The merging of the Lutheran and Calvinist (Reformed) confessions to form the United Church of Prussia was one of the most controversial policies pursued by Frederick William III after 1815. By the late 1830s it had provoked a large and well-organised movement of opposition, particularly among those ‘Old Lutherans’ in Silesia and neighbouring provinces who refused to abandon their liturgical traditions. This article examines the government's attempts to complete the process of unification through measures designed to atomize and silence Lutheran protest. Neither Prussian law nor Prussian law enforcement agencies, the article suggests, furnished an adequate foundation for Frederick William III's confessional policy. The unsuccessful campaign against Old Lutheranism exacerbated latent tensions between the executive and judicial branches of the administration and revealed the limits of government power and authority in the sensitive area of confessional policy. The aggressive and systematic confessional statism of the administration under Frederick William III was unprecedented in Prussian history; in this as in other areas of policy, the term ‘Restoration’ misrepresents political reality in post-Napoleonic Prussia.

Condorcet has been seen since the 1790s as the embodiment of the cold, rational Enlightenment. The paper explores his writings on economic policy, voting, and public instruction, and suggests different views both of Condorcet and of the Enlightenment. Condorcet was concerned with individual diversity; he was opposed to proto-utilitarian theories; he considered individual independence, which he described as the characteristic liberty of the moderns, to be of central political importance; and he opposed the imposition of universal and eternal principles. His efforts to reconcile the universality of some values with the diversity of individual opinions are of continuing interest. He emphasizes the institutions of civilized or constitutional conflict, recognizes conflicts or inconsistencies within individuals, and sees moral sentiments as the foundation of universal values. His difficulties call into question some familiar distinctions, for example between French, German, and English/Scottish thought, and between the Enlightenment and the ‘counter-Enlightenment’. There is substantial continuity, it is suggested, between Condorcet's criticism of the economic ideas of the 1760s (of Tocqueville's ‘first’ French revolution) and the liberal thought of the early nineteenth century.

The hesitation with which the national assembly approached the issue of guilds has long puzzled historians. After apparently abolishing them on the night of 4 August 1789, the national assembly delayed any action on guilds for eighteen months. This study examines the reasons for the tentativeness of the national assembly and the factors that ultimately led it to take action in 1791. A fear of aggravating violence in the countryside led the national assembly initially to delay action against guilds. By the time the assembly was ready to act, however, it found itself stymied by one of its own committees, which refused to bring the matter forward. The equivocation of the assembly led to unrest in towns and villages, and that unrest, along with the need of the assembly to realize the new principles it had advanced, led to a pre-emptive manoeuvre by the assembly against the obstructionist committee that resolved the anomaly of guilds in the new polity created by the national assembly.

This paper examines an important and rather neglected forum for popular discussion – the debating society – in London in 1780. This was the first full year that debating societies left their semi-private, club-like sites and took to new rooms, all across the metropolitan area. These new venues were large (seating between 400 and 1200) commercial settings, where men and women could come to speak and to listen, to enjoy an evening of rational entertainment at a small price. Using the many daily London newspapers as its main source, this essay examines the audiences present at these debates, the types of questions asked and the nature of the responses, when known, and surveys the wide range of reactions to such activity. Finally, it suggests some explanations for and evaluations of the growth and decline of this important cultural form.

Historians concerned to demonstrate women's increasing relegation to a private, domestic sphere in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have emphasized the extent to which married women's opportunities were restricted by the common law practice of coverture, which deprived wives of the ability to enter into economic contracts in their own right. Yet social and cultural historians have argued that women played an essential role as purchasers in promoting the consumer revolution of these decades. This article explores the devices used by married women consumers to evade the strictures of coverture. Focusing on three overlapping practices – wives' willingness and ability to pledge their husbands' credit to purchase a wide range of ‘necessary’ goods, their use of this tactic to secure a degree of independence from unsuccessful marriages, and their active participation in the deliberations of a variety of small claims courts – it argues that the purchase of coverture in the sphere of consumption was partial and contested, rather than monolithic.

In the debate between the charity organisation society and the new forms of personal service societies that grew up during the Edwardian period, disagreement centred on the nature of the boundary to be drawn between state and voluntary action. The paper reviews the theory and practice of the COS and suggests that while the new societies had much in common with the COS regarding their methods, the nature of their ‘partnership’ with the state was significantly different. While the COS operated a division of labour based on client groups, the new societies preferred a task-based division. The paper argues that while the new societies were determinedly more civic-minded and pragmatic regarding their attitudes towards state welfare provision, they offered no coherent rationale for voluntary effort to replace the theory developed by the COS.

