either ‘mercantilist’ or nascent ‘political economy’.

Within the last twenty years, historians' views about the significance of ‘Benthamism’ for the development of British government in the nineteenth century have fluctuated pretty widely. In 1948 J. B. Brebner set decisively in motion a movement away from the interpretation, stated in classic but curiously ambivalent form by A. V. Dicey, which made Bentham the philosopher and advocate of an allegedly dominant policy of laissez faire or ‘individualism’. Brebner attacked both legs of Dicey's argument, contending that in the years 1825–70 (which Dicey had identified as the period of individualism) the scale and variety of State intervention were extensive, and that the State intervention of the time ‘in practically all of its many forms was basically Benthamite—Benthamite in the sense of conforming closely to that forbidding, detailed blueprint for a collectivist state, the Constitutional Code’. More recently, some specialists in nineteenth-century administrative history have accepted, and have in some directions extended, one side of Brebner's thesis, but have cast doubt on the other side. Thus, reinforcing Brebner's interpretation of Victorian policy-making, David Roberts has located ‘the origins of the welfare state’ in the period 1832–54, and Oliver MacDonagh has argued that in ‘the middle quarters of the nineteenth-century…(contrary to all expectation and desire) the collectivist system of the present day began to take its shape’. But in developing their themes Roberts and MacDonagh have tended to attach little importance to what Dicey called ‘opinion’—consciously formulated and coherently worked-out beliefs or programmes—and to stress instead the pragmatic responses of politicians and administrators to problems and events.

Prior to 1944, the interpretation of the British anti-slavery movement was dominated by the ‘humanitarian’ ideas of the school of imperial historians centred round the great Sir Reginald Coupland. The turning point in slave trade and slavery studies came with the publication of Eric Williams' Capitalism and Slavery, significantly enough published at Chapel Hill—it would be interesting to find out whether the manuscript had previously been submitted to any English firms. In his bibliography, Williams remarked of Coupland that he ‘represents the sentimental conception of history; his works help us to understand what the anti-slavery movement was not’. But the attack went much further than personalities. Capitalism and Slavery included evidence which stood the more traditional interpretation on its head, while its conclusions rejected the simple moral motivation which had previously been picked out as the main factor behind the abolition of the slave trade and slavery. The whole thesis of Williams' book was that while the moral awakening of which Coupland and his followers had written may have genuinely affected the behaviour of individual supporters of abolition, the root cause of the abandonment of the slave trade and later of West Indian slavery was a change in the balance of economic pressure groups. Building on the work of Lowell Joseph Ragatz, Williams suggested that the anti-slavery movement was a group response of the middle class, to a decline in the relative power of the West India interest on the one hand, and a change in the needs of the increasingly industrialized society in which they lived on the other.