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.

The comprehensive neglect of English church buildings in the century after the Reformation until the advent of Archbishop Laud has long stood as one of the standard readings of English church history. This article argues that attitudes towards the building and repair of churches in the pre-Laudian period were far more complex than has previously been recognized. It documents a sustained revival of church building and beautification in London that took place well before Laud's emergence, and which is inexplicable without reference to a whole range of practical and social, as well as religious, forces. This evidence, however, should not lead us to downplay the novelty and distinctiveness of the Laudian building programme. Rather, it is suggested here that Laudian polemic advanced a specific view of puritanism as incorporating a profane neglect and contempt of both church services and of the building which housed them. It is this vision of puritan neglect that not only provided a justification for Laudian changes to church practices and interiors in the 1630s, but which has also deflected the attention of later historians away from programmes of church repair in the reign of James I.

The late nineteenth century is generally considered to be the period of Egyptology’s development into a scientific discipline. The names of Egyptologists of the last decades of the century, including William Flinders Petrie, are associated with scientific technique and objective interpretation as well as colonialist agendas. This article’s thesis is that rapid developments in scientific technique were largely driven by spiritual objectives rather than any other ideologies. Egypt – after being derided and ignored during the mid-century – became of great significance to the British when spectacular finds suggested that Egyptology might offer conclusive evidence against Darwinism and the higher criticism while proving events of the Old Testament to be historically true. Other groups used ancient Egypt – professing Darwin, Spencer, and Huxley as inspirations – but the teleologies they invariably produced owe more to spiritualism than to scientific naturalism, blurring boundaries between science, the occult, and religion. In terms of popularity traditional Christian approaches to ancient Egypt eclipsed all rivals, every major practising Egyptologist of the 1880s employing them and publications receiving large, demonstrably enthusiastic, audiences. Support for biblical Egyptologists demonstrates that, in Egyptology, the fin de siècle enjoyed a little-noticed but widely supported revival of Old-Testament-based Christianity amidst a flowering of diverse beliefs.

The examination of Pufendorf's Monzambano shows that he was strongly interested in the question of sovereignty, and that the complex reality of the Holy Roman Empire demanded a completely new approach to the question of where sovereignty within the Empire lay. Pufendorf developed his account of the Empire as an irregular political system by using essential aspects of Hobbes's theory and thus departed from all previous writers on the forma imperii. But Pufendorf's writing on the Empire has not only to be linked with political and philosophical discussion about sovereignty within the Empire but also with his own main writings where he developed a more detailed theory regarding the issue of sovereignty in general. The peace of Westphalia was not only an international settlement but it also shaped the constitution of the Empire to a considerable degree, and this is of crucial significance for the history of political thought during the seventeenth century.

John Locke received the following letter from the Hague on 31 January 1689, whilst he was waiting in Rotterdam for a ship to take him home, now that his exile in Holland could come to an end after the Revolution:

I have been very ill this fortnight. The beginning was what is called the disease of one's country, impatience to be there, but it ended yesterday with violence, as all great things do but kings. Ours went out like a farthing candle, and has given us by this Convention an occasion not only of mending the Government but of melting it down and making all new, which makes me wish you were there to give them a right scheme of government, having been infected by that great man Lord Shaftesbury.

For historians of the Edwardian Conservative party one problem in particular continues to present severe difficulties. This problem in the history of the Conservative party was first outlined by Lord Blake in his study of the party from Peel to Churchill, namely how to explain the feet that Conservative politics came to be so dominated by the issue of Tariff Reform in the decade preceding the Great War. Indeed, to Lord Blake it seemed scarcely credible that the Conservatives should have even considered, let alone shackled themselves to, a policy which was apparently so disastrous both for the party's unity and its electoral prospects. Such incredulity is, in many ways, hardly surprising for, as all the studies of Tariff Reform have agreed, there were enormous difficulties involved in the adoption of this policy – and two problems in particular were clearly almost insurmountable. Firstly, the core of the Tariff Reform policy, that is to say the securing of the imperial markets for British producers through a system of preferential tariff agreements with the colonies, was severely handicapped by the fact that the self-governing colonies, the only worthwhile markets, were very lukewarm about the whole idea. This difficulty stemmed from the fact that the colonies had begun to develop their own fledgling industries and were thus none too keen to have them swamped by a flood of imported British manufactures. Secondly, the only agreement in which the colonies were interested entailed the Conservatives advocating duties on imported foreign grain and agricultural goods. This, of course, led to the Conservatives being labelled the party of ‘dear food’ and there seems little room for doubt that these ‘food taxes’ did the Conservatives a great deal of electoral damage, especially amongst the working-class electorate.

