On 24 August 1931 the prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, tendered the resignation of the second Labour government. In its place he became the premier of an all-party ‘National’ cabinet. This included both the leader of the Conservative party, Stanley Baldwin, and the acting-leader of the Liberal party, Sir Herbert Samuel, together with a number of their senior colleagues. This temporary emergency administration went on to win a landslide majority in the general election of October 1931, and to govern for the ensuing decade. The crisis which created the National government has proved to be of enduring fascination, as a result of its intrinsic interest as the major political crisis of the inter-war period and its profound consequences for subsequent British history. However, historical attention has been principally focused upon the problems of the Labour government, the decisions of Ramsay MacDonald, and the contribution of King George V. As a result the role of the Conservative party – often portrayed as having been the sole benefactor from these events – has been either neglected for its supposed passivity or misunderstood in its mood and intention.

Around 1520, at the court of Henry VIII of England, a new meal type emerged. Called the ‘banquet’, this took place after the main meal, in a distinct space, and consisted of sweet foods, spiced wine, and sculptural sugarwork. Originally developing at court, the sweet banquet was quickly embraced by the nobility and gentry. This article investigates the adoption of this dining practice in the wealthy country houses of early modern England and the reasons for its popularity in this specific context. It draws on state papers, published works, and household accounts to establish the ways in which the banquet was utilized and understood by early modern elites. This evidence makes it clear that a high-status person would have expected to be entertained with a sweet banquet at any important social occasion involving their peers. An examination of the visual and material cultures associated with the banquet establishes that it was a highly effective means by which to express class status at a time of anxiety regarding social mobility. As an appropriation of the ancient symposium, it provided opportunities to engage with the intellectual and visual cultures of the classical world and the Renaissance.

This article examines centre–periphery relations in post-colonial India and Pakistan, providing a specific comparative history of autonomy movements in Nagaland (1947–63) and Baluchistan (1973–7). It highlights the key role played by the central government – particularly by Jawaharlal Nehru and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto – in quelling both insurgencies and in taking further steps to integrate these regions. It argues that a shared colonial history of political autonomy shaped local actors’ resistance to integration into the independent nation-states of India and Pakistan. This article also reveals that Indian and Pakistani officials used their shared colonial past in very different ways to mould their borderlands policies. India's central government under Nehru agreed to a modified Naga State within the Indian Union that allowed the Nagas a large degree of autonomy, continuing a colonial method of semi-integration. In contrast, Bhutto's government actively sought to abandon long-standing Baluch political and social structures to reaffirm the sovereignty of the Pakistani state. The article explains this divergence in terms of the different governing exigencies facing each country at the time of the insurgencies. It ultimately calls for an expansion in local histories and subnational comparisons to extend understanding of post-1947 South Asia, and the decolonizing world more broadly.

This article examines Poland's political and economic involvement in Liberia in the 1930s in an attempt to address the question of how countries that were not classical colonial powers were engaging in colonialism. Interwar Poland was a newly established country struggling to achieve political stability and economic growth. Looking for a solution to the economic difficulties, Poland started to show an interest in obtaining colonies in Africa. This interest developed into the colonial movement. Poland attempted to establish a long-lasting economic and political presence in Liberia in the 1930s. This attempt failed; however, Polish involvement in Liberia demonstrates the effect that the idea of colonialism had on Polish society and the Polish government.

This article addresses the reputation of Edmund Burke and his transformation into the ‘founder of modern conservatism’. It argues that this process occurred primarily between 1885 and 1914 in Britain. In doing so, this article challenges the existing orthodoxy which attributes this development to the work of Peter Stanlis, Russell Kirk, and other conservative American scholars. Moreover, this article historicizes one aspect of the construction of C/conservatism as both an intellectual (small-c) and political (capital-C) tradition. Indeed, though the late Victorian and Edwardian period saw the construction of political traditions of an entirely novel kind, the search for ‘New Conservatism’ has been neglected by comparison with New Liberalism. Thus, this study explores three main themes: the impact of British debates about Irish Home Rule on Burke's reputation and status; the academic systematization of Burke's work into a ‘political philosophy of conservatism’; and, finally, the appropriation of Burke by Conservative Unionists during the late Edwardian constitutional crisis. The result is to show that by 1914 Burke had been firmly established as a ‘conservative’ political thinker whose work was directly associated with British Conservatism.

The Anglo-American Committee, whose appointment was announced on 13 November 1945, had its origins in a purely British initiative: an ad hoc, spur-of-the-moment attempt to associate the United States responsibly with British policy in Palestine. However, this committee did not succeed, any more than had its many predecessors, in finding a solution to the Palestine problem palatable to all parties. Nor did it bring relief to the mass of refugees wasting away in displaced-persons camps in Europe. Its vigorous rejection of partition was shortly to be brushed aside by a different kind of logic, that of force majeure.

