In 1931 Herbert Butterfield, precisely as old as the century, published a short book entitled The whig interpretation of history. It made him famous, and for the next forty years or so he stood forth as one of the leading voices in the profession. His voluminous writings in books and essays were read avidly by schoolmasters and their pupils, by students and – less regularly – by dons; to a wide range of educated and reflective people not themselves historians he represented the voice of history in England. He added a further dimension to his image when singlehandedly and with considerable courage he engaged the then dominant Namierite school of eighteenth-century studies; though he cannot be said to have triumphed in that battle, he emerged from it with honour and with the satisfaction of having been able to crack the crystalline selfregard of the opposing party in several places. Those who knew only the voice, on paper at that, were liable to be profoundly disconcerted when they encountered him: no whitebearded old testament prophet after all, preaching stern simplicities, but a clean-shaven (often somewhatrazored) man permanently about thirty-five years old, brisk, cheerful, responsive, entertaining, variously chain-smoking or sworn off cigarettes altogether, always courteous, never pompous. It might be thought that today, less than four years after his death, it is yet too early to venture upon an assessment of his achievement, but it seems to me desirable that the task should be attempted by one who still remembers the famous Butterfield giggle while reading the Butterfield writings. My own special qualification, I would claim, lies in the fact that I knew him but not all that closely and did not belong to his circle (which tended to be based on Peterhouse); in thirty years of sharing the same history faculty with him I do not remember ever once seriously talking history with him.

In general it seems to me a primary condition of national health that there shall be free and abundant contact between the most advanced culture and the masses, that due pains shall be taken ‘to marshall well the ranks behind’, and keep the whole army together. Where there is a great residuum of ignorance and stupidity, everything is dragged down... But if ever this contact was needful it is now and here; for evidently what has put the finishing touch to our confusion is the fact that the residuum of ignorance and stupidity has become our master and our judge... Just when the religious tradition had been dethroned by scepticism, and the constitutional tradition by radicalism, a new sovereign was crowned who knew nothing of either. Ignorance was proclaimed king, and an authority set up.

Before whose fell approach and secret might

Art after art goes out, and all is night!

It is well worth pondering Seeley's gloomy cultural assessment delivered to the Ethical Society of Cambridge a few years before his death in 1895. It is not so much the pessimism attendant upon the era of mass politics and society that is so arresting. He was quick to acknowledge a brighter, more hopeful prospect in the passage which followed. It is more the idea, so fervently expressed, that national life is best served by the existence of an intellectual elite whose abiding concern is to tend the cultural well-being of the less advanced majority – to furnish and communicate moral truths, a vibrant atmosphere of thought, and a body of ideas that would at once provide unity and direction to society as a whole. He was not alone in entertaining these hopes, but instead expressed a common outlook among the leading thinkers of his day: despite very real divisions in the intellectual elite centring on such questions as free thought versus religion, tradition versus radicalism, imperialism versus ‘little Englandism’, all sought a prominent role for intellectuals in defining the central ‘public’ values and identities of their society through their scholarship and personal conduct alike.

Peace with Spain was debated by Elizabeth I's government from 1598, when France and Spain made peace by signing the Treaty of Vervins. Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex was zealously hostile to accommodation with Spain, while other privy councillors argued in favour of peace. Arguments for and against peace were, however, also articulated in wider contexts, in particular in a series of manuscript treatises, and also in printed tracts from the Netherlands, which appeared in English translation in the late 1590s. This article explores ways that ideas of war and peace were disseminated in manuscript and printed media outside the privy council and court. It is argued that disagreement about the direction of the war reveals differing contemporary responses to the legitimacy of the Dutch abjuration of Spanish sovereignty and the polity of the United Provinces, which have implications for our understanding of political mentalities in late Elizabethan England.

Bolingbroke has been overlooked by intellectual historians in the last few decades, at least in comparison with ‘canonical’ thinkers. This article examines one of the most important but disputable aspects of his political thought: his views on political parties and his theory of opposition. It aims to demonstrate that Bolingbroke's views on party have been misunderstood and that it is possible to think of him as an advocate of political parties rather than the ‘anti-party’ writer he is commonly known as. It has been suggested that Bolingbroke prescribed a state without political parties. By contrast, this article seeks to show that Bolingbroke was in fact the promoter of a very specific party, a systematic parliamentary opposition party in resistance to what he perceived as the Court Whig faction in power. It will also be argued that Bolingbroke at no time envisaged a final end to political conflict and that his opposition party should not be interpreted as a party to end all parties.

