Despite being coined only in the early 1970s, ‘peer review’ has become a powerful rhetorical concept in modern academic discourse, tasked with ensuring the reliability and reputation of scholarly research. Its origins have commonly been dated to the foundation of the Philosophical Transactions in 1665, or to early learned societies more generally, with little consideration of the intervening historical development. It is clear from our analysis of the Royal Society's editorial practices from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries that the function of refereeing, and the social and intellectual meaning associated with scholarly publication, has historically been quite different from the function and meaning now associated with peer review. Refereeing emerged as part of the social practices associated with arranging the meetings and publications of gentlemanly learned societies in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Such societies had particular needs for processes that, at various times, could create collective editorial responsibility, protect institutional finances, and guard the award of prestige. The mismatch between that context and the world of modern, professional, international science, helps to explain some of the accusations now being levelled against peer review as not being ‘fit for purpose’.

Ideological arguments are commonly sustained by an appeal to the past, an appeal either to see precedents in history for new claims being advanced, or to see history itself as a development towards the point of view being advocated or denounced. Perhaps the most influential example from English history of this prescriptive use of historical information is provided by the ideological arguments associated with the constitutional revolution of the seventeenth century. It was from a propagandist version of early English history that the ‘whig’ ideology associated with the Parliamentarians—the ideology of customary law, regulated monarchy and immemorial Parliamentary right—drew its main evidence and strength. The process by which this ‘whig’ interpretation of history became bequeathed to the eighteenth century as accepted ideology has of course already been definitively labelled by Professor Butterfield, and described in his book on The Englishman and his History. It still remains, however, to analyse fully the various other ways in which awareness of the past became a politically relevant factor in English society during its constitutional upheavals. The acceptance of the ‘whig’ view of early English history in fact represented only the triumph of one among several conflicting ideologies which had relied on identical historical backing to their claims. And despite the resolution of this conflict by universal acceptance of the ‘whig’ view, the ‘whigs’ themselves were nevertheless to be covertly influenced by the rival ideologies which their triumph might seem to have suppressed. It is the further investigation of the complexity and interdependence of these historical and ideological attitudes which will be attempted here.

It is by now accepted that James Mill’s History of British India, which exercised such influence over the British image of India and Indians throughout the nineteenth century, was cast in the mould of‘philosophical history’, the kind of historical writing typical of the Scottish Enlightenment By the 1790s such an approach was faught at Edinburgh by Dugald Stewart, and in Glasgow by John Millar; and their teachings and writings did much to form Mill’s approach, overlaid though it later was by the Benthamite political message. The characteristics of ‘ philosophical history’ can be identified. Writers of the Scottish Enlightenment were concerned to apply to the study of man and society methods of enquiry comparable to those of the natural sciences, and this, for them, involved the formulation of general laws on the basis of observation, and the available evidence about the history, economy, culture, and political institutions of different societies. Certain guidelines were evolved. The starting point was the close interrelationship between all aspects of men's life within society, between the economy, government, culture, and social life of a people. Secondly, a civilisation, by which was implied all these aspects of a society, could be located on an evolutionary scale, a ladder of civilizations running from ‘rudeness’ to ‘refinement’.

The modern reputation of Hobbes's Leviathan as a work ‘incredibly overtopping all its successors in political theory’ has concentrated so much attention on Hobbes's own text that it has tended at the same time to divert attention away from any attempt to study the relations between his thought and its age, or to trace his affinities with the other political writers of his time. It has by now become an axiom of the historiography that Hobbes's ‘extraordinary boldness’ set him completely ‘outside the main stream of English political thought’ in his time. The theme of the one study devoted to the reception of Hobbes's political doctrines has been that Hobbes stood out alone ‘against all the powerful and still developing constitutionalist tradition’, but that the tradition (‘fortunately’) proved too strong for him. Hobbes was ‘the first to attack its fundamental assumptions’, but no one followed his lead. Although he ‘tried to sweep away the whole structure of traditional sanctions’, he succeeded only in provoking ‘the widespread re-assertion of accepted principles’, a re-assertion, in fact, of ‘the main English political tradition’. And the more Leviathan has become accepted as ‘the greatest, perhaps the sole masterpiece’ of English political theory, the less has Hobbes seemed to bear any meaningful relation to the ephemeral political quarrels of his contemporaries. The doctrine of Leviathan has come to be regarded as ‘an isolated phenomenon in English thought, without ancestry or posterity’. Hobbes's system, it is assumed, was related to its age only by the ‘intense opposition’ which its ‘boldness and originality’ were to provoke.

