William III's military and political career was marked by a sustained tension between his obsessive struggle against France and the fear caused by his accession to enhanced titles of power. Crucial to William's shift from stadholderate to kingship was his assumption of emergency powers in 1672 to defend his country against French invasion. Throughout his stadholderate (1672–1702), he came to be seen by his Dutch republican opponents as a Roman dictator intent on using military power to break the harmony of the constitution, while Orangist propaganda tried to present the rule of the One as the best remedy to the recurrent danger of civil war and anarchy. Spurred by the Ryswick treaty of September 1697 and fuelled by a deeply engrained tradition of resistance to any expanded military establishment, the standing army debates of 1697–9 came as an effort to understand a major political controversy in the light of the history of republican Rome. The political theorists of the New Country Party strove to reassert the superiority of civil over military power by showing how the decay of the Roman Republic had been caused by a departure from the civic militia paradigm and a drift towards military monarchy which fostered the growth of tyranny. It was thought that England's commitment to a prolonged war effort would entail a similar process and imperil the age-old balance between king and parliament. The contention of this article is that the standing army debates of 1697–9 can be construed as an encounter between Dutch and English neo-Romanism, crystallizing in the controversial figure of William. An overall view of William's military and political career and the search for elements of continuity in his supporters' and his opponents' arguments will serve to look at the role of historicism in the construction of a late seventeenth-century Anglo-Dutch ideological space.

This article examines the ways in which debates on ecclesiology in the Church of England served as a venue for the examination of political precept. It argues in particular that polemical sources – whether sermons, pamphlets, or longer works – reveal that discussion of conformity, the nature of the church, and its doctrine and discipline led to a broader examination of law, sovereignty, parliament, and the political costs of religious discord. Underlying the dispute was a fundamental tension over civil and sacred authority, and the relationship between politics – the realm of human custom and history – and doctrine – the realm of the divine and immemorial. The article offers a number of revisions to current discussions of the history of political thought, while pointing to the importance of religious discourse for our understanding of the political tensions that existed in the years prior to the English civil war.

Early sixteenth-century Germany and Switzerland witnessed, amongst their peasants, a growing dissatisfaction with economic exploitation and the increasing power of political rulers. The Protestant Reformation at the time had a profound influence on the moulding of this dissatisfaction into a right to demand the enforcement of divine justice. The Swiss reformer, Huldrych Zwingli, provided parallels for the demands of the peasants, while the German reformers, Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon, criticized the rebellious methods of the peasantry. Against this background the young Swiss reformer, Heinrich Bullinger, responded more positively towards the claims of the peasants by opposing the views of the Lutheran reformers in his play ‘Lucretia and Brutus’. In this drama, Bullinger propounds the first steps towards the development of his federal theory of politics by advancing the idea of oath-taking as the mechanism for transforming the monarchy into a Christian republic. The idea of oath-taking was destined to become a most important device in early modern politics, used to combat tyranny and to promote the idea of republicanism.

John Locke is famous for his liberal and tolerationist works, published in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, which attacked the belligerent intolerance of the Restoration Church of England. But his early writings, the Two tracts on government, were composed in the period between 1660 and 1662 when the details of the church settlement were the subject of heated debate. The thought of the young Locke defended an uncompromising settlement which would rigidly enforce uniformity in religious worship and secure the restored monarchy from clerical subversion. Whilst scholars have previously focused on the changes in Locke's thought from royalist Anglicanism to whig toleration, this article focuses on the Tracts in their own right. By placing them in the context of the Restoration debate on adiaphora, ceremonial ‘matters indifferent’, the typicality or otherwise of Locke's early thought can be discerned. This article argues that the legalistic understanding of adiaphora meant that this debate touched on political authority and obedience as well as theological questions, not least because matters indifferent fell under the purview of the monarch as supreme governor of the church.

The tendency to draw a sharp line of demarcation between pre- and post-1660 England has long been standard historical practice. This separation is especially evident in the study of apocalyptic thought, which is accepted as important to understanding the history of early and mid-seventeenth-century England: despite the efforts of some scholars to trace its subsequent developments, the presence of eschatological language and belief in the later seventeenth century is most often relegated to the radical margins and lunatic fringes of English society. This article demonstrates that apocalyptic convictions were not dismissed from mainstream relevance after 1660. Using the Revolution of 1688–9 as a case-study, it demonstrates that hopes and predictions of eschatological fulfilment were present among nonconformists and Church of England proponents alike. In their works are found apocalyptic celebrations of the events of 1688 and 1689, and also the continued concern with issues that had dominated domestic religious and political discourse for the previous three decades.

