In 1856 the British government held an international competition for the design of public offices to be located near Whitehall and the houses of parliament. Comprising a Foreign Office and War Office, the project was radically altered in 1858 when the War Office component was abandoned and replaced with a new India Office. The controversy that surrounded this competition and its aftermath has attracted the attention of scholars for decades, not least for its importance to the history of Victorian architecture. The current study seeks a wider interpretation of this project by examining the way it became a conflict over ideas concerning British identity and nationhood. It is argued that, at a time when Britain had reached the relative height of its international power, these buildings were seen as a means of not only improving London's urban environment but also celebrating its unrivalled political and economic status. The India Office, often neglected by historians, was significant in this regard, symbolizing the reach and authority of the British empire. Here the Foreign and India Office are reconsidered for what they reveal about British national/imperial self-perception and its representation in architecture during the mid-Victorian period.

During the past quarter century scholars from several disciplines have established the central metaphorical function of the demise of the ancient Roman Republic for both literary and political discourse in eighteenth century Britain. But the reverse side of that inquiry – the impact of the analogy between Britain and Rome on the modern historical interpretation of the ancient republic – has received virtually no attention. This oversight has concealed a remarkable modern British historiographical phenomenon that did not end at the close of the eighteenth century. Rather, for over two hundred years modern British political ideologies and preoccupations determined not only how the collapse of the Roman republic would be interpreted but also in large measure even whether it would receive historical examination. The various shifts of historical interpretation from the age of Queen Anne through that of Chamberlain illustrate with stunning and disturbing clarity the relentless manner in which contemporary political concerns can shape, revise, and eventually overwhelm modes of historical understanding without discovery of significant new evidence or the application of new methodology. By the twentieth century methodology itself, in the form of prosopography, in part served the ends of political commentary.

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.

Contrary to stereotypes that represent it primarily as an expression of machismo or romantic chivalry, military honour in early modern England was professional, moral, utilitarian, and a force for social stability. It was pragmatic as well as idealistic. It shared attributes of civilian honour but also comprehended rules and obligations specific to soldiers. Professional honour required that the soldier should know and observe the codes and practices of his métier. To do so satisfied his internal sense of personal integrity and brought external reputation. Honour also had a broader social value. Mutuality and utility marked its operation in the English civil war. This mutuality safeguarded practices both sides found useful, such as prisoner exchanges, for the honour of each side was engaged in observance of the relevant rules. The survival of a bipartisan soldiers' honour ameliorated relations between enemies. It helped to prevent irrevocable social divisions, to sustain social order, and to enable previously warring Englishmen to live together with tolerable equanimity.

This article is a contribution to the continuing debate on the character and electoral fortunes of the Conservative party in late Victorian England. Using the West Riding borough of Leeds as a case study, this article focuses on suburban Conservatism (villa toryism) and situates it within the broader context of urban Conservatism in and beyond Leeds. It explores the nature of Conservative electoral dominance in the period after the Third Reform Act. In doing so, it further challenges conventional interpretations about the rise of class-based politics. As the example of Leeds demonstrates, villa toryism was not the political expression of a socially homogeneous, innately conservative suburban middle class. The intense electoral competition that ensued challenges assumptions about suburbia being politically quiescent and dull. Popular Conservatism, it is argued, was a protean and socially heterogeneous political culture, of which villa toryism was one distinctive strand. Villa toryism was the suburban incarnation of respectable, self-reliant, hierarchical, and domesticated popular Conservatism. This villa toryism was distinct from, but related to, the working-class Conservatism of the older industrial districts of urban England.

The states of sixteenth-century Europe fell into two financial groups. France and Spain, in a class of their own, enjoyed an apparently total freedom for much of the time from the normal constraints, and this in spite of their rapidly escalating debts. The other European states which made up the second category were compelled to observe far more stringent controls. The distinction between the two groups was further underlined by the question of credit. Although the Habsburg and Valois monarchs spent in a way that was both financially reckless and socially unpitying, the moneyed classes were only too eager to advance additional funds. Repeated, and sometimes spectacular, failures seemed rarely to have damped their enthusiasm. The smaller states seldom found such ease of access to credit. For most of the time they were obliged to maintain a semblance of order by sustained and sordid frugality - the bilking of minor creditors, the levying of dubious ‘loans’, or the dissipation of capital. While no strangers to these devices, France and Spain were able to operate for prolonged periods free from ordinary limitations. But even for these privileged beings the moment of truth eventually arrived. Resources were finite; and even an imperial state could exhaust the credit, if not the credulity, of its principal bankers. Such an intrusion of reality took the form of a public bankruptcy.

