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At first glance, the period from the second half of the seventeenth century to the latter decades of the eighteenth can seem very foreign to us today. One only has to think of the fashions of the time – men and women wearing wigs, men with stockings over calves made visible by short trousers, and women in expansive hoop skirts, carrying fans – to realise how other-worldly it can all appear. Nevertheless, despite major differences between those times and ours, Britain was undergoing a dramatic process of modernisation during this period. Britain was becoming increasingly urbanised, and London, during the eighteenth century, would become the largest city in Europe and one of the largest in the world. There was a burgeoning consumer culture, led by newly available products such as coffee, tea and porcelain; and Britain saw the development of its political parties (Whig and Tory) and had its first prime minister. Indeed, the entity of Great Britain itself was created during the period, through the 1707 Act of Union between the kingdoms of England and Scotland. The terms of modern political philosophy in English were both developed and implemented in the period, as contractual government went from theory to practice in the form of a constitutional monarchy, with a monarch brought to England from Germany (despite being more than fiftieth in line to the throne). Francis Bacon's insights for modern science – advocating the use of empirical induction and instruments – were institutionalised in the Royal Society (chartered 1662), which sponsored scientific investigation and published the results. The early 1660s also saw the creation of what would come to be known as the Royal Africa Company, which would organise Britain's participation in the transatlantic African slave trade. This involvement would be intimately bound up with the history of the thirteen colonies, many of them settled during this period, on the western edge of the Atlantic, and later known as the United States of America, which itself emerged during the eighteenth century. The early seventeenth-century creation of the East India Company similarly organised British trade with India, an involvement that would lead within a century to Britain ruling the entire Indian subcontinent.

The Habsburg Monarchy in its last century was one of the largest European polities by area and population, and was, as we shall see, a major player, a ‘great power’, at least in theory, until its demise in 1918. Yet it is not often studied at the forefront of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century European History. There are several reasons for this. It was not a successful nation-state, unlike France, Germany or Britain, or, in various forms, Russia. In its nineteenth-century manifestation the ‘Monarchy’ was the archetypal Central European state, so it did not fare well as a subject during the Cold War, when there was no Central Europe, only binary ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ halves. There is also the consideration that after 1918 it no longer existed, and it is always an extra reach to study something that has no obvious and significant successor, as is the case with the Habsburg Monarchy. There is even some reason to think that neither students nor professors are particularly attracted to study a subject with such an atavistic, ‘feudal’ moniker. In a world where democracies and republics are the norm (even when the most successful democracies tend to be constitutional monarchies), and empires, such as the Habsburg Monarchy was, are frowned upon, getting anyone to pay attention to a Monarchy named after an aged, and by now rather obscure, dynasty is always going to be a hard sell. The fact that the very identity of the subject is the cause of all sorts of confusion cannot help either. The history of the lands ruled by the Habsburg dynasty (from 1780, Habsburg-Lorraine) is such a long and convoluted one that it is best to call them by its ruling agent, hence the rather anodyne title of ‘the Habsburg Monarchy’ used by both Charles W. Ingrao, the author of the first volume, covering the early modern period of 1618–1815, and by myself in the sequel for the more ‘modern’ period of 1815–1918. Yet that territory and that history are also often named ‘Austria’ and ‘Austrian’, partly because the Habsburg dynasty had adopted the name of the House of Austria centuries before, when its main territory had indeed been in what is now part of the Austrian Republic, and partly because that is what contemporaries called this political entity for most of its premodern and modern career.