The real significance ofthe Representation of the People Act, 1918, for the Liberal and Labour parties lay in its mundane and little discussed financial provisions, not in its extension of the franchise. Despite the electoral reforms of 1883–5, election contests before 1914 were still expensive enough effectively to exclude the Labour party from politics outside the industrial centres. In 1918 the politicians of the older parties took the opportunity to relieve their pockets of a substantial part of the expense of elections. However, Labour was the main beneficiary: its new strategy of contesting seats nationwide was only made possible by the changes in and underlying the Fourth Reform Act. These changes, in turn, enabled Labour to benefit from being a ‘national’ party and ‘alternative government’, during a period when the established leading ‘progressive’ party was divided and weakened. The Fourth Reform Act also assisted Labour's strategy of eliminating the Liberal party as a parliamentary force: Liberals could be denied election victories in the countryside and the suburbs by hopeless but inexpensive Labour interventions.

The relationships between central government and local community have attracted much attention among historians of early Tudor England. Administrative studies have long since described the network of offices and institutions which theoretically implemented executive action; more recent work has analysed the social and political structure of individual counties. But the actual mechanics of interaction between centre and locality have received less attention. How, in practice, did an active and capable minister translate programmes and policies into action and good order at the local or regional level? What limitations, and what opportunities, did entrenched networks of local interest present to the central administration ? And what tools were available in turn at the centre to co-opt or overturn those networks as necessary in the service of the state?

One of the most challenging historical debates in early modern German history of recent years has been the ‘communalism thesis’ propounded by Peter Blickle, a German historian now teaching in Bern. The term ‘communalism’ was coined to designate attempts to achieve autonomous self-government in town and country during the Reformation period, and draws on an older historiographical tradition which stressed an inherent dualism at all levels of constitutional development between a corporate principle and one based on domination (Herrschaft). The former was founded on the equality of all members sharing common rights and obligations in a form of collective association. In late-medieval Germany the basic form of association in both town and country was the commune (Gemeinde), which possessed, or sought to possess, autochthonous rights to regulate its own affairs. This included the administration of justice, maintenance of peace within the community, economic functions such as distribution of common land or grazing, administration of church finances and church fabric, and in some places communal appointment of pastors. All these communal functions were justified by an appeal to the ideal of the ‘common good’ (gemein nutz), to which all individual self-interest (eigen nutz) was to be strictly subordinate. Thus, the commune appeared to be a fundamental building block of premodern German society.

This article examines the attitude and policy of Lord Malmesbury in regard to the growing Italian crisis of 1858–9. Making use of previously unavailable archival material (in particular the private papers of Malmesbury himself) it seeks to present a much fuller picture of tory Italian policy than has, until now, been possible. Although it is recognized that Malmesbury's Italian policy was based upon a sincere desire for peace, this does not explain why Malmesbury chose to hold Cavour personally responsible for the Italian crisis and directed his peace efforts not at Paris but at Turin and Vienna. This had much to do with Malmesbury's close personal links with the French emperor, Louis Napoleon. In addition, this article challenges the traditional view of Sir James Hudson as ‘more Italian than the Italians’. Hudson was not prepared to support Cavour in a course of action which promised only to deprive Piedmont of her constitutional freedoms and deliver Italy into the hands of France.

This article considers the changing ways in which French political elites understood imperial obligation in the interwar years. It suggests that the economics of imperial rule and disputes over what could and should be done to develop colonial economies provide the key to understanding both the failure of interwar colonial reforms and the irreversible decline in France's grip over its colonies. In making this case, the article investigates four related colonial policy debates, all variously linked to changing conceptualizations of economic obligation among France's law-makers. The first concerns Albert Sarraut's 1921 empire development plan. The second reviews discussions over the respective obligations of the state and private financiers in regenerating colonial economies during the depression years of the early 1930s. The third debate reassesses policymakers' disputes over colonial industrialization. Finally, the article revisits the apparent failure of the investigative studies of economic and labour reforms conceived by the left-leaning Popular Front in 1936–8. The point is to highlight the extent to which senior political figures clashed over concepts of ‘colonial obligation’ viewed less in the cultural terms of ‘civilizing mission’ than in the material sense of economic outlay.

This article assesses the significance of Presbyterian ideas of church government in Scottish politics after the revolution of 1688–90. While recent historians have revised our understanding of Scottish politics in this period, they have mostly overlooked debates concerning religious authority. The article focuses on what contemporaries called the ‘intrinsic right’ of the church: its claim to independent authority in spiritual matters and ecclesiastical administration. The religious settlement of 1690 gave control of the kirk to clergy who endorsed divine right Presbyterianism, believed in the binding force of the National Covenant (1638) and the Solemn League and Covenant (1643), and sought to uphold the intrinsic right. An ambiguous legal situation, the criticisms of episcopalian clergy and politicians, and the crown's religious policies helped to make the Presbyterians' ecclesiological claims a source of instability in Scottish politics. Meetings of the general assembly and, after 1707, the appointment of national fast and thanksgiving days were particularly likely to spark controversy. More broadly, the article questions two narratives of secularization assumed by many previous scholars. It argues that Scottish politics was not differentiated from religious controversy in this period, and that historians have exaggerated the pace of liberalization in Scottish Presbyterian thought.