‘Attainder’, A. F. Pollard once wrote, was ‘the characteristic instrument of Tudor policy’, and ‘acts of attainder [the’ favourite weapon’ of Henry VIII. Unfortunately Pollard did little more than throw out these striking phrases; he never made a systematic study of parliamentary attainder under die second Tudor. The use of attainder in die fifteenth century has been subjected to recent scholarly scrutiny, and certain bills from die period of Thomas Cromwell's ascendancy have been discussed by Professor Elton. But a careful examination of attainder under Henry VIII is still lacking. Since his reign marks die heyday of attainder by statute, such an inquiry is clearly important.

There can be no doubt that those who joined the officers corps in the eighteenth century became members of an exclusive club with its own distinctive values. These values were imposed on all members of the corps and, as is the case with most exclusive organizations, only a very few individuals were confident or perverse enough to challenge the group standards. The officers corps had an honour code; a set of principles which was informally enforced to ensure that each member soon learned proper from improper behaviour. When there were violations of the code the subaltern officers would bring peer group sanctions to bear in the form of social and professional ostracism until the offender cleared his name by removing the blot on his honour.

This article assesses the state of modern English rural history. It identifies an ‘orthodox’ school, focused on the economic history of agriculture. This has made impressive progress in quantifying and explaining the output and productivity achievements of English farming since the ‘agricultural revolution’. Its celebratory account was, from the outset, challenged by a dissident tradition emphasizing the social costs of agricultural progress, notably enclosure. Recently a new school, associated with the journal Rural History, has broken away from this narrative of agricultural change, elaborating a wider social history. The work of Alun Howkins, the pivotal figure in the recent historiography, is located in relation to these three traditions. It is argued that Howkins, like his precursors, is constrained by an increasingly anachronistic equation of the countryside with agriculture. The concept of a ‘post-productivist’ countryside, dominated by consumption and representation, has been developed by geographers and sociologists and may have something to offer historians here, in conjunction with the well-established historiography of the ‘rural idyll’. The article concludes with a call for a new countryside history, giving full weight to the cultural and representational aspects that have done so much to shape twentieth-century rural England. Only in this way will it be possible to move beyond a history of the countryside that is merely the history of agriculture writ large.

This article attempts to redefine the parameters of Napoleonic hegemony by applying two models to the territories of the Napoleonic empire: one developed by Nathan Wachtel, predicated on levels of acculturation and assimilation to the imperial core ; the second, derived from the work of Braudel and Brunet, which detects a European core, based along the Rhine–Rhone axis, a macro-region with a long, if submerged, history. This study concludes that the acceptance of Napoleonic reforms was achieved only in a core region, already predisposed to them.

Historians have become increasingly concerned to describe and to explain the role of capital and capitalists in three related episodes of Transvaal history: the Jameson Raid at the end of 1895, tne outbreak of the South African War in 1899, and the Reconstruction period after that war. This article reviews recent analyses, and seeks a new synthesis of the published evidence.

By the time Hobbes wrote Leviathan, he was a theist, but not in the sense presumed by either side of the present-day debate concerning the sincerity of his professed theism. On the one hand, Hobbes's expressed theology was neither merely deistic, nor confined to natural theology: the Hobbesian God is not merely a first mover, but a person who counsels, commands, and threatens. On the other hand, the Hobbesian God's existence depends on being constructed artificially by human convention. The Hobbesian God is not a natural person; he exists as a person only insofar as he is by fiction represented. Like the state and pagan gods, he is an artificial person by fiction. The upshot is that Hobbes was a sincere theist and that his seventeenth-century critics were right to think that, in their sense, he was an atheist: he did not steadfastly believe in an independently existing deity who precedes human convention. Hobbes was agnostic on this question. He nevertheless believed that God is brought into being as an artificial person. This ‘personal theology’ not only involved a heretical interpretation of the Trinity, it also came to play a significant role in his moral and political philosophy.

