This article explores the significance to the Irish land question of a controversial issue in late nineteenth-century international political economy – bimetallism. Bimetallists advocated a monetary system that used gold and silver to define currency value rather than gold alone. Archbishop William Walsh's support for bimetallism is analysed to highlight how Ireland provided a case-study that framed this debate. Walsh believed the gold standard deepened an agrarian crisis that drove the Irish land question. He argued that careful and internationally orchestrated reform of the monetary system offered the means for its resolution. Walsh's bimetallist views marked him out as an original thinker within Irish nationalism, and his views were debated and adopted by monetary reformers across Britain, Europe, and the United States where they featured during the 1896 Presidential Election. Walsh's engagement in monetary politics must also be understood within a tradition of Catholic social teaching in which he positioned himself as a critic of financial capitalism. This article contextualizes the Irish land question within wider debates on the role of silver in the global economy and argues that Walsh's monetary thought reveals him to be a more significant international intellectual than his involvement in Irish politics tends to allow.

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.

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.

The brief ministerial crisis of June 1844, precipitated by the defeat in the House of Commons of the government's proposals for the temporary adjustment of the duties on imported sugar, and resolved when Sir Robert Peel secured from the House what amounted to a reversal of the decision, has been scrutinized by two historians in recent years. In his earlier work, Dr Stewart cites with approval contemporary observations to the effect that Peel's authority was severely shaken by the affair, and remarks that ‘by 1844 the Tory, nationalist wing of Peel's party was beginning to unite in resistance to the progressive tendency of Peel's government. In 1844 they gave Peel a warning of what they might do.’ His second assessment is more emphatic. He interprets Conservative disaffection on the sugar issue, and on the factory bill three months earlier, as the ‘first challenge to Peel's leadership’, and argues that it revealed that ‘Peel's hold over a large section of his party was at an end, destroyed by his own methods’.

On 23 March 1815 Louis XVIII disbanded die French army. In June Napoleon lost Waterloo and abdicated, and the Bourbons returned to Paris to complete the destruction of the army. It had proved itself loyal only to Napoleon and over half of the 70,000 men of Davout's command preferred desertion to the white cockade. The country at large was hostile and in the royalist south returning officers were arrested and several were killed. In August the King published an ordinance ‘concerning the organization of a new army’. The army was ‘to be formed according to the principles which constitute a truly national army to form a military force in harmony with the liberal nature of our charter… avoiding the separation of die army from the interests of die country‘. It was not an easy task. Financial circumstances placed limitations on size, die Charter forbade conscription, the allies wanted reprisals and die royalists claimed rewards for their loyal service.

The countries of south-eastern Europe at the beginning of the last war were caught, as they themselves put it with as much self-deprecation as fear, between the Axis hammer and the Russian anvil. There was almost a touch of defiance in their description, as if the extraordinarily high odds against their survival confirmed in their eyes their claim to national independence and to world attention. In fact over the 20 years of their existence they had made a virtue of the politics of Kleinstaaterei, of the fact that their destiny was determined not by themselves but by the Great Powers surrounding them. The Balkan states were creatures of Great Power politics and, with an unerring appreciation of their dependence on powerful neighbours, they looked to London or Paris or Rome or Berlin or Moscow for sustenance and direction. And yet—and this is the crucial paradox—they continued to harbour, side by side with their acknowledged dependence on the Great Powers, a deeply felt longing for collective independence and for political self-sufficiency. This paper is concerned with the desperate attempts of the Balkan countries in the autumn of 1939 to harmonize these conflicting requirements by promoting collective independence in the form of a bloc of neutrals under the leadership of a Great Power.

Recent archival research has elucidated the German purpose in sending Joel Brand to Istanbul in May 1944 to negotiate the exchange of Hungarian jews for ‘goods’. Himmler's aim was to enlist the zionist leadership in an effort to detach the western allies from Russia and obtain a separate peace. It is also known now that the allies were initially willing to ‘keep the door open’ by negotiation, but suddenly broke off contacts in July. And we know too how Moshe Shertok – the jewish agency's ‘foreign secretary’ – was tricked by a British promise that Brand would be allowed after meeting him in Aleppo to return to Budapest.

