This article uses original research in archival sources, many of them not yet exploited by scholars of the early modern book trade, to demonstrate that the confluence of a printer-publishers' political and religious ideology and his trade was possible during the reign of Charles I. A detailed case-study of the family, life, career, as well as publications of Richard Badger (1585–1641), reveals that his emergence from the late 1620s as William Laud's house printer was rooted in a complex web of locality, kinship, self-promotion, and patronage that had at its heart a religious conservatism that flowed logically and, for a time, successfully into the movement now known as Laudianism. The article offers simultaneous insights into politics and religion in the Caroline book trade, and the emergence, flourescence – and collapse – of Laud's programme for religious change.

Although one of the most influential figures of his time, Bishop Gilbert Burnet has become one of the most neglected. This article outlines Burnet's worldview, arguing that it can only be partly understood by labelling him a ‘latitudinarian’ as scholars have hitherto tended to. Alongside Burnet's conventionally latitudinarian descriptions of Christianity as a set of rational and simple beliefs that could command very wide assent, the bishop also had a strong sense of history as a providential and apocalyptic unfolding of a battle between ‘true’ and ‘false’ churches, which was characterized by a powerful European dimension and by an identification of Antichrist with religious persecution. The article concludes with suggestions about how such lines of thought might have cohered with the more traditionally ‘latitudinarian’ elements of Burnet's philosophy, and about how they might allow historians to re-think the latitudinarian movement more generally.

The half-centenary of the Historical Journal is here used as an opportunity not for celebration but for historical analysis. How well does the journal's claim to publish ‘on all aspects of history’ stand up to scrutiny? Do its contents and contributors reflect the state of the profession, or are they skewed? These questions are explored both conceptually and quantitatively. The notion of a ‘general’ historical journal is examined, as also the distinction between a journal's research and pedagogic functions. Some implications of the HJ's origins in the period of high modernism are suggested. Finally, current dilemmas are examined, especially in the new era of electronic access.

Scholars have long known of the proposed marriage in 1630 of John Dryden, grandson of Sir Erasmus Dryden, and Elizabeth Isham, eldest child of Sir John Isham. All knowledge of this proposed marriage came from correspondence revealing that, having reached a financial impasse, the two families aborted the proposed match. At first glance, such a case seems rather unremarkable, since similar stories abound of other contemporary families and in more detail. The Dryden–Isham match, however, takes on increased importance with the recent discovery of Elizabeth Isham's 60,000-word spiritual autobiography. Unlike the correspondence that mainly deals with the economic aspects of the match, Elizabeth's autobiography provides a more personal and emotional account, revealing the importance that familial love and honour played in the arrangement. In addition, the autobiography shows that the failed match caused Elizabeth to have a religious aversion to marriage, leading her to choose singlehood for the remainder of her life. Her experience forces scholars to recognize the significance that familial love, honour, and personal piety could have on marriage formation in the seventeenth century, and it illustrates the lasting impact that a failed match could have on a woman in early modern England.

In the late 1730s the fourth earl of Shaftesbury engaged Benjamin Martyn to write a biography of his great-grandfather, the first earl, defending his reputation against the accounts given by Gilbert Burnet and others. With the support of other members of his family a considerable body of source material (some now lost) was assembled, including a memoir of Shaftesbury by his steward Thomas Stringer and a defence of his character and actions by another former member of the household, Benjamin Wyche. Most of Martyn's Life had been written by 1740, but it was not published. After his death in 1763 the papers he had left were extensively revised by a team of historians that included Roger Flexman and Andrew Kippis. Versions of the Life were printed in 1770 and 1773 but not published. Neither the fifth nor the sixth earl had any interest in the project, but the only copy of the 1770 printing not in the hands of the Shaftesbury family was bought in 1830 by a London publisher, and after further changes made by G. W. Cooke the Life was finally published in 1836.

Hobbes seems to have believed in ‘God’; he certainly disapproved of most ‘religion’, including virtually all forms of Christianity. This article disentangles the link between his ‘God’ and his ‘religion’; and in so doing illuminates what Stuart writers meant by ‘atheism’. Hobbes agreed with Sir Francis Bacon that ‘atheism’ was typically caused by bad religion (that is, by ‘superstitions’ designed to serve the interests of the clergy). The Hobbesian theory of language rules out the possibility of proving God's existence, but Hobbes seems to have believed in a Designer to whom a prudent man would offer worship. He also thought that commonwealths require revealed ‘religions’, which are shared systems of belief that rest on ‘faith’ in those who first proclaim them. Religions decay when ‘faith’ is undermined by the misconduct of ‘unpleasing priests’, especially if they enjoin ‘belief of contradictories’. Leviathan is anti-atheistic in seeking to undermine priestcraft and eliminate such flaws by reinterpretation of the Bible. Hobbes probably lacked ‘faith’. But he defended liturgy and ceremony even in the circumstances of the early 1650s; the religion that he favoured was a de-clericalized Anglicanism.

