John Rous did more than record the news that reached his isolated parish in Suffolk; he also recorded the local discussions of these reports. The latter practice was potentially dangerous. Two recent royal proclamations had expressly prohibited discussions of “affairs of state,” and, as Rous's diary reveals, these private talks could easily become extended critiques of royal policy. Perhaps for that reason Rous, the local parson, consistently sought to be a moderating influence: “I would alwaies speake the best of that our King and state did, and thinke the best too, till I had good groundes” to do otherwise. Unfortunately for Rous, he found it increasingly difficult to “speake the best” in the mid-1620s as Charles I dissolved parliament after parliament, collected taxes of dubious legality, and experimented with the established church; “our Kings proceedings have caused men's mindes to be incensed, to rove, and projecte.” Popular projections, moreover, led to the edge of “an insurrection”; in such an increasingly tense atmosphere, Rous was fearful that one misplaced word would fuel reports that “the whole state were revolting.”

His most severe trial came in 1627 when Charles I interrupted an otherwise disastrous war against Spain to invade France. The motive for the Ré expedition quite simply baffled Rous's parishioners. When the parson refuted the criticism of Mr. Paine, one of his parishioners, Paine simply “would not heare it by any meanes: but fell in generall to speake distastfully of the voyage and then of our warre with France.”

The myth of the English Reformation is that it did not happen, or that it happened by accident rather than design, or that it was halfhearted and sought a middle way between Catholicism and Protestantism; the point at issue is the identity of the Church of England. The myth was created in two stages, first in the middle years of the seventeenth century, and then from the third decade of the nineteenth century; and in either case it was created by one party within the church, largely consisting of clergy, with a particular motive in mind. This was to emphasize the Catholic continuity of the church over the break of the Reformation, in order to claim that the true representative of the Catholic church within the borders of England and Wales was not the minority loyal to the bishop of Rome, but the church as by law established in 1559 and 1662. In the seventeenth century the group involved was called Arminian by contemporaries, and in later days it came to be labeled High Church, or Laudian, after its chief early representative William Laud. In the nineteenth century the same party revived was known variously as Tractarian, Oxford Movement, High Church, Ritualist, and, most commonly in the twentieth century, Anglo-Catholic. Here are two characteristic quotations from one of the most distinguished of this nineteenth-century group, John Henry Newman, before his departure for Rome and a cardinal's hat. First, when defending himself against the charge of innovation: “We are a ‘Reformed’ Church, not a ‘Protestant’ … the Puritanic spirit spread in Elizabeth's and James's time, and … has been succeeded by the Methodistic. …We, the while, children of the Holy Church, whencesoever brought into it, whether by early training or after thought, have had one voice, that one voice which the Church has had from the beginning." Second, introducing the characteristic Anglican expression of the idea of continuity, the notion of the via media: “A number of distinct notions are included in the notion of Protestantism; and as to all these our Church has taken a Via Media between it and Popery.

This was the confident opening passage in Charles Pooter's entry for 2 November in George Grossmith's famous satire, The Diary of a Nobody, serialized in Punch in 1888. Simultaneously it celebrated the lower-middle-class husband's eager commitment to domesticity and marital harmony and acknowledged, in its reference to an equally popular contemporaneous correspondence series running in the Daily Telegraph, avid lower-middle-class engagement with routine popular press debates on marriage and domestic issues. The Diary's readers are invited to relish the irony in Charles's characteristic exaggeration of his domestic felicity, since they know that before long Carrie's patience will again be tried by another of his pretentious and interfering domestic schemes and ineffectual efforts to assert his household mastery. Such tensions in the Pooter marriage were emblematic of wider insecurities in the lower-middle-class identity.

For over a century Charles Pooter's transparent claim to a gentility, independence, and mastery far above his actual station of a struggling suburban bank clerk has provided the dominant metaphor for lower-middle-class pretension, weakness, and diminished masculinity. His bogus authority was exposed as much at home as at his workplace, the bank, where he paraded as the pompous chief clerk. Indeed it was that theme of false authority, both in private and public, palpable even in his dress, that satirists delighted in puncturing. Grossmith was gratified by the range of the Diary's readership, especially among upper-class personalities.

