The eighteenth-century commodifications of childhood and the sciences overlapped in the production of science books for children. This article examines a children's book written by two members of the Unitarian circle around Warrington Academy in the 1790s, and contrasts it with a Church of England work. The analysis reveals the extent to which religious differences could affect parental attitudes to the natural world, reason, the uses of the sciences, and the appropriate way to read and discuss books. Although the sciences were admitted as suitable for children, the issues of the subjects to be chosen, the purposes they were intended for, and the pedagogical methods by which they were presented, were still contested. This article also goes beyond the usual studies of children's books by focusing on non-fiction, and by emphasizing readers and use, rather than authors or publishers. Yet producing a history of reading based entirely on actual readers will be exceedingly difficult, so this article suggests an alternative, by combining accounts of actual readers' experiences with attitudes towards practices like orality and discussion.

Between the summer of 1912 and the summer of 1914, while the British political world seethed over Marconi, the National Health Insurance doctors' revolts, Home Rule, and the cost of oil-fired battleships, the chancellor of the exchequer, David Lloyd George, himself a centre of controversy, began to put together a legislative project to reconstruct the system of British land holding. He saw land reform as the major effort of his political career. Not only would it break up the monopoly of the squire in the countryside, but it would snatch away also the untaxed profits of the city land speculator. With a new system of land valuation, uniform throughout the kingdom, local authority rating resources would be immensely broadened, making possible the imposition upon local government of wide new responsibilities in public and personal health, education and housing. Land courts would set higher wages for labourers and lower rents for farmers, all at the expense of the landowner.

The Conservative party's preparations for the 1929 general election have been harshly treated by historians. Because the election was lost, they have understandably concentrated on explaining the defeat and so looked for weaknesses in Conservative leadership, policies and organization. It is also understandable that in the light of subsequent economic analysis, the Conservative election platform of ‘Safety First’ has suffered badly from comparison with the Keynesian-style policies of the Liberal party programme, We can conquer unemployment. But the contention here is that all too easily such hindsight has impeded a proper understanding of Conservative policies and tactics.

Although ‘Whig’ and ‘Tory’ are among the most historic words in the language of English politics, their origins have never been subjected to modern scholarly study. Modern historians of the Exclusion Crisis are attracted by other aspects of the period; we find in the words little of die immediate relevance or historical continuity which Macaulay saw when he wrote glowingly of ‘two nicknames which, diough originally given in insult, were soon assumed with pride, which are still in daily use, which have spread as widely as the English race, and which will last as long as the English literature’.

Recent work in the modern history of sexuality, now an established field of inquiry, is characterized by particular approaches to the interpretation of modernity and selfhood. In general, and in contrast to previous approaches, the books under review treat modernity as a localized process with specific effects. Sexual identity is understood in a similar way, as a phenomenon bounded by locality, class, age, nationality, gender, patterns of sociability, and other contextual factors. As such, speaking of sexual identity as a unitary entity, or as something that has historically been structured by an opposition of homosexual/heterosexual, no longer makes sense. In fact, the homo/hetero binary is of much more recent vintage than has been hitherto thought. These histories of sexuality challenge historians of all kinds to rethink the nature of categories like selfhood, identity, and modernity.

This article utilizes the metaphor of the post-war Lost Generation to investigate the chronology of middle class political realignment and Liberal decline. It suggests that the Liberalism of twentieth-century Norwich owed its existence to the perpetuation of a closed culture based on business, chapel and urban residence. It questions the degree to which dissenting Liberals had been assimilated into the dominant ideology before 1914 by reference to marriage ties and associational links such as the freemasons. It asserts that the downfall of this Liberal culture in the long run, though not immediately, was the result of the Great War, which allowed the younger generation to break out of their insular world and mix more freely with the Anglican upper-middle class. However, it also demonstrates that the closed culture was such that those of the Edwardian political generation, although affected by the War, did not reject their Liberalism. Most continued to actively support the party into the 1930s, questioning the view that the middle classes had largely deserted the Liberals by 1924. Rather, it was the political maturation in the 1930s of the War generation which heralded the end of urban Liberalism and the triumph of middle class Conservatism.

