The political history of Liberalism in the twenty years after 1886 was dominated by two great concerns: the need to find a unifying platform for the party which would be capable of sustaining it as an effective political force in the post-Gladstonian era and the need to come to terms with the growing economic and political strength of organized Labour. It was axiomatic that the two concerns were closely connected and that ‘social reform’ was the crucial link between them. It seemed clear that a more active social policy would not only renew the reforming impetus of Liberalism, but would also enable the Liberals to retain working-class support and so help to prevent the formation of a separate Labour party. This was the assumption that spurred Liberals to a redefinition of their political creed and led to the formulation of a ‘new Liberalism’ committed to policies of state intervention and social reform of the kind implemented by Asquith, Churchill and Lloyd George after 1906.3 However, while the New Liberalism may have acted as a cohering influence on the Liberal party (itself a moot point) and provided a firm intellectual justification for its policies, it proved less successful as a means of retaining Labour's undivided electoral support. With the formation, first of the Independent Labour Party in 1893, and then of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900, there was set in train the formal organizational separation of the Liberal and Labour parties that was so drastically to affect the subsequent fortunes of Liberalism and so decisively to shape the pattern of modern British politics. The question that remains is whether this rift was the result of the tardiness with which the Liberals adopted their new policies, whether it was the product of other, quite separate factors, or whether in some way the nature of the New Liberalism itself may have contributed to the breach.

This article considers British society's response to the suspension of cash payments in February 1797. Although this event marked the beginning of the so-called Bank Restriction Period, during which the Bank of England's notes were inconvertible, there have been no detailed studies on the social and political situation surrounding the suspension. This article provides an in-depth examination of the events leading up to and immediately following the suspension. It questions existing accounts of the suspension as a smooth transition into the nationwide use of paper money and describes the complex process that came into play to avert a nationwide financial collapse. The decision to suspend the Bank's cash payments stemmed from deep-rooted financial instability, exacerbated by recurrent invasion scares that heightened after the French attempt on Bantry Bay, Ireland, in December 1796. Under such circumstances, national support for drastic financial measures could not be taken for granted. The article demonstrates that the declaration movement, which was a form of consolidated and visualized trust in the financial system, played a crucial role in the 1797 suspension crisis.

The class and gender identities created by male politicians are vital to a proper understanding of how and why parliament increased women's legal rights in the nineteenth century. An examination of the parliamentary debates on the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 reveals that it is misleading to divide men into supporters and opponents of women's rights, because even some of those who supported the most radical reform did so in the belief that the gender hierarchy should be left intact. At the same time, politicians were reluctant to accept that their own homes should be affected by changes to women's rights, both because they feared that these changes would reduce their domestic authority and create discord in their homes, and because they did not think that the critique of male behaviour which justified the reforms should apply to them or their class. Their ability to confine both charges of abuse and the effects of the acts to the poor was essential to the successful passage of the Married Women's Property Acts. Rather than see this as the defeat of a liberal individualist vision, it was in fact the victory of an alternative strand of Victorian liberalism.

The historiography of English republicanism is dominated by the concept of classical republicanism. Its greatest shortcoming has been neglect of that subject's religious dimension. The consequent need is not simply to recover the radical protestant republican religious agenda. It is to explain why, when classical republicanism came to England, it did so in the moral service of a religious revolution. One context for the answer lay in Christian humanism. Another was the reformation, both magisterial and radical. Both informed the practical identity of the republican experiment as an attempted reformation of manners. So did the rational Greek moral philosophy, as indebted to Plato as to Aristotle, common to certain humanist and Christian political languages. In addition many of the themes of republican writing reflect the struggle by a traditional society to respond to unsettling forces, not only of political and religious, but also social and economic, change. Drawing upon all of these contexts, republican writers attempted to oppose not only private interest politics, embodied by monarchy or tyranny, on behalf of the public interested virtues of a self-governing civic community. This was part of a more general critique of private interest society; a republican attempt, from pride, greed, poverty, and inequality, to go beyond the word ‘commonwealth’ and reconstitute what Milton called ‘the solid thing’.