Local conditions and responses to European expansion were important in the ‘interactive emergence of European domination’. However, the comparative lack of sources has tended to obscure what these were. In the early eighteenth century, Morocco was responding to the growth of English power in the Mediterranean; new sources presented here show how ʿAlī b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Ḥamāmī, one of Sultan Mawlāy Ismāʿīl's most powerful ministers, tried to co-operate with the English in order to manage their influence and consolidate his own political position. This offered them a potential means to overcome the obstacles that, compared to the North African regencies, made Morocco resistant to European political and economic influence. These efforts, however, were thwarted by a combination of factors. With al-Ḥamāmī's political credibility threatened, the development of co-operation between the English and a section of the Moroccan elite was undermined, leaving the fundamental dynamics of Anglo-Moroccan relations unchanged.

From 1670 there were sustained attempts to use excommunication as a tool to influence parliamentary elections. Excommunicants could not qualify for membership of municipal corporations under the Test and Corporation Acts. Towards the end of Charles II's reign, as fear of protestant dissent grew, excommunication was, however, used to deny voters the right to exercise their franchise. There was a concerted attempt, encouraged by the king, to ensure the election of a compliant tory parliament through the use of excommunication in elections in borough seats. The attempt, reliant on bishops and spiritual courts, represented the high water mark of the ‘confessional state’. Of questionable legality, the exclusion of excommunicants from the right to vote was short-lived. The accession of James II, and his Catholicizing policies, created new alliances between Anglicans and dissenters and eroded the willingness of bishops to use excommunication as an electoral instrument. In 1689, the Toleration Act removed the principal cause of the persecution of dissent. The use of excommunication, nevertheless, represented an important attempt to unite the church and state for electoral reasons.

This article explains how the concept and the practice of gift-making evolved in Spanish Italy in connection with power. Contemporary chronicles, avvisi (newsletters), and letters enable us to reflect upon how gifts were seen, given, and received in the period at the Spanish embassy in Rome and in the viceroyalty of Naples. It aims to establish how the exchange of presents affected the wielding of power and how it contributed to shaping the political culture of the Spanish in Italy. The seventeenth century and Italy were the time and place that witnessed the greatest experimentation in gift-making practices. This experimentation and the polysemic nature of gifts can also be explained as a result of the low level of professionalization that still characterized diplomacy in seventeenth-century Europe.

The pamphlet debate concerning the perceived effects of parliamentary enclosure on property and population in eighteenth-century Britain has been largely neglected by intellectual historians. One consequence of this debate was to undermine the credibility of the classical republican economic vision of agrarian simplicity, due to its proponents' failure to come to terms with the enormous disjunction between ancient and modern economies. Although the enclosure of agricultural land had provoked hostility since at least the fifteenth century, after 1700 its opponents developed new arguments to take account of the legislature's increasingly prominent role in facilitating the process. In doing so, anti-enclosure writers drew on classical republican ideas, arguing that enclosure was contrary to the public interest because it eroded the independence of the yeomanry, valorized by numerous republican authorities as integral to the country's military strength. In their criticisms of modern policy, these writers praised the agrarian laws of the Roman republic, as well as the Tudor tillage acts. The agricultural ‘improvers’, on the other hand, denied the validity of these precedents on the grounds that the historical contingencies which had produced the Roman agrarian laws, or the Tudor tillage acts, were of limited relevance in a society based on the interdependence of agriculture, manufactures, and commerce.

