The failure of the socialization of heavy industry in West Germany following the Second World War has often been ascribed to American reluctance to allow meaningful social reform in the face of an intensifying Cold War. But a closer look at the socialization issue during the latter half of the 1940s demonstrates the enormous complexity of transforming Germany's heavy industry. First, the British, who originally advocated socialization, i.e. the public ownership of heavy industry, had done so on security grounds. But when trying to reach out to ‘democratic’ Germans, such as social democrats and left wing members of the Christian democratic union, the British realized the difficulty of cultivating a meaningful consensus within western Germany concerning the fate of heavy industry. In the end, they therefore acceded to American arguments that socialization of such important industries should wait until the creation of a central German government. But once a central German government existed from 1949, socialization did not take place. The chief reason for this was that West German social democrats had already concluded in 1947 that American ‘domination’ of western Germany meant the stifling of social reform. They therefore ceded leadership over German affairs to a Christian democratic union decidedly more favourable to free enterprise. Instead, the social democrats and their trade union allies concentrated their efforts at social reform in the introduction and institutionalization of management–labour co-determination.

In recent times the historiography of the Wilhelmine Reich has clearly reflected the influence of Eckart Kehr and of later historians who have adopted and developed his work. The Rankean dogma of the Primat der Aussenpolitik (primacy of foreign policy) has been replaced by a new slogan, Primat der Innenpolitik (primacy of domestic policy). The resultant interpretive scheme is by now quite familiar. The social structure of the Bismarckean Reich, it is said, was shaken to its foundations by the impact of industrialization. A growing class of industrialists sought to break the power of the feudal agrarian class, and a rapidly developing proletariat threatened to upset the status quo. The internecine struggle between industrialists and agrarians was dangerous for both and for the state, since the final beneficiary might be the proletariat. Consequently agrarians and industrialists closed their ranks against the common social democrat enemy and sought to tame the proletariat, which had grown restive under the impact of the depression, by means of a Weltpolitik which would obviate the effects of the depression, heal the economy, and vindicate the political system responsible for such impressive achievements. Hans-Ulrich Wehler and others call this diversionary strategy against the proletarian threat social imperialism; and this, it is said, is the domestic policy primarily responsible for Wilhelmine imperialism.

By examining the experience of rape in Spain in the 1930s and 1940s, this article explains how the Spanish Civil War and Franco's dictatorship dramatically increased the likelihood of women becoming victims of sexual assault. Contrary to what historians often assume, this phenomenon was not the result of rape being deliberately used as a ‘weapon of war’ or as a blunt method of political repression against women. The upsurge in sexual violence was a by-product of structural transformations in the wartime and dictatorial contexts, and it was the direct consequence, rather than the instrument, of the violent imposition of a fascist-inspired regime. Using archival evidence from numerous Spanish archives, the article historicizes rape in a wider cultural, legal, and social context and reveals the essential albeit ambiguous political nature of both wartime and post-war rape. The experience of rape was mostly shaped not by repression but structural factors such as ruralization and social hierarchization, demographic upheavals, exacerbation of violent masculinity models, the proliferation of weapons, and the influence of fascist and national-Catholic ideologies. Rape became an expression of the nature of power and social and gender relations in Franco's regime.

In the 1960s and 1970s both Conservative and Labour governments passed novel laws dealing with the rights of individuals at work. Overshadowed by conflicts over collective labour law, the political significance of this legislation has remained unexplored. This article suggests that the legislation struck a balance between recognizing the complexity of work in a modern society, and preserving managerial authority. It also argues that the reforms served a Conservative agenda in rooting an individual interest in work in a legal process. This was part of a pivotal challenge to the system of voluntary collective bargaining that had traditionally benefited the labour movement.

Historians have recently shown how the concept of ‘sustainability’ (Nachhaltigkeit) first emerged through statist ambitions to enfold nature into political economy in eighteenth-century Germany. Shifting the focus from forestry to mining, this article draws upon the case of Prussian mining official Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and the ‘Mining School’ he founded in Bad Steben to argue that sustainable resource management also entailed the strict discipline of labour relations and a programme of ‘psychological policy’. Humboldt's Mining School sought to address administrative concerns about ‘Raubbau’ – the rash exploitation of mineral resources ‘without consideration for the future’ – by cultivating a new generation of mine foremen loyal to the state and schooled in its protocol. Ostensibly, Humboldt wished to purge the industry of ‘superstitious’ folk knowledge that undermined the state's commitment to long-term exploitation. Yet analysis of mining songs and sagas suggests a striking analogy between official and vernacular understandings of resource extraction as an ethical matter. Thus, the environmental alarms sounded by German miners around 1800 were triggered by transgressions of a social nature; and political concerns about social order in the ‘mining state’ were constitutive of material concerns about natural resources.