The National Family Planning Programme (NFPP) was launched in Ghana in May 1970. It was a tool to implement the 1969 Population Policy Paper, which the military government, the National Liberation Council (NLC), had written with the aid of Ford Foundation advisers. The policy paper reiterated international ‘overpopulation’ discourses that pushed for national planning to stem population growth, especially in ‘developing’ countries. Indeed, it constituted an example of development planning. It discursively linked Ghana's prosperity, and modernity, to stemming rapid population growth through fertility limitation. When the NFPP was launched by the Progress Party (PP) government in 1970, its focus was to implement the population policy by limiting population growth through curbing fertility. International discourses of development and population, as well as the specific interventions of organizations such as the Ford Foundation, the Population Council, and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, shaped Ghana's family planning story. However, choices over the implementation of family planning were ultimately linked to governments’ modernization and development projects and ideologies. Different approaches to family planning by the Nkrumah, NLC, and PP governments highlight the fact that family planning was ultimately political, but legitimized by development discourses of global and local origin.

It is commonly asserted that people were hanged at Salem on charges of spectral appearance; and the way to avoid hanging was to confess. Non-spectral acts of witchcraft are regarded as inconsequential to the outcome of the trials. Yet it was the non-spectral acts which provided the one magnet that attracted attention from the court. No one charged only with spectral appearance was even tried. The reprieves granted to confessors were the last decisions the court was allowed to make. This profile provides evidence that the standard claims about the court of oyer and terminer's use of evidence are the reverse of what actually happened, and highlights a number of patterns that have gone unremarked, requiring fresh interpretations.

Few Lord Chancellors have defended the laws of England with greater steadfastness than Edward Hyde, first Earl of Clarendon. Yet the House of Commons impeached him in 1667 for attempting to subvert those laws. Standing guardian over the English constitution, he was accused of plotting its ruin. Less guilty than Francis Bacon, he suffered a harsher fate. More innocent than Lord Keeper Finch, he endured the same painful banishment from the England he loved. On 11 November 1667 the House of Commons impeached him for high treason, and though they were unable to prove their accusation, they forced him, by the violence of their prosecution, to flee to France. It was his personal tragedy to suffer disgrace, calumny, and banishment though guilty of no crime.

The Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth-century. By J. R. Jones. London: Longman, 1996. Pp. 242. ISBN 0-582-05631-4. £42.00.

Oliver Cromwell. By Peter Gaunt. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Pp. 263. ISBN 0-631-18356-6. £25.00.

Cromwellian foreign policy. By Timothy Venning. London and New York: St Martin's Press and Macmillan, 1995. Pp. 324. ISBN 0-333-63388-1. £47.50.

Protestantism and patriotism: ideologies and the making of English foreign policy, 1650–1668. By Steven C. A. Pincus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. 512. ISBN 0-521-43487-4. £45.00.

William III and the godly revolution. By Tony Claydon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. 288. ISBN 0-521-47329-2. £35.00.

A miracle mirrored: the Dutch republic in European perspective. Edited by Karel Davids and Jan Lucassen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. 559. ISBN 0-521-46247-9. £55.00.

Debating was an important part of schoolgirls’ political education in late Victorian and Edwardian England that has been overlooked in the scholarship on female education and civics instruction. Debates offered middle- and working-class schoolgirls an embodied and interactive education for citizenship. Considering both the content of discussions and the process of debating, this article argues that school debates provided a unique opportunity for girls to discuss political ideas and develop political skills. Debates became intertwined with girls’ peer cultures, challenging contemporary and historiographical assumptions of girlhood apoliticism. Positioning girls as political subjects sheds new light on political change in modern Britain. Schoolgirl debates show how gendered political boundaries were shifting in this period. Within the unique space of the school debating chamber, girls were free to appropriate and subvert ‘masculine’ political subjects and ways of speaking. In mock parliaments, schoolgirls re-created the archetypal male political space of the House of Commons, demonstrating their familiarity with parliamentary politics. Schoolgirl debates therefore foreshadowed initiatives that promoted women's citizenship after partial suffrage was achieved in 1918, and they help to explain how the first women voters were assimilated easily into existing party and constitutional politics.