During the East India Company's rule of India, Britons observed the pervasiveness of elephants in local modes of warfare, hunting, trade, and religious symbolism. The colonizers appropriated this knowledge about elephants: for instance, in the taking-over of Mughal trade routes or Tipu Sultan's stables. What Indians knew about the elephant also fed into a metropolitan culture of anthropomorphism, exemplified in the celebrated shooting of the elephant Chuny in 1826. Anthropomorphic approaches to the elephant held by Britons worked alongside Sanskrit texts and Mughal paintings. These hybrid understandings gave way by the mid-century to an allegedly objective and Christian science of animals, which could not be tainted by what was called pagan superstition. By using the elephant as a point of focus, this article urges the importance of popular traditions of colonial exchange in the emergence of science, and cautions against the reification of indigenous knowledge. The argument aims to show the strengths of a history of knowledge-making that is not focused on elites, the metropolis, or the periphery. A study of the uses of the elephant in colonialism also suggests the multiple and easily interchangeable meanings that animals could carry.

Recent historiography has argued that the British ecclesiastical policies of James VI and I sought ‘congruity’ between the different churches in Scotland, England, and Ireland, rather than British ecclesiastical union or the anglicanization of all the churches. It is argued here that the asymmetry of the changes he sought in Scotland and England has been underplayed and that this has masked his choice of a fundamentally Anglican model for the British churches. Through allowing the archbishop of Canterbury to interfere in Scottish ecclesiastical affairs, undermining the presbyterian system, promoting episcopal power and liturgical reform, anglicanization of the Church of Scotland was the goal of James VI and I, and one which he pursued until his death. The motivation for King James's persistent desire for the fulfilment of this policy is to be found in his rapid assimilation to the Church of England after 1603 and, moreover, in his goal of the reunification of Christendom as a whole, on the Anglican model.

Studies of Europe's Enlightenment have been enriched by attending to its real and imagined impacts on indigenous peoples and of indigenous peoples on Europeans. Applying these methods to new-settled eighteenth-century societies offers another standpoint on the Enlightenment. This study is a sample: a civic history of a relatively new – in European terms – place suggests the possibilities. In 1792, a bourgeois, Vasilii Krestinin, from Russia's White Sea shore, published a history of Archangel, founded in 1584. Krestinin's view from a new Arctic society is as far from Europe's elegant metropoles and eloquent lumières as the ship captains, Pacific Islanders, and cat killers in influential recent studies of the Enlightenment. Just as these studies – and others on readers and reading – transformed studies of the Enlightenment, historians can use sources from new societies to observe answers and actions of people casting themselves as Enlighteners. This study of enlightened sensibility in an Arctic society suggests how the Enlightenment – viewed from settler societies – became anxious, how it fanned nationalisms, and how it was ensnared by naïve presuppositions that progress was a prerequisite of power.

Burke's justification for intervention in French internal affairs in the name of the international community has formed a powerful strand of thought in both diplomacy and international relations theory. However, the strength and openness of Burke's advocacy, traced here, changed according to his target audience, the domestic, and the international political context. Crucially, when he came to justify the case openly, the arguments changed completely. Beginning with a Grotian argument drawn from Vattel and premised on states as isolated rights-holders in a pre-social ‘state of nature’, Burke always struggled to draw a justification for intervention in the case, allowed by Vattel, of irrevocable political disunion. This conflicted both with Burke's general conception of states as corporate wholes and his linked policy aspiration to restore the totality of French ancient institutions. Ultimately abandoning this, his final argument, fully set out only in the Letters on a regicide peace, is completely new. It is premised not on modern international law but on remedies to be found in Roman domestic law, invocation of which he justifies by claiming Europe to be a single juridical enclave, drawing on an eighteenth-century discourse of shared manners, law, and culture as constitutive of political identity and community.