Let me start by making it clear that, taken at face value, my title is entirely a piece of mischief: I am not about to disclose the fact that there were actually no learned women in Italy in the fifteenth century. Indeed, this paper is built around the careers and works of five distinguished women intellectuals of that period: Isotta Nogarola (1418–66); Costanza Varano (1426–77); Cassandra Fedele (c. 1465–1558); Laura Cereta (1469–99); and Alessandra Scala (1475–1506). There is, however, a serious point to my choice of words in the title. The point is that the ‘learned lady’ of the Renaissance (the cultivated noblewoman, beautiful, charming, gifted, ‘gentile’) has a mythic place in the secondary historical literature on humanism. From Isabella d'Este to Sir Thomas More's daughters and the English Tudor princesses, the cultivated gentlewoman is the Beatrice or the Laura of some male humanist's circle, his hi adoring pupil, his inspiration, his idol. Scholars adopt a fondly indulgent tone when discussing the women, which carries the implication that their intellectual calibre, their actual standing as scholars and humanists, is not a real issue, is perhaps not in fact of any real substance (a figment, rather, of their male admirers' or suitors' imaginations). The single scholarly piece of any significance on the life and work of Alessandra Scala concludes with typical sentimental indulgence:Her noble and elusive aspect – for no portrait of her survives, unless perhaps she smiles at us, unrecognised, in the guise of a saint or a goddess, from one of Botticelli's canvases, or that of some other Florentine artist – yet that aspect shines forth from the shadows of the past, and casts a beauteous and gracious light upon the discordant chorus of Florentine humanism at the end of the fifteenth century.

As a result of recent studies English imperialism has come to acquire a somewhat surprising reputation for sobriety and restraint; that is English imperialism considered as a serious and responsible political movement in contrast to its occasional ally, jingoism, which Stead aptly termed ‘imperialism sodden with gin’. So far from being marked by ‘earth hunger’ and the lust for limitless expansion, the imperialist attitude is now regarded as primarily a defensive one, originating as an impulse of defiant self-assertion to safeguard existing British overseas interests from injury or extinction. The elements of exaggeration in the older picture have been carefully toned down. The swing in British policy is now held to have been more gentle, more limited in extent and duration, more seriously checked by the traditional regulators of Gladstonian finance and the priority of European affairs than was allowed for in the polemics of the older view. Just as the swing in British policy and opinion was less violent, so the distance that divided the Little Englander from the Big Englander is seen to have been much narrower than the party controversies of the nineties would suggest. Dr R. E. Robinson, who has been among the leading exponents of the new view, adopts the terms ‘forward school’ and ‘consolidationists’ rather than ‘imperialists’ and ‘anti-imperialists’. Certainly there were no voices among the prominent Radicals and Little Englanders prepared to advocate the liquidation of the Empire; their concern was rather to prevent its further extension in the form of subject tropical dependencies. Some indeed, like John Bright and Leonard Courtney, were willing to desert Gladstone over Irish Home Rule because they saw it as a measure striking at the integrity of the Empire. Courtney, who came to regret his assent to intervention in Egypt in 1882 and stood out as the most unflinching opponent of the Boer War, was nevertheless no disintegrationist. In 1887 he wrote to his friend, John Scott, in India: voter would think no more of giving up India than of giving up Ireland, not caring to inquire seriously what would be the fate of either when abandoned.