Beyond charters, printed propaganda, and cosmographies, aspiring statesmen in Jacobean England engaged with Native Americans in commonplace books, poetry, court masques, and political debate. Rather than representing a remote ‘other’, this article contends that barristers and students of the law were fascinated by the perceived savagery of indigenous peoples because it allowed them to explore, interrogate, and define their own civility. The result was a cross-over between developing English articulations of their own behaviour and political responsibilities, and a rising enthusiasm for colonizing America. With their Whitehall masques and passionate pleas in parliament on behalf of Virginia and Virginian tobacco, members of the Inns engaged in a subversive wit culture that reconciled the exotic with the language of duty and good conduct, and helped turn colonization into a recognizable – and, for the first time, fashionable – element of early seventeenth-century political culture. By considering written discourse alongside tobacco smoking and court masques, this article contends that a broad approach to the socio-cultural world of Jacobean politics reveals some ways through which gentlemen consciously projected their civil state as one that might be strengthened, rather than weakened, by turning to America as a viable theatre for political involvement.

This article examines how the system for organizing resources created by the Swedish state in the sixteenth century was formed by, and intersected with, local societies. By looking at the organization of the local administration and economic production within crown demesnes and estates, this article nuances and broadens the understanding of the early phases of the fiscal-military state. It shows that notions about gender and especially the gender division of labour were important for the organization and further development of the state in its endeavour to mobilize and transform resources. This article argues that gendered divisions of labour and traditional ways of organizing work and administration played a crucial role in the first phases of early modern Swedish state formation; women's work affected the organization of the state and vice versa. By looking at the emergence of the male official and the all-male bureaucracy from a gender perspective, and by emphasizing the household as an organizational form, the present study contributes to the understanding of both state formation and gender relations in the early modern period.

In the years between the end of the First World War and the end of the Second, the estimate outside Britain of the status of intellectuals in the British Labour movement grew to prodigal dimensions.

This article analyses two dissenting periodicals, the Occasional Paper and the Old Whig. It argues that these periodicals provide an opportunity to reconsider the current priorities in the historiography of eighteenth-century political thought and religious history. Having considered the contexts from which the periodicals emerged and the importance of a perceived growth in catholic proselytizing in the 1730s, it analyses the importance of ‘popery’ in religious and political discourse. Taken together, popery and private judgement provided the parameters to descibe what was termed ‘consistent protestantism’ and this was used to defend a particular version of dissent. The protestant aspect to oppositional whiggery has been largely ignored, particularly by those keen to assert the centrality of ‘classical republicanism’ to opposition language in the early Hanoverian period. This article suggests an alternative account of the transmission of the commonwealth tradition and indicates further lines of inquiry into the evolution of whig ideas.

Kevin Sharpe has recently offered a new interpretation of English politics and government in the 1630s in which he seeks to assess the events of the decade as they might have seemed to contemporaries, rather than to use them as a vehicle to explain the events of the Long Parliament and the subsequent outbreak of civil war. Without questioning the validity of such an exercise, it may none the less be observed that the picture of the 1630s which results does raise the question of how the mood of the Long Parliament in its early stages is to be explained. Sharpe characterizes the 1630s as a period of ‘calm and peace’ in which, though tensions and grievances existed, in particular as a consequence of Charles's religious policies, they ‘neither stymied government nor threatened revolt’. If politics and government operated so smoothly during the 1630s, why were such extensive and radical demands for reform in church and state put forward when the Long Parliament met in November 1640? Was the critical attitude of so many members of the political nation in that November merely the product of short-term factors, such as Charles's use of force to impose a new prayer book in Scotland, or even of political opportunism, or was it a reflexion of grievances which had earlier lain beneath the political surface? This paper seeks to investigate the question of how far the attitude of 1640 was rooted in the experiences of the previous decade in one particular aspect: the career of Sir Edward Dering, with special reference to his position with regard to religion and the church. Dering's career is an appropriate object for a study of this kind because it is illuminated by an unusual variety of sources; this makes it possible to compare Dering's political actions with his ideological position as implied by documents which remained private. Apart from the well-known published Long Parliament speeches and a substantial collection of family papers (embracing both correspondence and documents arising from the offices which Dering held) and apart from the evidence of Dering's antiquarian and historical interests, there survive two published works of polemical theology (together with partial drafts for others), and a number of personal memorandum books.

Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles of England, Scotlande and Irelande are an impressive monument to the fruitful co-operation of sixteenth-century scholars. This paper explores part of the creation of the Chronicles and examines some of the complex evidence about the involvement of William Harrison, author of the informative and entertaining Description of Britain published in the Chronicles. For the discovery of a manuscript of Harrison's ‘Great English chronology’ allows a fuller appreciation of his role in the Holinshed group, and reveals tensions within the intellectual milieu from which the Chronicles emerged. The ‘Chronology’ demonstrates that Harrison's Description, written to a commission in 1576, was a deviation from the main thrust of his own work, and together with his other contributions was a late and complicating development in the genesis of the Chronicles. The ‘Chronology’ also shows that some of Harrison's work was censored by Holinshed where it offended his sense of legitimate historical discussion. Before the second edition of the Chronicles in 1587, there was further disagreement about the value of Harrison's contribution.

Although the existence of materials relating to Hobbes's Elements of law and De cive in Bodleian Library MS Clarendon 126 has been known to scholars for some time, the first notice of these in print came as recently as 1987, in an article by Dr J. C. Hayward. The aim of this communication is to provide a full description and analysis of one of these items – the notes and extracts from the Elements – in the hope that this will shed some light on the earlier stages of the relationship between Clarendon and Hobbes.

The quality of the Norman impact upon England in the eleventh century has occupied the attention of generations of historians. Nevertheless it is hoped that some adequate apology may be found for the subject of this paper. Certainly, however, the topic I have chosen calls for strict delimitation. No attempt is made here to reopen the time honoured comparison between the Norman and Old English Churches in the earlier half of the eleventh century. Indeed I wish wholly to avoid that controversial theme—and for a particular reason. Most of those who have been concerned to emphasize the importance of the Norman Church at this period have concentrated their attention—and obviously rightly—on the monastic revival which swept through the Norman Duchy at this time. Perhaps, however, the Norman bishops of this period also merit some particular attention. For these men, put properly into the shade by their monastic contemporaries, have had a very bad press from historians. Doubtless, they deserved it. Nevertheless, it might be to the advantage of Anglo-Norman studies if the Norman episcopate between 1035 and 1066 were to be studied a little more fully for its own sake. At all events, these bishops and their work form the restricted subject of this very tentative discourse.

The hesitation with which the national assembly approached the issue of guilds has long puzzled historians. After apparently abolishing them on the night of 4 August 1789, the national assembly delayed any action on guilds for eighteen months. This study examines the reasons for the tentativeness of the national assembly and the factors that ultimately led it to take action in 1791. A fear of aggravating violence in the countryside led the national assembly initially to delay action against guilds. By the time the assembly was ready to act, however, it found itself stymied by one of its own committees, which refused to bring the matter forward. The equivocation of the assembly led to unrest in towns and villages, and that unrest, along with the need of the assembly to realize the new principles it had advanced, led to a pre-emptive manoeuvre by the assembly against the obstructionist committee that resolved the anomaly of guilds in the new polity created by the national assembly.

No aspect of fifteenth-century Florence can be completely without interest, although a bare minimum may seem to attach to a study of the Jews during this period and of their connexion with the city finances on the one hand and the establishment of a Mons Pietatis on the other. Yet the economic foundation on which the magnificent artistic and literary superstructure rested is clearly important, and that not only for the fortunes of the Medici and other ruling, or rival, families, Strozzi, Pazzi, Tornabuoni and the like, but also where it affects the daily lives of the popolo minuto, tailors, potters and fishermen, or those craftsmen who by their labours built the church of San Spirito and the Ospedale degli Innocenti. Nor can we disregard a chapter of history which closes with some of the most direct and the most practically effective of the sermons of Savonarola.

The Liberal daily newspaper the Tribune had only a brief life, from 15 January 1906 until 7 February 1908. Its failure was then and has since been attributed, largely by journalists, to its neglect of the ‘ realities ’ of the newspaper industry. The Tribune, it is said, was too good for its readers, and concentrated upon its leading articles to the neglect of its proper business as a newspaper, the news. It did not in other words fit the pattern which the ‘new journalism ’ of the 1890s had set. Indeed, in several important respects it was an attempt to reverse the trend, and to return to the old liberal model of journalism in which the newspaper was looked upon mainly as a vehicle for news and opinion, rather than a saleable commodity. The case of the Tribune encompassed this whole problem of the relationship between Liberalism and journalism, during a period in which both were undergoing a process of transformation and change. As such it is a case which deserves describing in more detail than has been done hitherto.