This article examines the role that Ireland and Irish people played in the geographical construction of British colonial rule in India during the nineteenth century. It argues that as an important sub-imperial centre, Ireland not only supplied the empire with key personnel, but also functioned as an important reference point for scientific practice, new legislation, and systems of government. Occupying integral roles within the information systems of the colonial state, Irish people provided much of the intellectual capital around which British rule in India was constructed. These individuals were part of nineteenth-century Irish professional personnel networks that viewed the empire as a legitimate sphere for work and as an arena in which they could prosper. Through involvement and deployment of expertise in areas such as surveying and geological research in India, Irishmen and Irish institutions were able to act decisively in the development of colonial knowledge. The relationships mapped in this article centre the Irish within the imperial web of connections and global exchange of ideas, technologies, and practices during the long nineteenth century, thereby making a contribution towards uncovering Ireland's multi-directional involvement in the British empire and reassessing the challenges that this presents to existing British, Irish, and imperial historiography.

Historians of Britain and the First World War have debated the extent to which there was a rush to colours in August 1914, as well as the consequences of bringing the war effort to the communities and homes of the civilian population. While the historiography has gradually shifted away from accepting that the wave of volunteerism in 1914 was ultimately an expression of patriotism and support for the war effort, there is still little understanding of the impact of the recruitment and propaganda campaigns at the local level. Focusing on newspaper reports and recruitment records, this article offers an examination of how Devonians responded to recruiting agents and their attempts to get men to enlist, and the effect on communities, families, and individuals who were targeted by both civilian and military authorities. This study reveals that Devon's recruitment profile differed from national trends due to occupational and geographical factors, as well as the refusal of small county newspapers to practise self-censorship.

As British efforts to secure the approaches to India intensified in the closing years of the nineteenth century, expert knowledge of the states bordering the subcontinent became an increasingly sought-after commodity. Particularly high demand existed for individuals possessing first-hand experience of Qajar Persia, a state viewed by many policymakers as a vulnerable anteroom on the glacis of the Raj. Britain's two foremost Persian experts during this period were George Nathaniel Curzon and Edward Granville Browne. While Curzon epitomized the traditional gentleman amateur, Browne embodied the emerging professional scholar. Drawing on both their private papers and publications, this article analyses the relationship between these two men as well as surveys their respective views of British policy toward Iran from the late 1880s until the end of the First World War. Ultimately it contends that Curzon's knowledge of Persia proved deficient in significant ways and that Anglo-Iranian relations, at least in the aftermath of the Great War, might well have been placed on a better footing had Browne's more nuanced understanding of the country and its inhabitants prevailed within the foreign policymaking establishment.

This article uses a case-study of agriculture to explore the range of anxieties and contradictions surrounding women's work in the interwar period. National statistics are shown to be inconsistent and questionable, raising questions for historians reliant on official data, but they point to regional variation as the continuous defining feature of female labour force participation. Looking beyond the quantitative data a distinction emerges between traditional work on the land and processes. The article shows that women workers in agriculture provoked vigorous debate among a range of interest groups about the scale, nature, and suitability of this work. These groups, such as the National Federation of Women's Institutes, the Women's Farm and Garden Association, and the National Union of Agricultural Workers represented a range of social classes and outlooks, and had diverse agendas underpinning their interest. Consequently women's agricultural labour is exposed as a site of class and gender conflict, connecting to wider economic and cultural tensions surrounding the place of women in interwar society.

Recent studies of ‘total war’ depict a process of inexorable expansion leading to an often nebulous linkage of everything to war. This article takes the study of ‘total war’ in the opposite direction by studying a specific example of strategic restraint. It examines how the French bombing strategy that was developed over the course of the First World War went to considerable lengths to maintain a distinction between the civilian and the military. The article studies France's restraint by highlighting the strategic, geographical, institutional, and economic factors upon which it was built. It then goes on to examine the political pressures for an expansion of bombing which proved incapable of overturning this policy. Finally, it contrasts French restraint with that of its key ally, Great Britain. There, bombing developed into a strategic weapon designed to destroy the ‘home front’. This study of restraint underscores the importance of limits, and the attendant choices government has to make, in understanding the course and intensity of a country's mobilization for modern war.

This article considers the changing ways in which French political elites understood imperial obligation in the interwar years. It suggests that the economics of imperial rule and disputes over what could and should be done to develop colonial economies provide the key to understanding both the failure of interwar colonial reforms and the irreversible decline in France's grip over its colonies. In making this case, the article investigates four related colonial policy debates, all variously linked to changing conceptualizations of economic obligation among France's law-makers. The first concerns Albert Sarraut's 1921 empire development plan. The second reviews discussions over the respective obligations of the state and private financiers in regenerating colonial economies during the depression years of the early 1930s. The third debate reassesses policymakers' disputes over colonial industrialization. Finally, the article revisits the apparent failure of the investigative studies of economic and labour reforms conceived by the left-leaning Popular Front in 1936–8. The point is to highlight the extent to which senior political figures clashed over concepts of ‘colonial obligation’ viewed less in the cultural terms of ‘civilizing mission’ than in the material sense of economic outlay.

