This article argues that smell's place in nineteenth-century medicine and public health was distinctly ambiguous. Standard narratives in the history of smell argue that smell became less important in this period whilst also arguing that urban spaces were deodorized. The causal motor for the latter shift is medical theories about odour and miasma. By contrast, this article argues that sanitary practices of circulation, ventilation, and disinfection proceeded despite, not because of, medical attitudes to smell. Surgeons and physicians argued that odours were no indicator of disease causing matter and distrusted the use of smell because of its subjective qualities and resistance to linguistic definition. Yet these qualities made smell all the more powerful in sanitary literature, where it was used to generate a powerful emotional effect on readers. Histories of smell need to attend not just to deodorization but re-odorization; the disjuncture between practices of smelling and their textual or visual representation; and chronologies that track the shelving and re-deploying of ways of sensing in different times, places, and communities rather than tracking the de novo emergence of a modern Western sensorium. In mid-nineteenth-century England, smell retained its power, but that power now came from its rhetorical rather than epistemological force.

This article assesses ‘Rotten Protestants’, or Protestant home rulers in Ulster, by means of an analysis of the Ulster Liberal Association, from its founding in 1906 until its virtual disappearance by 1918. It argues that Ulster Liberalism has been neglected or dismissed in Irish historiography, and that this predominantly Protestant, pro-home rule organization, with its origins in nineteenth-century radicalism, complicates our understanding of the era. It has previously been argued that this tradition did not really exist: this article uses prosopography to demonstrate the existence of a significant group of Protestant Liberal activists in Ulster, as well as to uncover their social, denominational, and geographic profile. Ulster Liberals endured attacks and boycotting; this article highlights the impact of this inter-communal violence on this group. Although Ulster Liberalism had a substantial grassroots organization, it went into sharp decline after 1912. This article describes how the third home rule crisis, the outbreak of the Great War, and the Easter Rising of 1916 prompted a hardening of attitudes which proved detrimental to the survival of a politically dissenting tradition within Ulster Protestantism.

Historians have done much to unpick the image of development in poor countries after the Second World War as a technocratic phenomenon driven by centralizing planners and advocates of modernization. Yet scholars have done less to ask how development interacted with other major aspects of decolonization, notably the transformation of colonial subjecthood to postcolonial citizenship. Using the case of the Bhakra–Nangal dam complex, constructed in northern India during the late 1940s to early 1950s, this article argues that a major development project impacted not just on economic growth and the extension of state power, but significantly influenced the integration of postcolonial India's diverse political territories. At the same time, ideas about development and citizenship both offered resources that technocrats and dam-displaced people alike could use to make arguments about the relationship between people, territory. and the state. Development was not a rarefied space that escaped politics while extending state power, but was entangled in the broader processes through which subjects of an empire became citizens of a postcolonial state.

The first English translation of Castiglione's Il cortegiano was produced by Thomas Hoby, and published in 1561. Hoby began work on the text during Edward VI's reign, when Italian culture was admired for its progressiveness by the Protestant elite. He translated Book iii as a self-contained commission for Elizabeth Parr, marchioness of Northampton. The book in question had particular relevance for the marchioness at that stage of her career. Having ‘Englished’ it, Hoby did not initially intend to translate the rest of Il cortegiano. He knew that someone else was already engaged upon the project. The identity of this alternative translator has hitherto remained unknown. However, a strong case can be made in support of the candidature of William Thomas. Hoby only embarked upon a full translation after Thomas's execution for treason in 1554. By 1556, he had completed his task, and produced a dedication addressed to Henry Hastings. His choice of dedicatee is generally attributed to a sense of political and spiritual affinity; Hastings moved in the same intellectual circles, and shared the same Protestant background, as Hoby. However, the young man who would later be known as the ‘Puritan earl’ conformed to the prescribed religion of the Marian regime. More significantly, he was the nephew of Cardinal Pole. Hoby and several of his evangelical friends were seeking rapprochement with the Catholic government in 1556. Hoby hoped his translation would commend him to Pole, thus effecting his political rehabilitation. However, the authorities were suspicious of Hoby – and of the stationer to whom he entrusted his book. Doubts were also raised about the Catholic orthodoxy of Castiglione's dialogues. Consequently, Hoby's translation was not published until after the Elizabethan accession.

