During the old poor law, many paupers had their possessions inventoried and later taken by authorities as part of the process of obtaining poor relief. Historians have known about this for decades, yet little research has been conducted to establish how widespread the system was, what types of parishioners had their belongings inventoried and why, what the legal status of the practice was, and how it affected social relations in the parish. Using nearly 450 pauper inventories, this article examines these historiographical lacunae. It is argued that the policy had no legal basis and came from local practices and policies. The system is found to be more common in the south and east of England than in the north, and it is argued that the practice gradually became less common from the late eighteenth century. The inventorying of paupers’ goods often formed one of the many creative ways in which parishes helped the poor before 1770, as it guaranteed many paupers assistance until death. However, by the late eighteenth century the appraising of paupers’ goods was closely tied to a negative shift in the attitudes of larger ratepayers and officials, who increasingly wanted to dissuade people from applying for assistance and reduce expenditure.

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.

In Britain between 1838 and 1858, the Chartist movement demanded the implementation of the ‘Six Points’, a parcel of parliamentary reforms centred on universal male suffrage. Despite the movement's recognized importance, little study has been made into Chartism's attitude towards slavery and abolitionism. This article will provide the first comprehensive study of this topic, from Chartism's origins in the 1830s until its decline in the decade after 1848. It will illustrate that Chartism was influenced by the radical labour component of the ‘Democratic’ coalition that supported President Andrew Jackson. This helped reinforce amongst early Chartists theories that wage labour was more exploitative than chattel slavery, alongside a racist reaction to West Indian emancipation more extreme than has previously been acknowledged. By 1842, however, various changes within the movement helped bring to the fore more consistently anti-slavery and even anti-racist sentiment with Chartist culture, as did growing exposure to American abolitionism, especially that of William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. The development of the anti-slavery ‘Free Soil’ ideology amongst American labour radicals profoundly influenced the late Chartist position on slavery by inserting abolition into Chartist aspirations for land reform. Consequently, a core component of late Chartism was its own anti-slavery ‘Free Soil’ ideology, which greatly informed pro-Union working-class agitation during the American Civil War.

The 1939 Option Agreement between Italy and Germany concerning South Tyrol was the first population transfer agreement in western European history. Its analysis offers a unique opportunity to shift the focus of the historiography on interwar minority questions from eastern to western Europe, thus challenging the lingering view of eastern Europe as a land of endemic ethnic heterogeneity and conflict. Furthermore, the 1939 Option illuminates a form of ‘consistent ambivalence’ that problematizes dominant analytical frameworks concerning the management of ethnic differences. Italian fascists consistently affirmed the inevitable assimilation, and therefore inclusion, of minorities within the Italian nation, but they also deeply distrusted them. As this ambivalent attitude reached a climax in the 1939 Option, in order to understand fascist behaviour during the implementation of the agreement we need to consider the longer history of fascist attempts to homogenize the new provinces. Three features structured these attempts: a belief that the assimilation of these minorities would be inevitable; the absence of means to carry out radical solutions; and a deep-seated distrust of the minorities. Fascist policy during the Option was simultaneously more ambivalent than the current historiography suggests and more consistent with the regime's interwar homogenization policies.

The German Democratic Republic (GDR) became the focus of a recurrent and sometimes heated debate within the British Labour party before 1973. The official stance of the party followed an all-party consensus within parliament about the non-recognition of the second German state. Yet many on the left wing of the Labour party came, for various reasons, to perceive such an inflexible stance as governed not by reason but dictated by the West German government. Such ambivalence towards West Germany and the Adenauer government in particular led to ambiguities within the party's policy as a considerable minority, including some key figures within the party, offered alternative strategies for maintaining or improving relations with the GDR. The most radical alternative, official recognition of the GDR as a legal, political entity, was only propounded by a core of hard left campaigners both within and outside the party. This article examines why sections of the Labour left came to sympathize with the GDR and how successful it was in influencing official party policy during the whole period of non-recognition of the GDR between 1949 and 1973.

