This article tracks the shifting contours of John Maynard Keynes's invocation of certain ideas associated with Thomas Robert Malthus, between 1914 and 1937 especially. These ‘Malthusian moments’ in Keynes's work form a triptych. In pre-war thinking about global population dynamics as a Malthusian ‘devil’ threatening national political and economic stability, Keynes found optimism in the thought that modern political economy could be repurposed to avoid the horns of such a dilemma. In the 1920s, he moved to consider the international, and particularly European, responses to both population and to the developing Malthusian ‘devil’ of unemployment. Finally, in the 1930s, Keynes's view became increasingly domestic, focusing on ways that these devilish twin problems could be managed by nation-states organized for prosperity and self-sufficiency. Across these moments, Keynes sought to assert the power of past political and economic ideas to aid in the formulation of present policy, by continuously (if rather loosely) invoking the Malthusian trope of ‘effective demand’.

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.

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.

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.

This article explores the impulse behind the outpouring of extraordinarily ornate maps representing the inhabitants of Brazil that emanated from Normandy in the mid-sixteenth century. It aims to understand the reasons behind the iconography of Brazil, a region of particular commercial interest for the French. Whereas maps produced elsewhere in this period emphasize the presence of fierce cannibals in Brazil, Norman examples highlight peaceful relations, particularly the dyewood trade. By analysing the maps in comparison with extant maps from other centres of production (particularly Portugal and the German lands), travel accounts, and wider visual culture, this article explores their relationship to possible sources and considers the extent to which their iconography had a basis in experience. By investigating the use of these maps as gifts to French kings, it suggests that the mapmakers’ selective use of trading imagery also played a persuasive role in the Norman maritime world's disputes with the Portuguese crown over the extent of Portugal's Atlantic empire.

European empires experienced widespread anti-colonial rebellions during the First World War. These rebellions occurred for many different reasons, reflecting the diversity of context and history across colonial societies in Africa and Asia. Religion naturally played a strong role in most of the anti-colonial rebellions during the First World War, most prominently Islam. This article looks at the role Islam played in two key anti-colonial rebellions in North and West Africa: the rebellions in Batna, Algeria, and the Kaocen War in Niger, respectively. The article examines how Islam was instrumentalized by rebels, imperial collaborators, and French officers and administrators to further their own ends. Rebels called upon Islam to help inspire anti-colonial movements, to bind together diverse populations, and to contextualize their actions in wider socio-political conflicts. Imperial collaborators likewise called on religious authority to assist with European imperial recruitment efforts. French officers and administrators used Islam both as a justification and a target for collective punishment and repression after the rebellions were put down from 1917. This repression is still under-studied in a period usually portrayed as evidencing broad imperial harmony, rather than violent extraction and oppression.

The popular movement for parliamentary reform after 1830 managed to sustain its campaign for over eighteen months. The popular movement itself has largely been studied at a local level, and undoubtedly local contexts were influential in conditioning responses to reform. Reformers, however, predominantly represented themselves as patriots involved in a pan-British struggle, and this was a key factor in sustaining the mobilization. This article explores the reform movement on its own terms in one ‘national’ context, that of Scotland. If the immediate political context of reform was a spur to unity, the languages and strategies of reformers provided the real glue. Scottish reformers represented themselves as patriots involved in a ‘national movement’ and this article will analyse how the reform movement could act as a solvent for apparently conflicting aspects of Scottish and British national identities. It will argue that reformers deployed a language of ‘unionist-nationalism’ – which coupled demands for greater access to the British constitution with appeals to popular understandings of Scottish history – to call for reform, mobilize support, and maintain the unity of the movement.

This article presents an overtly atheistic text from the early eighteenth century that has hitherto been completely unknown. It survives in manuscript in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, to which it was presented in 1841, and is claimed to be the work of the Scottish medical theorist, satirist, and poet, Archibald Pitcairne (1652–1713). Here, its links with Pitcairne and his milieu are assessed and its content evaluated, in conjunction with the provision of an annotated edition of the text itself.

This article contrasts the early careers of Thomas Cranmer and Stephen Gardiner, two Cambridge dons of approximately the same generation who diversified into politics in the late 1520s. It attempts to assess their developing attitudes to the religious changes of the period, and considers the nature of humanism in Cambridge University; it suggests, with the aid of new evidence, that in the 1520s, Cranmer was more conventional in his religion than Gardiner, but already showed an especial interest in the authority of a general council. Attention is drawn to their similar patterns of church preferment up to 1531. The crucial change in both men's careers is here seen as occurring in 1532; this change projected them in opposite theological directions for the rest of their intertwined careers. Gardiner took a leading part in the church authorities' unsuccessful attempt at taking a firm stand against Henry VIII's plans, while Cranmer made a clear breach with the medieval rules on clerical celibacy by marrying the niece of a Lutheran theologian.

The possibility of Viscount Grey's return to active political life after his resignation from the Foreign Office in 1916 is one which historians have treated with understandable scepticism. Grey's well-documented distaste for political intrigue, his love of things pastoral and aesthetic, his failing health in general and eyesight in particular and hispatent joy at being released from office in 1916 lend force to the thoughtthat he was never likely to be brought back to the world of politics. ‘[H]e was always too blind and often too ill to lead a party, or to aspire to office,’ his friend and biographer G. M. Trevelyan wrote a few years after Grey's death; and more recendy Professor Robbins, whilst he concedes that there was a political dimension within Grey's make-up which Trevelyan was wont to ignore, likewise examines the period after 1916 rather dismissively. One consequence of this view of Grey's political biography has been the neglect of what has been seen to be an attempt on the part of some Liberals to remove Asquith from the leadership of the Liberal party in 1921 and to substitute Grey. The assumption has been that because Grey personally was likely to have been a poor conspirator, conspiracies involving him must have been unpromising or trivial. It is, on the contrary, the point of this article to suggest that the Grey conspiracy of 1921 should be seen as a significant development in the three-party situation which characterized post-war politics; and to argue that the conspiracy had little to do with Grey and a great deal to do with other politicians, of diverse background, party affiliation, position and ambition, who were looking for a new way to obtain some purchase on the politics of the centre.