This article argues for the central role of publicity and propaganda in the Labour party's 1945 landslide election victory. While the ‘swing to the left’ in the first years of the war provided an opportunity for Labour, popular radicalism did not automatically translate into support for the party. The following discussion shows how the national party leadership made use of the BBC, print media, and visual propaganda to associate itself in the popular mind with the successes of the coalition government and the promises of the Beveridge report. While the Conservatives' propaganda machinery fell into abeyance during the war, Labour deftly exploited new means of mass communication which had grown up during the interwar period to build a broad national constituency in favour of its return to power. In order properly to understand the link between ‘high politics’ and popular opinion, political historians need to consider not only the languages through which elite policies were translated and communicated to the public, but also the media of communication. This article argues that, contrary to common perceptions, Labour was successful in 1945 in part because of its ability to embrace and exploit the new mass media to its political advantage.

The 1937 Peel Commission proposal for the partition of British mandatory Palestine has generally been framed as the precursor to the United Nations partition plan of 1947. This article demonstrates the importance of tracing the roots of the 1937 Peel Commission plan back to conversations taking place in the Colonial Office and government of Palestine as early as 1929. A close analysis of dialogues over territorial division and of preliminary partition plans, particularly those drawn up by L. G. Archer Cust and D. G. Harris, leads to the conclusion that Britain's focus on the ideal of representative government played a primary role in the development of partition proposals. This article argues that inter-ethnic violence played a much smaller role in the development of partition proposals than has previously been thought. Instead, partition was proposed as a solution to the political implications of non-representative government in Palestine, a topic constantly in the spotlight thanks to the League of Nations.

This article makes the case for incorporating music into the history of war commemoration in 1920s Britain by examining John Foulds's A World Requiem, performed at the British Legion's first Festivals of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall between 1923 and 1926. A simultaneously modernist and spiritual work, Foulds's Requiem challenges Jay Winter's conclusion that modernism was unconcerned with public grief. The controversy which the Requiem caused also reveals the contested nature of public memory, particularly where music and religion were concerned. The Requiem's axing in 1927 points to a hegemonic process which, although it had yet fully to take shape, found no room on Armistice Night for Foulds's progressive ideals.

The Italian experience of being bombed has been neglected in the historiography of the Second World War, especially in English. This marginalization is not justified by the record of events; according to official estimates, Italian civilian victims of bombing numbered around 60,000. The reaction of the Italian population to air raids was carefully evaluated and discussed by the Allies, who decided to hit civilians living near industrial areas with a view to testing their psychological resistance. The article focuses on the civilians' reactions to death coming from the sky, by examining their response to both Anglo-American and Fascist propaganda, and to the experience of the raids at different stages of the war. It analyses the ways in which civilians coped with the collapse of state defences (including the creation of legends and the spreading of rumours independent of state propaganda), and the psychologically complex and shifting response to bombers who introduced themselves as liberators. The research presented is based on archival sources, particularly prefects' reports from different parts of Italy to the Ministry of Interior, on both Anglo-American and Fascist propaganda, newspaper articles, and civilians' diaries.

This article will analyse the psychology and reasoning in the Anglo-German naval agreement and it will hence ask the following questions. First, how did preceding naval agreements influence the conclusion of the Anglo-German naval agreement. Secondly, what were the reasons for Germany to conclude it? Thirdly, what were the reasons for Britain to conclude it? Fourthly, how does it fit into the larger strategy of arms limitations? And, finally, what part did the Anglo-German naval agreement play in the overall strategy of Germany and Britain in the interwar years? In order to come to a conclusion about the reasons behind the agreement it is the thesis of this article that it is essential to include later changes and additions to the agreement. This part has been neglected in previous analyses. Particularly the reasons behind the termination shed light upon the motives for initially concluding the Anglo-German naval agreement. For the British side this article will argue that the Anglo-German naval agreements fit into this general policy line of trying to limit naval armament through international agreements and that they actually fitted into the overall British policy of bringing Germany back into the circle of European powers as an equal partner. For Hitler's Germany, it will be shown that the Anglo-German naval agreement was the abortive step toward an eternal alliance between the two Arian races.

This article enhances our understanding of the Ford administration's foreign policy by examining how it sought to react to a changed situation in the Asia-Pacific after the fall of Saigon in May 1975. It shows how changes in regional politics forced the administration to adapt to a situation in which allies began to look to the Communist countries for friendship and to reconsider having American forces on their soil. It illustrates this situation by looking at base negotiations in Thailand and the Philippines, and the administration's search for an alternative arrangement in the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. It then reconsiders two crisis situations in the region to examine the relevance of the superpower competition to the administration's responses. This aids our understanding of the role that regional factors played in tactical foreign policy decisions taken by the Ford administration, extending beyond a focus on the superpower competition that has marked the historiography of the administration in the past.

This review points out the dangers of taking Jonathan Israel's volumes on the Enlightenment as a new framework for Enlightenment studies. Despite Israel's claim in Enlightenment contested to have historicized our understanding of the Enlightenment, his modus operandi is fundamentally unhistorical, and the result is a presentist interpretation with an oversimplified classification of thinkers into ‘radical’ and ‘moderate’ camps. The review suggests more effective ways to make a truly historicized Enlightenment present for us now, especially by devoting more attention to the literary and rhetorical properties of Enlightenment texts.