From its inception, the committee on national expenditure chaired by Sir Eric Geddes has been regarded as one of the most controversial exercises in the reduction of public expenditure essayed by any modern British government. The appointment in August 1921 of Geddes and a team of fellow businessmen to report on means of reducing supply services expenditure drew the criticism from contemporaries that it represented the abrogation of the executive's responsibilities for fiscal policy. The three reports which the committee produced in early 1922 were no less controversial: seeking a reduction of almost £87m in supply estimates of approximately £528m, they have been seen as the most radical statement of the policy of retrenchment adopted by the Lloyd George coalition. In view of this, and of the proud hopes of reconstruction which had been fostered after the armistice, the Geddes committee has often been the subject of obloquies from post-war British historians of liberal sensibilities.

This is a review of recent English- and German-language publications on suicide, both as an act and a subject of discourse, in the early and late modern periods. It argues that, while publications on the theme have increased considerably in the past two decades, the problematic character of the evidence for suicide has led to a focus on attitudes to suicide at the expense of empirical investigations. The latter have largely confirmed the link between social isolation and suicide, posited by Durkheim, but have revealed differences in patterns across social groups. The growth of lenient attitudes to suicide has proven to be more protracted and contested than originally believed. The ambivalent role of clergy, the persistence of religious sanctions against suicide, and continued efforts by the state to curb suicide all suggest that the term ‘hybridization’ better characterizes the changes over this period than the older term ‘secularization’. Finally, this review recommends that historians undertake further empirical investigations of suicide, where possible, and that they broaden suicide research to include suicidal behaviours and alternative responses to despair in order to identify the specific allure of suicide.

The 30 December 1546 date for the finalizing of Henry VIll's will is vindicated and the text re-established as the king's own work, namely (1) the supposed priority of a copy dated 13 December is shown to be erroneous; (2) the hypothesis that the will was manipulated by faction is rejected because (a) a reconstruction of the operating procedure of the Dry Stamp Office indicates the strong probability of the traditional date, (b) analysis of provisions allegedly suggesting forgery reveals no valid grounds for suspicion, and (c) circumstantial evidence; (3) the real interest of the Seymour faction in January 1547 is demonstrated as lying in implementing the king's intentions. An hypothesis is offered as to the king's motives. The prominence given to reformers is explained as projecting forward a movement from orthodoxy to reform which was inherent in the Supremacy. The conciliar provisions for Edward's reign are argued to be an attempt to create a closed regency council which would prevent both faction and individual bids for supremacy. The fact that Edward Seymour could become de facto regent only by a coup which jettisoned the will, is a vindication of Henry's provisions.

This article examines the circulation of printed questionnaires as a research strategy among those investigating the constituent parts of the British Isles between the mid-seventeenth and late eighteenth centuries. It traces the origins and development of published ‘heads’ or ‘articles of enquiry’ as a means of acquiring information on antiquities, geography, and natural history and pieces together the research networks through which this methodology was shared and elaborated. The learned societies, ecclesiastical infrastructure, and periodical publications of the day are shown to have been instrumental in promoting this practice and in forging links between scholars and the ‘learned and ingenious’ in the parishes to whom such ‘queries’ were addressed. It is argued that these questionnaires were an important and insufficiently appreciated aspect of regional studies during the period. Though the responses to them are shown to have been highly variable, both in quantity and quality, it is suggested that they helped to establish what has become an important technique of data collection in modern academic inquiry.

At the national women's conference convened by the government in September 1943 Winston Churchill assured the women delegates that the contribution to the war effort by British women had ‘definitely altered those social and sex balances which years of convention had established’. His belief that the war had brought about profound changes in the status of women was shared by contemporary authors attempting to evaluate the effect of the war on British women. Studies written near the end of the war by Margaret Goldsmith and Gertrude Williams refer to a wartime ‘revolution’ in the position of women. Both authors defined this revolution primarily in terms of the changed position of women workers.

During the first thirty-five years of the nineteenth century more than fifty men were hanged for sodomy in England. This was less than a seventh of the number of people executed for murder in the same period, though in one year, 1806, there were more executions for sodomy than for murder. Nevertheless, it was the case that in the first third of the nineteenth century trials and executions for sodomy were much commoner than they had been in any earlier period.

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.