The Conference of Paris, which met early in 1869 to settle the dispute between Turkey and Greece over the Cretan question, appears in retrospect as one of many abortive attempts to resolve an insoluble situation. The Cretan rebellion, stemming from religious and ethnic conflicts endemic in those parts of the Turkish empire which embraced Christian communities, invites modern parallels; while the attitudes of the spectators were governed not only by the immediate needs of their external policies, but by principles often based on ideological considerations. Panhellenism and panslavism came into conflict with the traditional desire to support Turkey. Liberal sympathy with the insurgents precipitated legal problems identical with those created by the American Civil War. Yet, apart from the intrinsic interest of any aspect of the Eastern question, and the importance of any issue which influenced the development of international law, the conference has a significance of its own as an attempt to apply the process of mediation. This requires explanation, since at first sight there is little to distinguish the conference from previous workings of the concert of Europe. During the peace conference at the close of the Crimean War the plenipotentiaries made an informal recommendation that ‘states between which any serious misunderstanding may arise should, before appealing to arms, have recourse as far as circumstances might allow to the good offices of a friendly power’. The conference of 1869 put into practice1 for the first time this Protocol no. 23 of the Treaty of Paris of 1856.

It is generally agreed that the body of legislation passed by the Liberal governments after 1905 represented a uniquely important contribution to the problems of social policy in the twentieth century. The attitude of the Unionist opposition of these years to such matters has, however, received little attention. Yet the posture taken by the Unionists was, it will be suggested, of crucial importance in the development of the party in this period, playing a major part in the determination of its electoral fortunes. An appropriate starting point for this study is the reaction of the Unionist leader, Arthur Balfour, to the electoral disaster of 1906, in which he personally had lost his parliamentary seat. ‘What is going on here’, he argued, ‘is the faint echo of the same movement which has produced massacres in St Petersburg, riots in Vienna and Socialist processions in Berlin… We are face to face (no doubt in a milder form) with the Socialist difficulties which loom so large on the Continent. Unless I am greatly mistaken, the Election of 1906 inaugurates a new era.’

In November 1844 the young Lord Ashley, not for 16 years to become the seventh earl of Shaftesbury, was in search of a public school for his son and heir, Anthony. ‘I fear Eton,’ he confided to his diary:

…it makes admirable gentlemen and finished scholars, fits a man, beyond all competition, for the dancing-room, the Club, St James' Street, and all the mysteries of social elegance; but it does not make the man required for the coming generation. We must have nobler, deeper, sterner stuff; less of refinement, and more of truth; more of the inward, not so much of the outward gentleman; a rigid sense of duty, not a ‘delicate sense of honour’; a just estimate of rank and property, not as manners of personal enjoyment and display, but as gifts from God, bringing with them serious responsibilities, and involving a fearful account; a contempt of ridicule, not a dread of it; a desire and a courage to live for the service of God, and the best interests of mankind, and by His grace, to accomplish the baptismal promise… Unless we have such men as these for our successors, goodbye to the British Empire.

This article examines the place of class and religion in discourses of voluntary action in mid-twentieth-century England, focusing on an overlooked Mass-Observation survey of the district of Aston in Birmingham. It situates Lord Beveridge's Voluntary Action report in its intellectual and social context, through utilizing the qualitative findings of the Mass-Observation district survey of Aston, elements of which were repurposed for the Voluntary Social Services Enquiry from which Voluntary Action emerged. The article takes a thematic approach, investigating how class and religion was seen and reported by Mass-Observers in the context of Aston. Two key arguments are made: that contrary to overarching narratives of post-war secularization, Christian churches actually remained in a relatively dominant position in terms of voluntary action; and that conceptions of voluntary action fundamentally misread working-class understandings of voluntarism, as well as the wider priorities of the post-war working classes. Drawing attention to the importance of class and religion to patterns of voluntary action evident in the Aston survey, yet less considered in historiographical terms, the construction of elite narratives of voluntary action and civil society are more discernible.