In 1882, when Dicey's so-called age of ‘Individualism’ was over and the high tide of laissez-faire was receding, there emerged for die first time in Britain a thoroughly dogmatic pressure group for extreme laissez-faire. This was the Liberty and Property Defence League. The League originated as part of what Beatrice Webb described as the ‘reaction against empirical socialism [which] came to a head under Mr Gladstone's administration of 1880–85’. But it out lasted Gladstone's second government and defended laissez-faire widi some effect until the end of the century.

On 21 October 1639 and 29 May 1652 the English Channel off the Downs and Dover was the scene of two highly significant events. The first of these was the crushing defeat inflicted on a Spanish armada by a Dutch fleet under the command of Maerten Harpertszoon Tromp while an English squadron commanded by Sir John Pennington watched from a distance and did nothing. On the second of the two dates Tromp and the English admiral Robert Blake clashed in the armed encounter off Dover which sparked off the first Anglo-Dutch War.

The history of emotion has focused on cognition and social construction, largely disregarding the centrality of the body to emotional experience. This case-study reveals that a focus on corporeal experience and emotion enables a deeper understanding of cultural mores and of transmission to the next generation, which is fundamental to the process of change. In 1914, parents in Dronfield, Derbyshire, attempted to get the headmistress of their school removed because she had taught their daughters sex education. Why did sex education arouse such intense distress in the mothers, born mainly in the 1870s? Examination of their embodied, sensory, and cognitive experience of reproduction and sexuality reveals the rational, experiential basis to their emotional responses. Their own socialization as children informed how they trained their ‘innocent’ children to be sexually reticent. Experience of birth and new ideas relating disease to hygiene reinforced their fears. The resulting negative conception of sexuality explains why the mothers embraced the suppression of sexuality and believed their children should be protected from sexual knowledge. As material pressures lessened, women's emotional responses lightened over decades. The focus on emotion reveals changes that are hard to trace in other evidence.

On 27 February 1919, while Britain and most of Europe were gripped by serious industrial unrest, 600 trade unionists and 300 employers met leading cabinet ministers and civil servants at a National Industrial Conference in London. After a morning's debate, the trade unionists and employers separated, each to select thirty representatives to form a ‘provisional joint committee’ (P.J.C.) which might translate the morning's general good humour into hard practical proposals for mutual cooperation and reform. Within five weeks the committee had drawn up a report embracing twenty-six reforms, which was duly confirmed by the reconvened conference on 4 April and approved in principle by Lloyd George (with impeccable timing) on 1 May. The report was a major initiative in domestic policy. Although pledged at the 1918 election to build a ‘land fit for heroes’, the government – fully absorbed in the immediate problems of European settlement, demobilization and decontrol – had had little time to consider its practical implementation. With the report, both sides of industry had provided it with an agreed programme of reform which enabled it, in the industrial sphere at least, to commence the fulfilment of its election promises.

Political and historical studies are still severely handicapped by the absence of an historical dictionary of political terms and slogans. Without such a dictionary the investigation of significant political expressions is still very difficult and time-consuming, while the process of critical political self-understanding and education lacks a vital tool. The great philological dictionaries of the European languages are of little help in this field of political semantics, because they have been the work of scholars whose main interest was philology and literature. International links, historical perspective, and political sensitivity can be found in no dictionary of the English, French, or German language. Littré's French dictionary notes that Europe is the name of a number of heavenly bodies and plays a part in Greek mythology. The Oxford English Dictionary, on the other hand, treats Europe as a proper name and omits it altogether. Without the benefit of competent lexicographical guidance the intensive historical study of the idea of Europe, which has been carried out for the last twenty years, has failed to discover the time and circumstances which led to the adoption of Europe as a symbol of political interest. The main fault of past historical investigations lies in a concentration on literary works and famous men of letters and a neglect of political literature, pamphlets, and diplomatic documents. Political expressions are the offspring of national and international conflicts. They become stereotyped symbols of loyalty or enmity and one criterion of their establishment in political life is the frequency of their use—and abuse—by one recognizable political group. When and how did this first happen to Europe?