Robert Darnton's acclaimed 1995 work on the late eighteenth-century francophone illegal book trade, The forbidden best-sellers of pre-revolutionary France, has become one of the most cited and studied texts in its field. The culmination of thirty years' archival research and reflection, it roots Darnton's previous case-study-driven articles and monographs in a wide-ranging empirical survey of the order books of the Swiss printer-booksellers, the Société typographique de Neuchâtel. It claims to offer readers a picture of what illegal books went into bookshops everywhere in pre-revolutionary France. The first fruits of the French Book Trade in Enlightenment Europe project, a digital humanities initiative that has created an on-line database revealing the STN's entire trade, this article challenges Darnton's interpretation of the nature and utility of the Neuchâtel archive. It demonstrates that the STN's order books are an unreliable gauge of general French demand. It goes further. It argues for a nuanced polycentric understanding of the eighteenth-century Francophone book trade, and outlines a bibliometric digital humanities pathway that might lead us there.

Zionism’s call for a Jewish return to ‘the East’ was rooted in part in a broader European fascination with ‘the Orient’. This interest in ‘the East’ coincided in time and in much of its imagery with a conceptual division of Europe itself into its ‘western’ and ‘eastern’ parts. The Jews were deeply implicated in these twin conceptualizations of ‘the Orient’ and of Europe’s own orient at home (referred to at times as halbasien, or half-Asia). The notion that Jews – particularly those of eastern Europe – constituted a semi-Asiatic, foreign element in European society became a pervasive trope by the latter part of the century, and one to which Zionist thought and praxis sought to respond in a variety of ways. When Zionists in Palestine, mostly eastern European Jews transplanted further east yet to the ‘Orient’, set out to create a new Hebrew national culture there, competing images of occident and Orient – resonating with a wide range of racial, social, political, and cultural overtones – would play defining roles in their praxis and in the cultural institutions, the rituals, and the national liturgy they would fashion.

Charles I and his clerical supporters are often said to have been wary of print and public discussion, only entering the public sphere reluctantly and to comparatively little effect during the political crisis of 1642. This article challenges such views by focusing on the neglected role of official forms of print such as proclamations, declarations, and state prayers and their promulgation in the nation's churches. It traces the ways in which the king utilized the network of parish clergy to broadcast his message and mobilize support during the Scottish crisis of 1639–40 and again in the ‘paper war’ of 1642. The article argues that traditional forms of printed address retained their potency and influence despite the proliferation of polemical pamphlets and newsbooks. The significance of these mobilizations is demonstrated by the profound disquiet they caused among the king's Covenanter and parliamentarian opponents as well as the ‘good effects’ they had in generating support for the royalist cause.

This article surveys recent research on the German Wehrmacht's anti-partisan campaign in the Soviet Union during the Second World War. German anti-partisan warfare in the Soviet Union was conducted not just against partisans, but also as cover for annihilating the Reich's ‘ideological enemies’ and plundering ‘bandit areas’ for resources. The Wehrmacht's role was significant, constituting an important element of its wider participation in Nazi crimes. The review sketches the historical background and surveys the historiography's development to the late 1990s. It then examines at length the significant works that have emerged since, dividing them according to the operational levels on which they focus: higher command, individual regions, and, finally, middle-level units.

Recent years have seen an increase in the number of historical studies dealing with the state and its involvement in the process of economic growth, both prior to and during the transition known as industrialization. This is striking inasmuch as for a long time the state as an actor had been absent from the master narratives in history. It is still lacking in most studies on the Great Divergence, i.e. the story explaining the long-run differential growth trajectories between Europe and Asia, c. ad 1500–2000. It has been, likewise, missing in the more ‘Euro-centrist’ accounts on the perceived ‘European miracle’ – models that were to an extent influenced by neoclassical theory about market performance and economic development, which quite naturally saw little room for the pro-active state in the explanation of economic success, and against which much of the Great Divergence narrative was developed as an alternative model. As an actor, the state has also been missing from most of the accounts on Europe's first transition to industrialization. And it has had, until very recently, very little place in modern economic theory explaining long-run growth and economic change. Even the wider public opinion – just think of journalist T. Friedman's early 2000s best-seller The world is flat – had, by the late twentieth century, increasingly subscribed to the idea that free markets, unfettered globalization, and the ‘invisible hand’ were the best means to achieve economic health.