Originally published in London in 1774 and subsequently republished in French in 1793 and 1833, Marat's The chains of slavery offers an interesting case study on the exchange of ideas between Britain and France during the late eighteenth century. It is suggested that the key to understanding this hitherto neglected work lies in reading it alongside other publications by Marat from the 1770s and in setting it firmly in the context in which it was published and disseminated in both Britain and France. Prompted by debates surrounding the election of 1774, the work embodies Marat's own particular version of the British commonwealth tradition, and can be linked to the Wilkite movement in both Newcastle and London. Despite its British origins, Marat and his followers were able to utilize the work after 1789 in order to engage in a number of French debates. It thus constitutes one of the means by which English republican ideas made their way across the Channel.

This article re-examines the role of civility and politeness in the writings of whig authors from 1688 to 1732. It argues that politeness was not an exclusively whig concept. Nor was there any unanimity amongst the whigs about its meaning. Politeness was a hotly debated topic in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, but differences in its interpretations did not follow party lines. The notions of politeness formulated by whig authors after 1688 differed from each other as much as they differed from those framed by non-whigs. The article also reconsiders the account that the whig theorists used their analysis of politeness to defend the commercial values of post-1688 England and Britain. Again, there was no agreement on this amongst the whigs. Some of them explicitly denied the putative link between commerce and politeness, some of them were not interested in it, and even those who argued for it still interpreted politeness in its traditional courtly terms rather than in post-courtly urban terms.

Ireland's status as a kingdom or as a colony continues to influence the historiographical debate about the country's relationship with the wider world during the early modern period. Interest in the continent is almost exclusively focused on exiles and migrants, rather than on diplomatic developments. Yet during the 1640s confederate Catholics in Ireland pursued an independent foreign policy, maintaining resident agents abroad, and receiving diplomats in Kilkenny. Following the execution of Charles I in 1649, they sought foreign assistance in their struggle against Oliver Cromwell. In alliance with the exiled House of Stuart, Irish Catholics looked to Charles IV, duke of Lorraine, as a potential saviour. For three years the duke encouraged negotiations in Galway, Paris, and Brussels. He despatched vital military supplies to Ireland, and attempted on at least one occasion to transport troops there from the Low Countries. Although his intervention ultimately failed to turn the tide of the war in Ireland, the English parliamentarians nevertheless believed he posed a serious threat. This detailed study of the duke's role, in the international struggle for Ireland during the early 1650s, largely ignored until now, helps to place the crises of the three Stuart kingdoms in their broader European context.

This article investigates the nature and prevalence of aristocratic liberalism in post-revolutionary France. Defenders of the aristocracy, it argues, departed from a specific conception of liberty, which can be distinguished both from a purely negative definition of liberty as the ability to do what one wanted to do, and from a republican conception of liberty as something that could be guaranteed through self-government alone. To legitimate the role of the aristocracy in post-revolutionary France, publicists and politicians developed a conception of liberty as a condition that could be guaranteed only through the existence of ‘intermediary powers’ between the central government and the people. Although this conception of liberty was severely criticized by Restoration liberals such as Benjamin Constant, it had a considerable impact on the debate about the best way to safeguard liberty in nineteenth-century France, as appears from texts by important political thinkers such as Tocqueville and Dupont-White.

During the 1890s evangelical Protestants took to preaching on the streets in southern Irish towns and cities. They provoked an angry response, with large Catholic crowds gathering to protest at their activities. This created a difficult situation for the authorities. Obliged, on the one hand, to protect the rights and liberties of the preachers, they also looked to nurture behaviour appropriate to the sectarian realities in Ireland. At stake was the extent to which Ireland could be treated as an undifferentiated part of the United Kingdom, with W. E. H. Lecky increasingly recognizing the need for a different legal basis in Ireland. These events formed part of the wider evolution of ‘constructive unionism’. More broadly, respectable Irish Protestant and Catholic disapproval of preachers and the ‘mob’ revealed the way in which class attitudes cut across sectarian identities, suggesting that the political dividends paid the wider unionist movement by this exposure of the apparent realities of ‘Rome rule’ were little valued in the locale. Similarly, interventions by home rule politicians reinforced the sense that conciliating British public opinion was a central concern. Here was an example of how locally orientated sectarianism helped shape national political agendas.

Burke's Reflections contains a section of about ten pages on the monasteries of France, deploring not only the confiscation of their property but also the destruction of the institutions themselves, which are defended for their contribution to learning, beauty, and agriculture and for their general social role. Their ‘superstition’ is vindicated as preferable to that of the philosophes. Burke maintains that they could and should have been reformed, rather than suppressed. This discussion of monasteries has been almost wholly ignored by commentators and editors. The following article considers these pages against the reality of French monasticism, itself a neglected theme, and shows their centrality to Burke's critique of the Revolution.

