This article offers a new interpretation of the Wallachian revolution of 1848. It places the revolution in its imperial and European contexts and suggests that the course of the revolution cannot be understood without reference to these spheres. The predominantly agrarian principality faced different but commensurate problems to other European states that experienced revolution in 1848. Revolutionary leaders attempted to create a popular political culture in which all citizens, both urban and rural, could participate. This revolutionary community formed the basis of the government's attempts to enter into relations with its Ottoman suzerain and its Russian protector. Far from attempting to subvert the geopolitical order, this article argues that the Wallachians positioned themselves as loyal subjects of the sultan and saw their revolution as a meeting point between the Ottoman Empire and European civilization. The revolution was not a staging post on the road to Romanian unification, but a brief moment when it seemed possible to realize internal regeneration on a European model within an Ottoman imperial framework. But the Europe of 1848 was too unstable for the revolutionaries to succeed. The passing of this moment would lead some to lose faith in both the Ottoman Empire and Europe.

This article examines the major role that newspapers played in Colombia, as central components of its political system, between 1830 and 1930. After some introductory remarks, the first section offers a general characterization of the Colombian press during the period, underlining its volatile existence, its national significance despite limited readership levels, and its overwhelming political nature in the hands of partisan editors. The second section analyses the political role of the press, by focusing on the crucial electoral functions performed by newspapers in launching candidates and providing them with platforms, serving as party organs, and measuring the amount of public support for candidates and parties. The article also explores the extent to which the press played a wider democratic role in supporting the suffrage, in instructing voters about rights and duties, and, by doing so, in forming an enduring sense of citizenship.

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.

Deficit financing, revenue projections and interest rates in Spanish Naples provide the context to reflect upon the exigencies of debt resolution, the illusions of mathematical certainty and the perils of temporizing in political decision-making. ‘Creative accounting’ explores the micro-history of an equation, which provided the mathematical rationale to lower Spanish interest rates to 3·3 per cent and to resolve the controversy over the ‘just’ rate of interest. In an attempt to generate revenues during the Spanish financial crisis of the 1570s that surrounded Philip II's second bankruptcy in Castile, Philip's Castilian accountants devised a proposal to suspend the hearth census in the Kingdom of Naples for fifteen years in exchange for a prepayment at discount. An analysis of the mathematics of the discount schedule raises questions about early modern economic realities. Changes in the significance of figures and quantitative relationships, like changes in the meaning of words, reveal the mental processes used to represent economic fact and to construct solutions to economic difficulties even in the midst of crises.

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.

The Allies' conduct of the Great War has frequently been castigated by historians as inept and amateurish. But it is perhaps the conduct of their diplomacy which most merits this description. Until the creation of the Supreme War Council at the end of 1917 there existed, apart from a number of liaison officers, no machinery to synchronise the strategy and diplomacy of Great Britain and France other than the periodic meetings of the politicans and generals of the two countries. Yet, as David Lloyd George came to realize, these were not really conferences at all, but rather meetings of men with pre-conceived ideas who desired only to find a formula which could obscure the underlying differences of opinion from the general view. They were really nothing but a ‘tailoring’ operation at which different plans were stitched together. What was required was the construction of an inter-Allied General Staff, designed to examine and give advice on the changing military situation. Obviously no government could abdicate its right to issue orders, but if the Central Powers were to be defeated the Allies needed to concede that there was far more to participation in a coalition than the mere lip-service to unity involved in the periodic gatherings of soldiers and statesmen. An examination of the Calais Conference of December 1915, called at a time when Allied operations on all fronts were showing a marked lack of success, will illustrate many of the failings and dangers of this primitive form of war diplomacy.

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.

Letitia Bushe (c. 1705–57), daughter of a minor Irish landowner and one-time office- holder, was a member of the intellectual and cultural circle that included Swift's friend, the letter writer Mary Delany, the ‘proto-bluestocking’ Anne Donnellan, and the ‘heretic’ bishop Robert Clayton. The means by which, as a single woman of independent but limited means, Bushe maintained her position within this circle had elements of informal domestic servitude. At the same time a cache of unusually intimate letters reveals a determined individualist, consciously distancing herself from some of the official pieties of her society, and enjoying a greater freedom of thought, action, and speech than might at first sight have been expected. The letters also document Bushe's intense and tortured relationship with a younger woman, Lady Anne Bligh, an episode which raises important questions about the nature of women's friendships at this time.

One of the arguments reported by Clarendon against the imposition of the English liturgy on the Scots ran as follows: ‘The kingdom of Scotland generally had long been jealous, that, by the king's continued absence from them, they should by degrees be reduced to be but as a province of England, and subject to their laws and government, which they could never submit to….’ Behind those words ‘the king's continued absence’ there lies concealed a series of ideas and assumptions which were so obvious in the seventeenth century that there was no need to elaborate or dwell upon them. For this very reason, it is possible that they have been overlooked in later periods, when conceptions of government and society had greatly altered. Yet phrases like ‘the king's presence’ had such vivid connotations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that to neglect them is to neglect important clues to the understanding of the social and political conduct of the men of the time.

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.

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.

Were the knowledge of the ablest farmers in the best-cultivated parts of the island collected, - English Agriculture would be found, at this day, to be far advanced towards perfection… In short, the art of agriculture must ever remain imperfect while it is suffered to languish in the memory, and die with the practitioner: RECORD, only, can perpetuate the art; and SYSTEM, alone, render the science comprehensive. William Marshall, The rural economy of Norfolk, 1 (London, 1787), vi–vii.

This article examines the figure of Boudica (or Boadicea), with a specific focus on Thomas Thornycroft's Westminster Bridge statue, and on the work of the seventeenth-century antiquary, Edmund Bolton. By synthesizing historiography which investigates the idea of ‘historical culture’ in the modern and early modern periods, this article attempts to bridge chronological and generic divisions which exist in the study of the history of history. It argues that to fully understand the genealogy of popular historical ideas like Boudica, it is imperative that historians of such subjects take a longue-durée approach that situates individual artists and writers, and the historical-cultural works they produce, within their broader political, cultural, and social contexts while simultaneously viewing these works as part of a long, discursive process by which the past is successively reinterpreted. As a consequence, this article eschews an analysis of Boudica which labels her an ‘imperial icon’ for Victorian Britons, and argues that the relationship between contemporary context and the re-imagined past is not as straightforward as it might initially appear.

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.

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.

In December 1540 one of Henry VIII's clerical diplomats defected to the papacy. As contemporaries believed that a king could be judged by the ambassadors he sent to represent him abroad, Pate's defection caused the English king considerable embarrassment. His acceptance of the bishopric of Worcester from the pope in July 1541 made Pate a figure of symbolic importance to opponents of Henry VIII's royal supremacy. This article examines Pate's diplomatic career, paying particular attention to how Pate negotiated the competing claims on his loyalty of the pope and Henry VIII. Although Pate was expected to represent Henry's church policy, his experiences in embassy also provided opportunities for conservatism, as Henry sought to maintain amicable relations with the emperor and deny charges of heresy. Pate's case raises important questions about the religious sympathies of those chosen by Henry to represent him abroad and had important consequences for the practice of diplomacy in the early English Reformation. Pate also offers important insights into the motivations of Henrician Catholic exiles, their views of the Henrician church, and their political opposition to it.