Robert John Wilmot Horton became associated with colonial affairs in an official capacity at a time when the Colonial Office was in the throes of a reorganization. He did not bring any previous experience to his new office, and his ability was not highly rated - ‘He had always appeared to me a particularly silly fellow’, Lord Melbourne, the prime minister, was to remark later - but his tenure as the Under-Secretary of State for War and Colonies was not devoid of success. The role he played in the reorganization of the Colonial Office, for instance, was noteworthy. He proved to be an able lieutenant to Earl Badiurst, the Secretary of State. Yet Horton attained only a limited success in his political life. By the year 1828 he was out of office, and by 1830 was out of parliament. Having reached an impasse in his political life, Horton was led to seek a colonial appointment, a decision which was also partly strengthened by his pecuniary embarrassments. He staked a claim to the Governorship of Canada, and later to the Governorship of Madras, but what he was to receive was a less coveted position, the Governorship of Ceylon.

Gladstone has not been well served by the historiographical tradition dominant for much of this century. It has disseminated an image of him that emphasizes little more than an undefined ‘reformism’ and a moralizing populism; this is as unhelpful and distorted as is the interpretation, emanating from the same source, of much of the rest of nineteenth-century politics. It is no longer enough to judge public figures of this period by the degree of their commitment to nebulous platitudes like ‘social reform’ or ‘progress’: historians have recently exposed the flimsy foundations that sustain the reputations of even those most frequently celebrated in these spheres. It is misleading to concentrate attention on the development of institutional reform, centralized government, trade union legislation, or welfare statutes for the poor; franchise extension apart, advances here were often provoked solely by bureaucratic agency or by the concern of philanthropic backbenchers, and contributed only occasionally to the major disputes of Victorian political society. If we are to shed light on the domestic issues of vital importance to contemporary politicians, we need a far more coherent account than is now available of financial, taxation and land policy on the one hand, and, on the other, of the main subject of this article, the role of religion in politics.

In spite of a welcome and ever growing academic interest in the lives and work of twentieth-century women writers the Yorkshire novelist, Phyllis Bentley, has remained resolutely hidden from view. This article seeks to demonstrate her importance as a ‘middlebrow’ novelist, particularly in the 1930s, and to examine the ways in which her career sheds light on contemporary relationships between the ‘provincial’ and the ‘metropolitan’. Through consideration of both her private papers and her fiction, it analyses Bentley's complex relationship with both her home town of Halifax and the West Riding more widely. It argues that Bentley played a major role in creating a greater space within the national culture for the representation of provincial, especially northern, life, while also displaying a profound ambivalence toward that very life. While in many ways a passionate and articulate interpreter of the region in which she spent virtually all of her adult life, she also clearly felt constricted by her provincial location and cultural setting, especially when in contact with the London-based literary elite; her relationship with Vera Brittain was particularly highly charged in this regard.

In a recent communication to the Historical Journal, Greta Jones submitted a critique that was largely a commentary on my article ‘Eugenics and progressive thought: a study in ideological affinity’. I am taking the liberty of replying not only because my views have been seriously misrepresented by Dr Jones but also because I believe that she has failed to appreciate important questions of methodology that transcend the particular subject of eugenics and are worth further elaboration. I shall relate in turn to the issues she raises.

This article examines a niche space: youth clubs created by small voluntary organizations for ‘gifted children’ in 1970s and 1980s Britain. It asks how individualism shaped everyday life and demonstrates how youth culture was much broader than just the permissiveness that dominates the literature. Gifted children are currently missing from accounts of modern Britain, which focus on mainstream educational categories. Yet, including them in our analysis provides new insights into the diversity of youth cultures that existed in these decades. Drawing on new uncatalogued archives, and centrally poetry, letters, and stories from young people themselves, the article shows that conservative and radical visions co-existed. Young people shaped their own culture, subverting and challenging ideas of themselves as distinctive future leaders.

The 1860 Japanese embassy inspired within the antebellum African American press an imagined solidarity that subverted American state hierarchies of ‘civilization’ and race. The bodies of the Japanese ambassadors, physically incongruous with American understandings of non-white masculinity, became a centre of cultural contention upon their presence as sophisticated and powerful men on American soil. The African American and abolitionist press, reimagining Japan and the Japanese, reframed racial prejudice as an experience in solidarity, to prove further the equality of all men, and assert African American membership to the worlds of civility and ‘civilization’. The acceptance of the Japanese gave African Americans a new lens through which to present their quest for racial equality and recognition as citizens of American ‘civilization’. This imagined transnational solidarity reveals Japan's influence in the United States as African American publications developed an imagined racial solidarity with Japanese agents of ‘civilization’ long before initiatives of ‘civilization and enlightenment’ appeared on Japan's diplomatic agenda. Examining the writings of non-state actors traditionally excluded from early historical narratives of US–Japan diplomacy reveals an imagined transnational solidarity occurring within and because of an oppressive racial hierarchy, as well as a Japanese influence on antebellum African American intellectual history.