The newly available documentation from the Russian archives sheds new light upon many aspects of Soviet-British relationship during World War II and the early Cold War. One such relatively unexplored facet of this relationship is propaganda interaction between the two countries. While the organization and technique of both Soviet and British propaganda machines have been studied rather extensively, there has been very little documented analysis of an actual impact of British propaganda on the Soviet regime and society in the mid-1940s (although some internal estimates within the British government must have been made at the time). Now, with the opening of Agitprop (department of agitation and propaganda of the central committee of the CPSU) records it becomes possible to measure this impact, including Soviet steps to manage it. A good case study in this regard can be made out of Soviet internal reaction to the main mouthpieces of the British printed propaganda targeted on the Soviet audience in 1942–8 – a journal, Britansky Soyuznik (The British Ally) and its digest companion Britanskaia Khronika (The British Chronicle).

Less than a month before Bismarck's dismissal as German chancellor, the Reichstag elections of February 1890 destroyed the parliamentary majority of the Kartell parties - National Liberals and Conservatives - with whose support he had governed. The number of Reichstag seats held by diese parties fell from 221 to 140, out of the total of 397; they never again achieved more than 169. To the multitude of problems left by Bismarck to his successors was therefore added one of parliamentary arithmetic: how was the chancellor to organize a Reichstag majority when the traditional governmental parties by themselves were no longer large enough, and the intransigently anti-governmental SPD was constantly increasing its representation? It was in this situation that the role of the Centre party in Wilhelmine politics became decisive, for between 1890 and 1914 the party possessed a quarter of the seats in the Reichstag, and thus held the balance of power between Left and Right.

There seems to have existed in France, at least after 1830, a general belief in the enormous social and political potenntial of education. Socialists, even after the penetration of vulgar Marxism, regarded ignorance as the great obstacle to working-class emancipation; democrats of all shades believed that the authentic Republic would emerge when a secular state primary education system became established; while, for conservatives, to entrust popular education to the Church was the only hope of preventing radical social change or collapse. Education became, therefore, one of the central political issues of the Third Republic. Recent work on the history and civics textbooks used in schools has given some indication of the picture of their society and its history which French schoolchildren were presented with, and of the way in which this may have guided their future attitudes and reactions. It is always difficult to assess the influence and importance of such material in the formation of mentalités, but, in order to do so, it must be remembered that the school textbooks were not the only formers of popular attitudes in this sphere. Not only did state school and Catholic textbooks present rival views, albeit mainly to two distinct audiences, but the period from 1900 to 1940 saw a flourishing of popular history books addressed to adults. These were mainly of Right-wing inspiration and were directed against the academic orthodoxy of the Republican University. A central role was played in this enterprise of historiographical vulgarization by the nationalist and royalist Action Francaise movement, whose ideology was often explicitly or implicitly present in it. The aim of this paper is to analyse the view of the past presented by the Action Franchise historians, and to suggest that the function of their historiography was to project a particular conception of what society was and ought to be like.

This paper deals with the history of French social history. Social history was not created once and for all; it is an historical construction; it had a beginning and may come to an end. Hence, its history may be written. However, two preliminary qualifications are needed. I shall not comment on ancient or medieval social history, but on the only social history which I know a little, that of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Secondly, for the same reason, I shall only discuss French social history written by French historians.

On Gibbon's death his papers contained an incomplete and unpublished essay on the genealogy of the European dynasty of which the British royal family was a branch, entitled The antiquities of the house of Brunswick. This article explains why Gibbon began this work, and why he laid it aside. Beginning by describing the nature and purpose of literature on Hanoverian genealogy in the earlier eighteenth century, and proceeding to relate the content of the Antiquities to the politics of Blackstone and Hume, the article identifies the Antiquities as a distinctively ancien régime defence of British political life and institutions which was elicited from Gibbon by the early months of the French revolution. The abandonment of the Antiquities is then explained as part of Gibbon's shocked response to the deepening gravity of events in France after the September massacres. In the polarized political atmosphere which ensued, the literary finesse of the Antiquities ran the risk of being confused with disaffection. That risk was increased when Gibbon and The decline and fall began to be used by radicals as auxiliaries in their attack on England's ancien régime. The textual history of the Antiquities allows us to perceive the rapidity with which the connotations and ownership of certain political vocabularies in England changed during the early 1790s.