This article seeks to re-examine the intellectual context of commercial policy and regulation in seventeenth-century England. It questions a common assumption about so-called ‘mercantilist’ writers: that they saw trade as in some way finite and therefore won by one nation at the expense of another. Instead, it proposes that the often belligerent attitude of the ‘mercantilists’ towards trade was rooted in an understanding of the nature of international commerce as both communication and competition. Although writers acknowledged the mutual aspect of trade, they did not see this exchange as automatically equal, but saw it as possible for one party to exploit the other. This situation demanded state action to protect national trading interests in the disputed area of commerce, and thus this ‘discourse of trade’ was linked to political and juridical discourses about international relations. The article shows how this understanding of trade influenced debates about commercial governance in the critical middle decades of the seventeenth century, culminating in the attempt to create a national monopoly through the navigation acts, ‘securing sovereignty’ over the nation's trade. The second half of this article examines this in more detail with reference to the ideas of a prominent defender of the 1651 Navigation Act: Benjamin Worsley.

Questioning Edward Said's controversial perception of European Oriental studies as a facilitator of imperialism, this article analyses the views and policies promoted in late imperial Russia by academics specializing in Oriental studies, as they debated how best to integrate ethnic minorities in the country's eastern borderlands. The article argues that, themselves influenced by the pervasive impact of nationalism on European scholarship, between the 1870s and the 1917 Revolution these academics proposed policies which are best understood as aimed at nation-building (i.e. fostering a sense of community and unity among the population of a state) rather than at imperial domination of the minorities by the Russians. Identifying the origins of the academics' support for cultural and linguistic pluralism as fully compatible with pan-Russian nationalism, the article demonstrates that the Bolshevik nationalities policies of the 1920s were strongly influenced by the views of academic Orientalists and the pre-revolutionary Russian intellectual tradition to which the latter belonged.

Taking an anthropological approach, this article interprets Pagnol's critically acknowledged classic as a reinvention of a carnivalesque ritual practised in France from the late middle ages through the late 1930s, when ethnographers observed its last vestiges. By linking La Femme du boulanger (The baker's wife, 1938) to contemporaneous debates over gender, national decadence, and the definition of French cultural identity, I argue that the film recycles the charivari's long-standing function as a tool of popular protest against social and political practices regarded as detrimental to the welfare of the nation. In the context of the Popular Front, Pagnol's charivari ridiculed divisive partisan politics pitting Left against Right, symbolically purged class conflict from the social body, and created a new form of folklore that served as a focal point for the communitarian ritual of movie-going among the urban working and middle classes. In so doing, the film promoted the ongoing shift in public support away from the Popular Front in favour of a conservative ‘National Union’ government under Prime Minister Edouard Daladier, who in 1938–9 assumed the role of France's newest political patriarch.

Penal reformers in the 1810s and 1820s condemned the English criminal law as a ‘bloody code’: a monolithic mass of draconian statutes inherited from a former, less civilized age. This overwhelmingly negative image underpinned the dramatic and unexpected repeal of the capital statutes in the 1830s and survived to define a whole era of criminal justice history. This article explores the conditions that enabled the reformers to establish such a powerful critique of the law in such a short space of time. It contends that a key to their success was their ability to exploit contemporary scandals to argue that the law had lost touch with public opinion. Forgery aroused more controversy than any other species of capital crime in the 1820s and became the focal point for opposition to the capital laws. By analysing how reformers used the scandal surrounding forgery to foster the notion that the law was a ‘bloody code’, this article presents a new perspective on the early nineteenth-century penal reform debate.

This article explores the rural poor relief system of colonial South Carolina. It finds that poor relief was substantially more generous and more readily available in rural areas of South Carolina than elsewhere in British North America, or indeed in the entire Anglophone world. It suggests that this was because elite vestrymen had deep-seated concerns about the position of the white poor in a society that was dominated by African slavery. Generous relief of adult paupers was therefore a public demonstration of the privileges of race to which all whites were entitled. Elites in rural South Carolina also made considerable efforts to provide a free education for pauper children that would inculcate industry and usefulness among those who might become future public burdens. The serious attention paid to the situation of the white poor in colonial South Carolina was therefore part of an effort to ensure the unity of white society by overcoming the divisions of class.