Like other advanced countries in the twentieth century, Britain has witnessed a remarkable expansion in the size and functions of government. Increasing public intervention has necessarily been accompanied by a vigorous expansion in the number of specialists and professionals employed in the public service. In recent times there has been increasing academic interest in the role of one particular category of specialist, the economist. We have the definitive account by Howson and Winch of the economic advisory council and its committee on economic information, the purely advisory bodies of academic economists and representatives of producer interest groups which encouraged officials and ministers to take a longer, broader look at trends in the national and international economies in the thirties. From the post-1945 period we have a number of studies of specific departments and a growing collection of memoirs written by disenchanted or self-justifying economists on leaving government service. For the crucial period of the second world war, however, when administrators and politicians seemed to accept the need for professional economic advice from within the bureaucracy, comparatively little systematic research has been undertaken. There are memoirs, but many have been written long after the event and tend to be discursive and occasionally unreliable as to detail. Fortunately the state papers relating to the war are available and should be a reliable source from which to make judgements about the work and effectiveness of economic advisers in this crucial period.

The last decade of the nineteenth century brought to a climax Anglo-French tensions on many colonial issues. Generally overlooked in the roll-call of disputes which centred upon Egypt but extended to Newfoundland fisheries, Siam, and West Africa as well, is the position of Madagascar between the two powers at the commencement of the difficult decade. Madagascar warrants greater attention than it has received, for, with Egypt and Newfoundland, it became in 1891 and 1892 the central problem in colonial discussions between the two governments. On the side of France the issue left feelings of bad faith and broken promises which contributed to the strained tone of relations with Great Britain during the decade. This was all the more unfortunate since Madagascar was an issue apparently settled by the colonial arrangement of 5 August 1890 between the two powers. But the instrument which might have been expected to improve relations became instead another source of discord. Madagascar, at the heart of the agreement for France, presents therefore a striking and significant example of lost opportunity in colonial diplomacy. For the diplomatic failure led inevitably to a military solution to the problems confronting France on the Grand Isle.

Both empirically and interpretively, extant histories of psychiatry reveal a vastly greater degree of difference among themselves than historical accounts of any other field. Scholarship focuses on the period after 1800 and the same is true of historiographical reviews; those of early modern British psychiatry are often brief literature studies. This article sets out in depth the development of this rich and varied branch of history since the 1950s, exploring the many different approaches that have contributed to understanding the mad and how they were treated. Social, cultural, philosophical, religious, and intellectual historians have contributed as much as historians of science and medicine to understanding an enduring topic of fascination: ‘disorders of consciousness and conduct’ and their context. Appreciating the sometimes unacknowledged lineages of the subject and the personal histories of scholars (roots and routes) makes it easier to understand the past, present, and future of the history of psychiatry. The article explores European and North American influences as well as British traditions, looking at both the main currents of historiographical change and developments particular to the history of psychiatry.

This article attempts to uncover the political significance of the Old Testament verse Judges 5:23, ‘the curse of Meroz’, during the English Civil War. Historians who have commented on the printed text of Meroz have done so primarily in reference to a single edition of the parliamentarian fast-day preacher Stephen Marshall's 1642 Meroz cursed sermon. Usage of the curse, however, as shown in more than seventy unique sermons, tracts, histories, libels, and songs considered here, demonstrates that the verse was far more widespread and politically significant than has been previously assumed. Analysing Meroz in its political and polemical roles, from the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion in 1641 and through the Restoration of Charles II in the 1660s, sheds new light on the ways in which providentialism functioned during the Civil Wars, and serves, more specifically, to illustrate some of the important means by which ministers and polemicists sought to mobilize citizens and construct party identities.

The Osborne judgment is always mentioned in political histories of the early twentieth century as one of the two principal judgments affecting the trade unions and the growth of the Labour party-the other being the Taff Vale decision of 1901. In both cases officers of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants were acting upon what they believed to be constitutional lines; in both cases, after lawsuits which went to the highest court in the land, the House of Lords, they were found to be behaving illegally; and in both cases parliament was eventually persuaded, if not precisely to reverse the Lords’ decision, at least to modify the law drastically in the unions’ favour. The repercussions upon the Lords themselves were not insignificant: the ordinary voter found it difficult to distinguish between the judicial and the legislative functions of the Upper House; and so both cases strengthened the willingness of trade unionists to support the Liberal government in its constitutional struggle against the Lords. Such was the outcome of Disraeli's decision in 1875 to retain the final appeal to the Lords, despite Gladstone's attempt, in the Judicature Act of 1873, to abolish it altogether.