This article argues that during the closing decades of the nineteenth century a significant group of British imperial thinkers broke with the long-standing conventions of political thought by deliberately eschewing the inspiration and intellectual authority provided by the examples of the ancient empires. While the early Victorian colonial reformers had looked to the template of Greece, and while many later Victorians compared the empire in India with the Roman empire, numerous proponents of Greater Britain (focusing on the settler colonies, and associated in particular with the movement for imperial federation) looked instead to the United States. I argue that the reason for this innovation, risky in a culture obsessed with the moral and prudential value of precedent and tradition, lies in contemporary understandings of history. Both Rome and Greece, despite their differences, were thought to demonstrate that empires were ultimately self-dissolving; as such, empires modelled on their templates were doomed to eventual failure, whether through internal decay or the peaceful independence of the colonies. Since the advocates of Greater Britain were determined to construct an enduring political community, a global Anglo-Saxon polity, they needed to escape the fate of previous empires. They tried instead to insert Greater Britain into a progressive narrative, one that did not doom them to repeat the failures of the past.

British colonial policy initiatives of the 1760s and the American revolutionary war led to a period of sustained lobbying by the West India interest in Britain; lobbying which developed from an informal body into a more professionally organized lobby, along the lines of modern economic interest groups. The composition of the lobby and its activities during the revolutionary period are examined here. Its considerable influence is also assessed and explained. The article finds that the lobby won major concessions from the British government and vitally affected British policy towards North America. It nevertheless concludes that the lobby enjoyed its greatest influence in the early century when ironically its organization was weaker but its goals coincided more harmoniously with those of British colonial policy. Its later reorganization was a response to the increasing conflicts of interest between the white elites of the British Caribbean and the mother country which intensified during the period of the American revolution and its aftermath.

This article surveys the literature on American neoconservatism since 1979, emphasizing those monographs which include assessments of developments in neoconservatism since 1995. It analyses the origins of neoconservatism in the anti-Stalinist Left and in the ideological divisions of the Democratic party. It assesses the position of neoconservatism in the American conservative tradition and its influence on Republican party policy. It places neoconservatism within the broader context of American foreign and domestic policy. It examines the emergence of networks of support which have sustained neoconservatives as a group of policy intellectuals independent of universities. It concludes by asking whether neoconservatism can be productively viewed as an expression of American ethnic politics, in particular as a response to the varying guises which anti-Semitism has assumed in the United States. The article asserts that, although commentators on neoconservatism from varying ideological standpoints have avoided the question of the neoconservatives' ethnicity, it offers a plausible explanation for the protean nature and apparent inconsistency of neoconservatism over the last forty years.

This article throws light on how the issue of conservation stood in tension with imperial hunting and exploitation in colonial India. The indiscriminate slaughter of wildlife and the declining numbers of game species in nineteenth-century India gave rise to a need for conservation, but with a caveat. Wildlife conservation, consequently, was aimed at the expansion of colonial economy and infrastructural development. Thus, in colonial India, wild predators that posed a threat to such interests were ruthlessly decimated and those animals that were useful for the smooth functioning of the British colonial rule were overlooked. This, in part, was also necessitated by the British seeking to establish their credentials as rulers, which explains the reason the colonial government's conservation programme was fundamentally selective and guided by expediency. The comparative perspective on elephants and tigers elucidates how the former were protected by the law because of the critical role they played in the colonial economy and administration, whilst the latter were ruthlessly exterminated for the threat they posed to the same. This article especially argues that the reasons for conserving elephants and decimating tigers in colonial India were more practical and economic than a mere reflection of cultural sensitivity on the part of the colonizers.

This article examines the development of the idea of the ‘superwoman’ among British Edwardian feminists and contextualizes it within the aristocratic political thought of the day. I examine the idea of the ‘genius’ and the ‘superman’ in order to shed light on why, for some Edwardian feminists, the ideal feminist agent was to be an elite, discerning, remote figure. I argue that Edwardian feminism witnessed an ‘introspective turn’, marked by an interest in character, will, and personality as the key components of emancipation. The focus of political change was firmly located within women themselves. This belief was widespread, even though only a minority chose the language of the ‘superwoman’ to elaborate it. References to the ‘superwoman’ indicates the impact of Nietzschean and egoist ideas upon the women's movement. The ‘superwoman’ was used to position feminism as a movement not just for political rights but for wider social regeneration, and represents a characteristically Edwardian belief in the power of the ‘exceptional individual’ to promote social change.

