For the first two years of the war the French government drew up no programme of its war aims. When the cabinet began to consider its aims in Europe during the summer of 1916, it still avoided serious discussion of war aims overseas. Faced with the overwhelming preoccupations of the Western Front, the government paid little heed to the future of the Empire. Such war aims as France possessed outside Europe by the time of the armistice were arrived at in two ways: first, by ad hoc agreenebts with her allies in the Middle East and in West Africa, agreements forced on the government by the course of the war; secondly, by a commission d'étude established in 1918 to prepare for the peace conference, a commission from which ministers were excluded. The colonial war aims that emerged in these two separate ways were the product not of the French cabinet but of the parti colonial and its sympathizers within the foreign and colonial ministries.

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.

Penal reformers in the 1810s and 1820s condemned the English criminal law as a ‘bloody code’: a monolithic mass of draconian statutes inherited from a former, less civilized age. This overwhelmingly negative image underpinned the dramatic and unexpected repeal of the capital statutes in the 1830s and survived to define a whole era of criminal justice history. This article explores the conditions that enabled the reformers to establish such a powerful critique of the law in such a short space of time. It contends that a key to their success was their ability to exploit contemporary scandals to argue that the law had lost touch with public opinion. Forgery aroused more controversy than any other species of capital crime in the 1820s and became the focal point for opposition to the capital laws. By analysing how reformers used the scandal surrounding forgery to foster the notion that the law was a ‘bloody code’, this article presents a new perspective on the early nineteenth-century penal reform debate.

This article, through a detailed examination of the private papers of the English landed elite, argues for the important place of anger in early modern society. It investigates the verbal expression of rage, from irritation to fury, in men and women: why it was aroused, how it was articulated, its effects, and in what circumstances anger was regarded as a legitimate response. Anger was a forceful invitation to renegotiate unsatisfactory aspects of relationships. It spotlighted deficiencies in duty, unacceptable conduct, disrespect, broken promises, and frustrated expectations. The article also challenges the prevailing approach to the history of emotions and suggests that we move from a model of linear repression to one of situated experience. Rather than postulating the gradual suppression of unacceptable emotions, historians should examine the conventions governing the expression of emotions in context, as well as the many perspectives on what was acceptable behaviour and what was not. Focusing on the situated use of emotions brings to light the different emotional mentality of the seventeenth century which linked emotions in unfamiliar ways. It also enables to us to uncover the interaction of emotions and how individuals engaged in daily life with cultural scripts, as well as bringing us closer to unravelling the emotional system of early modern England.

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’.

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’.

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.

The politics of the parish are increasingly attracting the attention of historians of early modern England. The exploration of the depth and extent of popular participation in the process of governance has disclosed sophisticated forms of political organization at relatively humble social levels. The locus classicus of innovation in parish governance is arguably the set of articles drawn up by the chief inhabitants of the Wiltshire community of Swallowfield in 1596. The articles are printed here for the first time. The introduction seeks to place them in their geographical, chronological, and historiographical contexts. In particular, the articles have profound implications for current debates over the nature and meaning of ‘community’, the dynamics of the growth of the state, and the scale and impulse of the reformation of manners.

The German political scientist and philosopher, Samuel von Pufendorf, described the Holy Roman Empire in 1667 as a ‘monstrosity’, because it did not fit any of the recognized definitions of a state. The issue of the Empire's statehood has been the most important consideration in its historiography in recent decades: was it a state? If so, what kind? This review addresses these questions by examining how the debate on the Empire is related to wider controversies surrounding German history, the contemporary process of European integration, and about political organization in general. It explains how these debates are rooted in the political and religious disputes of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that still influence how the history of the Empire is written today. The four principal modern interpretations are identified and assessed: the Empire as a ‘failed nation state’, as a federation, and, more recently, as an ‘Empire-State’ or a ‘Central Europe of the Regions’. The piece concludes by offering a new explanatory framework to assess the Empire's political development.

The First World War saw the collapse of the old order in the Eastern Mediterranean with the disintegration of the Ottoman empire, an event which threatened to create a dangerous power vacuum. Great Britain for the pastcentury had attempted to prevent just such a crisis by supporting the maintenance of the territorial integrity of the Ottoman state. Britain had a number of crucial strategic concerns in the Eastern Mediterranean, in particular the Suez Canal and the Straits. The former was the more critical interest and Britain was determined to keep this essential link to its Indian empire firmly under its own control. As to the Straits Britain, which was concerned about over-extending its strategic capabilities, was content to see this critical waterway dominated by a friendly state. The question inevitably arose therefore as to what would replace the Ottoman empire. One alternative was Greece, a possibility which became increasingly attractive with the emergence of the supposedly pro-British Eleftherios Venizelos as the Greek leader in early 1917.

This article examines the history of African resistance to colonial rule among the Nandi and Kipsigis peoples of Kenya's Western Highlands. Anti-colonial protest centred on the activities of a group of ritual leaders, the orkoiik of the Talai clan, who were believed to possess supernatural powers of prophecy and divination. Between the late 1890s and 1905, the orkoiyot Koitalel had come to prominence as a leader of resistance to conquest. After his defeat the British briefly attempted to harness his Talai clansmen to the system of colonial government, promoting them as chiefs. This move was based upon a misunderstanding of the status of the orkoiik, whose powers often stood in direct conflict with the authorityof the elders and who were greatly feared by many Nandi and Kipsigis. By the igsos the orkoiik were deeply implicated in much criminal activity, especially the theft of livestock from European settler farmers. On three occasions orkoiik attempted to organize armed risings.