This article addresses a neglected facet of a familiar political debate, the contribution of Anglican royalist writers to the Engagement controversy. A new interpretation of the core issues at stake in the debate is offered by focusing on these Anglican responses. The work of Quentin Skinner, Margaret Judson, and John Wallace concentrated on the discussion of the duty of obedience to de facto powers. This article contends, however, that it was a debate over the nature of oaths and the lawfulness of taking apparently contradictory sworn promises which was at the heart of the controversy. Writers offered competing interpretations of the bond of oaths and covenants, the supporters of the Rump claiming that they were conditional and dependent for the obligation on circumstantial considerations, the Engagement's opponents claiming that these sworn bonds were non-reciprocal and indissoluble. In this debate both pro- and anti-Engagement authors used casuistic arguments to urge their readers either to take or to refuse the declaration of loyalty to the Commonwealth. Yet, whilst in print Anglicans had counselled against subscribing, in two manuscript cases of conscience they allowed correspondents to take the Engagement.

Traditionally, the first English Reform Act has been conceived within the context of two discreet but overlapping models. Both separately and together these models have performed two important functions. They have provided a means of defining the nature and dynamics of the Act itself by relating certain of its crucial provisions to certain aspects of the pre-reform constituency structure. They have also provided a means of relating the Act as a whole—and as thus defined—to the general course of British history in the nineteenth century, to the general problems of explaining how Britain was transformed from an aristocracy to a democracy, from a rural and agri-cultural society to an urban and industrial one, from a Gemeinschaft to a Gesellschaft.

In the immediate aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, there appeared an anonymous pamphlet, Political aphorisms, which purported to instruct its readers in ‘true maxims of government’. The identity of the author of this bold doctrinal claim is not known, and while it would be useful to have this knowledge, it is not, for reasons which will become clear, the most crucial element of the story. What is important is the historical significance of the role played by Political aphorisms as part of the process by which the ‘revolution principles’ of 1689 gained widespread acceptance in eighteenth-century England. In this essay, we offer one concrete illustration of the complex process by which political ideas are transmitted from one generation to another; and, we shall argue, the example provides a case study of the conscious effort to formulate an ideological defence of specific political principles and practices in order to preserve the historical meaning of a partisan perspective.

Analysis of policy after 1945 has been profoundly shaped by the idea of a post-war settlement, which is increasingly viewed as inherently inflationary. For much of the period 1951–64, British economic policy was centrally focused on reducing inflation. The extension of sterling's convertibility in the mid-1950s forced British policy-makers to be sensitive to overseas perceptions of British policy and performance. At the beginning of the Conservative government's period in office, monetary policy was believed to be the most effective instrument to control inflation, but its limitations slowly became apparent and created enormous tension between the Treasury and Bank of England. In the literature stimulated by the Phillips curve, the formation of price expectations is the central element in inflationary dynamics, and it is argued that after 1955 Conservative policy was driven by the need to find alternatives to monetary policy to prevent and then limit inflationary expectations. A number of these initiatives – a steep rise in unemployment and confrontation in pay bargaining – sit uncomfortably with the idea of the post-war settlement and an alternative perspective on the Conservative years, emphasizing the Radcliffe committee and the investigations into incomes policy, is proposed.

The overwhelming majority of studies of the relationship between the British government and private industry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are, in reality, merely studies of the government's policy towards industry. The attitude of private industry towards the government has been almost entirely neglected, and this has inevitably led to a distorted understanding of the relationship as a whole. It is, for example, hardly ever made explicit in the extensive literature on the growth of state intervention in the British economy that in the decades before 1914 the assault on laissez-faire was pardy led by private industry itself. This development was most noticeable overseas, where the British government became involved in commerce and trade largely in response to requests for diplomatic support from British firms faced with growing competition from continental and American commercial interests, often supported by their respective governments.

This is a review of recent English-language scholarship on the development of Russian identity since the collapse of the USSR in 1991. The first part examines literature on the economic and political changes in the Russian Federation, revealing how scholars became more sceptical about the possibility of Russia building a Western-type liberal democracy. The second part investigates approaches to the study of Russian national identity. The experience of empire, in both the tsarist and Soviet periods, gave Russians a weak sense of nationhood; ethnic Russians identified with the multi-national Soviet Union. Seeking legitimacy for the new state, President El'tsin sought to create a civic identity focused on the multi-national Russian Federation. The Communist and nationalist opposition continued to promote an imperial identity, focused on restoring the USSR or creating some other formation including the Russian-speaking population in the former Soviet republics. The final section discusses accounts of the two Chechen wars, which scholars see as continuing Russia's imperial policy and harming relations with Russia's Muslim population. President Putin's co-operation with the West against ‘terrorism’ has not led the West to accept Russia as one of its own, due to increasing domestic repression and authoritarianism.