The English Revolution began in the summer of 1647. It was a struggle to delimit power and authority which neither the constitutional reforms of 1641 nor the civil war that followed had been able to resolve. Shortly after the fighting ceased in 1646 the House of Lords propounded that ‘things that are to be perpetual might be settled in the old way, by the three estates’. Unexpectedly, however, it was conservative ‘presbyterian’ members of the House of Commons who conducted an experiment in government without the king. In the winter of 1646 Denzil Holies succeeded in obtaining sufficient personal support and institutional power to coordinate and implement a political programme. But the inability of the men at Westminster collectively to secure an accord with the king had encouraged some to question parliament's intentions and others its integrity. Moreover, Charles's defeat, flight to the Scots, and subsequent imprisonment revived the long deferred examination of sovereignty. This now centred on parliament, whose good intentions were, nevertheless, an insufficient justification for its rule. Beginning in the winter of 1646 and building to a climax in the summer of 1647, an assault mounted from both left and right struck at the conduct of Holles and his ‘faction’ and then at the foundation of parliament's role as a conservator of order and authority.

While British colonial rhetoric consistently identified tradition as the basis of legitimate authority, colonial practice actually produced far-reaching changes in the nature of government in Britain's African possessions. New institutions, and new holders of power, emerged in African societies in response to the particular needs of colonial administration. This article explores this transformation in one part of Condominium Sudan, which was effectively a British possession but which has often been excluded from historical discussions of the impact of colonialism because of its unique status. The Nuba Mountains have recently gained notoriety as a particularly bloody theatre of Sudan's long post-colonial civil war; while some have sought to explain this as the result of British policies which encouraged racial antagonism, the article suggests that here, as elsewhere in Africa, the real legacy of colonial rule was the creation of new kinds of local government which sat uneasily with enduring local ideas of spiritual power and proper authority.

This article examines the policy pursued by William Laud during his tenure as bishop of London, focusing specifically on the way in which he enforced the various royal edicts against discussion of predestination. It is argued that Laud enforced Charles I's decrees in an unbalanced manner, attacking Calvinists while apparently leaving their anti-Calvinist opponents untouched. It is likewise argued, however, that this strategy was accomplished not through a policy of overt judicial persecution, but through a more subtle regime of quiet threat and harassment. Such a policy was necessary because, at least in London, the question of predestination had by 1629 become a serious and explosive issue, one that was inextricably linked in the minds of many observers to more explicitly ‘secular’ matters of government and policy. In the process of examining Laud's strategy, the article seeks to untangle the question of why both the Caroline authorities and their enemies saw the seemingly scholastic question of predestination as a matter of such crucial political significance. Ultimately, the article helps to revise our understanding of the political atmosphere that prevailed in England at the outset of the personal rule, while likewise contributing to a deeper understanding of the political breakdown that led to civil war and revolution in the 1640s.

This article examines the origins of the first Agreement of the people: a draft written constitution presented to the general council of the New Model Army on 28 October 1647. It argues that the Agreement was a document that emerged from concerns amongst some of the soldiery and their civilian allies that the terms of a projected settlement with Charles I, The heads of the proposals, would betray the political programme advanced in the army's earlier public statements, especially its Declaration, or, representation of 14 June 1647. As such, this article moves away from the traditional narrative of seeing the Agreement as a Leveller manifesto that was authored in a deliberate attempt to infiltrate the army, and thereby asks fresh questions about the political networks and the programme behind the document. What emerges is a picture of the post-first Civil War political scene that integrates parliamentary manoeuvrings with City of London politics and the public and private affairs of a politicized army. As a result, the article sheds new light on aspects of the constitutional crisis of the later 1640s.

Violence is the means of expression of men who lack any other, and is especially useful to the historian of an otherwise inarticulate working class, starving on die scraps which middle-class sources leave him. Everyman is anonymous, but becomes memorable in rebellion; and in die many memorable rebellions of nineteenth-century Europe, that self-proclaimed ‘age of revolution’, historians have rejoiced that trie poor had found voice in violence.

The debate over the popularity or otherwise of state social reform has been inhibited by the lack of contemporary sources. This article seeks to advance our understanding of working-class experience of the 1908 pensions scheme by utilizing the material in Post Office archives and the local press. It argues that the scheme was implemented in ways calculated to reassure the beneficiaries, that it promoted the independence of the elderly, that it reached more people than is usually thought, and that it helped to modify popular attitudes towards the state.

Recent historiography has argued that the British ecclesiastical policies of James VI and I sought ‘congruity’ between the different churches in Scotland, England, and Ireland, rather than British ecclesiastical union or the anglicanization of all the churches. It is argued here that the asymmetry of the changes he sought in Scotland and England has been underplayed and that this has masked his choice of a fundamentally Anglican model for the British churches. Through allowing the archbishop of Canterbury to interfere in Scottish ecclesiastical affairs, undermining the presbyterian system, promoting episcopal power and liturgical reform, anglicanization of the Church of Scotland was the goal of James VI and I, and one which he pursued until his death. The motivation for King James's persistent desire for the fulfilment of this policy is to be found in his rapid assimilation to the Church of England after 1603 and, moreover, in his goal of the reunification of Christendom as a whole, on the Anglican model.