During the winter of scarcity of 1794, Hannah More wrote “a few moral stories,” drew up a plan for publication and distribution, and sent the package around to her evangelical and bluestocking friends. Their response was enthusiastic; even Horace Walpole abandoned his usual teasing to write back, “I will never more complain of your silence; for I am perfectly convinced that you have no idle, no unemployed moments. Your indefatigable benevolence is incessantly occupied in good works; and your head and your heart make the utmost use of the excellent qualities of both…. Thank you a thousand times for your most ingenious plan; may great success reward you!” Walpole then sent off copies of the plan to the duchess of Gloucester and other aristocratic friends. Following Wilberforce's example, such wealthy philanthropists subscribed over 1,000 pounds to support the project during its first year. Henry Thornton agreed to act as treasurer and Zachary Macaulay as agent, and the ball was rolling.

In March 1795, the Cheap Repository of Moral and Religious Tracts issued its first publications. Prominent evangelicals and gentry worked to distribute them to the rural poor, booksellers, and hawkers and among Sunday schools and charity children. During the Repository's three-year existence, the fifty or so tracts written by Hannah More were supplemented by contributions from fellow evangelicals Thornton, Macaulay, John Venn, and John Newton, the poet William Mason, More's literary friend Mrs. Chapone, her protégée Selina Mills, and her sisters Sally and Patty More and by reprints of old favorites by Isaac Watts and Justice John Fielding.

In March 1761 the diarist Horace Walpole complained that “West Indians, conquerors, nabobs, and admirals” were attacking every parliamentary borough in the general election. Although it lacked statistical proof, this sour observation became an accepted tenet in political histories of Britain written during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Even the one full-length study of nabobs published in 1926 echoes Walpole's refrain; Holzman depicted them as a group of nouveaux riches “determined to raise their power and position to the level of their credit. This precipitated a fierce class strife, which was signalised [sic.] by changes in the ownership of landed estates and pocket boroughs.” The investigations of the Namierite school have long since demolished the myth of an East Indian onslaught on English politics and society in the mid-eighteenth century. Only a handful of novice MPs were returned to parliament in the general elections of 1761 and 1768, and those elected did not constitute a concentrated and coherent East Indian lobby at Westminster.

Yet should Walpole's observation be dismissed so readily? This was an age of ignorance of the nature of the British presence in India, of considerable misgivings over the many effects that an empire of conquest in the east would have on Britain, and of a resultant lack of enthusiasm for an Asian empire. The leading historian of the British connection with India in the eighteenth century has recently pointed out that this reluctance derived in part from fears that it would upset not only the social and political, but also the moral underpinnings of established society.

During the first half of the sixteenth century, the English gentry came to realize that its continued access to the controls of power would depend less on birth and military prowess and more on literacy and learning. As a result, the sons of gentlemen flooded into the grammar schools, where they acquired a good knowledge of classical Latin and, rather less commonly, the rudiments of Greek. Together with the languages of the ancients, the schoolboys imbibed at least something of classical ideals. Principally they learned the duty of service to the common weal, a service to be expressed politically. That ideal had permeated Roman education and, through the writings of humanist educational theorists such as Erasmus, was embodied in the curricula of the English grammar schools and universities. Young men were trained in the arts of argument. They learned the trick of compiling a commonplace book, under whose artfully devised headings they entered the “flowers” of their reading. Then, when occasion demanded it, in conversation or letter, in the law courts or parliament, they could search out the appropriate topos, in their memories or in their notes, and bring to bear the weight of classical (and even modern) wisdom. So much, indeed, might be learned by all grammar school boys. Those who proceeded to the universities added further weapons to their armories. Since the universities existed principally to train theologians and preachers, a function whose importance increased as it became necessary to defend English Protestantism from the attacks of Catholics and separatists, they emphasized dialectic.

Between 1848 and 1853 a series of major peace congresses was held—in Brussels (1848), Paris (1849), Frankfurt (1850), London (1851), Manchester (1853), and Edinburgh (1853). This midcentury period was one of great confidence and optimism in the likely success of the cause. Indeed, reading the reports of the congresses today, one is struck by the at times naive overoptimism of many delegates. This may in part have been the product of the millenarian atmosphere of the period. However, it has to be said that the congresses were also characterized by a strong sense of the practicality of their proposals and the steady progress toward their goal that implementation of such proposals would achieve. Above all, the efflorescence of the peace movement in the short six years around the midcentury was the product of a class confidence, of a momentary triumphalism that inspired a section of the bourgeoisie to believe that the scourge of war could be eradicated at last.

