This historiographical review offers a critical reconsideration of a central component of modernization theory: the model of secularization devised within the sociology of religion, and especially the version sustained by sociologists in the UK. It compares that model with the results of historical research in a range of themes and periods, and suggests that those results are now often radically inconsistent with this sociological orthodoxy. It concludes that an older historical scenario which located in the early modern period the beginnings of a ‘process’ of secularization that achieved its natural completion in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries is finally untenable, and it proposes a broader, more historical conception of ‘religion’ able to accommodate both persistent religiosity and undoubted changes in religious behaviour.

‘“What,” some simple-minded man might say, “is the connection between the Gospel and commerce?”’ Speaking in Leeds in May 1860 on behalf of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce was characteristically robust with his rhetorical question and no less direct in furnishing the answer. ‘There is a great connection between them. In the first place, there is little hope of promoting commerce in Africa, unless Christianity is planted in it; and, in the next place, there is very little ground for hoping that Christianity will be able to make its proper way unless we can establish a lawful commerce in the country’. Britain's part in forging the connexion was abundantly clear. It was effect of training the human race to a degree of excellence which it could never attain in non-Christian countries', giving ‘value to life’, ‘dignity to labour’ and ‘security to possession’, with the result that a Christian people would tend to be ‘a wealth-producing people, an exporting people and so a commercial people’.

In recent years historians have grown sceptical about attempts to trace connections between puritanism and liberty. Puritans, we are told, sought a godly society, not a pluralistic one. The new emphasis has been salutary, but it obscures the fact that a minority of zealous Protestants argued forcefully for the toleration of heresy, blasphemy, Catholicism, non-Christian religions, and even atheism. During the English revolution, a substantial number of Baptists, radical Independents, and Levellers insisted that the New Testament paradigm required the church to be a purely voluntary, non-coercive community in the midst of a pluralistic society governed by a ‘merely civil’ state. Although their position was not without its ambiguities, it constituted a startling break with the Constantinian assumptions of magisterial Protestantism.

According to the prevalent view, German citizenship was acquired only by descent from German citizens from the early nineteenth century onwards. This article argues, however, that a complete reading of the available sources suggests that citizenship was linked to the place of permanent residence in post-1815 legislation, and that the regulation of citizenship was a state responsibility, not one of the powers of the Germanic Confederation. The central points of citizenship law remained unchanged by the 1848 revolution and the unification of German states in 1866 and 1871, so that the increasing emphasis on descent in the 1913 Citizenship Act reflected a new departure rather than a traditional German concept of nationality.

In the early eighteenth century, the language of politeness became a major fixture of English discourse. Centring on the term ‘politeness’ and consisting of a vocabulary of key words (such as ‘refinement’, ‘manners’, ‘character’, ‘breeding’, and ‘civility’) and a range of qualifying attributes (‘free’, ‘easy’, ‘natural’, ‘graceful’, and many others), the language was used to make a wide range of objects intelligible. Though the word ‘polite’ had been in the English language from at least the fifteenth century, denoting the state of being polished or neat in quite literal and concrete ways, the term entered on its significant career only in the mid-seventeenth century, when it began to convey the meanings of studied social behaviour of the sort inspired by and associated with princely courts. However, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, ‘politeness’ grew to cover a range of meanings, considerably freed from the initial association with courts. Several broad categories of usage of the term ‘polite’ are indicative: as a behavioural and moral standard for members of an elite (e.g. ‘polite gentlemen’, ‘polite ladies’, ‘polite society’, ‘polite conversation’); as an aesthetic standard for many kinds of human artifacts and products (e.g. ‘polite arts’, ‘polite towns’, ‘polite learning’, ‘polite buildings’); and as a way of generalizing about and characterizing society and culture (‘polite age’, ‘polite nation’, ‘polite people’). In the latter usage, ‘politeness’ was frequently deployed retrospectively as an attribute of classical civilizations. ‘Politeness’ helped recast the renaissance model of history, in which modernity was separated from its true ancestor, the ancient world, by the vast dark gulf of the middle ages: the ‘politest’ nations were ancient Greece and ancient Rome; the ‘politest’ ages, the spells of Hellenic and Roman creativity.

This article reconsiders the sugar duties controversy in early Victorian Britain. Rather than representing the defeat of abolitionism by free trade zeal, the sugar question was a contest of two varieties of anti-slavery thought which had previously co-existed: one believing that slavery's immorality was accompanied by its productive inferiority to free labour and the other asserting that slavery's profits in this world were punished outside the marketplace. West Indian decline after the end of protection led to a revision of free labour superiority, with providential externalities replacing marketplace competitiveness. The episode demonstrates how little most Britons understood the welfare of black freedmen to be connected to anti-slavery after emancipation. A fuller appreciation of the slave sugar debate furthermore recovers an important abolitionist strand in the new ‘human history’ of free trade.

