This article establishes the significance of elections held in the annexed departments of the Napoleonic Empire from 1802 to 1813. It thus represents an original, and perhaps surprising, contribution to recent debate on the nature of Napoleonic imperialism, in which attention has shifted from core to periphery, and away from purely military matters. The electoral process under this authoritarian regime has been alternately neglected or derided, especially where the newly created departments of the Low Countries and parts of Germany and Italy are concerned. However, extensive archival research demonstrates that it was taken extremely seriously by both regime and voters, especially outside metropolitan France. These ‘First European Elections', as they may be dubbed, took place in regular fashion right across the Empire and are studied here on a transnational basis, which also involves the metropolitan departments. Though open to all adult males at the primary level, they were not exercises in democracy, but they did create some rare political space which local people were not slow to exploit for their own purposes. Above all, they served as a means of integrating ‘new Frenchmen’, particularly members of indigenous elites, into the Napoleonic system.

Manchester ‘working men’ approved an address in support of Abraham Lincoln's emancipation policy and the American Union at the Free Trade Hall on 31 December 1862. The US president described their gesture as ‘sublime Christian heroism’ when hopes of restoring the cotton supply and reopening the mills were better served by Confederate recognition. This transatlantic exchange became an integral part of the scholarly traditional interpretation that the British working class frustrated the pro-Confederate designs of the upper classes during the American Civil War. It formed the historiographical orthodoxy until revisionists countered that Lancashire workers advocated Confederate recognition. The Manchester meeting, revisionists claimed, was contrived to give the impression of working-class support for Lincoln which was, in fact, a myth. These two incompatible interpretations simplify and flatten the complexity of an event with local, national, and international ramifications. This article presents the first detailed examination of who organized the Free Trade Hall meeting and why. It moves scholarly understanding of the British public response to the American Civil War beyond its current stasis of ‘traditional’ versus ‘revisionist’ by placing the field in conversation with the recent history of radicalism and ‘class’ in the Victorian era.

This article is a response to an account of a communist espionage circle which appeared in this journal in 2003. It argues that the original article is seriously misleading because of its apparently exclusive reliance on previously classified intelligence documents and the interpretations found within them. Combined with a failure to provide an appropriate historical context, particularly concerning the politics of the drama's central figure – the Daily Herald journalist W. N. Ewer – and a tendency to import questionable value judgements into the narrative, the original piece substitutes the secret policeman's opinions for a real history of its subject-matter.

Based on sources from the East German regime's internal archives, this article examines how the exodus of over 3 million people from the German Democratic Republic (GDR) before the construction of the Berlin Wall undermined the communist regime's ability to exert its authority over internal affairs. Instead of focusing on the relatively well-known economic and diplomatic costs of the mass exodus, it considers rather the grass-roots political ramifications of this unique phenomenon among the Soviet satellite states. The article focuses on three interrelated issues: first, the government's little-known efforts to curb and control emigration before the Wall; second, the myriad causes of the mass emigration and how these were perceived by the party/state apparatus; and third, the variety of strategies through which ordinary East Germans who stayed in the GDR attempted to use the possibility of flight to the West to enhance their bargaining position with state authorities. It argues that the refugees to the West were not the only East Germans to capitalize on the permeable border around West Berlin. The possibility of emigrating westwards also gave those who stayed a degree of power vis-à-vis the regime that they otherwise would not have had.

Sex, populism, and the search for universal religious freedom were the overwhelming preoccupations of Russia's Silver Age, and no churchman did more to engage with them than Archimandrite Mikhail (Semenov). Having spearheaded the Russian Orthodox church's mission to the intelligentsia in the years before 1905, he fell from grace when Russian social Christianity was irrevocably politicized by revolution. Sacked from his chair at the St Petersburg theological academy when he declared himself a Christian socialist, he was unfrocked for converting to the Old Belief, and imprisoned for fomenting sedition. Yet even as he lurched from the established church, via the schism, to a revolutionary form of Golgothan Christianity, obsessed with suffering, Mikhail never abandoned his burning desire to build the kingdom of heaven on earth. His career, which has so far escaped detailed historical investigation, encapsulates most of the ecclesiastical tensions of his time, and reveals in particularly acute form the difficulties experienced by the Russian church when it attempted to respond to modernist intellectuals and to popular spiritual need.

The 1939 White Paper remained the basis of British rule in Palestine during the first three years of war. The military crises that erupted in the Middle East between 1940 and 1942 did not permit consideration of any alternatives - if only because Britain could not be certain that in would still be in the area at the end of the war. Since his appointment to the War Cabinet in September 1939, Churchill had tried, in vain, to halt the implementation of the White Paper.

About the circumstances surrounding Hobbes's dismissal from Charles's court and his subsequent departure from Paris at the end of 1651 we know little. While recent scholarship has clarified the broad outline of events, fresh evidence allows us to add some detail, showing that Leviathan was attacked in a sermon delivered by Richard Steward in the Anglican chapel of Sir Richard Browne, thus confirming Hobbes's claim for the involvement of the Anglican establishment in engineering his dismissal from court and giving us a slightly clearer sense of the source and character of the move against him.

The years immediately after the Glorious Revolution saw the Irish parliament establish itself as an active legislative body. Local government in the country then received something of a fillip, both through legislative action in Dublin, and by reason of the extended period of social and political stability that followed the end of Queen Anne's reign. This essay seeks to outline the responsibilities and functions of the grand jury in Ireland, and thus to establish its position as perhaps the most important component in the governance of provincial Ireland. Further to this it attempts to analyse the social composition of juries through a study of the methods of selection, and the attendant qualification criteria. The available evidence suggests that despite its extensive power and influence, membership of the grand jury was not completely monopolized by the land-owning Anglican elite. Rather, service on the grand jury reached some way down the social scale, and could be undertaken by men from outside the established church. Over time, however, jurors came to be selected from a diminishing pool of candidates : a practice which led to the creation of a largely homogeneous local administrative elite.

