Few works of economic thought have such a close association with the intellectual and economic history of their period as Adam Smith's An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations. Three recent careful assessments of the ‘influence’ of Smith's work, however, have found little direct evidence for its positive significance for economic policy in the 1780s and 1790s. Parliamentary debate seldom referred to the Wealth of nations, and then usually negatively unless by Smith's friends, or ‘radicals and Foxite whigs’. John Locke, David Hume, Charles Davenant, Sir Josiah Child, William Petty, Josiah Tucker and Arthur Young were all cited more frequently. A wide range of parliamentary leaders read Smith carefully, and several ministers knew him well and sought his advice, but with the exception of Shelburne they appear to have applied Smith's thought eclectically. Salim Rashid has noted that in 1776 there were already influential economic authorities, notably Arthur Young and Josiah Tucker, who advocated freer markets. Conversely, for over a decade after the publication of the Wealth of nations, articles on economic matters in the major periodical reviews made scanty reference to Smith's work, while the protectionist views of Sir James Steuart, whom Smith had ignored, were often authoritative. Smith's views became respectable among the political after negotiation of the Anglo-French commercial treaty of 1786, but it was this liberal economic policy which gave the wealth of nations currency, not the reverse.

The article takes issue with current orthodoxy concerning early modern republicanism, centred on Quentin Skinner's model of classical republicanism. I argue that historians of political thought need to return to first principles in their practice in order to understand early modern republicanism, and I provide an example by using those principles to reassess one canonical text, Philippe de Plessis Mornay's Vindiciae, contra tyrannos. Reading the Vindiciae in context reveals it as a work whose radicalism lies, not in its engagement with the Roman law tradition, but in its express conviction that each and every individual is responsible for maintaining a covenanted relationship with God. My reassessment tracks the political, and specifically regicidal, consequences of commitment to that belief in England from the late sixteenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries. It destabilizes the anachronistic distinction between ‘political’ and ‘religious’ modes of thought that historians of political thought too often use to characterize early modern political discourse, and it points to the common ground shared and articulated by theorists including, inter alia, John Ponet, George Buchanan, and John Milton. The conclusion considers what this investigation reveals about republicanism as a political phenomenon in Europe and America from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.

Many English political theorists of the mid-seventeenth century reveal in their writings an awareness that new political terminologies were needed to cope with the apparent breakdown of traditional ideologies. Such an insight is of course famously displayed by Thomas Hobbes and the early Hobbists such as Dudley Digges, in their treatment of orthodox Natural Law doctrines - ‘if we looke backe to the Law of Nature, we shall finde that the people would have had a clearer and more distinct notion of it, if common use of calling it Law had not helped to confound their understanding, when it ought to have been named the Right of nature’ wrote Digges in 1643.

The role of decolonization in the decline of the British empire has received a great deal of attention. In comparison there has been little research or analysis of the process of dedominionization affecting Australia and the other dominions. During the Second World War economic ties were seriously weakened and there were substantial conflicts over economic policy between the British and Australian governments. Australia refused to reduce imports in order to conserve foreign exchange, thus contributing to the United Kingdom's debt burden. The Australian government insisted that the British guarantee Australia's sterling balances and refused to adopt the stringent fiscal policies requested by the Bank of England and the British treasury. Australia also took the opportunity to expand domestic manufacturing industry at the expense of British manufacturers. Economic separation and conflict were complemented by political and strategic differences. In particular, the Australian government realized that British military priorities made it impossible for the United Kingdom to defend Australia. This led the Australians towards a policy of cooperating with the British embargo on Japan, only to the extent that this would be unlikely to provoke Japanese military retaliation. In general, the Australians preferred a policy of compromise in the Far East to one of deterrence preferred by the British.

This study examines the posthumous competition over the print publication of works by Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626) before the English Civil War. The print history of the two official volumes edited by Laud and John Buckeridge (1626), and of competing editions of texts rejected by them but printed by puritan publishers, sheds important new light not only on the formation of the Andrewes canon, but on Laud's manipulation of the print trade and his attempts to erect new textual authorities to support his vision of the church in Britain.

There is little reason to doubt that the Truman Doctrine was the direct result of the British announcement to the Americans on 21 February 1947 of the almost immediate withdrawal of financial aid to Greece. The Truman, Doctrine, in turn, is generally accepted as the real beginning of the Cold War; at least it is the declaration of full American involvement. What is not so definite is the British motivation for their withdrawal of aid. It is commonly assumed to have been the result of severe British financial difficulties in February 1947. In hindsight, this is highly credible because of the fuel crisis of that month and its effect on the export programme, as well as the approaching exhaustion of the American loan. It then follows that the British Labour government abandoned Greece at a time when its own continuation was in danger.

Colonization, as a means of reforming Ireland, had been advocated by certain Anglo-Irish politicians and English administrators since the early sixteenth century. This policy had been activated in 1548. Sir Thomas Smith (1513–77), a leading political and intellectual figure, contributed to the policy's development in the early 1570s with his colonial venture in eastern Ulster. Under Elizabeth, he served as ambassador to France on two occasions and held the principal secretaryship between 1572 and 1576. Smith is regarded as an important English humanist. His main works, A discourse of the commonweal of this realm of England (1549) and De republica Anglorum (1565) analyse respectively the economic problems and the legal and political system of the period.