The article concludes with a discussion of the place of the orkoiik in the historiography of Kenya. Although Koitalel and Barserion are commonly presented as heroes of a glorious resistance to colonialism, it is suggested that this interpretation fails to reflect the deep ambiguity of the status of the orkoiik, and the complexity of the struggles that took placewithin African societies under colonial rule.

One hundred years ago the most scholarly of the whig historians, Samuel Rawson Gardiner, gave the Petition of Right a leading place in his interpretation of early Stuart England, as the beginning of a constitutional revolution in which parliament took sovereignty from an autocratic Stuart monarchy. To Gardiner this was part of a movement, his portrayal of which was coloured by ideas of patriotism and moral good, and which had the sanction of historical inevitability. Clearly there were serious flaws built into Gardiner's view: teleology, narrowness of theme, implausible simplicity, belief in inevitable progress, and the selective attribution of unconscious motives to men such as Sir John Eliot. Recent historiography has demonstrated the inherent weaknesses of the traditional liberal-whig and indeed the Marxist views of this period. A most stimulating revisionist argument and a whole industry of scholarship seem likely to reduce Gardiner's work to a great narrative, graced frequently with sane judgement, but in conceptual terms virtually abolished. Nevertheless the Petition of Right remains a salient and significant feature of the early Stuart landscape. Conrad Russell has established clearly that the making of the Petition was important as the culmination of a national war crisis and as an ideological watershed. Indicative of an emerging fear of subversion – of the alteration of government and religion together – it anticipated the attitudes of those in the Long Parliament who came to oppose the Caroline regime. The Petition needs to be given due attention in seeking to understand the important relationship between the political events of the 1620s and those of the 1640s.

It is unfortunate for our understanding of the history of the tenth century that, for several critical periods for which the historian would most appreciate a full and reliable account of events, contemporary sources of information fail him at vital points. Until quite recently it was difficult to feel certain about the date of King Edward the Elder's death and the circumstances in which Aethelstan ascended the throne of England. The years between the death of King Eadred in 955 and the succession of Edgar to the reunited kingdoms of Mercia and Wessex in 959 are still obscure. Of the character of the reign of Edward the Martyr, ‘Little can be gathered…beyond a vague impression of disorder, and the knowledge that a period was abruptly set to the endowment of monasteries which Edgar had encouraged’. For this reign the historian's complaint is less of the dearth of evidence than that it is nearly all of the same kind.

From the mid-nineteenth century until the First World War the number of seats contested at general elections in the United Kingdom rose sharply though not altogether steadily. This note contains tables of uncontested seats and constituencies for the fifteen elections from 1852 to December 1910; earlier elections have already been tabulated, in a slightly less detailed form, by Professor Gash in Appendix E of his Politics in the Age of Peel, and after 1918 uncontested seats no longer made up a significant part of the total. (It is true that over a hundred seats went uncontested in the Coupon Election of 1918, because the parties in opposition were not prepared for the struggle. But this has little to do with the lack of contests in earlier elections.)

This article seeks to contribute to a revisionist account of the role of the British state and the nation in building the British Museum's early antique collections. Traditionally, there has been a perception that, in contrast especially to France, the British national collections of antiquities were formed primarily by private individuals donating objects, while the state looked on with indifference, or, at best, occasionally bought antiquities on the cheap from enterprising travellers or diplomats. Yet, the scale and quality of the British Museum's collections owe much to the power and reach of the British military and imperial state. The harnessing of political, diplomatic, and military resources to archaeological work, the dovetailing of private and public efforts, and a strong element of international, especially Anglo-French, competition added up to a substantial programme of public patronage. This is easily ignored by approaches that only consider (continental European) ideal types of public patronage, such as Napoleon's Egyptian Commission on the Sciences and Arts. The article sketches the chronological and geographical unfolding of state-supported archaeological activities around the Mediterranean and the Near East, and considers the connections between archaeology and diplomacy, the different modes of collection building, and the origins of debates about preservation and spoliation.

During the last two years of the Great War the British government undertook a global propaganda campaign to generate support for the military advance into the Near East, British post-war domination of the region, and the war effort in general. The objective was to transform how the West and the peoples of the Ottoman empire perceived the Orient, its future, and the British empire. To fit with the international demand that the war should be fought for the cause of national self-determination, the Orient was re-defined as the Middle East: a region of oppressed nations that required liberation and tutelage by Britain and the entente. Great Britain was portrayed as the pre-eminent champion of the principle of nationality, which was behind its move into the Middle East. It is argued in this article that these narratives constituted a significant change in Western representations of the Orient and the British empire.

This article seeks to locate William Shakespeare in the traditions of nineteenth-century popular politics in Britain. The bards of radicalism are usually seen as the romantic poets, particularly Byron and Shelley. Nevertheless, Shakespeare's national standing, the lack of hard details about his life, and the subversive messages many radicals believed to have discovered in his plays allowed reformers to project him as a ‘son of the soil’, and to contest appropriations of him by the aristocratic patrons of events like the Shakespeare Tercentenary of 1864. Through the agitation surrounding this celebration, a link into a radical bardolatry is established that indicates the centrality of memories of Shakespeare's England to the popular platform. The article concludes with a consideration of the light shed by ‘Shakespearean radicalism’ on current debates about continuity between Chartism and liberalism in popular politics, and the role of memory and memorialization in the political culture of nineteenth-century plebeian reform movements.