The history of ‘sociology’ as it has been written in the last generation is largely a history of fictions. It is characterized by the various mythologies that Skinner isolated in 1969 in his attempt ‘to uncover the extent to which the current historical study of ethical, political, religious and other such ideas is contaminated by the unconscious application of paradigms whose familiarity to the historian disguises an essential inapplicability to the past’. In a now familiar argument - that to Construct a truly ‘historical’ history of ideas we must concentrate on the actual intentions of historical agents, setting those intentions within their wider social, and, above all, linguistic context – Skinner anatomized the varieties of intellectual disfiguration to such an enterprise: the ‘mythology of doctrines’ where ‘the historian is set by the expectation that each classic writer (in the history, say, of ethical or political ideas) will be found to enunciate some doctrine on each of the topics regarded as constitutive of his subject’; the ‘mythology of coherence’, which substitutes a spurious unity and homogeneity for the fragments of an agent’s thought; the ‘mythology’ of prolepsis’ by which the actions of an historical agent are invested with retrospective significance unacknowledged in the actual intentions of the agent at the time; and the ‘mythology of parochialism’ where ‘the historian may conceptualize an argument in such a way that its alien elements are dissolved into an apparent but misleading familiarity’.

Of the many books written by the late Herbert Butterfield, the most influential by far was The whig interpretation of history. The importance of that essay is not just that it attained the status of a classic in Butterfield's own lifetime, and has continued to be reprinted for over fifty years. Its main significance is that the historical profession in Britain came to accept its polemical terminology. The phrase ‘whig history’ has long been used as a term of historiographical criticism, in such a way as to imply, firstly, that everyone knows what it means, and secondly, that nobody wants to be ‘whiggish’. This usage is much in accordance with Butterfield's intentions: he succeeded in implanting the term in the professional language of historians.

Over the course of the ‘long’ eighteenth century the nature and significance of duels fought in the London area changed dramatically. Pistols replaced swords, seconds took on a new role as mediators, and new conventions reduced the violence. Consequently, injuries and fatalities decreased significantly. The purpose of fighting duels also shifted from the defeat of one's antagonist to a demonstration of courage. Although duels continued to occur, growing opposition meant that the audience of people who supported duelling became increasingly limited and duels took place in places far from public view. At the same time, both the press and the courts provided alternative strategies for defending reputations. These changes cannot be attributed to technological developments, official attempts to prevent duelling, or the embourgeoisement of the duel. Rather, they resulted from a series of interlinked cultural changes, including an increasing intolerance of violence, new internalized understandings of elite honour, and the adoption of ‘polite’ and sentimental norms governing masculine conduct. These eighteenth-century changes shed new light on the reasons for the final end of duelling in England in 1852.

The single most intriguing problem posed by the history of the Reformation in Ireland is the failure of the state-sponsored religion to take root in any section of the indigenous population. Perhaps because this outcome has been taken so much for granted a satisfactory explanation of it has yet to be offered. Historians are now coming to recognize that the central question cannot be properly discussed without a prolegomenon ranging over the political, social and intellectual history of the period. What follows is intended as a contribution to such a series of preliminary studies. It investigates the sources of tension within reforming circles in sixteenth-century Ireland and considers the implications of this aspect of its internal history for the external history of the movement.

Before 1689 parliament met relatively infrequently and unpredictably, passing limited amounts of legislation. After that date parliament met annually and enacted a significantly enhanced volume of legislation. By relating attempts to legislate to patterns of acts this transformation is explored at a very general level. Some explanations are advanced, largely by examining institutional arrangements and the subject matter of legislation. Finally, some general observations on the significance of this ‘revolution in parliament’ are advanced.