In 1808, an Estate of the lesser nobility of the Lower Austrian diet approved a statute barring from membership persons of Jewish descent in the ‘third degree’ regardless of confession. It is the only documented instance in Europe for the revolutionary era of such a paragraph that, in its rejection of Jewish ancestry in both the paternal and maternal lines, resembled the early modern Spanish statutes of ‘blood purity’ and the twentieth-century Nuremberg laws. The Josephian patent of toleration of 1782 had not allowed Jews to become members of the corporate nobility (the first Jew was only ennobled in 1789), but had relieved some of the worst aspects of discrimination. By the early nineteenth century, the archduchy of Lower Austria (including the imperial capital at Vienna) contained the largest, wealthiest, and most self-confident Jewish community in the Hapsburg Monarchy. The statute of 1808 was a reaction to Jewish acculturation to the upper class (including conversion, intermarriage, concessions of property-rights, the existence of salons in which Jews and new Christians mixed with the nobility) that presented a perceived threat to the status of its marginal members (lesser landed nobles, ennobled officialdom, and ennobled professionals). The statute was also a product of the politically and nationally charged atmosphere in Vienna between the Austrian defeat by Napoleon at Austerlitz (1805) and the renewed war against France (1809). No simple ideological continuum connects the Lower Austrian paragraph to either the early modern Spanish or the late modern Nazi ordinances. But it was the first such statute to take shape in a political context fraught with recognizably late modern concepts of ‘nation’. The statute of 1808 furthermore evidences the continuing fractured nature of public authority and lack of thorough-going state-formation in Austria.

Most writers have taken Frederick II at his word and interpreted his sparse and generally derogatory comments about the Holy Roman Empire as indications of its low priority in Prussian policy after 1740. This article offers a reappraisal, based on a re-examination of his writings and his policy towards the Empire and its principal dynasties. Despite his distaste for the imperial constitution, Frederick swiftly appreciated its significance to his goals of security and international recognition. Certainly, relations with the imperial Estates remained secondary to diplomatic and military engagement with Austria and the other major European powers. Nonetheless, the Empire remained more than an arena in which Austro-Prussian rivalry was played out. The imperial constitution offered a means to neutralize threats to Prussia's more vulnerable provinces and a framework to constrain Habsburg ambitions, while ties to minor German dynasties offered avenues to maintain or improve relations with Europe's leading monarchies that were likewise bound within the elite kinship of the Christian old world. For this to be effective, however, Frederick had to engage in all aspects of imperial politics and not just representation in formal institutions.

This article reconsiders Thomas Carlyle's views on the crisis facing Ireland in the 1840s and British responses to it. It argues that while Carlyle saw this crisis as being related to difficulties facing contemporary ‘English’ society, he treated it as a distinctive manifestation of a malaise that afflicted all European societies. Carlyle's views on Ireland reflected the illiberal and authoritarian attitudes which underwrote his social and political thought, but they were not, as has sometimes been suggested, premised on anti-Irish prejudices derived from racial stereotypes. An examination of Carlyle's writings on Ireland demonstrate that he attributed the parlous state of that country in the 1840s to widespread failures in leadership and social morality that were not unique to the inhabitants of Ireland and were also to be found in England. Carlyle's works were not only admired by leading members of ‘Young Ireland’, but also generated ideas that framed their response to the economic, social, and political challenges facing Ireland.

From the age of twenty-three until his death at the age of sixty-eight, Lord Acton was or sought to be a member of the United Kingdom parliament. Although Acton remains a subject of scholarly interest, his political career has received relatively little attention. This article examines Acton's search for an Irish parliamentary seat, a search which was twice unsuccessful in 1857, but which resulted in May 1859 in Acton's return as the member for Carlow borough. Although Acton was pushed towards parliament by his family – and particularly his stepfather, Lord Granville – a close examination of Acton's campaigns reveals more dedication to a political career than has previously been accepted.

The international diffusion of ideas has often been described as an abstract process. John Bowring's career offers a different insight into the practical conditions that permitted a concept, free trade, to spread across national borders. An early advocate of trade liberalization in Britain, Bowring promoted free trade policies in France, Italy, Germany, Egypt, Siam, and China between 1830 and 1860. He employed different strategies according to local political conditions, appealing to public opinion in liberal Western Europe, seeking to persuade bureaucrats and absolute rulers in Central Europe and the Middle East, and resorting to gunboats in East Asia. His career also helps to connect the rise of free trade ideas in Europe with the ‘imperialism of free trade’ in other parts of the world. Bowring upheld the same liberal ideals as Richard Cobden and other luminaries of the free trade movement. Yet unlike them, he endorsed imperial ascendancy in order to remove obstacles to global communications and spread civilization outside Europe.