The draughtsman of a foundation charter in the century after the Norman Conquest had the choice of two distinct diplomatic forms, each of which was a legacy from earlier times. He might cast it in the shape of a letter, authenticated by the seal of the donor, informing the superior lord or the relevant bishop of what had been done: or he might use the more ancient, solemn and pretentious form of the diploma, authenticated not by the seal but by the sign of the cross made by the hands of the witnesses. In either case he would be careful to include a list of witnesses who could prove the grant; and the most obvious difference between them would lie in this—that the letter referred to the act as already past (sciatis me dedisse…), while the diploma described the actual moment of gift (do—or trado—deo et abbati…). To the latter an exact date was appropriate—hence the elaborate dating of the Anglo-Saxon landbocs: for the letter, on the other hand, a date was superfluous, since the act was recorded as a thing of the past. Whichever form he chose, his purpose was the same, viz. to supply evidence for the remote future of a grant made verbally. There is no question about this so far as letters or writ charters are concerned: for not only are they often addressed to all men present and future, but they sometimes include preambles which leave us in no doubt as to the current conception of the written word.

Sir Edward Grey presided over the Foreign Office, Lord Salisbury ruled it. While Salisbury's Foreign Office can still be discussed in Palmerstonian terms, Grey's resembled its modern—day counterpart. After 1906, men who had been clerks began acting as true advisers. This change was in part due to the increasing volume of business and to the personalities of the men involved, but it also resulted from a belated administrative revolution which brought the Foreign Office into line with the other great departments of state. The years under Lord Lansdowne were the transitional ones both in terms of policy and of Foreign Office organization.

In February 1839 Lord John Russell put before the House of Commons a set of proposals for governmental action in the field of popular education. It was a contentious move by the Home Secretary, and the bitter political tussle which it provoked was predictable. In the context of a flagging ministry facing an opposition already scenting office, it seems almost cavalier. The well-known outcome was the formation of a new executive agency for the management of the state's role in the education of the people, the Committee of Privy Council on Education. The whole incident attracts notice in several dimensions of historical commentary. Social and political narratives must record it; students of Whiggery, Russell, reform or radicalism, must give it place and plausibility; it is a turning point for the historian of education; and it provides a case study for the investigation of government growth in the nineteenth century.

There is at present much interest in historical explanations for the political attitudes and collective behaviour of industrial workers. Typically, such I explanations develop out of descriptions of production relations. In some cases, historians have adduced the constituents of such relations (including shopfloor conditions, job skills and hierarchies of workers and employers) to explain strikes, unions, and mass-based political parties. In other cases, historians of labouring people have emphasized one or another of these elements – e.g. relative levels of skill – in efforts to explain collective behaviour. Still others have taken a more general view, ascribing workers' collective rebellion to the history of industrial capitalism itself; in this view, conditions for rebellion depend upon the historical moment, or conjuncture.

By the middle years of the nineteenth century, Englishmen were in full revolt against the principle of centralization. Parliament's experiments in centralized administration had almost all ended in failure. A powerful and independent Poor Law Commission had given way, in 1847, to a more timid Poor Law Board under ministerial and parliamentary control. A strong Board of Health, ruled by that uncompromising centralizer and bureaucrat, Edwin Chadwick, was sheared of a large part of its influence when, in 1854, the government decided to release Chadwick from their employment. The Times responded to this event with a jubilant leader article which announced that, ‘If there is such a thing as a political certainty among us, it is that nothing autocratic can exist in this country.... Mr Chadwick and Dr Southwood Smith, have been deposed, and we prefer to take our chance of cholera and the rest than be bullied into health’.

Canadian Confederation took shape at a conference at Charlottetown in September 1864, was designed in detail at the Quebec conference in October 1864 and revised into final form in London in 1866–7. The sequence of conferences forms part of the stately tread of Canadian nationhood, and provides a counterpart to the Annapolis and Philadelphia conventions which originated the other great nation of North America, just as the Fathers of Confederation echo the Founding Fathers of the United States. Subsequent meetings in other cities were to reinforce the aura of the nation-building conference, through Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Durban to the less resounding triumphs of Montego Bay and Victoria Falls. Intercolonial unions, it seemed, were formed by calling conferences. From this assumption it could be deduced as a corollary that if no conference was called, there was no interest in intercolonial union. In Canada, the preservation of the Province House at Charlottetown as ‘the cradle of Confederation’ is a gesture to national feeling, but the mystique thus fostered risks creating historical distortion.

The process of parliamentary reform which laid the foundations for a democratic political structure in this country contained much that was haphazard, and it is the object of this paper to discuss some of these elements, and particularly some of the conceptions and aims on which the legislation was based, and the technical defects of the legislation itself.

In reply to the comment by Andrew Farrant and Edward McPhail on Ben Jackson's article ‘At the origins of neo-liberalism’, this communication briefly examines the development of the political thought of Friedrich Hayek in the 1940s. It argues that the chronology of Hayek's critical analysis of the ‘Keynesian welfare state’ is more complex than Farrant and McPhail suggest. Farrant and McPhail underestimate the extent to which neo-liberalism in the 1940s was a body of ideas in flux, trying to come to terms with a changing political context, but not yet achieving a mature and stable ideological statement.