Sidney and Beatrice Webb, in their book The State and the Doctor, which was submitted in the first instance as a memorandum to the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws in 1909, dismiss the work of the free dispensaries and medical missions in one short paragraph.

The Action Française dates from 1898—the year when the agitation for the revision of the trial of Dreyfus was at its height—and was an offshoot of the Ligue de la Patrie Française, one of the many anti-Dreyfusard organisations. The leaders of the Patrie Française having announced that in their agitation against Dreyfus they would do nothing illegal, the more extreme members, led by Henri Vaugeois, seceded and founded the Action Française, declaring that where the salvation of the country was at stake they would stick at nothing.

This article is a study of Archbishop Abbot's attitude to puritan nonconformity. It contends that the accusations of laxness levelled against him by Laudian apologists such as Heylin and Clarendon can be discounted as the inevitable consequence of the very different standpoint from which they judged him. It was not laziness that led the primate to turn a blind eye to certain types of nonconformity, but rather a detached attitude – not shared by his anti-Calvinist opponents – which allowed him to differentiate between mild cases of conscience-induced ceremonial nonconformity which posed no danger to the status quo, and the factious high-profile stance of those who undermined the authority of the established church. By taking a very hard line against separatists and their ilk, Abbot felt he could justify the degree of tolerance he granted to those peaceable and orthodox preaching pastors with scruples over certain adiaphora, whose role was so crucial in the unremitting battle against popery to which he dedicated his life.

The Ministry of All the Talents was essentially a coalition of three parties: the followers of Fox, of Grenville, and of Sidmouth. Yet in retrospect it was looked upon as principally a Whig ministry. This was partly because office consolidated what had hitherto been the rather uneasy alliance of Foxites and Grenvillites; partly also because for adherents of the main Foxite tradition of Whiggism the ministry of 1806 provided the only experience of government between 1783 and 1827.

Recent historians have highlighted the importance of the web of illicit commercial transactions which connected competing imperial networks to create an integrated Atlantic economy but have paid little attention to how co-operation worked across borders. Of necessity, participants acted without the legal institutions which are often afforded a central role in narratives of modernization. In the case of Jamaica, a hub of illicit trade, most merchants found it difficult to survive in this high-risk environment but members of the Sephardic diaspora, a traditional, communitarian group, had competitive advantages which they exploited with vigour. They did not rely on innate attributes of kinship, ethnicity, or religion. They closed entry and built on a favourable historical and geographical legacy to cultivate attributes which maintained high levels of social discipline with credible rewards and punishments which were reinforced by their outsider status. Their competitive advantages did stimulate retaliation but also allowed the Sephardim to combine with the Christian elite to capture rent-seeking opportunities. Far from falling away as modernization gained pace, the Sephardic diaspora survived and flourished by constructing the strong private-order institutions needed in large swathes of the economy where neither impersonal corporations, nor state enforcement mechanisms, were able to manage risk.

It is an irony that so much of the major historiography of the revolutionary era outside France has succeeded – often unintentionally – in reducing the role of the patriots to a marginal one, peripheral to the impact of the French revolution on western Europe and devoid of importance for the policies of successive French regimes. There have been two main reasons for this, although many recent works have begun to dispel this image. The first has been an exaggerated concentration on the ideology of the ‘Jacobins’, which inevitably reduces the study of patriotism to that of a handful of powerless intellectual cliques, most of whose adherents were, indeed, swept away by the advent of the Consulate in 1799 and were seldom taken seriously by the French before then. These men were far from central to the history of the period, and the undue attention they have received from ideologically motivated historians has been properly criticized. However, the critics themselves have often compounded the misconception surrounding the phenomenon of patriotism, exactly because they have adopted the narrow conception of patriotism inherited from their opponents, the shared acceptance of a definition of the patriots as an intellectual clique. By concentrating on the ideas of a minority, this approach simply leaves out too many people, and fails to encompass the phenomenon of practical, political collaboration with the French, something quite different from an ideological commitment to the French revolution.