Over seventy years ago J. A. Hobson put forward the theory that the Anglo-Boer War had been created by the Rand mining magnates and their financial allies, in their search for increased profits. Subsequently this interpretation was extended to the immediate post-war period of British Crown Colony administration, for it was argued that the politics of the post-war period were equally dominated by the Rand mining magnates. More recently, increasing doubt has been cast on this interpretation, for it has been found, inter alia, that the idea of the mining industry engaged in politics as a coherent and monolithic group did not accord with the great variety of behaviour to be found in practice amongst the mining magnates. In the 1960s, however, an attempt was made to overcome this weakness and to return to a strictly economic interpretation of the period, by grafting on to Hobson's basic interpretation the concept of financially-based rivalry between conflicting groups of mining magnates as the key to Transvaal political divisions.

In the first great age of English scholarship, to write history was to write polemics. England was a legal, not a geographical expression; to write her history was to interpret her law, or the relation of that law to the Crown, and so to take sides in the battle of parties. The law was timeless; its principles were the same in all ages; the past was a storehouse, not of mere examples, but of authoritative precedents. A statute whose making was ‘beyond memory’ was of greater authority than one whose beginnings were known. What the constitution was it had always been and to define its past was to define its true nature in the present. No scholar wrote more openly to support a cause than Dr Robert Brady, who was Master of Caius College from 1660 to 1700 and defended the Stuart monarchy with his learning in the last ten years of its existence; but the paradox of his career is that no man did more to bring to an end the climate of thought in which his work had been born. An interpreter of history in an age remembered rather for great textual scholars, he was a principal agent in bringing English historical method out of its medieval and into its modern period. For the student of English historiography in its peculiar and intimate connexions with legal and political thought he is, therefore, a notable figure.

On the morning of Saturday 25 October 1924 Philip Snowden, the Labour chancellor of the exchequer, was woken by the sound of J. H. Thomas, the colonial secretary, hammering on his bedroom door. ‘Get up, you lazy devil!’ Thomas is reported to have said. ‘We';re bunkered.’ What Thomas really said was probably more vivid but less printable. The cause of his excitement was the publication of the Zinoviev letter, the greatest Red Scare in British political history. Allegedly written by Zinoviev, president of the communist International, to the British Communist party on 15 September 1924. this sinister document instructed British Communists to put pressure on their sympathizers in the Labour party, to ‘strain every nerve’ for the ratification of the recent treaty with the Soviet Union, to intensify ‘agitation-propaganda work in the armed forces’, and generally to prepare for the coming of the British revolution. A copy of the letter was first obtained by the Daily Mail, then circulated by the Mail to the rest of Fleet Street. It was published in the press four days before the general election of 29 October 1924, at a critical moment in the life of the first Labour government. Until its publication Labour leaders felt their election campaign was going well. Afterwards they changed their minds.

A revisionist explanation of the political events of the Glorious Revolution has crept into recent literature virtually unscathed. Briefly summarized, the argument contends that it is difficult to discover evidence of resistance to the Crown in the debates of either the House of Lords or the Convention parliament during 1689. According to J. P. Kenyon, a major advocate of this new interpretation, John Locke's Second treatise of government misled historians and even some contemporaries into believing that parliament deposed James II for breaking the original contract between sovereign and people. Actually, during the long debates in and between both houses ‘it was clear that the word “abdicated”, or the Lords’ preferred choice, “deserted” both implied a voluntary act, if not a rational choice, on James's part’. The Lords especially, Kenyon argues, were careful to dissociate themselves from contract theory. Whig ‘revolution principles’, then, built upon the ‘haste and confusion of the occasion’ were rooted in a misunderstanding of actual events, a mis-understanding fostered by the writings of Locke and Algernon Sydney and enshrined as doctrine by whig politicians and historians.

By taking the Austrian province of Tyrol as a case-study, the article explores the relationship between Enlightenment, anti-Enlightenment, and national sentiments in and around the 1790s. Characterized by economic crisis and political turbulence, this period had profound consequences for the formation of national and regional identities amongst the region's German-speaking majority. In reaction to the challenges posed first by the centralist reforms in the Habsburg monarchy, and secondly the experience of the French Revolutionary Wars, the local nobility and clergy articulated a greater Tyrolian provincial consciousness, and also a stronger sense of their German identity. The mobilizing experience created by Tyrol's fight against the invading French armies meant that these sentiments were disseminated among and articulated by broader sections of the German-Tyrolian population as well. The article assesses the meanings and nuances of regional consciousness, local patriotism, German identity, and dynastic loyalty, and argues that national feeling in Tyrol was strongly influenced by anti-Enlightenment political and social forces.

In the history of early modern political thought, gender is not well established as a subject. It seems that early modern politics and its philosophical underpinnings are characterized by an exclusion of women from the political sphere. This article shows that it is indeed possible to write a gendered history of early modern political thought that transcends questions of the structural exclusion of women from political participation. Through a nuanced reading of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century commentaries on Aristotle's practical philosophy, it deconstructs notions on the public/political and private/apolitical divide and reconstructs that early modern thinkers saw the relationship of husband and wife as deeply political. The article argues that it is both necessary and possible to write gender in and into the history of political thought in a historically sound and firmly contextual way that avoids anachronisms, and it shows – as Joan Scott has suggested – that gender is indeed a ‘useful category’ in the history of political thought.