This article examines religious and political conflict in the Kent boroughs of Dover, Canterbury and Sandwich in the early 1680s. Section II describes the personal, political and religious divisions in Dover which lay behind a local campaign to persuade the crown to force the surrender of the town's charter. Section III charts the growth of concerted anglican opposition to the dissenting group which controlled the corporation of Canterbury. The activities of the dissenting mayor of Sandwich which aggravated political differences within the town are described in section IV. The final part of the article suggests some implications of the three case studies for understanding of English politics in the period. It argues that the government took action against the town charters principally in response to the demands of local loyalists, rather than as part of a policy of centralization. It concludes that anglican royalists within the towns were the principal agitators for, and beneficiaries of, the new charters.

Although his activity as a private collector has been documented, the extent to which William Ewart Gladstone's interest in art was implicated in his thought on church and state has been overlooked. Previously unnoticed memoranda and correspondence of the 1830s and 1840s with the French art historian and Roman Catholic thinker, François Rio, demonstrate a fascination with religious painting of early Renaissance Italy, of the sort which only came to be appreciated in Britain many years later. For Rio, however, introducing Gladstone to ‘Christian art’ was as much about encouraging Gladstone in his hopes of reuniting the Protestant and Catholic churches as it was about reforming his taste. The manuscripts considered here show Gladstone to have viewed art history in terms of a struggle between sanctity and sensuality, visualized in terms both of the individual as well as of nationalities. In so far as the young Conservative politician formulated this history in tandem with his theory of the religious personality of the state, a study of his model of Christian art's development affords a new path into an old debate: did Gladstone betray the principles of his first book, The state in its relations with the church (1838) in his subsequent political evolution into Liberal statesman?

Historians have long debated which continental sources gave a major impetus to the early Elizabethan religious reform. While many have examined the alleged Reformed influence on the English church, that of the Lutherans has also been discussed by some. However, these have in the main failed to appreciate the full implications of this German influence which was linked closely with ongoing diplomatic developments on the continent. During the early years of Elizabeth's reign, political considerations more than religious actually dominated the minds of politicians like William Cecil in formulating the nation's ecclesiastical policy. In fact, some key decisions on religion were the direct result of contemporary diplomatic talks with Lutheran princes.

William III's military and political career was marked by a sustained tension between his obsessive struggle against France and the fear caused by his accession to enhanced titles of power. Crucial to William's shift from stadholderate to kingship was his assumption of emergency powers in 1672 to defend his country against French invasion. Throughout his stadholderate (1672–1702), he came to be seen by his Dutch republican opponents as a Roman dictator intent on using military power to break the harmony of the constitution, while Orangist propaganda tried to present the rule of the One as the best remedy to the recurrent danger of civil war and anarchy. Spurred by the Ryswick treaty of September 1697 and fuelled by a deeply engrained tradition of resistance to any expanded military establishment, the standing army debates of 1697–9 came as an effort to understand a major political controversy in the light of the history of republican Rome. The political theorists of the New Country Party strove to reassert the superiority of civil over military power by showing how the decay of the Roman Republic had been caused by a departure from the civic militia paradigm and a drift towards military monarchy which fostered the growth of tyranny. It was thought that England's commitment to a prolonged war effort would entail a similar process and imperil the age-old balance between king and parliament. The contention of this article is that the standing army debates of 1697–9 can be construed as an encounter between Dutch and English neo-Romanism, crystallizing in the controversial figure of William. An overall view of William's military and political career and the search for elements of continuity in his supporters' and his opponents' arguments will serve to look at the role of historicism in the construction of a late seventeenth-century Anglo-Dutch ideological space.

The question of the direction of the speech which Lloyd George made at the height of the Agadir crisis of 1911 has recently been raised again by Dr Cosgrove. His article, however, is in some respects not entirely satisfactory. Most of the material that he uses to revive the traditional version of the Mansion House speech – namely that it was directed against the Germans – is derived from letters which deal with reactions to it, most of them Foreign Office reactions, and some of them at a considerable remove from the event itself. Admittedly one can build a prima facie case on ‘the entirely different impressions’ which the speech was observed to produce in Paris and in Berlin. There was the placing of it by Paul Cambon, the French Ambassador to London, at the end of a line of mounting irritation in England against the attitude of Germany, as the sort of thing the Spectator might have quoted in support of its thesis of the necessity of the union ‘intime évidente, affirmée’ of England and France; and his suggestion that French papers be encouraged ‘à publier quelques appréciations flatteuses de ce discours et de son auteur’.