The British poet Felicia Hemans, already celebrated in her own country, began to be published in the United States in 1826, just as the American writer Lydia Huntley Sigourney was achieving national recognition. Sigourney was soon being called “the American Hemans,” and continued so for the rest of the century on both sides of the Atlantic. There were reasons for this: both writers achieved prominence during the onset of modernity as a field of struggle between different interests in the Atlantic world, and their work participated in this struggle, at a time when the roles of women and women authors continued to be controversial. This essay examines that participation in terms of the circulation of Hemans's and Sigourney's poems in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world and representative comment on it on both sides of the Atlantic in the nineteenth century. For present purposes, I understand modernity as a relentlessly changing social-cultural discourse and set of practices that mediated and enabled modernization. Modernization I understand as an accelerating social, economic, cultural, and political transformation that was a field of struggle between contending interests, from social groups through regional formations and nation-states to empires. Modernity centered on a model of self-reflexive personal identity that was ostensibly created, nurtured, and repaired in “pure” or disinterested relationships of intimacy, domesticity, sociability, community, and nation. This modern subject was supposedly better able to manage modernization's more intense relationships of risk and trust, to disembed from customary relationships and networks and re-embed in modern ones, to manage the increasingly abstract systems from banking to government and education to empire, and to negotiate modernization's new chronotopes or representations of time and space. But if the Atlantic world was the cradle of modernization, it was also the cockpit, as different versions of modernization contended for domination within nations and within the Atlantic world as a whole – versions serving different forms of state organization, from European absolute monarchies through British constitutional monarchy to American constitutional republic. Their differing interests and forms of modernization periodically impelled these Atlantic states into wars, notably the American War of Independence, the French and Napoleonic wars, and the British-American war of 1812–1814, which in turn intensified modernization within the combatant nations.

Between 1492 and 1600, Spain acquired a remarkable overseas empire in the Caribbean, mainland America and the Pacific. Discovery and conquest were by no means complete by 1600: indeed, the Spanish empire was still expanding in mainland America in the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, Spanish America was already substantial by 1600 (Map 12.1). At the same time, Spain was extending its overseas dominion nearer to home, in North Africa, Italy and the Low Countries (Flanders). These acquisitions, creating the largest empire Europe had known to date, and the first real European maritime or overseas empire, represented a number of major challenges for Spain's monarchs and ministers, including how to administer them and ensure obedience and loyalty at such a distance. This was especially true of the newly acquired transatlantic dominions: whereas it took just two to three weeks for a letter from Madrid to reach Brussels in Spanish Flanders, it took between two and eight months for a letter to reach New Spain, and twelve months to reach the Philippines. For many historians, the elaboration of an imperial machinery was one of the great Spanish successes of the sixteenth century. Indeed, among the enduring images of King Philip II of Spain (d. 1598) is that of the king as bureaucrat, sitting at his desk in the palace of the Escorial reading and signing great numbers of state papers produced by that administration, although for many historians the latter was one more element in the so-called black legend of Spanish imperial government, which is invariably contrasted with the supposedly more beneficent British model and legacy in the Americas. Spain in this period is invariably described by historians as ‘imperial’, and the collection of territories ruled from Spain as an ‘empire’. There is some justification for this. Those territories and their inhabitants were governed from Spain, often by Spaniards, in accordance with policy objectives formulated in Spain, and were regarded as offering resources to be exploited by and for Spain and its rulers. In that sense, there was a Spanish empire, as ‘empire’ is defined by Michael Doyle: Empire is a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another political society. It can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, by economic, social or cultural dependence. Imperialism is simply the process or policy of establishing or maintaining an empire.

Introduction Like the United States, Australia is a federation. As in the US, the federation brought together into one polity a number of existing British colonies. In contrast to the US, however, where only nine of the now-fifty States existed at the time the federation was created, all six Australian States joined the Australian Commonwealth at its founding (in 1901) and no new States have been created since. Whereas the first American colonists left England in search of greater political and religious freedom, most of the first Australian colonists were prisoners, transported to the other side of the world to ease prison overcrowding caused partly by the cessation of transportation to the American colonies after 1776. The Australian Federation and Constitution were products of peaceful transition, not of war and revolution. In political terms, that transition began in the late nineteenth century, but in constitutional and legal terms it is still not complete: the Queen of England is also Queen of Australia, and the Australian head of state is the ‘vice-regal’ Governor-General, the Queen's representative in Australia. Australia is not a republic but a constitutional monarchy. Moreover, the head of the governmental systems of the various States is a vice-regal Governor, appointed by the Queen. Unlike the American States, the Australian States have never engaged each other in civil war. Australia is geographically a very large country – about four-fifths the size of the United States; but it is very sparsely populated, having fewer than 24 million inhabitants at the time of writing, mainly concentrated in the south-eastern coastal fringe. This chapter is divided into two main sections, the first dealing with the colonial period up to Federation in 1901, and the second with the period since then. The focus of the chapter is on the Australian federal system of government, which is the subject of the comparison with the English and US systems. Colonial antecedents The British established their first colony on the Australian continent (on the site of what is now Sydney) in 1788, just as the American colonies were ratifying the US Constitution.