This review outlines some of the key interventions in the literature on Latin America's Cold War produced since the early 1990s, concentrating largely on broad shifts in anglophone historiography. With questions of periodization and definition in mind, it offers a new, multi-layered model of the Cold War in the region, though with wider application. Using the example of Mexico, it then demonstrates some of the weaknesses of the current literature's assumptions and argues for the potential usefulness of a new way of seeing the period and its interconnected conflicts.

This article explores the engagements of people and various civic organizations, even from the margins of society, with the making of India's constitution during the early stages of its drafting. Using hitherto unstudied archival materials, it examines constitutional visions, demands, conceptions of inclusion, and constitutional proposals, as these were expressed at the time by people outside of the Constituent Assembly. The conventional understanding has been that the constitution was a product of elite consensual decision-making, and that India's nationalist leaders endowed it from above. This article shifts the historical inquiry away from the Constituent Assembly onto the ways the constitution-making process was experienced, related to, and understood from below by ‘We the People’ – those on behalf of whom the constitution would ultimately be enacted. Hence, it constructs a new perspective on the making of India's constitution. In doing so, the article throws light on the significance of people's interactions with the constitution-making process on the nature of India's decolonization, on its successful democratic transition, and on the rooting and endurance of its constitution against many odds.

In July 1918 it was the considered opinion of Lord Northcliffe that propaganda and diplomacy were incompatible. When, only five months earlier, Northcliffe had accepted Lloyd George's invitation to take charge of the newly created department of enemy propaganda, his appointment, coupled with that of Lord Beaverbrook as Britain's first minister of information, had held out the promise of a new phase in the efficiency and co-ordination of Britain's conduct of official propaganda in foreign countries. It was then, in February 1918, that the Foreign Office had finally been forced to relinquish its control over such work. However, the creation of the two new departments had produced an intolerable situation. After three years of inter-departmental rivalry and squabbling over the conduct of propaganda overseas, Whitehall closed ranks on Beaverbrook and Northcliffe and united behind the Foreign Office in opposition to any further transference of related duties into their hands. Now, after five months of continued obstruction, Northcliffe expressed the view that:

As a people we do not understand propaganda ways…Propaganda is advertising and diplomacy is no more likely to understand advertising than advertising is likely to understand diplomacy.

Already at the beginning of her reign Elizabeth I was resolved to effect at the earliest opportunity both the restoration of the Royal Supremacy and the replacement of the Latin liturgy by an existing Edwardian Prayer Book. Constrained by Marian legislation which she was firmly minded not to break, the queen signalled her intentions by conspicuous adoption in her Chapel Royal of such few and minor manifestations of Protestant liturgy and practice as fortuitously were still legitimate, amplified by certain early Edwardian practices (1547–9) originally introduced not by statute but by proclamation or injunction and therefore never formally de-legitimated by statutory repeal. That her initial intention was restoration of the Prayer Book of 1549 is indicated by the identity of certain texts set to music early in 1559 by her Chapel Royal composers, and by the response of Edmund Guest to a contemporary request that he undertake a revision of parts of the 1549 Book. Arising from her own personal convictions, Elizabeth's policy was not without merits; however, political pragmatism and ecclesiastical realities coerced her into agreeing instead to the restoration of the Book of 1552. She exacted a number of concessions to her own conservatism ; first discernible in the instructions given to Guest, these achieved their realization through the rubrics of the 1559 Prayer Book and certain of the 1559 Injunctions.

The inter-war period saw the decline of the Liberal party, the traditional political ally of the free churches, and the rise of the Labour party. This article traces the responses of the free churches to these developments. The relationship of the free churches with the Labour party in this period is examined at three different levels; that of the free church leadership, that of the chapels and the ordinary people in the pews and that of the nonconformists who became active in the Labour party. Whilst attitudes towards the Labour party changed within free church institutions during the inter-war years they did not become important supporters of the party, or greatly influence it. The number and proportion of individual nonconformists who were active and influential in the party in this period was however considerable. In the process not only did Labour M.P.s become the main carriers of the nonconformist conscience on issues such as drink and gambling. They also made a distinctive and important contribution to the development and ideals of the Labour party.

This essay surveys the wave of new literature on early modern migration and assesses its impact on the Dutch golden age. From the late sixteenth century, the Netherlands developed into an international hub of religious refugees, displaced minorities, and labour migrants. While migration to the Dutch Republic has often been studied in socio-economic terms, recent historiography has turned the focus of attention to its many cultural resonances. More specifically, it has been noted that the arrival of thousands of newcomers generated the construction of new patriotic narratives and cultural codes in Dutch society. The experience of civil war and forced migration during the Dutch revolt had already fostered the development of a national discourse that framed religious exile as a heroic experience. In the seventeenth century, the accommodation of persecuted minorities could therefore be presented as something typically ‘Dutch’. It followed that diaspora identities and signs of transnational religious solidarity developed into markers of social respectability and tools of cultural integration. The notion of a ‘republic of the refugees’ had profound international implications, too, because it shaped and justified Dutch interventions abroad.

