The common law tradition: lawyers, books and the law. By J. H. Baker. London: Hambledon, 2000. Pp. xxxiv+404. ISBN 1-85285-181-3. £40.00.

Lawyers, litigation and English society since 1450. By Christopher W. Brooks. London: Hambledon, 1998. Pp. x+274. ISBN 1-85285-156-2. £40.00.

Professors of the law: barristers and English legal culture in the eighteenth century. By David Lemmings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+399. ISBN 0-19-820721-2. £50.00.

Industrializing English law: entrepreneurship and business organization, 1720–1844. By Ron Harris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi+331. ISBN 0-521-66275-3. £37.50.

Between law and custom: ‘high’ and ‘low’ legal cultures in the lands of the British Diaspora – the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, 1600–1900. By Peter Karsten. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi+560. ISBN 0-521-79283-5. £70.00.

The past few decades have witnessed a welcome expansion in historians' understanding of English legal cultures, a development that has extended the reach of legal history far beyond the boundaries circumscribed by the Inns of Court, the central tribunals of Westminster, and the periodic provincial circuits of their judges, barristers, and attorneys. The publication of J. G. A. Pocock's classic study, The ancient constitution and the feudal law, in 1957 laid essential foundations for this expansion by underlining the centrality of legal culture to wider political and intellectual developments in the early modern period. Recent years have seen social historians elaborate further upon the purchase exercised by legal norms outside the courtroom. Criminal law was initially at the vanguard of this historiographical trend, and developments in this field continue to revise and enrich our understanding of the law's pervasive reach in British culture. But civil litigation – most notably disputes over contracts and debts – now occupies an increasingly prominent position within the social history of the law. Law's empire, denoting the area of dominion marked out by the myriad legal cultures that emanated both from parliamentary statutes and English courts, is now a far more capacious field of study than an earlier generation of legal scholars could imagine. Without superseding the need for continued attention to established lines of legal history, the mapping of this imperial terrain has underscored the imperative for new approaches to legal culture that emphasize plurality and dislocation rather than the presumed coherence of the common law.

One of the best-known remarks of the nineteenth century, and probably the one most often repeated by contemporary politicians, was the Duke of Wellington's challenge to the Whig reformers in 1831, ‘How is the King's government to be carried on?’ In their difficulties in the late 1830s the Whigs found the question more pertinent than they had allowed during the debates on the Reform Bill.

One of the basic points of the National Socialist programme was the promise of the ‘Liberation’; of German nationality groups who had come under the control of neighbouring states through the peace treaties of 1919. Accusing a country of maltreating its German minority became a classic Nazi gambit in opening aggressive operations in the late 1930's. In most instances Nazi propaganda charges were vastly exaggerated, but if ever there existed a situation which might have provided some justification for Hitlerian wrath, it was Fascist repression in South Tyrol.

For the last two centuries Edward Gibbon has been regarded—either favourably or disparagingly - as the Enlightenment's greatest celebrant of the ‘triumph of human reason’. He has been almost invariably portrayed as an essentially optimistic believer in rational man's potential for social progress and moral advancement. Much of Gibbon's modern reputation as the Enlightenment's historian par excellence is due to early and widespread acceptance of certain assumptions about his religious sentiments. There has been a strong tendency to assume that Gibbon stood in the vanguard of what Peter Gay has called ‘modern paganism’: ‘The French philosophes and British infidels like Hume or Gibbon rejected revealed religion so vehemently and so completely that the Christian contribution to their ideas was modest and subterranean; they were usually unaware of it’. Gibbon has been traditionally seen as a vocal deist, while the account of the rise and consolidation of the Christian church contained within The history of the decline and fall of the Roman empire (1776–88) has often been thought intrinsically anti-christian.

The activity of the foreign Powers in Persia during the early twentieth century has begun to receive historians’ attention; the British role in the Persian struggle against Kajar despotism, however, has not been made clear. The British have been pictured as indecisive and as not significantly supporting the Persian revolution. Or, where they have been described as aiding rebellion, only vague implications exist as to their purpose: hints that before the Anglo-Russian Convention the British encouraged the revolutionaries in order to extend British influence, presumably at Russian expense, and that after the Convention the British tried to make the shah honour his promises to the constitutionalists to obtain political stability and a secure environment for British trade. At least partly correct, if limited in scope and inexplicit about details, these ideas do not allow a full understanding of British policy during the tumultuous Persian struggle for a constitution. A thorough examination of the exact impact of the Anglo-Russian Convention on Russians and revolutionaries in Persia is required for comprehension of British attitudes and policies.

This article analyses a key reformist gesture by General Smuts's Second World War South African government – the May 1942 order suspending enforcement of the pass laws in major cities. Hated by Africans for curbing their mobility, employment opportunities, and urban residence rights, the pass laws were a fundamental instrument of white supremacy. What then did the suspension order signify? Reconstructing debates and divisions within and beyond the state, the article traces the steps leading to the suspension order, and discusses the responses to its implementation resulting in its later withdrawal. The account considers common explanations for the suspension order's genesis: industry's demand for labour, the wartime state's reduced policing capability, and official anxieties about Africans’ loyalty at a time of vulnerability to invasion. Of these, only the last has clear merit. The real puzzle is the relaxation's continuance beyond the emergency situation of 1942. For this, the credit belongs to the momentum of liberal organization and opinion in encouraging advocates of reform within the state to hold their nerve. Only gradually could the opposition Nationalists, the party of apartheid, mobilize whites’ hostility to black urbanization, thereby enhancing the influence of restorationist elements within the state calling for renewed coercion.

