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Scotland was unique in Western Europe in continuing to accord legal validity to irregular marriage until 1939 with one form of irregular marriage remaining legal until 2006. This article examines official attitudes to irregular marriage in Scotland in the period 1855–1939 as well as its incidence and popularity amongst the populace. The article argues that irregular marriage was narrowly defined by the authorities as meaning those irregular marriages that had been registered. Other forms of irregular marriage were often deemed to be cohabitation or concubinage which was regarded as morally reprehensible. However, authorities, including Poor Law officers, could also be flexible and sympathetic in their treatment of couples who lived together where the law was perceived to be rigid. Although it is impossible to quantify the numbers of couples who lived in non-registered informal unions, the evidence suggests that there were significant numbers but that in the majority of cases couples cohabited because they were unable to marry for legal, religious, or financial reasons. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article reconstructs the seventeenth-century Dutch debate about the proper method to reconstruct the biblical temples of Jerusalem. It examines the involvement of Willem Goeree (1635–1711), an expert in architectural theory, in this debate which was dominated by philologically trained scholars. The article suggests that the clash between professional exegetes and a lay theologian like Goeree allows us to see hermeneutical debates of the early Enlightenment in a new light. While the skilled professional aspired to make arcane Temple scholarship accessible to a wider lay audience, theologians denied him the competence to do so, insisting on the primacy of sacred philology in interpreting the Bible. This case thus moves outside of the dogma vs reason dichotomy which dominates historiography concerning early modern biblical interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article is a revised and expanded version of my inaugural lecture as Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Cambridge, delivered on 12 March 2014. It highlights the evolution of Ecclesiastical History to include the study of Christianity in the global south and shows how recent developments in the study of African and world history have produced a dynamic and multi-faceted model of religious encounter, an encounter which includes the agency of indigenous Christians alongside the activities of missionaries. Investigating the contribution of faith missionaries to the production of colonial knowledge in Belgian Congo, the article challenges stereotypes about the relations between Pentecostalism and modernity, and between mission and empire. Throughout, consideration is given to the range of missionary sources, textual, visual, and material, and their utility in reconstructing social differentiation in African societies, particularly in revealing indigenous African criticism of ‘custom’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines travel within a group of Protestant families from Ireland over three generations after the Restoration. It offers both a case-study through which to reassess continental educational voyages, exploring a neglected period between the royalist exile of the 1650s and the mid-eighteenth-century heyday of the Grand Tour, and a contribution to current work on Irish elite formation. Histories of travel often begin as undifferentiated Englishmen or Britons arrive on the French or Dutch coast, but this study is the first to prioritize where travellers came from. Backgrounds, outlooks, and networks from home shaped experiences abroad. The article uses manuscript journals, letters, and financial accounts to locate travel within family educational strategies and to reconstruct preparations and advice. It explores how connections and identifications from home informed interactions with fellow travellers, expatriate communities, and foreign hosts. Travellers pursued two-sided interactions with hosts and destinations, returning with objects, accomplishments, and connections that fed into Irish elite formation. Continental links often feature in explanations of how Catholic Ireland survived, but this article shows that European encounters also contributed to Protestant hegemony. It demonstrates the importance of origins, as well as destinations, to understandings and experiences of educational travel. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The entrance of women into the male-dominated spheres of the professions and the arts has been a major theme of women's and gender history in nineteenth-century Britain. In general, historians have located this development primarily in the second half of the century and depicted it as an important corollary to the political aims of the wider women's movement. In contrast, this article contends that an overlooked earlier context for the formation and emergence of ideas of female professionalism and artistry were the debates surrounding female singers in the press between c. 1820 and 1850. In this era, writers in newly emerging specialist music periodicals increasingly advocated a view of female singers as both professionals and artists. Such views did not dominate discourse, however. There remained a great deal of ambivalence even in specialist publications about just how far female singers should pursue the lifestyle of the professional artist, while in the mainstream press very different attitudes towards female singers prevailed. Although female musical professionalism and artistry therefore remained contested concepts, this article highlights the significance of these debates about female singers as an important source for the new ideas about women's professional and artistic work emerging in nineteenth-century British society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores whether the British decision-makers and public were conscious of the habit-forming nature of opium at the time of the Chinese war of 1839–42, the First Opium War. While most political historians have assumed that the British authorities understood the nature of the drug, social historians argue that notions of addiction only arose, in Britain, at the end of the nineteenth century. Examining the abundant press, pamphlet, and parliamentary literature generated by the war debate, this article examines in what terms opium use was characterized. It considers the groups that intervened on both sides of the debate and draws lessons from the arguments they deployed for and against the war. Situating the source literature within the context of early Victorian values and mores, finally, it argues that the British leaders and political nation were aware of the drug's habit-forming properties. Not only was it widely recognized that it was something dangerous that was being introduced, at the point of a gun, into China, but there can be said to have existed, in Britain, a layman's notion of drug addiction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the final years of French rule in India. It questions the established narrative of the merger of the French settlements, which implied that they were always a ‘natural’ part of the Indian Union. It argues, on the contrary, that a full merger was only one of several possibilities for the various actors involved in the negotiations that took place between the independence of India in 1947 and the French withdrawal in 1954. Even those who supported a merger did so for different reasons, while a significant proportion opposed the merger on economic, social, and historical grounds. By examining more closely the opposing positions in the merger debate, we can locate them within the larger tensions of early post-colonial India – a new state that was struggling to define its geographical and ideological boundaries. This suggests that the decolonization of French India was not simply another chapter in French imperial decline; it was also an important example of Indian nation-building. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In their published memoirs of the Peninsular War, a surprising number of British officers mentioned visits to Portuguese convents and openly confessed to having flirted with the sisters – occasionally to the point of outright seduction – and abandoned them when the regiment moved on. This seems like a very negative self-fashioning to modern readers, but can best be understood in the context of the political and cultural climate in which these memoirs were produced. This article argues that officers' descriptions of convent visiting and their professions of sympathy for cloistered women revealed the influence of gothic, erotic, romantic, and travel literature on military life writing. Their depiction of nuns differed from nuns’ portrayal by common soldiers due to its infusion with masculine ideals of chivalry and sensibility. Elite memoirists saw no need to justify their abandonment of nuns because they viewed it in light of other literary accounts of soldiers who broke nuns’ hearts. At the same time, they contrasted themselves with the barbarism of the French, believing themselves to be far more compassionate and tolerant of Catholic strictures. Officers’ portrayals of Portuguese sisters can thus also be seen as an expression of Britons’ sense of their relationship with Portugal in the war. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the criminal law reform career of James Mackintosh (1765–1832). As Recorder of Bombay (1804–11), writer and Whig MP (1813–32), Mackintosh engaged with diverse aspects of criminal law. His view of the organic relationship between law, society, and public opinion, which was shaped by his Scottish intellectual background and Foxite Whig politics, was distinct from the radical and liberal political perspectives most often associated with criminal law reform. The article traces the implications of Mackintosh's approach for the practice of politics and legislation in the period and suggests cause to revise assessments of its outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article looks at the attempts made by British governments after the Seven Years War to reduce colonial consumption of continental European manufactures. It begins by sketching the pre-war background, focusing first on the availability of European goods in North America and the Caribbean and then on British debates about foreign commodity penetration of the Atlantic colonies. The next part charts the emergence after 1763 of a political consensus in London on the need to give British goods added advantage in American markets. The article goes on to suggest reasons for the forming of this consensus, and finally considers the success of the measures introduced by British governments to diminish colonial purchases of European products. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the enrollment of a brigade of armed volunteers which took place in Great Britain in summer 1860 to help the Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi in southern Italy. Through the narrative strategies used to promote the enlistment and the images of the brigade that circulated in both Great Britain and Italy, it reveals features of a cosmopolitanism of nations and of a commitment based on transnational values spread in the nineteenth century. This article argues that the narratives used to mobilize men for a foreign cause not only shared values of freedom, justice, fraternity among nations, and a romantic appeal, but they had a strong national connotation. It was British pride in its freedom and constitution that gave the power and legitimacy to interfere in foreign affairs. Moreover, joining foreign causes strengthened a sentiment of British national pride and identity. The Legion's organizational and disciplinary problems also shed light on the biases and difficulties that troubled these kinds of expeditions and on the latent contradictions between a sense of patriotic duty, the transnational ideals that dominated the rhetoric, and the underlying disillusionment and frustration of the daily routine. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 provided monetary independence to the newly established Irish Free State. The existing historiography views Irish monetary and banking policy post-independence as following British precedent in terms of the structure and design of state monetary institutions. However, this article considers how Professor Henry Parker-Willis's experience of establishing the United States (US) Federal Reserve system in 1913 had a direct impact on his work as chair of the Irish banking commission in 1926. This research highlights that Parker-Willis played a significantly more important role in formulating the Irish Currency Act 1927 than is currently recognized. It further identifies that Parker-Willis's design for a wholly independent, non-political Irish currency commission was primarily based on his disillusionment with the political interference then evident in the management of the Federal Reserve system. This article, therefore, challenges the dominant view that Irish monetary institution building in the 1920s automatically followed British precedent, but rather identifies the direct influence of US monetary structures on the development of Irish institutions. This is an internationalist dimension not recognized in the existing historiography. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In September 1579, at the height of an intense political debate over her prospective marriage to the duke of Anjou, Elizabeth I visited New Hall, the country seat of the match's greatest supporter within England, Thomas Radcliffe, third earl of Sussex. Her entertainment on that occasion, hitherto completely unknown, was described in a letter, printed here, from one Norfolk gentleman, Sir Edward Clere, to another, Bassingbourne Gawdy. The letter describes the dramatic performances and other entertainments provided for the queen, which included coded but unmistakeable encouragements for her to proceed with the marriage. This article discusses the ways in which this was done and their consequences for our knowledge of the Anjou marriage debate as a political episode, suggesting that Sussex sought to use the entertainment to boost the participation of more conservative members of the nobility in government. It also explores how this evidence affects our picture of Elizabethan courtly entertainments, and particularly their non-dramatic elements. Finally, it discusses Clere's letter itself as an insight into the nature of gentry news culture, particularly with regard to matters of high politics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The importance of the honours system as an institution in British politics and public life has frequently been underestimated. At the end of the First World War, the British government prioritized voluntary service to the state as an area which the honours system should reward more than others through the newly created Order of the British Empire. However, after the war the Order changed to focus more on civil servants, soldiers, and the broad category of ‘local service’. The latter could include volunteers, but more often did not. Various attempts to democratize honours through reforms from the 1960s focused on rewarding a wider range of service. The most successful of these was John Major's honours reform programme in 1993, which returned volunteer service to the forefront of the public image of honours. While these reforms were not as egalitarian as they seemed, they were successful because they integrated an ideology of crown honours with the other functions of the modern monarchy and opened up the honours system to a wider potential set of recipients. At the same time, they maintained a hierarchical structure that meant that elites who had traditionally enjoyed the exclusivity of high honours continued to do so. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Street vending was a common feature in many towns in early modern Europe. However, peddlers and hawkers often operated outside the official framework, lacking permission from governments and guilds. The impact of their informal status has hitherto not featured very extensively in historical studies. This article assesses the impact of policing of street vendors by looking at familiar source materials in a new way. Rather than solely focusing on those people who were ultimately punished, this article investigates the full process of policing and prosecution of street traders in eighteenth-century Dutch towns. It exposes that apart from those receiving a formal punishment, many more traders could suffer from policing activities, and that particular groups of street vendors were more vulnerable than others due to the specific dynamics of local power relations. As such, this article provides new insights into policing and social control, while also offering wider lessons for our understanding of the relationship between the formal and informal economy in pre-industrial Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The use by British crowds of victorious admirals to articulate patriotic and libertarian ideas during the wars of the long eighteenth century is well known. But conflict also posed awkward questions about masculinity and issues surrounding it. Was military prowess compatible with politeness, with religiosity? During the 1790s, the fight to the death with revolutionary France made such questions hard to ignore, being compounded by the fact that Britain's most celebrated leader – Nelson – was not a paragon of virtue. This article shows how evangelicals sought to resolve these tensions by advancing a different set of ideals founded on piety and professionalism: by finding heroes of their own. This has crucial consequences for our understanding of how they and the ideas they championed became so prominent in late Hanoverian public life. In contradistinction to recent work suggesting that they exploited causes that were already popular – moral reform, antislavery – this article shows how they advanced a powerful providential narrative in which Christian heroes and godly policy were what made Britain great, a narrative whose veracity was ‘proven’ by wartime successes, especially in the navy, and which would remain highly influential well into the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Beyond the repression of the national waves of food rioting during the subsistence crises of the 1790s, workers in the English countryside lost the will and ability to mobilize. Or so the historical orthodoxy goes. Such a conceptualization necessarily positions the ‘Bread or Blood’ riots of 1816, the Swing rising of 1830, and, in particular, the agrarian trade unionism practised at Tolpuddle in 1834 as exceptional events. This article offers a departure by placing Tolpuddle into its wider regional context. The unionists at Tolpuddle, it is shown, were not making it up as they went along but instead acted in ways consistent with shared understandings and experiences of collective action and unionism practised throughout the English west. In so doing, it pays particular attention to the forms of collective action – and judicial responses – that extended between different locales and communities and which joined farmworkers, artisans, and industrial workers together. So conceived, Tolpuddle was not an exception. Rather, it can be more usefully understood as a manifestation of deeply entrenched cultures, an episode that assumes its historical potency because of its subsequent politicized representations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers British society's response to the suspension of cash payments in February 1797. Although this event marked the beginning of the so-called Bank Restriction Period, during which the Bank of England's notes were inconvertible, there have been no detailed studies on the social and political situation surrounding the suspension. This article provides an in-depth examination of the events leading up to and immediately following the suspension. It questions existing accounts of the suspension as a smooth transition into the nationwide use of paper money and describes the complex process that came into play to avert a nationwide financial collapse. The decision to suspend the Bank's cash payments stemmed from deep-rooted financial instability, exacerbated by recurrent invasion scares that heightened after the French attempt on Bantry Bay, Ireland, in December 1796. Under such circumstances, national support for drastic financial measures could not be taken for granted. The article demonstrates that the declaration movement, which was a form of consolidated and visualized trust in the financial system, played a crucial role in the 1797 suspension crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From the 1820s to the 1850s, the British Indian state undertook its final major phase of expansion to assume the approximate geographical extent it retained until its demise in 1947. It confronted at its north-eastern and north-western outskirts seemingly intractable mountains, deserts, and jungles inhabited by apparently stateless ‘tribal’ peoples. In its various attempts to comprehend and deal with these human and material complexities, the colonial state undertook projects of spatial engagement that were often confused and ineffective. Efforts to produce borders and frontier areas to mark the limits of administered British India were rarely authoritative and were reworked by colonial officials and local inhabitants alike. Bringing together diverse examples of bordering and territory-making from peripheral regions of South Asia that are usually