As long as the army is sound there is nothing to fear. Domenico Farini, 29 January 1894 The First World War began as a clash of contending armies but soon became a conflict that would test to the limit not just the military power but also the state machinery, social cohesion and cultural values of the countries caught up in it. Italy passed that test despite being perhaps the most poorly prepared of the Great Powers to face it. By common agreement the ‘least’ of them, she along with Germany was also the newest, and she was the weakest. The legacy of five decades of unification was not one that best prepared her for the maelstrom into which she plunged in 1915. The Italian Risorgimento was a national revolution from above. After 1870 the king of Italy headed a parliamentary monarchy lacking both the popular underpinning provided for the French parliament by the traditions of the Republic and the autocratic authority through which the Kaiser and hisministers governed the German Reich . Italian governments stood or fell according to their leaders’ success in making and maintaining majorities that were fundamentally unstable and precarious. The country was run by a narrow political and social oligarchy: on the eve of the world war the sociologist Guglielmo Ferrero concluded that thirty people were governing thirty million people for the benefit of three hundred families. The politicians presided over a predominantly rural peasant society: on the eve of the war over half of the active population worked in agriculture, and in turn half of these were rural day-labourers who were employed on average for only 150 days a year.

On his mother's death Paul came to the throne, the first undisputed and male inheritance in seventy years. His first act was to rebury Peter III, whom he believed to be his father, in the church of St. Peter and Paul with the other rulers of Russia from Peter onwards. His next act was to replace most of Catherine's ministers and officials, and send a number of them into exile. Thus began the brief and often bizarre reign of Tsar Paul. Paul's reign began just at the moment that the French revolution, having passed through its most radical phase, began to turn outward, and the new tsar had to respond to the apparent danger from his first days on the throne. Far more conservative than his mother, he made it his priority to strengthen the power and authority of the state. He recentralized the government, reestablishing some of the colleges and reviving the Council of State. He also enlarged the Senate, and saw to it that it exercised more effective supervision of law and administration. To this end he issued an enormous number of new laws, orders, and regulations. In Paul's mind, everything needed a regulation and his job was to compose one where it did not already exist.

The quarter of a century from the assassination of Alexander II until the 1905 Revolution was one of political stagnation. The response of the new government to the assassination was to stop the process of reform, to publicly affirm the necessity of autocracy, and to formulate plans for counter-reforms. The latter came to little, but the government took advantage of every possibility to block criticism, political discussion, and organization among the public. Though it returned to sponsoring economic development in the 1890s under Minister of Finance Sergei Witte, it refused to recognize the implications of the further modernization of society that resulted in part from its own measures. The increasing isolation of the government and its own internal lack of coordination led to the botched attempt at modern imperialism in Manchuria, an attempt resulting in a failed war with Japan that nearly brought down the monarchy. Alexander III had become the heir to the throne in 1865 on the death of his older brother. Alexander was already twenty at the time and the product of a rather narrow military education unlike that provided for his brother. In 1866 he married Princess Dagmar of Denmark (Mariia Fedorovna after her conversion to Orthodoxy), leading to a stable marriage with a woman of intelligence and extremely conservative views. The young heir was no intellectual, but he did come in contact with Slavophile ideas at court and through his tutor in jurisprudence, Konstantin Pobedonostev. Through the guards and other aristocrats he became friends with the conservative publicist (and the most prominent gay in the St. Petersburg aristocracy), Prince V. M. Meshcherskii. These were highly principled radical conservatives, with nothing but contempt for freedom of speech, democracy, and representative government, all of which they saw as shams and likely to lead to revolution. In their view what was needed was the unity of society and the monarch, which they saw as the essence of autocracy. By the 1870s they formed a powerful opposition to the more liberal ministers around Alexander II, powerful largely because of their association with the heir. As part of his attempt at balanced government, Tsar Alexander II appointed Pobedonostsev head of the Synod, a position he held for the next twenty-four years. After Alexander III came to the throne, Pobedonostsev used his position at the Synod to retain constant access to the tsar, offering him advice on all sorts of subjects well beyond the ecclesiastical issues under his purview. In the eyes of liberal society and many government officials, he had far too much power and influence, all of it in a conservative direction. “Prince of Darkness” was one of his milder nicknames.