The debate over Free Trade was central to modem British history. This essay shifts attention from party politics to the changing discourse and perception of state and economy within the business community. It distinguishes three phases in the erosion of liberal political economy: reciprocity, defensive tariff reform, and modernizing protectionism. An analysis of the changing argument for protection points to the emergency of a new politico-economic settlement in the age of war and coordinated capitalism. The Free Trade culture of individualism and market was displaced by a new economic vision of combination and regulation. In political culture, however, state and economy continued to be viewed as separate spheres. Instead of a corporatist system, the new settlement between state and business was marked by a dissociation of economic from political pluralism.

On 9 May 1950, Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister, offered to pool the coal and steel resources of France with those of its European neighbours. The proposal was directed principally at Western Germany. After a year of negotiations six western European states agreed to form the European Coal and Steel Community, an organization rightly seen as the beginning of the European Union. However significant at the time and subsequently, this creation resulted from a series of political bargains familiar to any practitioner of traditional politics. France was determined to limit the competitive advantages of German heavy industry to prevent future dominance by the Ruhr industrialists whose unsavoury past was also remembered. Jean Monnet, the head of the French delegation at the talks held in Paris, insisted on the ‘deconcentration’ of the steel and coal industries. Steel companies would be compelled to dispose of the colleries which they owned. To do this, however, Monnet had to invoke the help of the American high commissioner in Germany, John J. McCloy and his expert advisers. In terms of its origins the Coal and Steel Community can be considered the product of a bargain struck between the Federal Republic and America, not France and Western Germany. That the safeguards against vertical combinations and a single sales agency for coal proved unnecessary (and unenforceable) may partly explain the success of the first venture in European integration.

Between June 1940 and September 1942 the French colony of Madagascar was a part of the Vichy French empire and a life-line for supplies to French Indo-China. Governor Paul Annet's island administration assumed a critical importance to Britain and South Africa after the fall of Singapore in February 1942. Conscious of the precedent of Vichy's two-fold capitulation to Japanese demands upon Indo-China in August 1940 and July 1941, both the British and the American governments feared that Annet might follow suit, conceding to Japan the use of Madagascar's principal ports and air bases. This threat led to the invasion of Madagascar by British empire forces. The attack began in May 1942 and was completed by October. Much to General Charles de Gaulle's lasting annoyance, the Free French movement played no part in these operations, although the British installed a Free French administration at Tananarive in December. This article examines the Madagascar invasion in the light of this exclusion of the Free French. It measures the strategic importance of the island against the political damage caused to Anglo-Free French relations by the British rebuttal of de Gaulle. It is argued that the British government utilized the Madagascar takeover as a means to keep the French national committee in check, disregarding Free French proposals as a result. Albeit temporary, this generated political confusion within Madagascar itself.

The leading Fabians held different versions of permeation: Shaw saw permeation in terms of weaning the Radicals away from the Liberal party, so he favoured an independent party; Webb defined permeation in terms of the giving of expert advice to a political elite without any need for a new party. These varieties of permeation can be traced in the individual and collective actions of the Fabians, and, in particular, in their attitude to the formation of the Independent Labour party (I.L.P.). The Fabians did not simply promote the I.L.P. nor did they simply oppose the I.L.P.

South Africa was part of the sterling area (an international currency and payments system centred on Britain) from 1933 until the area itself collapsed in the early 1970s. This was despite the fact that throughout this period, and especially after 1948, Afrikaner nationalists were actively undermining other elements of the British connection. The South African government was compelled to enter and remain in the area above all because of its dependence on Britain both as a customer for South African agricultural goods (the production and export of which were disproportionately significant in South African politics) and as a source of capital funds and goods (particularly for the highly capital-intensive gold-mining industry which dominated the South African economy as a whole). The British government promoted South Africa's membership of the area not just for reasons of economics (the flow of South African gold to London facilitated the maintenance of sterling as an international currency; trade with South Africa could generate substantial net earnings of convertible currency which helped to sustain British trade on a largely multilateral basis) but also for reasons of strategy, geopolitics and prestige.

In January 1937 the government of the USSR conducted its first population census in eleven years. This article, which is based on the archives of the census organizations and on reports from some local offices for the registration of births, marriages and deaths, describes the campaign of data collection, the questions that were asked (including, for the first and last time, a question about the respondent's religion) and the response which people give to this personal contact with their rulers. The information gathered was exceptionally thorough and complete. Crucially, however, the census was entirely suppressed, and the officials responsible for organizing it promptly arrested and executed. The reasons for doing this – which largely centred on the sensitivity of evidence of high mortality during the famine of 1932–3 – are discussed, as are the potential implications of the suppression of such information. Finally, the article questions how complete any statistics about famine mortality in this period can be, and calls for a discussion of the broader questions of memory and loss which underlie the bare statistics of death.