It is really deplorable that until quite recently there still existed in Western academic circles a number of serious misunderstandings about Chinese historiography, particularly the Chinese theory and practice of historical method and critical techniques. Many well-known academic figures still do not know, or refuse to face the fact, that the Chinese tradition of pursuing an objective knowledge of history can be dated back as far as the first century and that the quality of critical scholarship had reached a level equal, either in terms of textual criticism or higher criticism, to any found in the West up to the beginning of the nineteenth. To cite a few examples of Western ignorance. An American sinologist specializing in Chinese traditional historiography firmly asserts that ‘the Chinese are not a whit behind Western scholarship in the exacting domain of textual or preparatory criticism’, but ‘in the field of historical criticism... Chinese historians of the old school did not evolve those principles which are now regarded in East and West alike as an indispensable part of scientific historical method’, although ‘since the seventh century, a few bold, independent spirits have evolved the elements of historical criticism’.1 Another sinologist holds nearly the same position by stating that ‘what was missing’ in traditional Chinese historiography until the sixteenth century was a ‘systematic method’ of criticism, while recognizing that ‘there was an almost continuous line of doubters’ from the early eighth century onwards, and that under the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) attempts were ‘made to bring all the doubts together into one publication’and so to lay‘ the basis for organized study’, an active role being played by ‘ancillary studies of all’ including philology in the development of the Chinese textual criticism of history.2 The most bigoted and dogmatic verdict passed on Chinese historiography which I have ever read in the Western literature is Professor J. H. Plumb's assertion that Chinese historians ‘never attempted, let alone succeeded, in treating history as objective understanding’, and that ‘Chinese scholars were using historical materials for the same purposes in the early twentieth century as in the T'ang and Han dynasties’. Professor Plumb's bias is further reflected in the affirmation, which was added after his reading of Professor E. G. Pulleyblank's remarkable essay Chinese historical criticism: Liu Chih-chi and Ssu-ma Kuang,3 that ‘I would maintain that the Chinese were concerned solely with creating an educative past - subtle, highly detailed, accurate in commission, but not history’4.

While the introduction of central-government inspectors for prisons in a British act of 1835 has been seen as a key Whig achievement of the 1830s, the Irish precedent enacted by Charles Grant, a liberal Tory chief secretary, in the early 1820s, has gone unnoticed by scholars. The article sets out to trace the Irish prefiguring of this measure and, in the process, to consider prison reform in the United Kingdom in the early nineteenth century in a more transnational manner. A new analysis of the critical years between 1823 and 1835 in both Britain and Ireland based on a detailed examination of parliamentary inquiries and legislation shows how developments in the two countries overlapped and how reforms in one jurisdiction affected the other. This article explores the channels through which this exchange of knowledge and ideas occurred – both in parliament and through interlinked penal-reform philanthropic societies in both countries. This article also highlights inadequacies with the theory supported by some scholars that Ireland functioned as a laboratory for British social reform at this time, and instead suggests a more fluid exchange of ideas in both directions at different times.

In 1852 a new British Colony, the Colony of the Bay Islands, was set up by Letters Patent. In 1859 Great Britain signed a Treaty, subsequently ratified in 1860 and put into effect in 1861, recognizing the Bay Islands as part of the Republic of Honduras. These facts are well known in the diplomatic history of the Central American question, and in the history of Anglo-American relations. The diplomatic historians have not, however, been able to find any convincing diplomatic explanation for the creation of the Bay Islands Colony in 1852; and, while they have fully explained the diplomatic reason for the cession of the islands in 1859, they do not seem to have considered it necessary to inquire how such a rare event in the history of the British Empire as the peaceful cession of a regularly constituted British colony to a foreign nation was brought about. This article seeks to explain the history of the Bay Islands Colony by showing that the colonization was effected by the Colonial Office without the Foreign Office being informed, and that the cession was effected by the Foreign Office without the Colonial Office being informed.