In the early nineteenth century, political economists, politicians, and geologists debated the size and duration of the British coal supply. For mineral Malthusians, the argument about a dwindling supply sharpened anxieties about population pressure, fuel demand, and limited resources. They introduced a new sense of geological limits and long-term obligations into the theology of atonement. But for cornucopian liberals, the shift to a mineral energy regime supplied a powerful refutation to the Malthusian forecast. Inexhaustible coal promised growth without end.

This article traces the history of the commemoration in Britain, India, and America of leading Bengali religious and social reformer, Rammohun Roy, from his death in Britain in 1833 through to the publication of the first substantial account of his life and work in 1900. It reveals the vital part that commemorative processes played in creating a sense of imagined community among liberal religious groups who were in the vanguard of social reform movements in India, Britain, and the United States. The groups under consideration are the Brahmo Samaj, an organization founded by Roy to reform Hinduism, and Unitarians, Protestant dissenters who rejected the orthodox Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity and the evangelical approach to missionary work. Bridging the study of transatlantic and imperial networks, the article explores a culture of commemoration that emphasized affinity rather than difference between groups whose members were unequally positioned in colonial discourse as on opposite sides of the colonizer–colonized, Hindu–Christian, and East–West divides. It exposes the commemoration of Roy as a complex and contested process, creating both ‘localized’ and ‘globalized’ collective memories. These reveal the possibilities for, and limitations on, cross-cultural interchange in an age of global Christian mission and British imperial power.

From the mid-seventeenth century, the problem of human sociability, long a staple of natural jurisprudence, became even more central to political thought. Faced with Hobbes's insistence on man's natural unsociability, Protestant thinkers continued to treat the question from within natural law. For reasons we do not yet understand, however, Catholic thinkers did not. Instead, it is argued here, they turned to sacred history, and in particular to the Old Testament, as the earliest record of the formation of human societies, Hebrew and gentile. The materials for this enquiry were provided by new critical scholarship on the Bible and the peoples of the ancient Near East. Despite the hostility of the authorities in Rome to its findings, this scholarship was widely available in the Catholic world, notably so in contemporary Naples. Two of the most remarkable applications of sacred history to the problem of sociability were by the Neapolitans Pietro Giannone, in his ‘Triregno’ (1731–3), and Giambattista Vico, in the Scienza nuova (1725–44). These works explored the ways in which family relations, religious practices, and war enabled the ancient Hebrews and their gentile neighbours to form and maintain societies, notwithstanding the unsocial tendency of human passions.

This historiographical review considers recent developments in the writing of imperial history, paying particular attention to the growing emphasis on cultural history. Such an emphasis reflects a close engagement with issues such as the formation of national identity in an imperial context and the ways in which systems of knowledge – including religion, science, and notions of gender – were linked with structures of empire. The extent to which cultural history intersects with concerns of literary scholars and anthropologists – in its engagement with travel literature, for example – further indicates the increasingly interdisciplinary character of imperial history. In conclusion, the review raises the issue of the limits, as well as the strengths, that flow from the expanding scope of cultural history, as well as offering suggestions as to why imperial history is likely to become increasingly important in a globalized world.

Drawing on witchcraft cases reported in newspapers and coming before Ireland's courts, this article argues that witch belief remained part of Protestant and Catholic popular culture throughout the long nineteenth century. It is shown that witchcraft belief followed patterns established in the late eighteenth century and occasioned accusations that arose from interpersonal tensions rather than sectarian conflict. From this article, a complex picture emerges of the Irish witches and their ‘victims’, who are respectively seen to have fought accusation and bewitchment using legal, magical, physical, and verbal means. In doing so, the contexts are revealed in which witchcraft was linked to other crimes such as assault, slander, theft, and fraud in an era of expansion of courts and policing. This illustrates how Irish people adapted to legal changes while maintaining traditional beliefs, and suggests that witchcraft is an overlooked context in which interpersonal violence was exerted and petty crime committed. Finally, popular and elite cultural divides are explored through the attitudes of the press and legal authorities to witchcraft allegations, and an important point of comparison for studies of witchcraft and magic in modern Europe is established.