This article surveys recent research on the German Wehrmacht's anti-partisan campaign in the Soviet Union during the Second World War. German anti-partisan warfare in the Soviet Union was conducted not just against partisans, but also as cover for annihilating the Reich's ‘ideological enemies’ and plundering ‘bandit areas’ for resources. The Wehrmacht's role was significant, constituting an important element of its wider participation in Nazi crimes. The review sketches the historical background and surveys the historiography's development to the late 1990s. It then examines at length the significant works that have emerged since, dividing them according to the operational levels on which they focus: higher command, individual regions, and, finally, middle-level units.

This review considers how historians have approached the role of ideas in understanding the beginnings of early British abolitionism. It pays particular attention to the work of Eric Williams, Roger Anstey, David Brion Davis, and, most recently, Christopher Leslie Brown. It uses Brown's Moral capital as a point of departure for offering an alternative approach to the role of ideology in early British abolition and about its operation generally.

The Spanish empire's vertiginous collapse in the first decades of the nineteenth century has long been a source of historiographical disputes. Historians seeking to explain the demise of Spain's dominion in the Americas and the emergence of independent nation-states have identified certain factors as decisive. Among these are: the coalescence of an anti-colonial, national consciousness among creoles; peninsular misrule and economic mismanagement; and the seismic effects of geopolitical upheaval, particularly the Napoleonic occupation of Spain. This historiographical review recapitulates established explanations, introduces a new wave of scholarship on the subject, and identifies topics that may be crucial for future research.

The most useful sexual histories are those that provide depth of context without either assuming sexual identity or anticipating its complete absence; those that do not force taxonomies; histories that resist any simple teleological account of a shift from ‘homosexuality’ as sexual excess to the homosexual as a species. This review examines attempts to write such histories – what has recently been termed the ‘new British queer history’. I will focus on some strands of male and female same-sex desires and their expression in England in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: male and female same-sex friendships, effeminacy in men and masculinity in women; and representations of lesbianism. This review discusses these histories of desires that resist present-day sexual assumptions.

Prostitution has been linked by many historians and social commentators to the industrial development and capitalism of the modern age, and there is no better example of this than the prostitution that developed in mining regions from the mid-nineteenth century. Using research on mining-related prostitution, and other social histories of mining communities where prostitution inevitably forms a part, large or small, of the historian's analysis of the mining region, this article will review, contrast, and compare prostitution in various mining contexts, in different national and colonial settings. From the American and Canadian gold rushes in the mid- and late nineteenth century, to the more established mining frontiers of the later North American West, to the corporate mining towns of Chile in the interwar years, to the copper and gold mines of southern Africa and Kenya in the first half of the twentieth century, commercial sex was present and prominent as the mining industry and mining communities developed.1 Challenging the simplistic images and stereotypes of prostitution that are popularly associated with the American mining frontier, historians have shown that prostitution's place in mining communities, and its connection to industrial development, was as complex as it was pervasive and enduring.

This article surveys the literature on American neoconservatism since 1979, emphasizing those monographs which include assessments of developments in neoconservatism since 1995. It analyses the origins of neoconservatism in the anti-Stalinist Left and in the ideological divisions of the Democratic party. It assesses the position of neoconservatism in the American conservative tradition and its influence on Republican party policy. It places neoconservatism within the broader context of American foreign and domestic policy. It examines the emergence of networks of support which have sustained neoconservatives as a group of policy intellectuals independent of universities. It concludes by asking whether neoconservatism can be productively viewed as an expression of American ethnic politics, in particular as a response to the varying guises which anti-Semitism has assumed in the United States. The article asserts that, although commentators on neoconservatism from varying ideological standpoints have avoided the question of the neoconservatives' ethnicity, it offers a plausible explanation for the protean nature and apparent inconsistency of neoconservatism over the last forty years.

Christian ideals of manliness were articulated by writers across the religious spectrum throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At their heart was the shared ideal of the imitation of Christ, an all-encompassing Christian ideal of personhood. Whilst non-partisanship was itself an important ideal, theological differences and disagreements over the strictness of ideals led to accusations that some Christians, attacked as ‘moralists’ or ‘enthusiasts’, undermined or neglected ideals of manliness. At the same time, there were attempts to associate Christian ideals of manliness exclusively with the emerging ‘Evangelical’ party. In the historiography of masculinity in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, however, Christian ideals have often been marginalized, and, when considered, they have tended to be misconstrued by the adoption of church-party approaches. This review offers a detailed critique of Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall's account of Evangelical ideals of manliness in Family fortunes: men and women of the English middle class, 1780–1850 (1987; rev. edn, 2002). Their notion of distinctive ‘Evangelical’ ideals of manliness does not withstand scrutiny, and the key concepts associated with them, including ‘domesticity’, ‘the calling’, ‘the world’, ‘public’, and ‘private’, demand revision. At the same time, they gave insufficient consideration to ‘solitude’ and ‘charity’.