The inter-war years are a nomansland in the history of British decolonization. Conventional as it is to see the first World War as a great watershed in British imperial history, separating the era of strength and success from the age of decline and dissolution, it remains difficult to show conclusively that the disintegration of the imperial system had become inevitable before the second World War. Yet historians have felt instinctively that after 1918 much of the crude self-confidence had drained out of British imperialism. The age when Curzon could proclaim heroically that ‘efficiency of administration is in my view a synonym for the contentment of the governed’; when Cromer could lecture the khedive of Egypt like a schoolboy; or when Milner could set out to demolish everything that preserved a separate identity to the Afrikaners, appears in striking contrast to the post-war era when statesmen spoke the language of trusts and mandates, genuflected before the image of self-determination and claimed that self-government was the ultimate purpose of colonial rule. But for all the piety of its new principles, post-war imperial policy seemed strangely reluctant to liberate Britain's dependencies or hold out firm promises of independence; and the imperial government periodically repressed its recalcitrant subjects with a vigour and efficiency that would have impressed Lord Kitchener.

The identity of eighteenth-century North Britons needs to be disaggregated: there were significant variations in North British attitudes to the Anglo-Scottish relationship in areas such as politics, economics, language, religion and manners. In the first-order spheres of politics and economics North Britons generally subscribed to an Anglo-British identity and tended to welcome anglicization of Scotland's feudal institutions and laws as an acceleration along the pathway of modernization. Although this crucial aspect of North British identity became widespread only from the 1730s its roots can be traced back to the sophisticated debates which had preceded Scottish agreement to incorporating Union. This adherence to an Anglo-British form of patriotism was a common feature of political discourse in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world. North British patriotism also shared another prominent characteristic with Anglo-Irish and American identities. The aspiration to share English liberties to the full, when thwarted, could trigger anglophobic responses, as occurred in America in the 1760s and 70s, and in the Irish constitutional revolution of 1780–2. Among North Britons, a coherent Anglo-British ideology of improvement co-existed with a traditional Scottish chauvinism, which was normally dormant, but whose occasional eruptions tended to be provoked by perceived exclusions of North Britons from the liberties of Englishmen.

After partition, minorities in South Asia emerged as a distinct legal category of citizens who were not fully protected by the states within which they lived. The power of South Asia's nation-states over their ‘minority-citizens’ far exceeds their sovereignty over ordinary citizens, and the capacity of ‘minority-citizens’ to resist this power was broken, this article will show, by a series of draconian executive actions. But ‘minority citizenship’ was not simply a product of ‘bureaucratic rationality’, as some have suggested, or even of ‘governmentality’. On the contrary, it was produced by complex, often violent, interactions between government and a range of non-state actors, who forced their own ideas of nationality, justice, and entitlement on to the statute books. Citizenship in South Asia thus proves to have a complex parenthood, with ‘civil’ and ‘political’ more entangled, and mutually constituted, than some theorists would have us believe. India and Pakistan continued to be bound together by migrants and migration even as their discursive claims seemed to pull them ever further apart.

This article recovers some of the classical, constitutional, and religious languages of empire in early-modern Britain by a consideration of the period between the end of the first Anglo-Dutch war in 1654 and the calling of the second Protecloral Parliament in 1656. It examines in particular the strategic and political motivationsfor CromweWs ‘western design’ against the Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and presents the response to thefailure of the design and the oppositiorud literature published around the second Protectoral Parliament as the immediate context for the publication of James Harrington's Oceana (1656). It is argued that Harrington's Machiavellian meditation on imperialism is intended as a critique of the expansion of the British republic, so placing Harrington more firmly within the oppositiorud bloc of the late Protectorate. A concluding section details the recovery of this moment of historical argument in the heat of the opposition to Sir Robert Walpole during the early stages of Anglo-Spanish hostility in 1738—9, and leads to some wider refUctions both on the ideological uses of history in the aeation of the British empire and on the centrality of the languages of empire to an understanding of Anglo-American intellectual history up to the late eighteenth century.