Malthus was severely critical of the old poor law, especially when the payments paid to recipients were made in conformity to the principles adopted by the local magistrates in Speenhamland in 1795. He considered that it encouraged early and improvident marriage with unfortunate consequences. There have been a number of attempts to determine whether Malthus was justified in supposing that the old poor law had this effect, some concluding that he was correct in his assumption, others that he was mistaken. The information contained in the first four English censuses did not include a breakdown of the population by age, sex, and marital status, and therefore did not provide a basis for a definitive test of Malthus's assertion before the repeal of the old poor law in 1834. The 1851 census, however, did provide this breakdown for five-year age groups which makes it possible to compare marriage patterns in counties in which a large proportion of the male workforce were ‘peasants’ (Malthus's term for agricultural labourers), and the Speenhamland provisions were widely adopted, with other counties. The results show that Malthus was mistaken.

While recent research in the English context on the so-called ‘economy of makeshifts’ has demonstrated the importance of alternative welfare options outside of the poor law, less work has been conducted on the situation in larger towns and cities. This article seeks to remedy this imbalance by examining the different welfare systems available in one city, Oxford, during the early nineteenth century. Poor law provision in the city, while extensive, was significantly less per capita than in rural parts of Oxfordshire. There was a high degree of charitable provision, not only from the continued survival of endowed charity, but also from the creation of newer subscription charities. The contribution made by charity to medical provision for the poor was especially significant, as was the role of emergency subscriptions in alleviating short-term economic and other crises. With such a varied range of assistance, traditional assumptions concerning the importance of the poor law in urban areas may require revision, with implications not only for the scale and measurement of poverty, but also for the ways in which both poor and wealthy alike managed and negotiated the supply of welfare.

What is the history of science? How has it changed over the course of the twentieth century? And what does the future hold for the discipline? This ‘Retrospect’ provides an introduction to the historiography of science as it developed in the Anglophone world. It begins with the foundation of the Cambridge History of Science Committee in the 1940s and ends with the growth of cultural history in the 2000s. At the broadest level, it emphasizes the need to consider the close relationship between history and the history of science. All too often the historiography of science is treated separately from history at large. But as this essay shows, these seemingly distinct fields often developed in relation to one another. This essay also reveals the ways in which Cold War politics shaped the history of science as a discipline. It then concludes by considering the future, suggesting that the history of science and the history of political thought would benefit from greater engagement with one another.

The leading Fabians held different versions of permeation: Shaw saw permeation in terms of weaning the Radicals away from the Liberal party, so he favoured an independent party; Webb defined permeation in terms of the giving of expert advice to a political elite without any need for a new party. These varieties of permeation can be traced in the individual and collective actions of the Fabians, and, in particular, in their attitude to the formation of the Independent Labour party (I.L.P.). The Fabians did not simply promote the I.L.P. nor did they simply oppose the I.L.P.

This is a study of a successful parliamentary campaign led throughout the 1920s by a small group of backbench Labour MPs aimed at abolishing the military death penalty for the offences of cowardice and desertion. It was sustained in the face of opposition from the military establishment, the Conservatives, and finally the House of Lords. The campaigners used the opportunity afforded by the requirement on government to pass, annually, an Army Bill, to challenge the military establishment's insistence that a capital penalty was essential to the maintenance of army discipline. Despite the unwillingness of the 1924 Labour government to confront the military on this issue, the reformers persevered, securing some minor, incremental reform before the coming of the second Labour government in 1929. The new government was prevailed upon by backbench pressure to authorize a free vote in the Commons which approved the abolition of the capital penalty for cowardice and desertion in the Army Act of 1930.

On the fourth of July 1754 a garrison of Virginians, under the command of the young George Washington, marched its British colours out of a small log fort in an isolated valley of the Appalachian mountains, where it had capitulated to a French detachment the previous evening. Washington's defeat had an impact upon world history no less significant than did his more famous victories subsequent to a more dramatic removal of British colours, on another fourth of July twenty-two years later. The French expulsion of British colonials from the Ohio valley led to nine years of war in America and quickly escalated into seven years of general war, so wide in its geographical extent that Churchill called it the first world war. At the end of hostilities in 1763 the acquisition from France of Canada and a number of West Indian islands laid the foundations of the nineteenth-century British empire.