The last revolutionary process of the era, and the only one initiated in the middle of the interwar period, opened in Spain in 1931. It was unique in not having been stimulated or catalyzed by major war; it was almost exclusively the product of endogenous factors, which to that extent makes it the most singular of all the European cases under consideration. This was all the more extraordinary in that Spain had an entire century of parliamentary government behind it, even with all the limitations involved in early parliamentary development. For the second half of that period, stable and reformist constitutional monarchy had prevailed, free from any significant foreign or military pressures in Europe, complicated only toward the end by the establishment of the Spanish Protectorate in northern Morocco in 1913.

After Primo's dictatorship ended in January 1930, the king asked General Damaso Berenguer to form a new government, based on the constitution of 1876, in an attempt to reestablish the constitutional monarchy. Berenguer had served as the military high commissioner at the time of the disastrous battle of Anual in 1921. His appointment to head the government signaled the king's continuing support for the army, but it can hardly have inspired confidence in the country as a whole. In a play on words that is typical of Spanish political humor, Berenguer's government was dubbed the “dictablanda” or “soft dictatorship,” as opposed to the hard dictatorship ( dictadura/dicta-dura ) under Primo. Berenguer lasted just over a year in office, during which the republican opposition organized support. In the Pact of San Sebastian in August 1930, republican leaders joined with Catalan nationalists and the Socialist Party (PSOE) to plan a provisional government after the ouster of the monarchy. Military leaders sympathetic to the republican cause staged an uprising in Jaca (Aragon) in December 1930. After forces loyal to King Alfonso put down the rising, the king ordered its leaders executed, creating martyrs – military martyrs – for the republican opposition. The king dismissed General Berenguer in February 1931 and replaced him with Admiral Juan Bautista Aznar, no doubt hoping that the navy leadership would prove more steadfast than the army had been. Aznar called elections for municipal officials on April 12, 1931 – the first elections under the 1876 constitution since 1923. In Spain's largest cities, republican candidates won a majority of the votes, although their victory was not a landslide. Nonetheless, the king knew all too well what the vote portended. Joyous republicans took to the streets to celebrate the victory, and their leaders proclaimed Spain a republic on April 14, announcing a provisional government under the leadership of Niceto Alcala Zamora. When army leaders made clear that they would no longer support King Alfonso, on the night of April 14 he simply left Spain without abdicating, as his grandmother Isabel II had done in 1868. Queen Victoria Eugenia also went into exile – separately from her husband. Their marriage had become increasingly strained over the years, not least because of the king's numerous extramarital affairs.

Introduction Any analysis of the long nineteenth century (1801–1914) in terms of state finance has to consider first the issue of political instability and regime change. Three revolutions, two coups d'etat, and three types of regime (monarchical, imperial, and republican) made for critical disjunctures in fiscal policy. To facilitate discussion, the data have been presented in separate tables according to regime. Bruno Theret (1995) argues for a different categorization of disjunctures, between the constitutional monarchies (1815–30, 1831–47, and 1851–70) and the Third Republic (1878–1939), with a significant transitional phase (1871–7) in between. These periods, he argues, can be further subdivided, notably into an opportunist Third Republic (1878–93) and a moderate (1894–1913) and then radical Third Republic (1914–39) (Theret 1995: 58–9). There is no doubt that political instability and regime change were important factors in limiting the possibilities for government innovation in state finance; but in this analysis, two long-term realities are emphasized as of primary importance – first, the failure of population growth in France, in comparison with its economic rivals; and second, the longevity of an oligarchic rentier social order, in spite of the various constitutional crises and regime changes. Thus in France, again in comparison with its two main European economic rivals, Germany and the United Kingdom, the growth of the state was regarded as a serious threat to the economic interests of the ruling social class.