Modern historians have been more confident than Restoration Englishmen in stating who the ‘latitudinarians’ were, what they held and where they dwelt. The ‘latitudinarians’ have been described as ‘the central force in the movement toward toleration which came from within the Restoration Church of England’ and as a clerical third force, neither anglican nor puritan, but united in an advocacy of ‘natural theology and rational Christianity’. Their ‘basic convictions’, as summarized by Professor Margaret Jacob, were that

rational argumentation and not faith is the final arbiter of Christian belief and dogma; scientific knowledge and natural philosophy are the most reliable means of explaining creation; and political and ecclesiastical moderation are the only realistic means by which the Reformation will be accomplished.

This article examines the relationship between the consumer and the citizen from the eighteenth century to the present in Europe and the United States. Part I highlights the political narrative underlying the opposition between courtly consumption (absolutism) and the inconspicuous consumption of the middling sorts, and explores early formulations of the relationship between consumption and democracy. Part II looks at the first half of the nineteenth century, defined by the opposition between consumers (coded feminine, and as ‘despised’) and citizens (coded masculine, and as ‘restrained’). Part III goes from the 1860s to the 1930s. American historians have emphasized the positive political agency of consumers in this period, and their contribution to the notion of social citizenship. This article emphasizes the less democratic aspects of consumer politics, and the contributions of anti-liberal movements on the extreme left and right to a stronger tradition of social citizenship in Europe. Part IV takes Lizabeth Cohen's claim that a ‘Consumers' Republic' was forged in the US in the post-war period, and casts the Marshall Plan and the Cold War as the context that gave rise to an international negotiation over the relationship between consumption and democracy that continues to the present.

The legend of the encounter between Wilberforce and Huxley is well established. Almost every scientist knows – and every viewer of the BBC's recent programme on Darwin was shown – how Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford, attempted to pour scorn on Darwin's Origin of species at a meeting of the British Association in Oxford on 30 June 1860, and had the tables turned on him by T. H. Huxley. In this memorable encounter Huxley's simple scientific sincerity humbled the prelatical insolence and clerical obscurantism of Soapy Sam; the pretension of the Church to dictate to scientists the conclusions they were allowed to reach were, for good and all, decisively defeated, the autonomy of science was established in Britain and the western world, the claim of plain unvarnished truth on men's allegiance was vindicated, however unwelcome its implications for human vanity might be, and the flood tide of Victorian faith in all its fulsomeness was turned to an ebb, which has continued to our present day and will only end when religion and superstition have been finally eliminated from the minds of all enlightened men. Even churchmen concede that it was a disastrous defeat. Only Owen Chadwick strikes a note of caution, observing that the account given of the incident in Wilberforce's biography seems hardly consistent with an overwhelming defeat, and maintaining that the received account must be a largely legendary creation of a later date.

Some years ago Henry Pelling offered one of his stimulating and provocative challenges to a conventional wisdom of labour history. He pointed out that it is often assumed that the significant extensions of the welfare activities of the state by the post-1906 Liberal governments were in some way associated with the growth of the organized labour movement; that they were, if not simply responses to pressure from Labour (which has rarely been seriously argued), at least supported and welcomed by a significant proportion of the working class, and therefore could be expected by Liberal politicians to increase their credit with working-class voters, perhaps sufficiently to persuade them to resist the lure of Labour.

After more than five hundred years the political ideas of Sir John Fortescue (c. 1394–c. 1476) retain the potency which has ensured that they have seldom suffered total neglect, even if much of the interest they have aroused has been ideological in character. It was perhaps only in the 1930s that Fortescue first received appropriate attention in the context of the history of political thought; and the varied consideration devoted to him by scholars over the past quarter of a century suggests that the process of appraisal is by no means complete. Despite much discussion of Fortescue's basic political categories, it will be argued here, important dimensions of his thought have been fore-shortened – notably in regard to origins, basis, and character of political society as such. Again, some of the perspectives in which the fundamental concept of dominium has been presented may be misleading if they are applied to Fortescue's use of that concept without full recognition of his specific political purposes.