Mid-nineteenth century Imperial trade policy has been discussed mainly from the standpoint of the constitutional historian. It is probably for this reason that the economic events with which the policy is connected have received very little critical analysis, and are usually expounded on lines laid down by contemporary partisans. The orthodox view that the Canadian corn-exporting trade was encouraged by the English grant of increased preference in 1843, and in the midst of consequent expansion was injured by the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, and later revived in some measure by the compensating repeal of the Navigation Laws in 1849, was the view normally held by Canadian writers in 1850. Having its origin in past politics, it characteristically exalts the influence of legislation. It is hoped to show in this article that when disturbing factors besides English tariff policy are taken into account—speculation, harvest fluctuation, and the policies of foreign states, to name no others—the interpretation which has proved so seductive is in the main a legend. A legend, it is true, whose acceptance in the late “forties” is not difficult to understand.

On Gibbon's death his papers contained an incomplete and unpublished essay on the genealogy of the European dynasty of which the British royal family was a branch, entitled The antiquities of the house of Brunswick.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.

During periods of recession, both historians and policy-makers have tended to revisit the multi-faceted relationship between health and economic crisis. It seems likely that the current economic downturn will trigger a new revival of efforts to gauge its implications for people's health around the world. This review will reflect on aspects of the relationship between health and economic crisis, exploring some of the unanswered questions within the historiography of the Great Depression and health, and suggest new directions that this work might take. Within a broadly transnational framework, I will reassess the diverse historiographies of interwar public health, in order to highlight ways in which the methodologies used could inspire future studies for neglected areas within this field, such as Southeast Asia. In doing so, I will illustrate that the effects of the interwar economic fluctuations on health status remain imprecise and difficult to define, but marked a transitional moment in the history of public health.

When emissaries of the German underground opposition against Hitler's dictatorship sought contacts and co-operation with the British government in 1938, prime minister Neville Chamberlain said they reminded him of the Jacobites in King William's reign; but until May 1940, the British government was not averse to co-operating with Germans conspiring to overthrow their own government.

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).

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.

The authorship of the Vindidae has been a vexed question for 350 years, and perhaps it is not likely to be solved. The book belongs, in the main, to a body of Huguenot literature which appeared after 1572 and was concerned with the dangerous question of the right of resistance. A good deal of this literature was sedulously and obstinately anonymous. There was a reason. If a writer advocated resistance, and, still more, if he advocated or even condoned “tyrannicide,” he would be committing himself to something as abhorrent to the general opinion of his age as “Bolshevism”is to the general opinion of ours. If in addition he backed his opinions by his name, and his name were that of a known adherent of the Calvinist cause, he would be committing that cause to certain obloquy and possible danger. He would be trespassing beyond the bounds of cautious and guarded discretion which Calvin had imposed upon himself in this matter: he would be giving to the enemies of Calvinism the very handle which they desired. In these conditions anonymity flourished: pseudonyms were rife; and calculated puzzles were set to baffle future ages. Not only are we confronted by problems of authorship: we have also to face other and lesser problems. Sometimes, for example, the place and the date of publication are falsified. There was indeed a particular reason for such falsification. Printers as well as authors—perhaps even more than authors—had to be wary; and a genuine place and date of publication afforded too easy a clue.

Class has long been used as an analytical tool in the study of history and much has been written with regard to the formation of class-consciousness, which has to a considerable extent been related to the first half of the nineteenth century and especially to the events surrounding the passing of the first Reform Bill. Professor Briggs has noted the growing use of the term ‘class’ in the early nineteenth century and has postulated a middle-class consciousness created by the media of the Reform Bill and Anti-Corn Law agitations. ‘Sandwiched between an entrenched landed Parliament on the one hand and a bitter but still imperfectly integrated labour movement on the other, the middle classes were compelled to lay down their own postulates and programmes.’ More recently E. P. Thompson, in a brilliant and wide-ranging study of the working classes, has seen the formation of a working-class consciousness which involved ‘consciousness of identity of interests between working men of the most diverse occupations and levels of attainment’ and also ‘ consciousness of the identity of interest of the working class, or “productive classes”, as against those of other classes; and within this there was maturing the claim for an alternative system’.

During the 1670s, the navy was the focus of increasingly critical scrutiny from parliament and the political nation. This article considers the causes and nature of this criticism, which had its roots in the perceived dominance of the catholic James, duke of York, in the field of naval appointments, and examines the political context of the various inquiries into the state of religious affection in the fleet. By so doing, the article identifies a dilemma which confronted the crown's opponents in the period 1678–81, namely the conflict between the requirement for a strong navy to oppose France and the risk that, because of York's influence over it, that same navy might in fact be an instrument of French and catholic designs. Finally, the response of the officers and men of the navy to the events of the popish plot, exclusion crisis and ‘tory reaction’ is examined, placing the navy in the mainstream, rather than on the periphery, of the political and religious history of the period.

The purpose of this article is to explore the political importance of Neapolitan Carnival and the government's involvement in steering and controlling the celebrations at various historical junctions during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is particularly important to note in this context the ritual pillages of cuccagne staged by the rulers. The sponsorship of such Carnivalesque entertainments quelled the rulers' fears from popular rebellion and disorder as much as they fed popular needs for bread and circuses; and it is in this context of maintaining intact the city's fragile social balances that we should interpret the ubiquity of these violent spectacles in early modern Naples.

This article reviews recent research investigating the impact of societal culture on combat performance in the western world during the first half of the twentieth century. It identifies two main strands of historiography. One group of studies has focused on societal culture's influence in shaping the form and functioning of military institutions. A second approach adopted by current scholarship has been to examine societal culture's effect on individual soldiers' resilience and motivation. The article compares and evaluates the results of this research. It concludes that, while sometimes overstressed at other factors' expense, especially combatants' common humanity and the complexity of militaries' own cultures, societal culture has proved to be a subtle yet important influence on martial performance.

The condition of the Anglican elite in eighteenth-century Ireland has been the focus of some debate by historians. Members of the Protestant Ascendancy class have been variously cast as a community under constant threat, or as a self-confident group secure in their control of the country's political and economic systems. Various contributions to this dialogue have been made through the study of popular movements and civil disorder. Rather than further comment on such phenomena this article seeks to examine the reactions of the Irish political elite to them. Although the country had no general Riot Act on the English model until 1787, legislative initiatives were made on several occasions prior to this. While these initially tended to be unsuccessful in parliament, local in their application, and to impose relatively lenient punishments, attitudes began to change in the 1770s. The political elite then moved comparatively rapidly to general legislation that created riot as a felony. Such developments suggest that prior to the last quarter of the eighteenth century civil disorder was not seen as a real threat to Protestant ascendancy, though Protestant fears finally culminated in legislative action in 1787. Arguably it was this event that marked the first great nadir in Anglican self-confidence in eighteenth-century Ireland.