Historians have spilt much ink in explaining the diplomatic machinations which led to war in 1914, but rather less ink in accounting for the bitterness which the war aroused. The answer to that question probably lies outside the realm of diplomatic documents. For Britain at least, a tiny part of the answer can be found in a myth which became increasingly virulent in the decade or so before the war: the myth of the evil and ubiquitous German spy.

By his ‘attempt to formulate a general notion’ of the nineteenth-century revolution in government, and ‘to construct an ancillary, explanatory “model”‘ of its operation, Dr MacDonagh has initiated a discussion of great importance.1 For general notions are what we lack in the field of administrative history since 1832:

National identity, nationalism, patriotism, state formation, and their present-day policy implications now constitute one of the most vital areas of scholarship on British history. In no other period is the debate currently as focused as it is in the long eighteenth century, that crucially contested territory in which older assumptions about a fundamental transition between pre-modernity and modernity have now been called in doubt. This article offers an overview of recent work. It argues that much writing on these years has framed misleading models both of state formation and of national identity. It adds that this period is nevertheless a key one in revealing that the processes at work in sustaining collective identities in the British Isles did not originate with ‘nationalism’ in its historically correct meaning, and need not follow its trajectory.

During the East India Company's rule of India, Britons observed the pervasiveness of elephants in local modes of warfare, hunting, trade, and religious symbolism. The colonizers appropriated this knowledge about elephants: for instance, in the taking-over of Mughal trade routes or Tipu Sultan's stables. What Indians knew about the elephant also fed into a metropolitan culture of anthropomorphism, exemplified in the celebrated shooting of the elephant Chuny in 1826. Anthropomorphic approaches to the elephant held by Britons worked alongside Sanskrit texts and Mughal paintings. These hybrid understandings gave way by the mid-century to an allegedly objective and Christian science of animals, which could not be tainted by what was called pagan superstition. By using the elephant as a point of focus, this article urges the importance of popular traditions of colonial exchange in the emergence of science, and cautions against the reification of indigenous knowledge. The argument aims to show the strengths of a history of knowledge-making that is not focused on elites, the metropolis, or the periphery. A study of the uses of the elephant in colonialism also suggests the multiple and easily interchangeable meanings that animals could carry.

In all three great imperial powers of Western Europe, imperialism acquired a popular following only in the 1890s. This change in public attitudes was particularly striking in France. For most of the 1880s the French public had seemed at best indifferent, at worst violently hostile, to colonial expansion. The Tunisian expedition had helped to bring down Jules Ferry's first ministry in 1881; the proposed Egyptian expedition brought down Freycinet in 1882. Three years later Ferry was hounded not merely from office but virtually from public life after an insignificant military setback in Tonkin. At the elections of 1885 the Opposition reserved its most virulent invective for the attack on colonial expansion, and even the Moderate Republicans felt obliged to condemn the politique d'aventures which they had previously supported.2

The essay attempts to recover a language of liberty, a set of assumptions common participants in the mid-seventeenth-century discourse on religion and liberty. The current historiography of seventeenth-century liberty and contemporary consensus on the complementarity civil liberty and law are used as contexts. In the religious sense, liberty was commonly taken to imply submission to the will of a God of millennial purpose and providential power. In the struggle for appropriate submission to such divine authority issues of freedom arose in the Pauline paradoxes service as perfect freedom and in the process of liberation from inappropriate authorities. The polarization of liberty and authority in traditional accounts of the puritan revolution, the reduction of religious liberty to an element within a greater struggle over constitutional forms, and the identification of religious liberty with individual and corporate rights are called in question.

No description of the theory of the constitution which the Whigs Professed in the five years of their existence as a political party in Charles II's reign, can be adequately made except in relation to the position in which they found themselves during this period. For though their view of what the constitution ought to be was to a considerable extent built up on ideas inherited from past ages and especially from the previous half-century, as it was formulated between 1678 and 1683 it was designed to justify a particular set of actions, and to advocate a type of government appropriate to the needs of a group of people at a particular moment.

The general election of 1945 is described as ‘the Waterloo of the Conservative party’. Yet, in 1951 the Conservatives returned to power and were to remain in office for thirteen years. The purpose of this article is to examine this transformation in electoral fortunes. Labour's defeat in 1951 is usually explained in terms of government fatigue, redistribution, and Liberal disintegration. It is argued here that the Conservative party was not just a passive beneficiary of these developments. Rather, the 1951 result was the outcome of a sustained effort since 1946 to regain the initiative and political power. The Conservatives were actively engaged in forging an anti-socialist coalition focused on disaffection with austerity, rationing and controls on which the party's recovery after 1945 is based.