No form of English popular protest has been subject to such close scholarly analysis as the eighteenth-century food riot, a response not just to the understanding that food riots comprised two out of every three crowd actions but also to the influence of E. P. Thompson's seminal paper ‘The moral economy of the English crowd’. If the food riot is now understood as an event of considerable complexity, one assertion remains unchallenged: that riots remained a tradition of the towns, with agrarian society all but unaffected by food rioting. This article offers a new interpretation in which the rural is not just the backdrop to food protests but instead a locus and focus of collective actions over the marketing of provisions, with agricultural workers taking centre stage. It is shown that agricultural workers often took the lead in market town riots as well as well as in instigating riots in the countryside. Further, such episodes of collective protest were neither rare nor unusual but instead formed an integral part of the food rioting repertoire. It is also shown that rural industrial workers – notoriously active in market town riots – were often joined or even led by agricultural workers in their protests.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Marathas and the British confronted each other in India like two finalists after a series of elimination bouts. The East India Company had reduced the native princesBengal and the Carnatic to ciphers, crushed Mysore and emasculated Oudh and Hyberabad. The Marathas, under the leadership of the Sindia dynasty, of Ujjain, had extinguished the last pretensions of the Mughal emperor and reduced the Rajput states to surly submission. The defeat of Sindia and the confederated Maratha princes of Nagpur and Indore in the Anglo-Maratha war of 1803–5 was therefore historic. It confirmed the British as inheritors of the old Mughal supremacy and extinguished all hopes of a native hegemony in the subcontinent for 140 years. This defeat has hitherto been attributed to strategic error. The Marathas should, it has been argued, have adhered to their ancestral cavalry warfare and spread fire and devastation in the traditional Asiatic manner, instead of trying to beat the Europeans at their own game, with infantry and guns. Re-examination of the evidence leads to the conclusion that this argument is unsound. It underestimates the competence of the Marathas in their new style of combat and misplaces the blame for their failure. Traditional methods had paid off in the past; but things had changed by 1803, and had those methods been used in the second Maratha war the margin of defeat would probably have been much wider. As it was, the British victory must be described as hard won.

This article re-examines the concept of the fiscal-military state in the context of the British armed forces during the Seven Years War (1756–63). This war, characteristic of British warfare during the eighteenth century, demonstrates that British victory depended on the state caring about the wellbeing of its troops, as well as being perceived to care. At the practical level, disease among troops led to manpower shortages and hence likely defeat, especially during sieges and colonial campaigns. During the 1762–3 Portuguese campaign, disease was regarded as a sign of ill-discipline, and jeopardized military and political alliances. At Havana in 1762, the fear, reports, and actual outbreaks of disease threatened American colonial support and recruitment for British campaigns. Throughout the controversial campaigns in the German states, disease was interpreted as a symptom of bad governance, and used in partisan criticisms concerning the conduct of the war. Military victory was not only about strategy, command, and technology, but nor was it solely a question of money. Manpower could not simply be bought, but needed to be nurtured in the long term through a demonstration that the British state cared about the welfare of its armies.

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, European observers and commentators have frequently employed the term ‘Americanization’ to make sense of the astonishing rise of the USA to the status of a world power. More specifically, they used this term to describe the social changes brought about by industrialization and urbanization. In this context, European intellectuals have often used ‘America’ as shorthand for ‘modernity’; across the Atlantic, they believed, it was possible to learn and see the future of their own societies. Criticism of ‘the Americanization of Europe’ – or the world – easily led to outright anti-Americanism, i.e. a radical and reductionist ideology which held the USA responsible for the economic, political, or cultural ills of modern societies. The war in Iraq in 2003 and the alienation between the USA and France and Germany that followed provided a new impetus for studying the history of European perceptions of America. A large number of studies have since been published that deal with the history of the ‘Americanization of Europe’ and anti-Americanism, and several monographs, which are based on original research and promise new insights, will be the focus of this historiographical review.

In July 1971, one of the most non-conformist and Western-oriented leaders in the Soviet bloc, made what appeared to many as a radical turn of his domestic policy: liberalization of arts, culture, and social life were drastically limited and the communist party engaged on a course which was strongly inspired by Stalinism. Since then, questions had been raised as to the reasons and the timing of the change. This article explores various hypotheses in light of newly available archival documents in order to assess the role of the external factors in precipitating or determining the change. Soviet pressures are considered as well as the Chinese source of inspiration, as the change had been initiated shortly after Nicolae Ceauşescu's visit to China, demonstrating that the change was the product of interfering factors. What appeared at the time to be a sudden and unexpected change had in fact been prepared years before, under various forms. Romania was at the time dealing with growing social expectations due to liberalization measures, just as most other East European societies, but Ceauşescu chose to react differently, in the Chinese-style of mass mobilization, aiming to consolidate his party's grip on society and avert risks of Soviet intervention.