Ever since the First World War, but especially during the Weimar period, Bismarck's dismissal has exercised a strong attraction on German historians, and has probably received more attention than any other event in the history of the Second Reich. In the troubled post-war years, 20 March 1890 seemed to stand out prominently as the fateful turning point of Germany's history. Wilhelm Schvissler, the first to exploit the unprecedented wealth of evidence available in consequence of the monarchy's collapse, did not hesitate to claim that ‘even at that time [1890] the downfall (Untergang) of the German Reich was written in the stars’. ‘Who would doubt’, he asked, ‘that our misfortune began there…and led to the catastrophe of the Imperial Monarchy and the German Reich—exactly 20 years after his [Bismarck's] death!’ This highly emotional approach to the subject was fully shared by Wilhelm Mommsen, whose standard work on the role of the political parties in the crisis appeared in 1924. Bismarck's fall, he wrote, ‘appears to us today as a turning point of German history, and it is only with deep feeling that we can recall the events of March 1890’. It is perhaps partly for this reason that these early writers tended to misinterpret the nature of Bismarck's relations with the parties in the crucial months before his fall. There was, for one thing, an inclination to idealize the bygone age in which ‘the State’ was thought to have stood incorruptibly ‘above the parties’, and as a result the party struggles of 1889 and 1890 were relegated to a self-contained compartment whence, it was held, they were able to influence the course of events only in the negative sense of providing no obstacle to the chancellor's dismissal. The influential work of Hans Rothfels probably typified this attitude, but even Mommsen warned his readers that his study of the parties could throw at best an oblique light on the crisis ‘since the parties had no direct and at any rate no significant effect on the course of those events’. According to Hans Herzfeld's summary of the present state of knowledge on the subject, this view is still widely accepted today.

Originally published in London in 1774 and subsequently republished in French in 1793 and 1833, Marat's The chains of slavery offers an interesting case study on the exchange of ideas between Britain and France during the late eighteenth century. It is suggested that the key to understanding this hitherto neglected work lies in reading it alongside other publications by Marat from the 1770s and in setting it firmly in the context in which it was published and disseminated in both Britain and France. Prompted by debates surrounding the election of 1774, the work embodies Marat's own particular version of the British commonwealth tradition, and can be linked to the Wilkite movement in both Newcastle and London. Despite its British origins, Marat and his followers were able to utilize the work after 1789 in order to engage in a number of French debates. It thus constitutes one of the means by which English republican ideas made their way across the Channel.

This article examines the history of the German Fürstenbund prior to the Prussian take-over of the scheme in 1785. In charting the union's initial conception as a small-state alliance designed to resist both Prussian and Austrian expansionism, the article reveals the cultural dimension of imperial diplomacy. Exclusive concentration on the straightforward diplomatic sources produced by Prussian-style bureaucracies has led historians to underrate the contribution of smaller German principalities, which typically employed more indirect, metaphorical means of political communication. A prominent example of such ‘cultural politics’ is the process by which Prince Franz of Anhalt-Dessau drew on English precedents in shaping the Fürstenbund. Its participants were to be united not just by formal agreements, but by a shared spirit. Under the leadership of a ‘Patriot king’, they were to act as champions of ancient regional liberties, thus resembling the English aristocrats of the anti-Walpole opposition whom Franz admired. At the same time, an English-inspired rhetoric of sentimentalism was employed to suggest that this political union would function in analogy with sentimental friendships, creating a firmer bond whilst preserving that small-state ‘individualism’ which was the source of so many reform initiatives in the late eighteenth-century German Empire.

Burke's Reflections contains a section of about ten pages on the monasteries of France, deploring not only the confiscation of their property but also the destruction of the institutions themselves, which are defended for their contribution to learning, beauty, and agriculture and for their general social role. Their ‘superstition’ is vindicated as preferable to that of the philosophes. Burke maintains that they could and should have been reformed, rather than suppressed. This discussion of monasteries has been almost wholly ignored by commentators and editors. The following article considers these pages against the reality of French monasticism, itself a neglected theme, and shows their centrality to Burke's critique of the Revolution.