There is no longer any excuse for thinking of the Third Reich as a model totalitarian monolith. That simplistic assumption was questioned by some of the earliest observers of the period, and has never been seriously rehabilitated. But the task of examining its actual complexities is much more challenging than a description of any putatively monolithic construct would be, for there will not be a single ‘key‘ to an acknowledged polycratic structure. The challenge is, then, to accept the limitations of a necessarily monographic approach, but to avoid losing sight of the broader perspective - the dynamics of the Nazi regime as a whole.

My first research for this lecture1 was into the name and fame of Lewis Fry, whom it commemorates. The university administration kindly told me that Lewis Fry played a leading role in Bristol's founding, such that a contemporary could call him ‘the father of the university’. It is a nostalgic thought today, for all ofus in British universities, that we once had anything so benevolent as a father. Our institutions now feel like orphans in a harsh world, whose only remaining relative – here (as Canon Chasuble would have hastened to add) I speak metaphorically, my metaphor is drawn from fairy-story – is an unloving and nagging step-mother. The more reason to honour and celebrate past benefactors of liberal education who had humane vision.

J. W. Croker's papers are a valuable and rare source concerning British government patronage of the first half of the nineteenth century. They show us a system that was burdensome for the participants, made more acceptable since it was an extension of gentlemanly civility. The papers also show that patronage, like government generally, was able somewhat to reform itself. True, in his particular sphere as patron – as first secretary to the Admiralty (1809–30) – Croker favoured his relatives, but appointed only those he thought fit, and supervised and controlled their work in a way not feasible outside a family. Nepotism could mean efficiency. It created a Croker family circle within the Admiralty that lasted until the 1860s. Croker continued to have influence as a patron until he died in 1857. He was aided by his network of friendships, but also there was the obligation felt by those in power – of whatever party – to Croker's long years of Admiralty service. Political links had their importance, but is is argued that the three factors of family, friendship, and service were predominant. His career as patron illustrates a vital stage between ‘old corruption’ and competitive entry to the civil service.

This article gives chronology, nuance, and context to an analysis of how early socialist attitudes to religion changed. It asks why socialists argued with increasing fervour between the early 1830s and 1848 that social reform had to be rooted in spiritual as well as moral values. Two of the largest groups, the Icarians and the Fourierists, moved from a rational deism to Christianity. Both were driven by the need to defend themselves from accusations of immorality levelled against Fourier and the Saint-Simonians because of their rejection of monogamous marriage. The Fourierists, strongly influenced by their dominant female members, transformed Fourier's diety into a Christian God. Cabet, under pressure of ‘moral outrage’ from his critics, did likewise and found that this corresponded to the experiences of the Icarians in their artisan organizations. The religion of the early socialists was a democratic and a pragmatic morality, derived from artisan corporations, and seen as a vital base for fraternal association which was their solution to the ills of society.

This article reconsiders the significance of an episode of monstrous birth in Fisherton Anger, Wiltshire, in 1664. Tracing the influence of natural philosophical, spiritual, and providential impulses in extant accounts of the Fisherton birth, it suggests that in order wholly to comprehend this material it is necessary to move beyond debates about the ‘rise of science’. It therefore explores the contemporary claims made about the Fisherton monster against the backdrop of the aftermath of the Civil Wars and Interregnum, suggesting that the rampant politicization of monstrosity after the outbreak of war in 1642 provides the key to understanding the emphasis on different kinds of natural, spiritual, and moral truth in accounts of physiological abnormality after 1660. A case-study of early Restoration efforts to negotiate the instability of past events, this article further argues that the impulse to forget which underpinned the Indemnity and Oblivion Act (1660) found different expression elsewhere in the form of censorship and beyond the political sphere in the field of natural philosophy. Considered in light of this early Restoration culture of amnesia, the Fisherton monster embodies a series of attempts to forget the passions of a turbulent political past.

Between June 1940 and September 1942 the French colony of Madagascar was a part of the Vichy French empire and a life-line for supplies to French Indo-China. Governor Paul Annet's island administration assumed a critical importance to Britain and South Africa after the fall of Singapore in February 1942. Conscious of the precedent of Vichy's two-fold capitulation to Japanese demands upon Indo-China in August 1940 and July 1941, both the British and the American governments feared that Annet might follow suit, conceding to Japan the use of Madagascar's principal ports and air bases. This threat led to the invasion of Madagascar by British empire forces. The attack began in May 1942 and was completed by October. Much to General Charles de Gaulle's lasting annoyance, the Free French movement played no part in these operations, although the British installed a Free French administration at Tananarive in December. This article examines the Madagascar invasion in the light of this exclusion of the Free French. It measures the strategic importance of the island against the political damage caused to Anglo-Free French relations by the British rebuttal of de Gaulle. It is argued that the British government utilized the Madagascar takeover as a means to keep the French national committee in check, disregarding Free French proposals as a result. Albeit temporary, this generated political confusion within Madagascar itself.