The nineteenth-century peace movement effectively began with the establishment toward the end of the Napoleonic Wars, independently and virtually simultaneously, of peace societies in the United States and Britain. They were dominated by men of religion, particularly Quakers, and for a quarter of a century their work was essentially that of proselytizing the peace cause through publicity, petitions, and lecture tours. In connection with the last, the London Peace Society sent emissaries on tours of continental Europe in the early 1840s to spread the peace message.

A recent article in the Calcutta magazine Desh outlined the exploits of a revolutionary fighting for “national freedom” against the British Empire. The article related how, during wartime, this revolutionary traveled secretly to secure the aid of Britain's enemies in starting a rebellion in his country. His mission failed, but this “selfless patriot” gained immortality as a nationalist hero. For an Indian—and particularly a Bengali—audience, the logical protagonist of this story would be the Bengali nationalist leader Subhas Chandra Bose. Bose, the former president of the Indian National Congress, assumed the leadership of the Indian National Army with the support of the Japanese imperial government during the Second World War in the hopes of freeing India from British rule. The subject of the story, however, was not Bose, but the United Irishmen leader Theobald Wolfe Tone and his efforts in 1796 to secure assistance for an Irish rebellion from the government of Revolutionary France. The article went on to narrate how Ireland had been held in the “grip of imperialism” for an even longer period of time than India and concluded that the Irish and Indian nationalist movements were linked by a history of rebellion against British rule.

As the Desh article illustrates, the popular image of the relationship between Ireland and India within the British Empire has been that of two subject peoples striving for national freedom. This linkage of Irish and Indian history has had particular resonance in Bengal.

Centenary commemorations can have their ironies. If we look from 1783 to 1883 to 1983, we see a rise in the status of centenaries, and a decline in the status of Algernon Sidney. This is, I think, the first time that a centenary of the Whig martyrdoms has been publicly observed. But it is not the first time one has been noticed. Soon after the first centenary, a play in London by the Irish clergyman Thomas Stratford about Sidney's fellow martyr Lord Russell, apparently a theatrical disaster of some magnitude, remarked on the passage of “one hundred years since godlike Russell bled” and portrayed Sidney as “Brutus of England,” whose “pulse beats with rapture at the sound of freedom.” Eleven years later, in the north German town of Kiel, the eighteen-year-old Barthold Georg Niebuhr—who was to exert so strong an influence on Ranke—celebrated as a “consecrated day” the “anniversary of Algernon Sidney's death.” (He got the day wrong, but that was an error common enough during the process of sanctification that raised Sidney's virtues above the chronological detail in which they had found reflection.) Niebuhr noted gloomily that, although Sidney's name and his “brilliant talents” were widely known, “perhaps there are not fifty persons in all Germany who have taken the pains to inform themselves accurately about his life and fortunes.” I doubt if there are fifty today.

By 1648 in England many of parliament's supporters believed that peace was as far away as ever. The members of parliament who had declared they were fighting to rescue the king from the hands of his evil counsellors may have rethought their views about the personal responsibility of the king, but they still believed that the only viable settlement would be one based upon agreement between king and parliament. Consequently they had dispatched, with wearisome monotony, negotiators and messengers with propositions for peace to the king. Their initiatives were always destroyed in the last resort because Charles refused the terms offered, but apart from governing without him for the time being, the members of parliament could think of nothing else but a settlement based on agreement with Charles. The political thinking of the majorities in both Houses was bound by convention: a king was essential. Outside parliament, pamphleteers had questioned the importance of the king, but parliament's view was not seriously threatened until 1647 when it showed itself incapable of settling the kingdom and the Army showed a willingness to intervene in politics. The outbreak of the second Civil War in 1648 convinced the soldiers that parliament's policies of either seeking terms with the king or of ignoring him were alike futile and dangerous. So long as Charles remained alive, at the center of royalist hopes, so long would wars continue and lives be lost. At this point the Army spoke of the king in a new way.