‘Successful constitutions and institutions’, says Ian Gilmour ( Inside Right: A Study of Conservatism (1978), p 70), ‘are not mere pieces of machinery. If they work, it is because of the ideas and beliefs of those who try to work them.’ The British constitution, having evolved over centuries, does not embody any single constitutional theory. It is the product of a long period of kingly rule, parliamentary struggle, revolution, many concessions and compromises, a slow growth of custom, the making and breaking and alteration of many laws. Although we lack a general theory of the constitution, there has come down to us an idea of constitutionalism – of a constitutional order which acknowledges the necessary power of government while placing conditions and limits upon its exercise. The British version of constitutionalism has been shaped by a number of leading ideas or principles: some of these have crystallised as rules or doctrines of the constitution; others have influenced constitutional thought or have gained currency as explanations or justifications of particular features of the constitution. In this chapter we shall consider some of these commanding ideas or doctrines and their place in the modern constitution. We start with democracy and then move on to consider the sovereignty of Parliament, the rule of law and the separation of powers. It will appear that, at times, there is a conflict, or tension, between these ideas; between democracy, for instance, and parliamentary sovereignty, or between sovereignty and the rule of law. A good deal of contemporary constitutional analysis is concerned with how such conflicts, or tensions, should be resolved and worked out. (For an engaging critique, see Murkens, ‘The quest for constitutionalism in UK public law discourse’ (2009) 29 OJLS 427.) Democracy and the constitution Democracy is not to be taken for granted. Neither is its contemporary acceptance as the only form of government able to claim legitimacy to rule. As John Dunn asks in his account of the history of democracy, Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy (2005), pp 13, 15: Why does democracy loom so large today? Why should it hold such sway over the political speech of the modern world? What does its recent prominence really mean? When Britain and America set out to bury Baghdad in its own rubble, why was it in the name of democracy of all words in which they claimed to do so? Is its novel dominance in fact illusory: a sustained exercise in fraud or an index of utter confusion? Or does it mark a huge moral and political advance, which only needs to cover the whole world, and be made a little more real, for history to come to a reassuring end? Why should it be the case that, for the first time in the history of our still conspicuously multi-lingual species, there is for the present a single world-wide name of the legitimate basis of political authority? Democracy came late to the British constitution. Much of our constitutional architecture was constructed at a time when to accuse someone of harbouring democratic sympathies was a grave political insult. This is not to say that democracy came late to Britain in comparison with other countries. But it is to say that several key elements of the British constitution predate the emergence of democracy as an accepted form of government. Anthony King puts the point well ( The British Constitution (2007), p 249): The United Kingdom was a monarchy before it became a constitutional monarchy. It was a constitutional monarchy before it became a system of government built around ministers of the Crown. It was a system of government built around ministers of the Crown before it became a parliamentary system. And it was a parliamentary system before it became a parliamentary democracy. Democracy . . . was a novel feature grafted on to a pre-existing constitutional structure. Nonetheless, democracy deserves to be treated as the first of our constitutional themes since the working assumption of all the principal actors on the constitutional stage, even those who (like the monarch and the House of Lords) are not themselves democratically elected, is that Britain is, and ought to consider itself as, a modern democracy. Even if the assumption is sometimes misplaced or over-stated, it is impossible to understand the way the contemporary British constitution works without taking on board this basic working assumption. Equally, however, like all assumptions, it is rebuttable. On no account could today’s British constitutional order accurately be described as entirely or unambiguously democratic. (Valuable introductions to the idea of democracy abound. Among the better ones, see R Dahl, On Democracy (1998) and B Crick, Democracy: A Very Short Introduction (2002).)