Blackstone's Commentaries have traditionally evoked two responses. On the one hand, from Bentham on, the work has been seen as confused and contradictory, based on theoretical foundations which were either irrelevant to his task, or ignored in practice in the book. On the other hand, although his achievement and in particular his theorising have been criticised, the Commentaries have also been seen as the first attempt to systematise English law and to ground it on solid principles, thereby creating a new ‘science of English law’. Both Lord Mansfield and Bentham himself praised Blackstone on this score, while Sir William Jones enthused that ‘his Commentaries are the most correct and beautiful outline that was ever exhibited of any human science’ Modern writers have agreed that Blackstone made a significant contribution to the development of law as a science.

As Oliver Cromwell set out on his controversial reconquest of Ireland in 1649, it was widely believed in England that the Levellers were opposed to all English rule in Ireland, and that these pro-Irish views were responsible for the mutinies and disorders in the commonwealth's armies which delayed the setting out of Cromwell's expedition.

The Second International's socialism saw itself as a moral force. That moral force served to maintain a precarious balance between politics conducted perforce within a national framework, and an internationalist rhetoric; between politics which in practice worked within an established system, and a theoretical rejection of that old society. The First World War broke one part of this precarious balance by demonstrating the impotence of the organized working class in stopping an imperialist conflict; but another pillar of marxist orthodoxy, economic dogma, remained for the marxist parties of the post-war world. That pillar was unshaken by the collapse of societies and politics in Central Europe; it held up an intellectual elite in the world of post-war socialist politics.

A study of the Victorian poacher raises several points of interest for historians of nineteenth-century society. First, he was such an ordinary figure, an accepted and normal part of rural life. In recent works of oral history, old people recall just how important poaching had been for their predecessors, and for the family and village economy. An examination of the statistics of rural crime in the nineteenth century reveals that, together with theft, trespass, vagrancy and Poor Law offences, poaching offences absorbed a major share of the magistrates' time. For example, in 1843, one in four convictions in Suffolk were against the Game Laws, whilst in Norfolk over 2,000 poachers were fined or imprisoned in the years 1863–71. Landowners such as Lord Ashburnham of Battle in Sussex, and Lord Musters and Sutherland in the Midlands, fought a daily, and sometimes losing battle, against these people. In the second quarter of the century poaching was widely regarded as one of the fastest growing crimes in Britain, and, unlike arson, highway robbery, cattle, horse and sheep stealing, it continued to be a prominent and permanent part of the rural scene. Even in the 1880s and 1890s contemporaries were periodically shocked by the bitterness and violence which accompanied this particular criminal activity. A study of poaching, therefore, tells us a good deal about the secret world of the village and the labourer.

On 11 January 1910 Lord Esher, a permanent non-government member of the Committee of Imperial Defence and a close confidant of King Edward VII, dispatched these encouraging words to a relatively unknown journalist: ‘Your book can be as epoch making as Seeley's Expansion of England or Mahan's Sea Power. It is sent forth at the right psychological moment, and wants to be followed up.’ The recipient of the letter, a Mr Ralph Lane (better known under the pseudonym of Norman Angell), had just begun to receive recognition for his small monograph, Europe's Optical Illusion, later revised and expanded into its more celebrated version, The Great Illusion. Esher's words were prophetic. The Great Illusion ran into numerous editions: it sold over two million copies from 1910 to 1913, in 1939 over half a million, and was translated into twenty-five languages.

Ireland's position as a kingdom in early modern Europe was, in some respects, unique, and this eccentricity sheds light upon the complexity of governing a multiple kingdom during the seventeenth century. The framework for looking at the way Ireland operated as a kingdom is provided, first by an article by Conrad Russell on ‘The British problem and the English civil war’ and secondly by an article by H. G. Koenigsberger entitled ‘Monarchies and parliaments in early modern Europe – dominium regale or dominium politicum et regale’. Russell listed six problems that faced multiple kingdoms: resentment at the king's absence, disposal of offices, sharing of war costs, trade and colonies, foreign intervention and religion. Koenigsberger used Sir John Fortescue's two phrases of the 1470s to distinguish between constitutional, or limited monarchies, and more authoritarian ones during the early modern period. Both these contributions are valuable in looking at the way the monarchy operated in Ireland because the application of the constitution there was deeply influenced by Ireland's position as part of a multiple kingdom and because Englishmen, looking at Ireland, wanted her to be like England, but, at the same time, did not wish her to exercise the type of independence that they claimed for England.