Nation-making, said Canadian journalist Sir John Willison, was one of Canada's infant industries. Canada had first become a nation in 1867, and, according to party literature, with every subsequent change of government “we have been made a nation over again.” Sir John was not exaggerating the number of times that writers have made Canada a nation, and, since historians have often been employed in the same nation-making industry, this paper will concern itself with the problem of the historian in dealing with the conceptions of “nationalism” and “imperialism” in Canada and other colonies of British settlement.

The study of nationalism in British settlement colonies is hampered by difficulties of terminology, conceptualization, and ideological inflection. Looseness of word-usage, such as using “nation” for both state or country and as a word to describe a group of people with some common features, constitutes a major difficulty, especially when historians accept the looseness uncritically and without analysis. Sometimes “national” is used as a euphemism for the policy of protection – Sir John A. Macdonald's Canadian National Policy was originally little more than that. The same term was used by Queensland's Premier McIllwraith in 1882, and there “national” could only have meant the economic development of the Queensland “nation.” “National” sometimes simply means a geographic whole or a common, central institution – that is, a “national” government can merely mean one government governing four provinces, or six states. The word can even, as in “national schools,” mean non-denominational.

The nineteenth century was the century of the penitentiary. Public and physical punishments (from whipping to the death penalty) were gradually replaced by the less visible, less corporal sanction of imprisonment. By the start of the Victorian era, imprisonment was the predominant penalty in the system of judicial punishments. For every 1,000 offenders sentenced at higher and summary courts in 1836 for serious (or indictable) offenses, 685 were punished by imprisonment in local prisons. By midcentury, moreover, sentences of penal servitude in convict prisons were plugging the gap left by the end of transportation to Australia. The three hundred or so local prisons in the 1830s, to which offenders were sent for anywhere between one day and two years (though typically for terms of less than three months), were locally controlled until 1877 and were less than uniform in regime. The separate system of prison discipline (or cellular isolation) increasingly prevailed over the silent system (or associated, silent labor), but it was subject to considerable local modification. Convict prisons were run by central government with less variability.

During the last decade, there has been a steady growth in scholarship concerning the moral and philosophical dimensions of Adam Smith's economic theory. The reasons are various: a determination to take Smith out of the dark shadow cast on him by Karl Marx, the perceived intellectual impoverishment of socialism, and an historical concern for tracing the peculiarly Scottish dimensions of the Wealth of Nations (1776). This renewed interest in Smith appears to be more than a sudden intellectual fashion. The now completed publication of the “Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith” provides the basis for the work of systematically reconstructing Smith's intellectual career. Most students of Smith would agree that at the moment this work of reconstruction has just begun.

One of the curious features of recent Adam Smith scholarship has been its perfunctory treatment of “das Adam Smith Problem,” a problem that once seemed at the very center of understanding the moral and philosophical dimensions of Smith's work. In the last decades of the nineteenth century a group of German scholars coined that phrase to describe what they saw as a possibly fundamental break between the assumptions that guided Smith's first work, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), and those that supported the economic theory of his later work, the Wealth of Nations. On the one hand, Smith's explanation of moral judgment was based upon the psychological principle of “sympathy,” a capacity inherent in every individual which allows a person to “enter into” the situation of another and thereby bring his own “sentiments” into accord with those of his fellow.

The transformation of patriotism into nationalism has become one of the accepted grand narratives of eighteenth-century British history. From its first appearance in English in the 1720s, “patriotism” as a political slogan expressed devotion to the common good of the patria and hostility to sectional interests and became a staple of oppositional politics. Though it was attacked by ministerialist writers, it was a liability only for those like the elder Pitt, whose attachment to patriotism when in opposition was not matched by his behavior when in government. However, the Wilkesite agitations and the debate over the American War decisively tainted patriotism with the whiff of factious reformism, and it was in just this context, in 1775, that Dr. Samuel Johnson famously redefined patriotism as “the last refuge of a scoundrel.” In the following half century, both radicals and loyalists fought over the appropriation of patriotism: the radicals to rescue it from the contempt into which it had fallen in the 1770s, the loyalists and the government to harness its potent discourse of national duty for the cause of monarchical revivalism and aggressive anti-Gallicanism. It is now generally agreed that the conservatives won, as the oppositional language of the early and mid-eighteenth century was thereby transformed into “an officially constructed patriotism which stressed attachment to the monarchy, the importance of empire, the value of military and naval achievement, and the desirability of strong, stable government by a virtuous, able and authentically British elite.”