In 1863, Emperor Tewodros II of Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia and Eritrea) took a British consul hostage; five years later, the British sent a punitive expedition. This military expedition continued the brutal tradition of earlier ones and shaped later campaigns in Sudan and West Africa in the 1890s. Typically, a large contingent of non-military personnel accompanied these expeditions and the 1868 expedition to Maqdala was no different. What was unique for Maqdala was the inclusion of a member of staff from the British Museum. We argue that a letter from Charles Thomas Newton, keeper of the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, to Sir Roderick Murchison, the president of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS), illustrates that the plunder of cultural heritage was planned. We also argue that the plunder did not go to plan. The inclusion of a man from the museum made this expedition unique in the museum's history. The acquisition of these objects through colonial violence constitutes a strong moral reason for their repatriation from the British Museum and the numerous institutions in which they are dispersed. Understanding the planning involved in their plunder illustrates the entanglement of politics and imperialism with scientific and cultural institutions that constituted the backbone of Victorian Britain.

In the 1621 parliament members of the House of Commons clashed with the king over the issue of clergy as JPs: there were suggestions that no clergyman should sit as a JP, or that only bishops and deans should be appointed. Why were there complaints at that time, and were they justified? Was the nomination of clergy as justices an element in ‘the rise of clericalism’? This analysis of clergy JPs between 1590 and 1640 shows that they had been increasing slowly in number from 1590, and more rapidly towards 1617 under Lord Chancellor Ellesmere. But the major expansion in their ranks came under his successors Francis Bacon 1617 to 1621, and especially Bishop John Williams 1621 to 1625. However, there was no systematic central policy behind appointments, and local interests and the normal processes of patronage were important. Perhaps precedence among the justices and the exercise of secular authority by clerical JPs were sometimes troublesome issues. But, despite continuing complaints from MPs, the proportion of clergy to lay JPs was always small – at its highest in 1626, with 7·6 per cent. Thereafter Lord Keeper Thomas Coventry allowed the clerical presence to decline, both absolutely and proportionately. If there was a ‘rise of the clergy’ after 1625, clergy JPs were not part of it.

For at least a decade, many American historians have bemoaned the downfall of synthesis in the writing of the history of the United States. A wide variety of subfields has replaced a single national narrative. This fragmentation has been caused in part by methodological changes in the historical profession worldwide, but also because of the collapse of American exceptionalism. However, there are still some distinctly American themes that are interwoven throughout these subfields. These themes include the rise of transnational and regional history as replacements for an exceptional national history, and above all the influence of the American present on the study of the American past.

This article summarizes the apparent fragmentation of the history of the United States before discussing some of the distinctively American themes that remain. The article then focuses in detail on five subfields in modern American history – the new western history, the new history of the segregated South, the cultural turn in Cold War history, and the histories of modern conservatism and modern evangelicalism – to show how these distinctively American themes recur in seemingly disconnected debates.

The seventeenth century was one of the twelve during which, in spite of what geographers might regard as probable and proper, the two sides of the Mediterranean were in the hands of two separate and inimical civilizations, different in religion, morals, law, economy and knowledge. That sea was nevertheless a busy highway. The Levant trade, the most important of all for the French and the Italians, was also important for the English and the Dutch; but North Africa, from the Atlantic coast of Morocco to the Libyan desert, Barbary par excellence, was outside the European system of international law and conduct. Even when they were nominally at peace the Christians and the Moslems never trusted one another or succeeded for long in abiding by the rules on which they agreed. Both sides tried to enforce such rules by collective and vicarious punishments, by reprisals and by other devices to which men resort when there is no law between them. Each side, often in spite of express treaty stipulations, made slaves of prisoners from the other: the Islamic society was based on slavery, and the Latin states also manned their war-galleys partly with their own criminals but largely with Moslems captured at sea. To the seafaring men of Europe captivity in Barbary was a danger worse than shipwreck.

This article explores the impact of the First World War on the social reform movement in France, emphasizing hospital policy and medical insurance. I argue that the war gave birth to a concerted reform movement which succeeded in bringing about fundamental changes to health care policy. During the inter-war years, the French embarked on a mission to replace the traditional hospital, the maison des pauvres, with modern facilities designed to cater to the middle class as well as to the poor. In 1928, a landmark law was passed which extended medical insurance to workers and the lower middle class. By 1940, over one half of the population was covered by medical insurance, and dozens of modern hospitals had been constructed. The impetuses to this national reform legislation were the numerous local experiments, whose stories I examine in some detail. Despite the image of Third Republic ‘decadence’, the success of health policy reform during the 1920s and 1930s shows that France was indeed capable of important domestic reforms. Under Vichy, these reforms were consolidated and after the Liberation, Vichy's efforts were saluted and affirmed by French politicians.