A little body of illuminati, whose residence is in the Prime Minister's garden, and their business to cultivate the Prime Minister's mind. These gendemen stand in no sense for a Civil Service cabinet. They are rather of the class of travelling empirics in Empire, who came in widi Lord Milner, whose spiritual home is fixed somewhere between Balliol and Heidelburg. Their function is to emerge from their huts in Downing Street, like the competitors in a Chinese examination, with answers to our thousand questions of the Sphinx.

As the Anglo-Spanish dispute which developed between 1756 and 1761 over the taking of Spanish ships by British privateers was undoubtedly one of the chief causes of the declaration of war by King Charles III in 1761, the Spanish story of these events is of considerable interest. A full treatment of the whole problem of the prizing of neutral ships has been promised by Mr Richard Pares, but the present study may be of some interest as showing the Spanish views of the situation as shown in the correspondence between the Spanish Chief Minister, General Richard Wall, and the Spanish chargé d'affaires in England, Don Felix Abreu.

Augustine Birrell performed the thankless task of chief secretary for Ireland for a longer period than any of his forty-nine predecessors. His nine years of office from 1907 to 1916 included some of the most critical years of Anglo-Irish history, and ended tragically when he accepted blame for the 1916 Easter rebellion, which has haunted his political reputation ever since. Birrell has been generally condemned by the English and consigned to oblivion by the Irish. This article will reassess Birrell's work as Irish secretary by relating his actual achievements and failures to the complex problems which constituted the Liberal dilemma in Ireland. Emphasis is placed on the earlier and more successful period of Birrell's administration, which has been almost entirely neglected by English historians.

What lay behind the anxiety of so many Frenchmen of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to defend the ‘liberties of the Gallican church’? In a stimulating essay published in 1971, Professor W. J. Bouwsma argued that Gallican ideas transcended any purely national setting, and that they should be studied (to borrow Febvre's distinction) from the standpoint of religious rather than of ecclesiastical history. Beyond the narrowly institutional concerns of traditional French approaches to the subject, Professor Bouwsma glimpsed among the upholders of Gallican liberties a certain cast of mind: a disposition towards religious renewal, an acceptance of the diversity of local church arrangements, and a corresponding distaste for the dogmatic certainties and standardizing ambitions of Tridentine Catholicism. So Professor Bouwsma argued.

The great migration from the tsarist empire, sparked by the assassination of Alexander II, in 1881, saw two to three million east European Jews re-settling in the great cities of the Atlantic world before the First World War. Often discriminated against in labour markets, and socially marginalized in new environments, Russo-Polish males either persisted in, or resorted to, organized crime centred on the illicit sale of alcohol, professional gambling, and prostitution to survive. Atlantic states, however, were reluctant to employ Jews as uniformed police or detectives in their fight against syndicated crime. In order to overcome the challenge of ethnicized crime, law-enforcement agencies, like nineteenth-century tsarist administrations before them, employed informers. Jewish informers who, unbeknown to police handlers, were sometimes also psychopaths in an era before the condition was clinically identified, were used to infiltrate underworld structures. By nature, informing offered a short-term, unstable, existence fraught with unintended consequences for police and spies alike – thereby encouraging extraordinary geographical mobility amongst informers. Orthodox histories of law-enforcement agencies tend to focus on structural changes in police forces but a re-examination of the role of informers in organized crime should allow for the development of more subtle insights into the evolution of policing as a dynamic, interactive, social process.

When the judge of the High Court of Admiralty, Dr Julius Caesar, rode south from London to Lewes on 26 June 1591 1 an important experiment was initiated in the Admiralty court's continuing quest for greater respect and authority. The judge was setting out on a circuit of the troubled south and west coast of England in hopes of forcing the local authorities in those regions to submit to the supremacy of the High Court of Admiralty.2An examination of the prelude to the circuit and of the circuit itself, as well as an appraisal of its aftermath, will provide us with an instructive view of the tension between the local authorities and the central Government at the end of the sixteenth century. If there were a marked reduction in the quality of central government leadership at the end of Elizabeth's reign, one cause was perhaps the unsubdued strength of the provinces coupled with the corruption of Crown officers who were beyond the effective control of Westminster.

When parliament abolished episcopacy, cathedrals, and the Book of Common Prayer, what was left of the Church of England? Indeed, as contemporaries asked between 1646 and 1660, ‘Where is the Church of England?’ The episcopalian clergy could not agree. Some thought the remaining national framework of parishes and congregations was ‘the Church of England’, though now deformed, and worked within it. Others thought that only those ministers and parish congregations who remained loyal in heart to the church as it had been qualified as ‘the church’: most of them continued to serve a parish church and tried to keep the old practices going. A third category of hard-liners thought ‘the Church of England’ was now restricted to a recusant community that worshipped with the Prayer Book in secret and rejected the new national profession. The fundamental issue was the nature of a church: was it a society of believers, however organized, or a hierarchical institution following rules prescribed by God? The question caused tensions and distrust among the clergy, and the rigorists thought of the rest as time-servers and traitors. Disagreements continued to divide the clergy after the Restoration, and were reflected in attitudes towards concessions to dissenters.