During the years following the end of the Second World War the British Labour government was preoccupied with the threat posed by Russia. Britain could not contain Russia on its own; indeed, only the United States possessed the necessary power. At the beginning of 1949 this was emphasized by the newly formed permanent under secretary's committee headed by William Strang. That committee considered the Anglo-American special relationship as the pivot of British foreign policy: British interests were best likely to be ensured by its maintenance and consolidation. An inequality was, however, inherent in the association, and Britain thought that the alliance would be least effective in Asia and the far east, an area where American naivety and selfishness were particularly evident. The spread of Mao Tse Tung's communists across the Chinese mainland emphasized Britain's predicament, especially as, initially, the Chinese were regarded as orthodox communists.

Although it is now recognized that the Stalin-Tito dispute was sparked off by Tito's desire to intervene decisively in the Greek civil war, the ideological context of that decision has never been fully explored. This article suggests that, since the early days of the Second World War, Tito had been committed to establishing a popular front ‘from below’, i.e. under clear communist control. He did this not only in Yugoslavia, but used his position in the war-time Comintern to persuade other communist parties to do the same. As a result he was dissatisfied with the all-party coalition governments established with Stalin's consent throughout Europe in 1945. Tito favoured a communist offensive, while Stalin, aware of the international position of the Soviet Union, favoured a more cautious approach. When Stalin summoned the first meeting of the Cominform in September 1947 and made Tito its de Facto leader, Tito mistakenly assumed he was to head a new international committed to a revolutionary offensive not only in Eastern Europe but in Greece and even Italy and France.

The article takes issue with current orthodoxy concerning early modern republicanism, centred on Quentin Skinner's model of classical republicanism. I argue that historians of political thought need to return to first principles in their practice in order to understand early modern republicanism, and I provide an example by using those principles to reassess one canonical text, Philippe de Plessis Mornay's Vindiciae, contra tyrannos. Reading the Vindiciae in context reveals it as a work whose radicalism lies, not in its engagement with the Roman law tradition, but in its express conviction that each and every individual is responsible for maintaining a covenanted relationship with God. My reassessment tracks the political, and specifically regicidal, consequences of commitment to that belief in England from the late sixteenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries. It destabilizes the anachronistic distinction between ‘political’ and ‘religious’ modes of thought that historians of political thought too often use to characterize early modern political discourse, and it points to the common ground shared and articulated by theorists including, inter alia, John Ponet, George Buchanan, and John Milton. The conclusion considers what this investigation reveals about republicanism as a political phenomenon in Europe and America from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries.

In early modern Europe, religious heterodoxy and intellectual inquiry posed serious challenges to the authority of centralizing forces both secular and ecclesiastical. At the same time, however, these dangerous developments had been driven by those individuals whom eighteenth-century writers had adopted as ‘culture heroes’ for an age increasingly self-conscious of its own enlightened status. In Britain, the newly established order defended itself against the scepticism and moral determinism of ‘freethinkers’ by upholding a religious and moral order based on liberty. But ‘freethinkers’ such as Anthony Collins were themselves the inheritors of, and propagandists for, the seventeenth-century revolution in science which underpinned the ideology being wielded against them. Their challenge elicited from Edmund Law an argument which co-opted their epistemology to ground the familiar metaphysics of liberty associated with the Newtonian position of Samuel Clarke. Where ‘freethinking’ had been perceived as a dangerous solvent of the social order, ‘freedom of thought’, within limits that were themselves a leading subject of debate in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain, could be upheld as consistent with the demands of political society.

The reasons for the decline of the Liberal party in Britain, and its replacement by the Labour party as the representative of the left, continue to be the subject of debate among historians of twentieth-century British politics. An important point at issue has been whether or not the Liberal decline had irreversibly set in prior to World War I; or if the war itself with the strains it placed on liberal ideology and the relationship among the party's most prominent leaders, and with the stimulus it provided for a more militant working class, was the catalyst for decline. There can be no question that the Liberal party was critically dependent upon the support of working-class voters for its viability as an alternative party of government.1 Thus, a major issue of contention among historians of Liberal politics has been the party's success or failure before August 1914 in retaining the allegiance of this crucial electoral base.

The popular mind loves the dramatic and the macabre, and so it has come about that the two events of British Indian History which the man in the street is aware of are the Black Hole of Calcutta and the Great Mutiny. When there were no Mutiny horrors to contemplate, their place was taken by the legend of Tipu Sultan; even in 1831 Ram Mohan Roy was followed about by crowds in London crying Tipu Tipu. It has been a misfortune for British Indian understanding that these two events seemed discreditable to India; for though Seraja-Daula is now acquitted of responsibility for the Black Hole, and the military revolt theory of the Mutiny generally prevails, the popular legend continues. The well of Cawnpore is remembered where the well of Ujnalla is forgotten.

A leading historian of the British intelligence community has described the British public archives as ‘laundered’. Christopher Andrew was, of course, referring to the closure, sometimes deceptively, of the official records of the security services. ‘Laundered’ can cover a wide variety of sins and might even give a misleading impression. An understanding of the disposition of the historical records of British intelligence, of the prospects for access to such an archive, and the implications for research in this field, depend on more than knowledge of Whitehall practice or the state of legislation regarding public records. Such understanding depends, in the first instance, on what we mean by ‘intelligence archives’.