The deep-seated hostility of the railway companies of the United Kingdom to trade unionism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is well known to students of labour history. The foundations of that hostility were two-fold. Railway companies objected to the organization of their employees by outside bodies because this was felt to endanger discipline; in consequence, directors saw the growth of collective bargaining procedures as an attempt to divide responsibility for die running of the railways, and hence as a threat to public safety, for which they, the directors, were responsible. Moreover, the large companies had strong paternalist leanings, and provided their men with many of the housing, educational, recreational and medical facilities associated with a welfare state; they expected loyalty in return, and were quick to react when this loyalty was not forthcoming. Though trade unionism on the railways can be traced back at least to 1848, none of the early organizations survived. Collective bargaining, even in its most elementary form, the presentation of petitions by elected representatives of the men, was strongly discouraged.4

In 1820 many of the leading figures in the governments of the Italian states were men who had already been prominent before 1796, and had collaborated with the French during the period of the Empire. Vittorio Fossombroni and Neri Corsini in Tuscany and Prospero Balbo in Piedmont are the outstanding examples in the years immediately following the Vienna settlement. The political survival of these men into a Europe dominated by violent reaction against the events of the preceding twenty years poses interesting questions. How had the pre-revolutionary Italian ruling aristocracies reacted to the experience of Napoleonic government, and how did this experience affect their attitude to the events of the succeeding decade?

In 1808, an Estate of the lesser nobility of the Lower Austrian diet approved a statute barring from membership persons of Jewish descent in the ‘third degree’ regardless of confession. It is the only documented instance in Europe for the revolutionary era of such a paragraph that, in its rejection of Jewish ancestry in both the paternal and maternal lines, resembled the early modern Spanish statutes of ‘blood purity’ and the twentieth-century Nuremberg laws. The Josephian patent of toleration of 1782 had not allowed Jews to become members of the corporate nobility (the first Jew was only ennobled in 1789), but had relieved some of the worst aspects of discrimination. By the early nineteenth century, the archduchy of Lower Austria (including the imperial capital at Vienna) contained the largest, wealthiest, and most self-confident Jewish community in the Hapsburg Monarchy. The statute of 1808 was a reaction to Jewish acculturation to the upper class (including conversion, intermarriage, concessions of property-rights, the existence of salons in which Jews and new Christians mixed with the nobility) that presented a perceived threat to the status of its marginal members (lesser landed nobles, ennobled officialdom, and ennobled professionals). The statute was also a product of the politically and nationally charged atmosphere in Vienna between the Austrian defeat by Napoleon at Austerlitz (1805) and the renewed war against France (1809). No simple ideological continuum connects the Lower Austrian paragraph to either the early modern Spanish or the late modern Nazi ordinances. But it was the first such statute to take shape in a political context fraught with recognizably late modern concepts of ‘nation’. The statute of 1808 furthermore evidences the continuing fractured nature of public authority and lack of thorough-going state-formation in Austria.

The aim of the high church agitation in the 1690s for a convocation was to establish doctrinal discipline within the anglican church. When convocation met in 1701 the lower house produced censures on Toland's Christianity not mysterious and Burnet's Exposition of the thirty-nine articles.

It was Francis Atterbury who insisted that Burnet's Exposition was heretical. He had long been critical of Burnet's views on the trinity and his erastian interpretation of English church history in his History of the reformation. And if Burnet's History was an attempt re-write English church history from the perspective of a latitudinarian, then his Exposition was its theological counterpart.

It was assumed that the charges against Burnet were lost. But a copy of them has surfaced and it confirms that it was the connection between latitudinarians and dissent which led to the attack on Burnet. In his zeal to heal divisions within anglicanism and between anglicans and other protestants Burnet had introduced a ‘latitude and diversity of opinions’ which misrepresented true anglican doctrine. This was dangerous, because Burnet intended his Exposition as ‘a platform laid for Comprehension’ with the dissenters and other ‘Adversaries of our Church’. These included obvious heretics like socinians and the deist Toland.