The discussion is divided into four sections. The first outlines the extent of shortages, establishes the significance of this issue in political debate, and identifies the social groups most affected. Part two traces the swing to the right from 1947 onwards and the third section explores Conservative propaganda in opposition to rationing, austerity and controls. The final part examines the party's assessment of the electoral task, its monitoring of public opinion, and the range of techniques employed to rally support.

Labour's victory at the general election of 1945, the first in which the party won an absolute majority in the house of commons, had fundamental implications for Britain's post-war history. Despite this, historians have failed to examine the popular political temper which made Labour's term of office possible. Instead, they have largely assumed that the Second World War radicalized the public, turning an unprecedented number into enthusiastic Labour voters. Whilst not denying that the war had a profound impact on the politics of some sections of society this article proposes a rather different perspective to that normally offered. Instead of promoting pro-Labour sentiment it seems that the conflict left many members of the public disengaged from the political process and cynical about the motives of all politicians. As a consequence, rather than have Labour hold office by itself the generally favoured outcome appears to have been the formation of a progressive coalition committed to the implementation of the Beveridge report. However, in reality, electors who did not want to see the return of a Conservative government had no choice but to vote ‘straight left’.

One of the most striking features of recent writing on early modern social history has been the emergence of the family as a subject of central concern. As befits an historical area being subjected to new scrutiny, much of this concern has expressed itself in the form of specialized, and often narrowly-focused articles or essays.1 To these have been added a number of more general works intended to examine the broader developments in and implications of family life in the past.2 Several themes within family history have already received considerable attention: the structure of the family, for example, a topic already rendered familiar by earlier work on historical demography; the concomitant topic of sexual practices and attitudes; and the economic role of the family, especially in its capacity as a unit of production. These are, of course, important matters, and the research carried out on them has revealed much of interest and consequence to the social historian; this should not, however, obscure the existence of a number of other significant dimensions of family life in the past which await thorough investigation.

In a previous article, we examined Herbert Butterfield's identification of a certain pattern of anachronism in historical writing, in his classic book The whig interpretation of history (1931). In the decades since that book was originally published, Butterfield's designation has been extended far beyond its original domain of political and religious history. The terms ‘whig history’ and ‘whiggish history’ have passed into the common parlance of historians. This very success, however, has masked a failure to define the nature of such anachronistic writing, its causes and remedies. Such definition is all the more necessary since Butterfield's own attempts were clearly inadequate. Building upon and amending certain tentative formulations of Butterfield's, we defined the root of the anachronistic error as present-centredness: that is, that the historian, in seeking to study, reconstruct and write about the past, is constrained by necessarily starting from the perceptual and conceptual categories of the present.

This paper is a study of the relationship between economic culture and trade union economic subculture during the years in which both the Victorian trade union movement and the classical economists' view of it reached their maturity. This period represented a turning point in the history of the movement, which achieved a full institutionalization and legitimation. The Webbs, and a historiographic tradition since them, maintained that these results were obtained at the price of a complete submission to the ideological hegemony of the bourgeoisie. In the 1960s R. V. Clements challenged this view and argued that such a subordination had never taken place, and that trade unionists had managed to keep their independent views – especially at the level of economic thought. Recent discussions have been content to stress the sound and ‘aseptic’ pragmatism of the working men, and the abstruse dogmatism of the economists. A footnote quoting Clements' article seems to be all that readers can reasonably ask for. The possibility of an alternative interpretation – namely, that classical economics could actually be useful to trade union strategies and interests – has not yet been sufficiently considered. The aim of this paper is to argue that there is much evidence in support of such an interpretation.

The law had always been deployed by the police to regulate traffic, but the development of motor vehicles, travelling at much greater speeds than previous road traffic, constituted a problem of a new dimension. By the early 1920s the use of the law to control motor vehicles was jamming the magistrates' courts and creating friction, hitherto unknown, between the police and the middle classes. The paper explores the way in which, and the extent to which, the criminal law was used to control the motorist in the first third of the twentieth century. It takes issue with the whiggish view of law making, which understands laws as logical remedies for readily identifiable problems; it rejects equally the idea of seeing laws as inspired by class interest. Rather the motor traffic legislation fits better with the concept of the ‘policeman state’ which, according to V. A. C. Gatrell, developed from the late nineteenth century. At the same time the paper suggests that a scapegoat – ‘the road hog’ – was created as the focus for criticism in much the same way that other criminal scapegoats have been established; the offender thus ceased to be a member of society and became an outsider, threatening respectable law-abiding citizens.