Lord Hardinge, returning to the Foreign Office as Permanent Undersecretary in June 1916, after an interval of six years spent as Viceroy of India, remarked that he could scarcely recognize the pre-war Foreign Office in the structure with which he was confronted. Hardinge was thinking of the more obvious changes wrought by the war on the Foreign Office, where the work had increased dramatically since August, 1914 – indeed, by 1918, it was estimated that it had ‘more than quintupled since the outbreak of hostilities’ – and the resulting increase in staff had produced almost insurmountable practical difficulties. Yet there were other, more subtle ways in which the Foreign Office of 1916 differed from that over which Hardinge had presided from 1906 to 1910. Lord Bertie, British Ambassador in Paris, hinted at what was perhaps the most fundamental change when, writing to congratulate Hardinge on his appointment, he commented: ‘I think you will find that the Foreign Office is in great part a “pass-on” department viz. it issues instructions at the instance of other offices often without considering whether such instructions are advisable or feasible…’ Bertie's comment was to prove as relevant to the second as to the first half of the war. Indeed, there were occasions during the 1916–18 period when the Foreign Office might more properly have been described as a ‘passed-over’ department with little influence on the policy-making process.

Through an analysis of the debate between Charles Davenant in England, and Arthur Dobbs, Thomas Prior, and Samuel Madden in Ireland, it establishes that the founders saw the society as a response to Ireland's dependent status in the emerging British empire. The Dublin Society distinguished itself from other improving societies in the British Isles because it explicitly represented a new principle of sociality. The article describes the cultural origins of that principle arguing that a diverse set of groups converged on the ideal of association as a new form of order. The article concludes with a consideration of Madden's understanding, derived from his commitment to improving associations, that Irish national life was best understood as the pursuit of happiness rather than justice or virtue.

‘No member of this House’, proclaimed Bulstrode Whitelocke in February 1642 ‘ought to publish any speech or passage of this House, though it be very frequent.’ Very frequent it was; by this stage of the Long Parliament more than 100 purported speeches of named members were in printed circulation. Orations attributed to 45 M.P.s had been published, at a time when only ‘75 M.P.s made the motions, spoke to the issues, and delivered the reports of conferences and committees’. Printed speeches must have become a familiar genre to the customers of London booksellers. Invariably they were quarto in format; typically a pamphlet consisted of a single address, between three and eight sides in length and carelessly printed. Titles were informative and unpretentious: Mr. Thomas Pury his Speech upon the clause, the which concerns Deans and Chapters is a representative example. Most gave the date, or alleged date, of delivery, and the name of the printer responsible. There was nothing surreptitious, in other words, about the phenomenon. The chronological Thomason catalogue shows that speeches were significantly more numerous than any other kind of ephemeral tract, at least until March 1642, and that during the first session they were the only source of printed information about parliamentary debates. After March 1642 the flow of publication dried up. Large-scale publication of individual parliamentary speeches is therefore unique to a particular fifteen month period. Their importance, as historical sources, hardly needs stressing. The purpose of this article is primarily to explain the nature, and limitations, of the evidence this material can provide.

Citizenship has been widely debated in post-war British history, yet historians discuss the concept in very different, and potentially contradictory, ways. In doing so, historians are largely following in the footsteps of post-war politicians, thinkers, and ordinary people, who showed that citizenship could – and did – mean very different things. The alternative ways of framing the concept can be usefully described as the three registers of citizenship. First, there are the political and legal definitions of what makes any individual a citizen. Secondly, there is the notion of belonging to a national community, an understanding of citizenship which highlights that legal status alone cannot guarantee an individual's ability to practise citizenship rights. Thirdly, there is the idea of citizenship as divided between ‘good’ or ‘active’ citizens, and ‘bad’ or ‘passive’ ones, a differential understanding of citizenship which has proved very influential in debates about British society. This article reviews these registers, and concludes by arguing that all three must be taken into account if we are to comprehend properly the nature and citizenship as both status and practice in post-war Britain.