Like the ‘Tory in clogs’ of Edwardian Britain, the Unionist working man has generally eluded the historian of modern Ireland. Indeed, to some extent, the image of Irish Unionism, whether popular or scholarly, has been supplied by the apologetic biographers of the ‘great men’ of loyalism, and by the rhetoric of political opponents like Michael Farrell: at any rate the historiography of the movement is peopled with irredentist squires and Anglo-Irish peers, bowler-hatted Orange artisans – Engel's ‘Protestant brag-garts’ – and cynical industrial barons. The existence of a more popular Unionism is acknowledged, though only in a context (the militancy of 1912, the bravura of 12 July marches) when it may not be ignored: even so, as with an older scholarly attitude towards popular British toryism, there has been a tendency among historians to treat mass Unionism as a freak of progress, demanding apologetic explanation rather than sustained illumination. With the institutions of popular Conservatism now, after thirty years of historical research, a firm feature of the British historical landscape, the need to reveal something of the electoral base of Ulster Unionism is all the more apparent. This is particularly true of the rural hinterland of the loyalist movement which, even more than Belfast, has been the victim of neglect.

If English reform lacked a Luther or a Zwingli at least it had Thomas Bylney. In his capacity as an inflammatory preacher and a leader of men, he took the lead in starting the English Reformation. He often evoked the epithet of ‘Little’ – a reference to his slight stature – but a more fitting description would have been ‘aggressive’ or ‘tough-minded’ Bylney. Although he expressed doubts about the papacy he never openly repudiated the see of Rome: nor did he doubt the traditional doctrine of the real presence in the eucharist. Clearly, he cannot be called a Protestant although he is often portrayed as one. His conversion to evangelical reform came through reading the Novum testamentum of Erasmus, but his subsequent attack on the saints puts him beyond the pale of the milder, conservative Erasmianism. His personal influence at Cambridge was immense since he was responsible for converting key men in the coming Reformation of England: Thomas Arthur, Hugh Latimer, Robert Barnes and John Lambert. The portrait that Foxe paints of him is of saintly hue. Like the apostle Paul he was an insignificant-looking man, temperate in his habits, ascetic in his tastes, and unflagging in his concern for others. He visited ‘lazar cots’ where he comforted the sick, and went to the prisons to reclaim the hopeless. He was something of a Puritan since when his college neighbour, the future Bishop Thirlby, practised his recorder, Bylney would resort to prayer.

In the voluminous historiography of international relations between 1871 and 1914, one of the thinnest patches is the middle 90's. Documents Diplomatiques Français had in 1939 not reached the years 1893–1900, and even now are filling this gap only slowly; the British archives for 1885–1902 were not opened until 1948; Russian material is slight. The consequent dependence of students upon Die Grosse Politik has had profound effects. French policy stands in especial need of re-examination; there is much interest in the early, vain attempts of French statesmen to end the baleful conflict with England. Mr A. J. P. Taylor has gone so far as to say that the Russian alliance was for France a means of achieving British friendship in more favourable conditions. The latest volume of French documents makes it possible to take this study further.

Liberalism in Devon and Cornwall before 1914 pursued a traditional ‘democratic’ rhetoric based on a class division which associated the Liberal party with ‘the people’ and Unionism with a privileged aristocracy. The ‘new Liberalism’ and social reform were unimportant. In the 1920s, the Gladstonian trinity of peace, retrenchment and free trade comprised easily the most common theme in Liberal candidates’ speeches. The Gladstonian tradition remained central to Liberalism because it accurately reflected the preoccupations of the party's core supporters in the region. There was apparently no belief amongst Liberals that the party's policies after 1918 were out-dated and irrelevant; their view is supported by an analysis of the 1923, 1924 and 1929 contests and their results.

Throughout the period, Liberal candidates were as ready and able as their opponents to use the coarser arts of electioneering. Liberalism was not wedded to a restricted Edwardian electorate with a relatively high level of political intelligence. The argument that it was is contradicted by contemporary accounts that the electorate of the 1920s was more thoughtful and less susceptible to emotional appeals than were pre-war voters.

The separation of Norway and Sweden in 1905 and the subsequent developments in Scandinavian politics evoked in British diplomacy a concern and an activity which are remarkable in view of the neglect into which Baltic questions had fallen during the preceding half-century. This new concern (like the previous neglect) can be explained satisfactorily only by reference to changing strategic circumstances. The diplomatic events are of interest not only because of the light which they shed upon the evolution of wider European politics at the time, but also because of their relation to strategic calculations; and they provide one of the rare instances before 1914 in which the direct influence of the Committee of Imperial Defence on foreign policy can actually be demonstrated.