John Locke is famous for his liberal and tolerationist works, published in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, which attacked the belligerent intolerance of the Restoration Church of England. But his early writings, the Two tracts on government, were composed in the period between 1660 and 1662 when the details of the church settlement were the subject of heated debate. The thought of the young Locke defended an uncompromising settlement which would rigidly enforce uniformity in religious worship and secure the restored monarchy from clerical subversion. Whilst scholars have previously focused on the changes in Locke's thought from royalist Anglicanism to whig toleration, this article focuses on the Tracts in their own right. By placing them in the context of the Restoration debate on adiaphora, ceremonial ‘matters indifferent’, the typicality or otherwise of Locke's early thought can be discerned. This article argues that the legalistic understanding of adiaphora meant that this debate touched on political authority and obedience as well as theological questions, not least because matters indifferent fell under the purview of the monarch as supreme governor of the church.

Recent historical writing has shown the petite bourgeoisie to have been a distinctive group within British politics and society during the nineteenth century. Its politically active members provided a fluctuating and positive challenge to the authority of both the landed aristocracy and the developing urban elites. In the 1790s, an active fringe of small masters, shopkeepers and less prosperous professional men joined with the wage earners and artisans of the Corresponding Societies. They were cautious Painites, giving depth and breadth to the eighteenth-century radical tradition which sought to extend the franchise and reduce the power of government.

This review is intended to examine the development of representations of elves and fairies in British culture between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries. It will argue that a very clear two-stage evolution in those representations can be found in literary sources, from an inchoate range found in different kinds of text, with no apparent collective identity, to a coherent sense of a kingdom, to which the common word ‘fairy’ could be applied, to an intense interest in, and discussion of, the nature of fairies. The first development occurred in the late middle ages, and the second after the Reformation, and both were pan-British phenomena. These literary changes were, moreover, paralleled at each stage, and perhaps responsible for, changes in perception in culture at large. The alterations in representations of these non-human beings, with no clear status in Christian theology, may have wider implications for an understanding of late medieval and early modern cultural history.

Eric Hobsbawm's concept of ‘social banditry’, as presented in Bandits of 1969, is probably the single most influential idea in the modern study of bandits and outlaws. Key to Hobsbawm's argument is the assumption of a more or less direct relation between ‘a bandit's real behaviour and his subsequent myth’ – in other words, that the popular perception of bandits reflected the social reality of banditry, and that accordingly the Robin Hood myth had some basis in historical events. This article seeks to qualify some of the basic premises of Eric Hobsbawm's concept of social banditry by examining the context and process by which popular and official knowledge of banditry emerged. This analysis is based on a case-study of the thugs of early nineteenth-century colonial India. Though seldom described as such, thuggee is one of the best-documented instances of banditry historically speaking. This makes the findings and theoretical considerations made in connection with thuggee pertinent to banditry worldwide and during various periods. By focusing on issues of methodology it is hoped that a critical discussion of Hobsbawm's model, rather than just being a polemic deconstruction, may suggest a new approach to the study of banditry more generally.

The first World War ended very suddenly. Large numbers of civilian workers lost their jobs in the period of industrial dislocation that followed, adding to the numbers of unemployed already swollen by the return of demobilized soldiers from the continent. No plans existed, however, to provide for the civilian unemployed. A last-minute decision was made in November 1918 to extend free out-of-work donation to them as well as to those newly released from the army. Although this scheme proved inordinately expensive it did provide the cabinet with a much needed breathing-space. In the event, however, general policy on how to cater for the unemployed was not tackled again for many months.

Two points may be safely made about biographies of Robert Clive. One is that the first adequately documented biography, by Sir John Malcolm, published in 1836, has never really been superseded, because it was solidly based on family papers made available by Lord Powis. The other is that if the modern general reader has any acquaintance with Malcolm’s work it is likely to derive from the sonorous prose of the oft-reprinted review which Lord Macaulay originally published in the Edinburgh Review in January 1840. This magisterial apportionment of praise and blame does not invite the criticism which H. W. C. Davis levelled at Macaulay’s equally celebrated essay on Warren Hastings; that it was even doubtful whether Macaulay had read with care the biography of Hastings by the Reverend G. R. Gleig which he purported to review.

The relationship between the ‘growth of professional society’ and the growth of new universities in England from the later nineteenth century is more often asserted than examined in detail. This article examines the policies towards graduates of three large professions, those of schoolteachers, solicitors, and accountants. The crucial first stage was the growth of an examining society during the second half of the nineteenth century; exams were necessary for almost everything and middle-class children, girls as well as boys, stayed at school longer to take them. This process provided the students both for women's colleges and for the new universities. However, graduate employment remained a problem: solicitors resisted large-scale graduate entry until well into the 1950s, accountants for a decade longer. Teaching was exceptional as a large profession that accepted graduates in large numbers. As a result, the secondary school system produced teachers, who produced university students, many of whom had little option but to return to teaching. This applied to Science as well as Arts students, male as well as female. Secondary school teaching rapidly became a graduate profession, while interwar elementary school teaching moved quite rapidly in that direction. The restricted occupations available for graduates created a vicious circle that significantly restrained the Redbrick universities' opportunities for expansion from their foundation until after 1945. Thereafter, with their traditional intake now going to university, solicitors and accountants were increasingly compelled to accept graduates in large numbers. The post-war growth in student numbers was bound up with a widening of social access to universities, particularly within the middle classes.