A tax on dogs was passed in 1796 because it seemed to address both the government's need for revenue and other serious social and economic problems. Arguments for and against a dog tax throughout the eighteenth century engaged with issues not raised in discussions of other kinds of taxes because of the unique place of dogs in human society; positions on the question of a dog tax depended largely on assumptions about the purpose that dogs served, or ought to serve. Proponents often argued that a dog tax would decrease the population of nuisance dogs, whilst also preventing poaching. Other tax advocates presented a dog tax as a luxury tax, but there was no agreement about which kinds of dogs were luxuries, and which were necessities that should be exempt from the tax. By the time a bill was debated in parliament in 1796, the terms of the debate had shifted because of new attitudes toward animals. The tax that was ultimately passed largely ignored the interests of the primary advocates of a tax throughout the century, instead treating the pets of the poor as necessities that merited exemption.

During the nineteenth century the British consular service was often dismissed as an organization with purely commercial responsibilities. A succession of governments and diplomats insisted upon this notion, despite the fact that at certain times both relied very much on consular officials for information on foreign affairs. This dependence was especially evident in Italy during the decade after 1860, when British leaders had lent their moral and diplomatic support to the creation of the modern Italian state against considerable international opposition. During this period their desire not to see the achievement undone led them to maintain a close watch on Italian affairs. The contribution made in this area by the consular service, and the manner in which it was reorganized in response to Italian unification, show how such a role could take priority over its other functions. Although this state of affairs was no doubt exceptional on account of the remarkable level of British interest in the Unification of Italy, it nonetheless provides a clear demonstration of how the organization could be used under certain circumstances. The extent to which British consuls were used to monitor affairs in post-unification Italy also encourages reflection upon the widespread view that British foreign policy rejected interventionism in favour of isolation from European affairs during the 1860s.

The advent of conscription in Britain in 1916 was greeted with profound dismay by many in the Liberal party. At Westminster, however, a significant minority of Liberal MPs, who were members of the Liberal War Committee (LWC), were amongst the most enthusiastic advocates of compulsory service, from a surprisingly early stage in the war. It has usually been assumed that those Liberals who embraced conscription were effectively abandoning their progressive principles, and moving to another, more reactionary, political allegiance. This article argues that this was not the case. The Liberal advocates of conscription represented a range of political opinions, but all insisted that they remained Liberals, and many went to considerable lengths to reconcile their support for universal military service with their continued adherence to the Liberal creed. This article reassesses the phenomenon of Liberal support for compulsory service, examining the arguments, activities, and personnel of the LWC. It sheds new light on the vitality of Liberal principles in wartime, demonstrating that Liberal doctrine was often far more flexible than scholars have realized.

Using Bury as a case study, this article reassesses the mechanism of the formation of political opinion in Lancashire factory towns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This subject has heretofore been dominated by sociological explanations of the 1970s and early 1980s. A re-examination of the ‘Three Lancashires’ paradigm, the socio-economic model that has underpinned most Lancashire studies for this period, demonstrates that the socio-economics of urban Lancashire were more diverse than previously thought. From this basis, the article challenges the empirical basis of one of the most enduring tenets of Lancashire politics: the deferential ‘factory politics’ model. To provide an alternative explanation, this article reasserts the importance of ‘issues’ to the debate, and underlines the contingent nature of the relationship between representative and constituents. An important strand is whether political activists integrated their plebeian rank and file into new party structures, thus neutralizing threats to status quo. This interpretation has been central to much recent revisionist history; however, this article demonstrates that the ‘rise of party’ during the mid-Victorian period was contingent upon political activists acquiescing to certain requirements of their followers.

Russia's ‘democratic’ revolution of February 1917 saw all types of professions and social groups mobilize into unions and congresses to articulate their demands. Lower and middle classes dominated, but it is notable how former elite groups were quick to form bodies to defend their interests and to promote their visions of Russia's future. Historians have invariably dismissed these groups as marginal to the revolutionary process and inherently ‘counter-revolutionary’. This article challenges these assumptions, using the Union of Officers, formed across the military in May 1917 to defend officers' professional interests, as a case study. The union spread quickly, published a newspaper, and agitated among politicians for greater discipline in the military. Its activities fuelled popular fears of counter-revolution, but only a few of the union's leaders actively worked against the government. General Kornilov's failed revolt in August demonstrated that most officers had doubts. Nevertheless, the union played a crucial role in mobilizing moderate and conservative forces against further reform. This exacerbated social conflict and political polarization, fatally undermining the Provisional Government and democracy in 1917.