This piece reinterprets the career of the Leveller, John Lilburne, during the English Civil War, by re-examining the official sources pertaining to him, and the multitude of pamphlets written by himself and his enemies. The article recovers the chronology of Lilburne's story, by stripping away the layers of propaganda with which he later surrounded himself. It shows that he had powerful friends at Westminster, and that his tribulations were caused by political rivalries within Westminster rather than his development of a radical political theory. He is shown to have formed part of the ‘Independent alliance’ during the mid-1640s, although his protected position was eventually imperilled by the fracturing of this group after the end of the first Civil War. The aim is to improve not just our understanding of Lilburne, but the complexity of parliamentarian politics during the 1640s.

This article addresses one aspect of the legal proceedings known collectively as the ‘Nuremberg trials’: British policy towards, and trials of, Nazi war criminals in the British zone of occupied Germany. The killing of fifty allied airmen after their escape from Stalag Luft III illustrates how atrocities against British POWs affected British war crimes policy. The article examines one part of that policy: the efforts to expedite trials and the decision to end them. It examines the ambivalence that characterized British attitudes towards war crimes trials, and also discusses British hopes for an expeditious trial programme and political and legal objections to delays in prosecutions. Finally, it shows that concerns about the Stalag Luft III case led to extensions in the trial programme, but that eventually the programme was subordinated to Britain's broader policy of reintegrating Germany into the western fold.

The Armenian crisis of the middle 1890s is sometimes regarded as a matter which is far removed from the main current of history. No doubt many Armenians were killed; no doubt it was the occasion (though hardly the cause) of Lord Rosebery's resignation from the Liberal leadership; but was it really a matter of great importance to anyone except the Armenians and possibly the British Liberals? It will be argued here that the manner in which that crisis was handled throws some useful light on the diplomatic and political processes of the period. It provides a baleful precedent for the much greater sufferings of the Armenians in later years; for the Jews in Hitler's Europe; and for many 'minorities' down to our own time. A powerful argument could be advanced for the view that the failure of the Powers to intervene on behalf of the Armenians was an essential link in the chain of events which led to the First World War.

In the middle of the seventeenth century, scholarship on ancient Stoicism generally understood it to be a form of theism. By the middle of the eighteenth century, Stoicism was widely (though not universally) reckoned a variety of atheism, both by its critics and by those more favourably disposed to its claims. This article describes this transition, the catalyst for which was the controversy surrounding Spinoza's philosophy, and which was shaped above all by contemporary transformations in the historiography of philosophy. Particular attention is paid to the roles in this story played by Thomas Gataker, Ralph Cudworth, J. F. Buddeus, Jean Barbeyrac, and J. L. Mosheim, whose contributions collectively helped to shape the way in which Stoicism was presented in two of the leading reference works of the Enlightenment, J. J. Brucker's Critical History of Philosophy and the Encyclopédie of Diderot and d'Alembert.

This article argues that within the debates over medical reform which took place throughout the Victorian period, there flourished a variety of models of authority with respect to illness and the body. The controversies surrounding the illness and cure of the journalist, Harriet Martineau, provide a particularly useful vehicle for exploring some of these different models. During a time when many doctors were anxious to establish the medical profession as an authoritative body within British society, Martineau put forward a portrayal of invalidism that gave invalids, especially women, a degree of authority that made many medical men uneasy. By examining the question of the status of the sick individual during this period, and especially Martineau's case, historians can gain a new perspective on broader issues of reform and the status of women in Victorian society.

The idea that war was a football match writ large was commonly expressed in Britain during the First World War. This article looks at the attitudes and actions of the English Rugby Football Union and its supporters before, during, and after the First World War to examine how such beliefs were utilized by sports organizations and the impact they had on the military and on society as a whole. Rugby union football was viewed both by its supporters and general observers alike as the most enthusiastic and committed sporting supporter of the war effort; the article explores rugby's overtly ideological stance as a means of shedding light on broader discussions about the cultural impact of the war, such as in the works of Paul Fussell and Jay Winter, and about the continued survival of traditional and Edwardian ideas of patriotism among the English middle classes in the immediate post-war period.

This article examines the final years of French rule in India. It questions the established narrative of the merger of the French settlements, which implied that they were always a ‘natural’ part of the Indian Union. It argues, on the contrary, that a full merger was only one of several possibilities for the various actors involved in the negotiations that took place between the independence of India in 1947 and the French withdrawal in 1954. Even those who supported a merger did so for different reasons, while a significant proportion opposed the merger on economic, social, and historical grounds. By examining more closely the opposing positions in the merger debate, we can locate them within the larger tensions of early post-colonial India – a new state that was struggling to define its geographical and ideological boundaries. This suggests that the decolonization of French India was not simply another chapter in French imperial decline; it was also an important example of Indian nation-building.