In the 1950s the Democratic Party in California grew from a struggling, rump organization into the major political party in the state. This was in large part due to the activities of a network of liberal activists in the California Democratic Council, a group formed in 1953 to encourage the creation of local Democratic ‘clubs’ across California in which those interested in left-of-centre politics could debate issues of the day and campaign for Democratic candidates in elections. This article argues that the rise of the Democrats in the Golden State was predicated on the espousal by both amateur activists and party politicians of an explicitly social democratic ideology that provided a bridge between the policies of the New Deal in the 1930s and the more ambitious goals of the Great Society at the national level in the 1960s. The article examines the ideas embraced by liberal politicians in the 1950s and looks at how those ideas underpinned a massive expansion of California's welfare state in the early 1960s.

Decolonizing history and anthropology is often presented as a theoretical enterprise, through which a more rigorous and inclusive framing of historical precepts will deliver a clearer and less Eurocentric understanding of the past. Yet it is arguably necessary to decouple decolonization from the broader practices of anti-Eurocentric historiography. Via an empirical assessment of the legacy of Hermann Klaatsch, a German anthropologist working on the colonial frontier, this article examines the possibilities and limitations of a decolonizing approach to settler colonial history. The article reflects upon its own study of colonial anthropology and the historical complexity of the repatriation of Indigenous human remains, and suggests that not all anti-Eurocentric interrogations of the colonial past are synonymous with decolonization.

Contrary to the widespread assumption that in imperial Germany urban affairs were conducted by a homogeneous ‘unpolitical’ notable elite until around 1900, a review of recently published case studies suggests that politics had entered local government by the 1870s. Frequent causes for the politicization of local affairs included confessional divisions, territorial change, or simply the wish of local elites to buttress their own positions. The ways in which liberals in particular took advantage of this emergence of political discourse at the urban level is highlighted by the case of Frankfurt am Main. The city's three liberal parties developed in competition with each other. Each managed to address and articulate the citizens' peculiar grievances with differing degrees of success. By 1880, public life inside and outside the town hall was conducted according to political ground rules, and this was accepted by every party. Against the still prevailing view of a rigid liberalism which after 1874 was in evident terminal decline, the decade after 1866 needs to be recognized as the period in which liberals took charge of municipal government across most of Germany, through the politicization of often highly individual local concerns with astonishing sophistication and flexibility.

This article examines the French response to the rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party in Germany in January of 1933. It argues that French intelligence warned civilian and military leaders that the priorities of the new regime were rearmament and the militarization of German society in preparation for a war of conquest. This essentially accurate appreciation of the situation inside Germany had little impact on the course of French foreign policy. At this juncture French society was preoccupied with worsening economic crisis and pacifist sentiment had reached its inter-war zenith. The national focus was inward and domestic concerns took priority over the external threat from Germany. Finally, France was in a position of relative isolation and could garner no support for a policy of firmness from its erstwhile allies, Great Britain and the United States. This combination of national introspection and diplomatic isolation deterred a succession of governments from taking determined steps to meet the Nazi challenge in 1933.

This review furthers our understanding of the history of neo-liberalism in Britain, and more particularly of the economics and politics of the 1970s and 1980s, through an examination of the writings of the economic journalist, Samuel Brittan, widely regarded as a central figure in undermining the intellectual basis for the Keynesian consensus about big government. This review provides a close study of Brittan's ‘The economic contradictions of democracy’ (1975, hereafter ECD) – one of the most cited contributions to the declinist literature of the decade – in which Brittan warned that, without remedial action, liberal democracy ‘is likely to pass away within the lifetime of people now adult’. In this reappraisal of Brittan's ECD, it is argued that this paper is much more than just eloquent, scholarly declinism, and in the process, the generic problem facing all contemporary historians of thought and policy is confronted: what is the influence of any one individual and/or work? The reappraisal relates directly to central themes of the 1970s ‘crisis’, especially ‘overload’ and ‘ungovernability’; it examines the competitive nature of the market for declinist prognostications (notably the Jay–Brittan nexus), with one objective being to provide a counterbalance to much recent scholarship which has over-focused on think-tanks at the expense of elite journalists who were very far from being academics manqués; and, finally, it reviews Brittan's role in the so-called Thatcher revolution, where much has been claimed but little documented.

Though Mr Gladstone was speaking of the opposition to home rule in the country, rather than in the parliamentary Liberal party alone in the statement quoted above, this has become the rather standard interpretation of the great separation in the Liberal party in 1886. As one modern historian of the Liberal disruption puts it, ‘a striking characteristic of modern British history has been the class alignment of political parties… The Liberal Unionist party (those who seceded on the home rule question) was a half-way house, which entertained for a time much of the wealth and territorial influence which had been Liberal and was to be Conservative.’ One of the most influential historians of late-nineteenth-century Britain puts the issue in broader terms. The origins of Conservative dominance as well as the leakage of the landed and business classes to the Conservative party, Sir Robert Ensor argues, are to be found in the undermining of English and Irish agriculture by the invasion of North American wheat. This produced, in turn, agrarian revolution in Ireland, the rise of violent nationalism in Ireland, the growth of social and political conflict, and, ultimately, the rejection of Irish political demands by the English. Yet another attributes the fall of Gladstone's third ministry to a general revolt against the Liberal party by railway directors and other businessmen who had been alerted to the dangers to property which the government's railway policies implied. This theme has been taken up and many have come to argue that class voting emerged in 1886 when the upper – and middle-class Liberals, taking home rule as an excuse, departed to the Conservatives in a reaction against growing social radicalism.