treated separately lays bare the limits of the colonial state's power and its ambivalent attitude towards spatial forms and technologies that are conventionally taken to be key foundations of modern states. These cases also intervene in the burgeoning political geography literature on boundary-making, suggesting that borders and the territories they delimit are not stable objects but complex and fragmented entities, performed and contested by dispersed agencies and therefore prone to endless fluctuation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article uses new archival evidence and the growing literature on religion and the foreign relations of the United States to reinterpret the Peace Corps. The religious revival of the 1950s continued into the 1960s, and the Kennedy administration saw ‘spiritual values’ as part of the national interest. Church–state politics and Kennedy's public conception of the role of religion in foreign relations dictated that this aspect of the cold war would change in form. The Peace Corps should, in part, be seen as a continuation of the religious cold war, one that drew on the precedents of missionary and church-service organizations. The Corps was a counterpart to church groups working abroad, and hoped to subcontract much of its work to them. Kennedy hoped to work with religious groups in ecumenical fashion. As Catholic organizations were most visibly interested in receiving Corps funds, funding church groups proved politically unworkable, leading to church–state arguments that Kennedy wanted to avoid. The Kennedy administration struggled to separate the secular and the sacred, as confused definitions of ‘religion’ and a tough constitutional stance narrowed policy options. The Peace Corps fight shaped, and was shaped by, contemporary debates over church and state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Following the rediscovery of the ‘Christ's copy’ in 1944, Peter Laslett's decision to use it as the copy-text of his edition of John Locke's Two treatises of government (1960) was, in more ways than one, a landmark event. It not only revitalized an entire generation of academic study in the field of Lockean scholarship and, more broadly, in the history of political thought, but has also had a lasting impact in as much as Laslett's edition has remained, since then, the reference text that scholars use, persuaded as they have been by Laslett that it represents ‘the version which would have satisfied Locke at the time of his death’. However, by re-examining the Christ's copy in the light of a near contemporary testimony unknown to Laslett, this article reveals that, with its three layers of corrections, the Christ's copy seems to be a richer palimpsest than what has so far been supposed, belonging as much to the francophone world of Huguenot exile as to an anglophone publishing schedule, and represents, as such, an artefact of transcultural relations. This article therefore challenges Laslett's interpretation of the nature and purpose of the Christ's copy, and thereby questions his editorial decision. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article analyses the historical conditions for, and implications of, the attitudes and conduct of a number of prominent or influential public intellectuals in the United States during the Great War. It argues that many intellectuals, particularly those who supported American entry to the war, shared a general lack of concern with the realities of full-scale warfare. Their response to the war had little to do with the war itself – its political and economic causes, brutal and industrial character, and human and material costs. Rather, their positions were often based on their views of culture and philosophy, or on their visions of the post-war world. As a result, relatively few of these intellectuals fully considered the political, social, and economic context in which the catastrophe occurred. The war, to many of them, was primarily a clash of civilizations, a battle of good versus evil, civilized democracy versus barbaric savagery, progress versus backwardness, culture versus kultur. The article describes several manifestations of American intellectual approaches to the war, discusses the correlation between intellectual and general public attitudes, and concludes with some implications for thinking about the relationship between intellectuals and war in more recent American history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Zeroing in on private garden plots, the article discusses the manner in which Germans portrayed themselves in relation to displaced persons (DPs) – former foreign workers, Allied prisoners-of-war (POWs), and concentration camp inmates – in immediate post-Second World War Hanover. Challenging the notion that a coherent narrative of German victimization truly emerged only in the 1950s, the article reveals how German gardeners already articulated loudly a discourse through which they sought to depict themselves as decent, hard-working sufferers, while portraying displaced persons as immoral and dangerous perpetrators. The plots of garden owners, as foci of German yearnings for Heimat, came particularly under threat. Germans cherished such sites, not only because they provided the opportunity for procuring additional sustenance amidst a post-war world of scarcity, but because they symbolized longings to inhabit a peaceful, productive, and beautiful space into which the most turbulent history could not enter, and upon which a stable future could be constructed. Only with the removal of DPs could Germans claim for themselves the status of victims, while branding DPs perpetrators, and reaffirm past patterns of superiority and inferiority in both ethical and racial terms. In so doing, Germans could realize the innocence integral for achieving Heimat and establish democratic stability after 1945. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of the more difficult practical questions raised by the English Reformation was just how to support its clergy and its fabric. Despite extensive resistance from the godly members of church and state, the Elizabethan church maintained the pre-Reformation system of impropriations, lay ownership of ecclesiastical tithes. This article examines the historical, practical, and ideological stakes of these everyday economics in the late sixteenth century. It argues that the majority of impropriators were responsive to the needs of the church, sustaining rather than undermining the nascent English church. In the space opened up by the Reformation's rents in the social and physical fabric of the parish, new bonds between church, state, and society were knit. This process of building the post-Reformation church thus tied the laity closer to the interests and activities of the church in England. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The provenance of the dreadnought battle-cruiser and its significance with respect to the Anglo-German naval rivalry has generated sharp scholarly disagreement. This article reviews the work of four historians who have wrestled with the battle-cruiser issue in order to evaluate their different approaches to the evidence and conflicting conclusions. It then identifies hitherto unnoticed connections between the battle cruiser, a redefinition of the two-Power standard, and the financing of the 1908 Old Age Pensions Act. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article throws light on how the issue of conservation stood in tension with imperial hunting and exploitation in colonial India. The indiscriminate slaughter of wildlife and the declining numbers of game species in nineteenth-century India gave rise to a need for conservation, but with a caveat. Wildlife conservation, consequently, was aimed at the expansion of colonial economy and infrastructural development. Thus, in colonial India, wild predators that posed a threat to such interests were ruthlessly decimated and those animals that were useful for the smooth functioning of the British colonial rule were overlooked. This, in part, was also necessitated by the British seeking to establish their credentials as rulers, which explains the reason the colonial government's conservation programme was fundamentally selective and guided by expediency. The comparative perspective on elephants and tigers elucidates how the former were protected by the law because of the critical role they played in the colonial economy and administration, whilst the latter were ruthlessly exterminated for the threat they posed to the same. This article especially argues that the reasons for conserving elephants and decimating tigers in colonial India were more practical and economic than a mere reflection of cultural sensitivity on the part of the colonizers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A number of late eighteenth-century English parliamentary reformers synthesized arguments based upon reason and natural law with appeals to the ‘ancient constitution’. This article aims to examine how such reformers were able to move to a democratic view of political agency while maintaining a rhetorically powerful appeal to constitutionalist precedent. It will examine how three of these radicals, John Cartwright, Granville Sharp, and Capel Lofft, collaborated in their utilization of the latent natural law maxims of the English common law, reviving the rationalist potential of the jurisprudence of Edward Coke and Christopher St Germain to democratize the seventeenth-century Whig conception of the ancient constitution. It will thereby show how reformers in the 1770s and 1780s challenged the domestic and imperial political status quo by exploiting the underlying ambiguities of the intellectual resources of their own ‘respectable’ legal and political tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most of the existing literature on the ‘Repeal Year’ agitation in Ireland explains the rise in popularity of the 1842–3 campaign for repeal of the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland in political and religious terms. This article argues that, in addition, the British government's economic policy of reducing tariffs in 1842 damaged Ireland's agricultural economy and increased popular support for the Repeal movement. Using both qualitative and quantitative analysis, this article shows that the tariff reductions and import relaxations of the 1842 budget had an immediate negative impact on Irish real incomes by reducing agricultural prices. A negative relationship between these prices and the Repeal rent, together with the economic rhetoric of Repeal in favour of protection, indicate a link between the economic downturn and the rise in the popularity of Repeal. This article concludes that Peel's trade policy changes of 1842 should therefore be added to the traditional religious and political explanations as a cause behind the sudden surge in popularity of the Repeal movement between 1842 and 1843. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the second half of the nineteenth century, British social purity campaigners framed the pornography trade as a major source of cultural and moral pollution. As in their anti-prostitution efforts, purity campaigners presented the abolition of pornography as an attempt to protect women, children, and impressionable members of the lower classes from sexual immorality. Their rhetoric and policy efforts, however, reveal deeply entrenched fears of middle-class vulnerability to the negative effects of pornographic literature and images. Building on existing obscenity studies scholarship, this article explores the role of class and gender tension in nineteenth-century pornography regulation. In contrast to the majority of work on Victorian pornography, this article focuses on the British lower classes as producers and distributors rather than consumers of pornography. In addition, this article argues for a higher level of female participation in the pornography trade than has been previously recognized. By focusing on the contradictions and biases at the heart of campaigns against pornography, this article explores the ways in which regulation efforts and discourses of obscenity were shaped by the class and gender dynamics of the pornography trade. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article looks at central government's role, focusing on the parliamentary terms 1959–64 and 1964–6, in directing the way in which local authorities enacted the central area redevelopment schemes of the 1960s. The first two sections review the substantial but little-studied literature produced across the political spectrum about central area urban renewal in the period 1959–64. Section III uses the Joint Urban Planning Group, a group set up within the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, as a case-study to show how modernist approaches to redevelopment became operative within a government department. The Joint Urban Planning Group has received no attention from historians. Section IV discusses the fate of these ideas during Labour's first term after the 1964 election. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Conservatives usually play down their intellectual credentials because it provides them with an effective means of distancing themselves from the ‘doctrinaire’ or the intellectualized politics of the left. But this approach was challenged by a significant group of Conservative MPs and intellectuals during the interwar period. Conservatives wrote articles for a range of periodicals, which were still important channels of communication for the sharing of political ideas between the wars. Stanley Baldwin banned government ministers from publishing independent journalism, which meant that it was mainly young, ambitious, or marginalized Conservative MPs who wrote for periodicals. When left-wing sentiment started to swell up during the Second World War, some Conservative supporters started to question the interwar leadership's neglect of the party's intellectual and publishing culture. It was now thought that the Conservative party lacked a convincing media-based popular ideology to compete with the left. But if Baldwin prioritized other aspects of the interwar party's appeal, the intellectual culture of Conservatism still acted as an important barrier to communist and fascist thought in elite political circles. This culture also had important resonances for the party in the post-war period because it contributed to its self-evaluation and policy restatements after 1945. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents a new perspective on Elizabethan puritanism. In particular, it examines the ways in which the memory of Marian conformity continued to influence religious and political controversy during the reign of Elizabeth I. Drawing upon extensive archival evidence, it focuses on moments when the chequered pasts of Queen Elizabeth, William Cecil, and other chief officers of English church and state were called into question by puritan critics. In contrast to the prevailing narrative of Elizabethan triumphalism, it argues that late Tudor religion and politics were shaped by lingering puritan distrust of those who had revealed a propensity for idolatry by conforming during the Marian persecution. This fraught history of religious conformity meant that, for some puritans, the Church of England had been built on unstable foundations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Beethoven the revolutionary is fading from history. Ossified by the Romantic tradition and, under the pressure of recent revision, reconsidered as conservative and prone to power worship, Beethoven's music has been drained of its radical essence. Yet his compositions also evoked the sonic impact of revolution – its aesthetic of natural violence and terrifying sublime – and so created an aural image of revolutionary action. Through stylistic appropriations of Luigi Cherubini and others, Beethoven imported the rhetorical tropes of French revolutionary composition to the more culturally conservative environment of Vienna. But where the music of revolutionary Paris accompanied concerted political action, the Viennese music that echoed its exhortative rhetoric played to audiences that remained politically mute. This inertia was the result of both a Viennese mode of listening that encouraged a solely internalized indulgence in revolution, and a Beethovenian musical rhetoric that both goaded and satisfied latent political radicalism. Far from rallying the public to the figurative barricades, then, the radical content of Beethoven's music actually helped satiate – and thereby stymie – the outward expression of rebellion in Vienna. This article is a bid to reaffirm the revolutionary in Beethoven. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This review is intended to examine the development of representations of elves and fairies in British culture between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries. It will argue that a very clear two-stage evolution in those representations can be found in literary sources, from an inchoate range found in different kinds of text, with no apparent collective identity, to a coherent sense of a kingdom, to which the common word ‘fairy’ could be applied, to an intense interest in, and discussion of, the nature of fairies. The first development occurred in the late middle ages, and the second after the Reformation, and both were pan-British phenomena. These literary changes were, moreover, paralleled at each stage, and perhaps responsible for, changes in perception in culture at large. The alterations in representations of these non-human beings, with no clear status in Christian theology, may have wider implications for an understanding of late medieval and early modern cultural history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses the social, cultural, and political history of backstreet abortion in post-war Britain, focusing on the murders of Beryl Evans and her daughter Geraldine, at Ten Rillington Place in 1949. It shows how the commonplace connection of John Christie to abortion and Beryl Evan's death was not a given in the wider public, legal, political, and forensic imagination of the time, reflecting the multi-layered and shifting meanings of abortion from the date of the original trials in the late 1940s and 1950s, through the subsequent judicial and literary reinvestigations of the case in the 1960s, to its cinematic interpretation in the 1970s. Exploring the language of abortion used in these different contexts, the article reveals changes in the gendering of abortionists, the increasing power and presence of abortion activists and other social reformers, the changing representation of working-class women and men, and the increasing critique of the practice of backstreet abortion. The case is also made for a kind of societal blind spot on abortion at the time of both the Evans and Christie trials; in particular, a reluctance to come to terms with the concept of the male abortionist, which distorted the criminal investigations and the trials themselves. Only when public acceptance for legalizing abortion grew in the more liberal climate of the 1960s and beyond did a revisionist understanding of the murder of Beryl Evans, in which abortion came to be positioned as a central element, gain a sustained hearing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the intersection between polite manners and company in eighteenth-century England. Through the laughter of gentlemen, it makes a case for a concept of occasional politeness, which is intended to emphasize that polite comportment was only necessary on certain occasions. In particular, it was the level of familiarity shared by a company that determined what was considered appropriate. There was unease with laughter in polite sociability, yet contemporaries understood that polite prudence could be waived when men met together in friendly homosocial encounters. In these circumstances, there existed a tacit acceptance of looser manners that might be called ‘intimate bawdiness’, which had its origins in a renaissance humanist train of thought that valorized wit as the centrepiece of male sociability. This argument tempers the importance of politeness by stressing the social contexts for which it was – and was not – a guiding principle. Ultimately, it suggests that the category of company might be one way of rethinking eighteenth-century sociability in a more pluralistic fashion, which allows for contradictory practices to co-exist. As such, it moves towards breaking down the binary oppositions of polite and impolite, elite and popular, and theory and practice that have been imposed on the period. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 1970s was a decade of acute existential crisis for the Democratic party, as ‘New Politics’ insurgents challenged the old guard for control of both the party apparatus and the right to define who a true ‘liberal’ was. Those Democrats who opposed New Politics reformism often found themselves dubbed ‘neoconservatives’. The fact that so many ‘neoconservatives’ eventually made their home in the Grand Old Party (GOP) has led historians to view them as a Republican bloc in embryo. The apostasy of the neoconservatives fits neatly into the political historiography of the 1970s, which is dominated by the rise of the New Right and its takeover of the Republican party. Yet this narrative, though seductive, overlooks the essentially protean character of politics in that decade. This article uses the 1976 Senate campaign mounted by Daniel Patrick Moynihan – the dandyish Harvard academic, official in four presidential administrations, and twice US ambassador – to demonstrate that many ‘neoconservatives’ were advancing a recognizably liberal agenda and seeking to define a new ‘vital center’ against the twin poles of the New Politics and the New Right. A microcosm of a wider struggle to define liberalism, Moynihan's candidacy complicates our understanding of the 1970s as an era of rightward drift. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article surveys the wave of new historical and political-science literature exploring humanitarianism and the ‘pre-history’ of human rights in the long nineteenth century, noting the presentist assumptions underpinning much of this literature. On the one hand, histories of humanitarianism have focused on the origins of present-day humanitarian concerns, paying particular attention to the anti-slavery movement. On the other hand, the overwhelming majority of this literature has explored Anglo-American (and usually Protestant) humanitarianism to the exclusion of the humanitarian campaigns and ideologies of other nations and faith traditions. A more properly historical approach is required, which would pay greater attention to the fusion of religious and secular traditions of activism, to the particular role of women in constituting these traditions, and to the different national contexts in which they bore fruit. Such an approach would also expand our understanding of ‘humanitarian’ activity to incorporate causes with less obvious present-day relevance, such as the temperance movement and Josephine Butler's campaign against the state regulation of prostitution. It would certainly prompt deeper reflection on the contingency of humanitarianism as a topic of historical inquiry, at least as currently constructed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Anna Gambles's Protection and politics (1999) established the existence of a sophisticated and pervasive conservative economic discourse in Britain in the decades before Repeal. This article argues that the imperial aspect of that discourse – comprising ideals of imperial economic integration, imperial preference, and British navigational prowess – has been mistakenly understood as a response to ‘the imperialism of free trade'. In fact, these ideals were evolved primarily as the intellectual response of the West Indian lobby to the Anti-Slavery Society's campaign for the emancipation of British colonial slaves. Emancipation was regarded as a prospective economic disaster for the British plantation system and so the years after 1823 witnessed the vigorous and sophisticated defence of West Indian slavery by rhetorical and discursive means traditionally ascribed the label of ‘conservative economics'. This article argues that the imperial economic discourse hitherto considered ‘conservative’ should more properly be recognized as ‘pro-slavery’, something underscored by the pro-slavery sympathies of the writers credited with the articulation of this discourse, and by the almost exclusive relevance of its arguments to West Indian, as opposed to other colonial possessions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In October 1916, the French government agreed with Armenian political elites to establish a Légion of Armenian volunteers in British Cyprus to fight the common Ottoman enemy. Despite British, French, and even Armenian rejections of such a Légion during different times throughout 1915 and early 1916, all sides overcame earlier concerns. Understanding how they managed to overcome these concerns will allow for this little-known episode in the history of the Great War in the eastern Mediterranean to contribute to the knowledge on (1) the complex French and British wartime stances towards this region, driven by imperialism and humanitarianism; (2) the ability of local elites to draw concessions from the Allies; (3) the important role played by local British and French colonial and military officers; and (4) broader historiographical debates on the responses to the Armenian Genocide. This article explores the origins of how the Entente co-opted Armenians in their eastern Mediterranean campaigns, but also made them into pawns in the French and British reinvention of their imperial rivalry in this region in order to achieve their post-war imperialist agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Apart from Italian fascism and German National-Socialism – the most famous fascisms of the interwar era – considerable research has been conducted during the past two decades about generic fascism: fascist groups, movements, and parties in other countries. In Israel, while the Revisionist Zionist movement has been continually accused by its political rivals of being fascist, these accusations have not yet been examined according to any comparative model of fascism. Relying on Robert Paxton's model of generic fascism, this article examines how one of its components – the drive for closer integration of the national community – was manifested in the writings of seven Revisionist activists in mandatory Palestine: Itamar Ben Avi, Abba Aḥime'ir, U. Z. Grünberg, Joshua Yevin, Wolfgang von Weisl, Zvi Kolitz, and Abraham Stern. Their writings between the years 1922 and 1942 reveal a strong drive for social integration, similar to that manifest in other fascist movements of the interwar era. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article revisits the late seventeenth-century histories of two of England's most successful overseas trading monopolies, the East India and Royal African Companies. It offers the first full account of the various enforcement powers and strategies that both companies developed and stresses their unity of purpose in the seventeenth century. It assesses the complex effects that the ‘Glorious Revolution’ had on these powers and strategies, unearthing much new material about the case law for monopoly enforcement in this critical period and revising existing accounts that continue to assert the Revolution's exclusively deregulating effects and that miss crucial subtleties in the case law and related alterations in company behaviour. It asks why the two companies parted company as legal and political entities and offers an explanation that connects the fortunes of both monopoly companies to their public profile and differing constituencies in the English empire and the varying non-European political contexts in which they operated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholars, journalists, and government officials have tried to understand al-Qa'ida and its predecessor, Maktab al-Khidamat, since the early 1980s. These efforts increased significantly after the 11 September 2001 attacks against the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon. Yet, despite this attention, questions remain unanswered. What factors have influenced al-Qa'ida leaders over time as they have made and executed strategic decisions? How have they defined their relationship with affiliated groups in the context of these decisions? This present article utilizes private al-Qa'ida documents, captured by United States Navy Seals during a raid on Osama bin Laden's compound in Pakistan, and recently released to the public, to answer these questions. In doing so, it casts doubt on some of the conventional explanations for al-Qa'ida's trajectory between 2004 and 2013. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In his influential work on German Romanticism, Isaiah Berlin suggested that Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) catalysed the growth of the nineteenth-century counter-Enlightenment. This causal thesis, however, ignored the extent to which the Reflections' German translator, Friedrich Gentz (1764–1832), altered the meaning of the text to suit his own philosophical agenda. Although Burke saw rationalism and revolution as natural allies, Gentz – a student of Immanuel Kant – used the Reflections to articulate a conservative form of rationalism that, he believed, could stand up to the philosophes' radicalism. Through his selective translation, numerous in-text annotations, and six long interpretive essays, Gentz pressed Burke's Reflections into a Kantian epistemological paradigm – carving out a space for a priori right in the logic of the text, and demoting traditional knowledge from a normative to a prudential role. In Gentz's translation, Burke thus appeared as a champion, not a critic, of Enlightenment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Research on the relationship between England and Protestant Germany during the sixteenth century has recently experienced a revival. A significant area of concentration for confessional interests among Lutherans a century ago, Anglo-German relations took a backseat in Reformation historiography during the twentieth century, but during the last decade or so a host of scholars in the UK, Germany, and USA have once again turned their attention to the topic. This review article surveys trends in scholarship on Reformation studies in both England and Germany before turning specifically to works considering instances of interaction, co-operation, and adaptation across the confessional and geographic divides. Gathering a considerable array of secondary materials, the article offers an overview of the merits and criticisms of previous analyses and concludes by pointing out a few areas for future inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that theatre in colonial India – both in the form of touring companies and amateur dramatics – offered much more than mere entertainment: first, it was an important social space where the British diaspora constituted itself as a community. Secondly, it served as a lifeline to the home country. By watching theatrical performances either brought to them straight from London or which they performed themselves, colonial Britons felt in touch with their homeland. Finally, theatre not only allowed colonial audiences to participate in the metropolitan culture; it inadvertently helped to unify the British empire. Whether living in London, the provinces, or a colonial city, all British subjects consumed the same popular culture, forming in effect one big taste community. Theatre, therefore, lends itself to a discussion of central issues of imperial history, as, for example, the relationship between the metropolitan centre and the imperial periphery, the colonial public sphere, social and racial hierarchies, the perception of the ‘Other’, and processes of cross-cultural exchange and appropriation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the experiences of university elites in Britain and France during and after the First World War. It compares the elite network of the École Normale Supérieure with that of Trinity and King's Colleges in Cambridge, arguing that these communities functioned and understood themselves as families. The war, which suspended normal intellectual practice and placed mobilized university elites (as junior officers) at an increased risk of wounds or death, was seen as a threat to the very existence of the family. The article traces the responses of these groups to the outbreak of war, to the cessation of normal scholarly life, and to the shocking death rate; in so doing, it demonstrates the resilience of these networks. To date, historians have drawn on the writings of members of these families to make broader arguments about the war experience. This study is the first to examine the self-perception of these groups, and in so doing, provides a new context for scholarly activities during and after the war, bereavement, and remembrance, as well as for academic practices in the post-war period. As a Franco-British comparison, it argues for great similarities of experience between two superficially disparate university cultures [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article presents the main findings of the first detailed reconstruction of the pattern of attendance at an early modern German school, based on the exceptionally preserved matriculation records of the Latin (grammar) school of Zwickau/Saxony in the second half of the seventeenth century. It investigates pupils’ social background, their geographical mobility, and reconstructs their educational choices. Prevailing top-down perspectives on early modern education obscure the range of choices available to pupils. This article argues that substantial social mobility into learned professions formed the backdrop to the preoccupation with rank and distinction within the Republic of Letters in the Holy Roman Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article seeks to illuminate significantly our understanding of the link between abolitionism and evangelicalism by considering the debate at the formation of the Evangelical Alliance in 1846 surrounding the propriety of Christian fellowship with slaveholders. The leading critic of the pro-slavery faction was the Revd Isaac Nelson, an orthodox Presbyterian minister from Belfast, Ireland. Nelson's importance to anti-slavery was recognized by abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic at the time, but has not yet been adequately analysed by historians. Hence, this article will examine Nelson's role in the dispute with the defenders of the American slaveholders at the London meeting in 1846 and in further debates within the Alliance on the slavery question. The article will conclude by examining Nelson's claim that the Alliance was a failure owing to its alleged compromise on the slavery question. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article aims to locate English republican thought and writing in a wider European context and to understand the personal connections that aided the distribution and reception of English republican ideas abroad. It does so through the case-study of a little-known pamphlet published by the English regicide Edmund Ludlow during his exile in Switzerland after the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. Les juges jugez, se justifiants (1663) was a French translation of the dying speeches and other miscellaneous texts of some of the English regicides, produced in Geneva and subsequently printed in Yverdon with the help of Ludlow's local Protestant network. Rather than propagating a secular republican ideology, Ludlow offered his work to a European Protestant audience in the language of Geneva, promoting a primarily religious cause in an attempt to make martyrs out of political activists. It is therefore to Ludlow's Protestant networks that we need to turn to find out more about the transmission of English republican ideas in francophone Europe and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]