The history of social and political ideas is often brilliantly illuminated by personal intellectual confrontations. Our understanding of the concept of progress is enhanced by consideration of the divergences between Diderot and Rousseau; our attitudes to revolutionary change cannot fail to be influenced by the debate between Burke and Paine; our appreciation of communist and anarchist ideals is refined by contemplating the dispute between Marx and Bakunin. Similarly our view of certain questions important to mid-nineteenth-century social philosophy may be sharpened by an examination of another confrontation, less famous though scarcely less revealing than the foregoing, embodied in the exchange of letters between Alexis de Tocqueville and Arthur de Gobineau. The present discussion of some aspects of their correspondence makes no attempt at a full-scale comparison of the two figures. Rather, it places an emphasis upon him who is now the lesser known—a stress which is all the more defensible in view of much of the debate's previous treatment at the hands of historians. Into such historiographical questions there is no need to venture—at least, not beyond stating the two broad considerations which seem to justify an essay in reinterpretation along the lines suggested here.

The history of the intendants, so important to the understanding of France during the latter two centuries of the ancien régime, remains unwritten. There are of course particular studies of various great intendants of Louis XIV and of Louis XV, but the institution as a whole remains astonishingly ill-known, and this is especially true of its early years. Gabriel Hanotaux did make a brave attempt in 1884 to work out the Origines de l'institution des intendants des provinces, but his arguments have been severely criticized by subsequent writers, whose strictures have most recently been summarized by Roger Doucet in Les institutions de la France au XVIe siècle. As Doucet points out, the source-material used by Hanotaux was limited to a few Parisian manuscripts and, for the reign of Henri IV, essentially to the Lettres Missives of that king. For the reign of Henri III, Doucet adds, his work is weak in that he ignores the increase in the traditional chevauchées (tours of inspection) of the maîtres des requêtes, surely one of the most suggestive of early institutions in our present context. This in turn springs from a more basic weakness, that of using only a titular and not a functional definition for his subject; in refusing to consider any officers other than those who actually held the title intendant (usually de justice). Doucet himself does not carry the investigation any further for, as he remarks, the only way to do this would be by undertaking a series of studies in local archives.

As a result of the Great War, the Zionist movement came of age. For the first time since its inception as a political organization, Zionism gained a backer of international and worldwide repute. The political charter which Herzl had hawked around the chancelleries of Europe found its consummation in the Balfour Declaration. The British Empire, in its moment of supreme crisis, stamped its seal of approval on the concept of a Jewish National Home in Palestine.

This article continues an examination of the British government's counter-revolutionary organization begun in ‘The Alien Office 1792-1806’, The Historical Journal, XXXIII (1990), which outlined the department's functions and secret service policy. The Swiss and Swabian agencies were one aspect of British foreign secret service; they linked the French princes' secret agents to the British government under the central European control of William Wickham, ambassador in Berne 1794–7, and military and diplomatic subsidiaries. Anti-republican secret committees were set up covering all France, Switzerland, northern Italy and southern Germany, which included members from every grade of society. French republican generals, even Ministers were swayed, allowing infiltration of the French secret police. British control was however limited to the finesse of finance – bribery was implicit. By never offering enough to the leaders and too much to assistants, initial constitutional intentions slid into subversion and assassination. The first complete andfully documented description is included of how, why, and by whom, the French deputies were assassinated at Rastadt.

Russia's ‘democratic’ revolution of February 1917 saw all types of professions and social groups mobilize into unions and congresses to articulate their demands. Lower and middle classes dominated, but it is notable how former elite groups were quick to form bodies to defend their interests and to promote their visions of Russia's future. Historians have invariably dismissed these groups as marginal to the revolutionary process and inherently ‘counter-revolutionary’. This article challenges these assumptions, using the Union of Officers, formed across the military in May 1917 to defend officers' professional interests, as a case study. The union spread quickly, published a newspaper, and agitated among politicians for greater discipline in the military. Its activities fuelled popular fears of counter-revolution, but only a few of the union's leaders actively worked against the government. General Kornilov's failed revolt in August demonstrated that most officers had doubts. Nevertheless, the union played a crucial role in mobilizing moderate and conservative forces against further reform. This exacerbated social conflict and political polarization, fatally undermining the Provisional Government and democracy in 1917.

Inspired by the debate about the influence feature films exerted over popular political attitudes during the interwar period, this article explores how one of cinema's most popular genres, the historical drama, represented British politics during the 1930s. It concentrates on eight films that depicted leading figures from Britain's modern political past, ranging from Robert Clive and Pitt the elder to Queen Victoria by way of Benjamin Disraeli. The article emphasizes how this historiophoty was shaped by the movies' production context. For they were: created within a transatlantic culture, with a majority produced in Hollywood; depended on how stars associated with the genre, notably George Arliss, embodied their roles; and structured around conventions which privileged popularity over accuracy. Thanks to such influences, these movies articulated a strongly normative view of British democracy, showing how personable, paternalistic, and disinterested leaders had improved the people's welfare and advanced a benevolent empire. This picture of Britain's political past was clearly convenient to Stanley Baldwin's Conservative party. However, it owed its essential character less to the establishment bias of the interwar film industry and more to the irreducibly ‘cinematic’ nature of commercial cinema.