Political historians have recognized that politics and high society interacted in eighteenth-century England; and most would also recognize the presence of elite women in the social world of politicians. These assumptions have not, however, been subjected to much scrutiny. This article takes the social aspects of politics seriously and aims to provide an introduction to social politics – the management of people and social situations for political ends – and, specifically, to the involvement of women therein. Politics in eighteenth-century England was not just about parliament and politicians; it also had a social dimension. By expanding our understanding of politics to include social politics, we not only reintegrate women into the political world but we also reveal them to have been legitimate political actors, albeit on a non-parliamentary stage, where they played a vital part in creating and sustaining both a uniquely politicized society and the political elite itself. While specific historical circumstances combined in the eighteenth century to facilitate women's socio-political involvement, social politics is limited neither to women nor to the eighteenth century. It has wider implications for historians of all periods and calls into question the way that we conceptualize politics itself. The relationship between the obstinately nebulous arena of social politics and the traditional arena of high politics is ever-changing, but by trivializing the former we limit our ability to understand the latter.

In the last two decades historians have been increasingly interested in the modernization of the monarchy, and the nature of the republican threat. This review evaluates some of this recent literature. The first section argues that while Walter Bagehot's views about ceremony in The English constitution (1867) have influenced historical writing, these approaches do not yield much information about what the monarchy actually meant to people. The second section turns to the political powers of the monarchy, and examines the wide range of views about what the constitutional limits of royal power were. It also shows that even radical writers were often unable to dispel the monarchy from their imaginations. Finally, the review suggests that criticism of the royal family was not necessarily republican, and arose more from concern that particular figures were failing to conform to shared public values. Pure republicans were few, and did not usually focus their energies on the monarchy, but rather on the nature of parliamentary representation and the power of the Lords.

Anglican parish registers have been the basis for most studies of population trends and characteristics in early modern England, and one of the most important of the techniques used in analysing them has been family reconstitution. But Anglican registers at all times were an incomplete and inaccurate record of vital events, and their defects tended to become more pronounced in the later part of the period during which they afford the chief source of empirical information about population behaviour. And there are inherent limitations and biases in the results that can be obtained by family reconstitution. This article attempts to describe the range of difficulties and dilemmas involved in studying the demography of populations in the past when using this source of data and this technique of analysis. A variety of tests is deployed to establish the degree of reliability attaching to the results obtained in a recent exercise based on the family reconstitution of 26 parishes, and more generally to assess the opportunities open to scholarship in this area and the pitfalls associated with such work. The conclusion is that reliable results can be obtained but that great care is needed in the selection of suitable registers, and that a number of tests should be employed to monitor the internal consistency and the demographic plausibility of any findings.

This article highlights the present lacuna in the study of politics and political culture in the Scottish Highlands between the battles of Culloden and Waterloo. It argues that this neglect is symptomatic of the contentious historiography that surrounds the Highland Clearances. Yet politics remained a crucial factor shaping landlord attitudes to improvements and their estates in general. Moreover, in contrast to their well-known failure to manage the region's economic and social development, Highland landlords exhibited a sophisticated understanding of how British politics had been reconfigured by the emergence of the British ‘fiscal-military’ state. The region's elites constructed a distinctive and effective political strategy that sought to place the Highlands in a mutually supportive relationship with the British state. Scottish Highland political culture thus offers a useful corrective to recent debates on the ‘fiscal-military’ state that stress either the centre's overwhelming power or the ability of local elites to resist that power. Although the Highlands is remembered primarily for its hostile relationship with the political centre, the region in fact constituted a prime example of the process of mutual accommodation that underpinned the domestic authority of the eighteenth-century British state.