Since D. B. Quinn's The Elizabethans and the Irish, the history of early modern Ireland has been the subject of a wide range of studies, but only recently has women's role in that history received attention. Similarly, Nicholas Canny's article on “Edmund Spenser and the Development of an Anglo-Irish Identity” initiated a debate about whether sixteenth-century tracts on Ireland express a unified colonialist ideology, but only recently has the construction of sexuality in these texts come under scrutiny. It is not surprising that those who study the history of women in early modern Ireland do not often turn to the English tracts for evidence, except with great caution and reservation. So much related in these documents is indebted to the stereotypes of a colonialist discourse, initiated by Giraldus Cambrensis in the twelfth century, rather than to observation or encounter. Recent work on the history of women in early modern Ireland presents us with a sense of what is not being represented in the English settlers' descriptions. Such aspects of women's lives in Gaelic Ireland as their right to hold and acquire their own land and to keep their own names while married are not referred to in these tracts. These tracts do not yield transparent information about actual Irish women of the period, although there are fascinating references to their activities. Spenser writes that Irish women had “the trust and care of all things both at home and in the fields.” And at least one woman, the foster mother of Murrogh O'Brien, is said to have drunk the blood of her child's head as she grieved when he had been drawn and quartered by the English. The character of these texts as colonialist discourse makes the representation of women as a symbolic category or “gender” the more useful focus rather than some unmediated sense of “women.”

On October 5, 1663, the Scottish Parliament took an action unique in its long and variegated history. It ratified a marriage contract between two of the king's subjects. Not ordinary subjects, to be sure—they were the duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s eldest bastard, a lad of fourteen, and Anna Scott, countess of Buccleuch, aged twelve, who had been married the previous April. Persuading Parliament to ratify this contract was potentially a very tricky business; the king entrusted the handling of it to the earl of Lauderdale, the secretary of state, normally resident in Whitehall, who had been sent to Scotland to manage this session of Parliament. The ratification was a private act, one of a large number passed at each session of the Scottish Parliament in favor of private individuals and corporations: towns, universities, etc. Because it was a private act Osmund Airy, the editor of the Lauderdale papers, our principal source for the day-to-day doings of this Parliament, ignored it in making his selection from the vast Lauderdale correspondence. So the episode has gone completely unnoticed by historians. This is a pity, not only because the story of the marriage contract and its ratification is fascinating in itself, but also because it was important for Lauderdale's political future. Lauderdale's success in getting the ratification passed without backlash helped to convince King Charles that he was the man to manage Scottish business from now on.

The political history of Restoration Scotland has been largely neglected by historians. Lauderdale was the dominant figure for most of Charles's reign, but it was some years before he achieved that eminence. Lord Chancellor Clarendon, until his fall in 1667, was Charles's principal adviser for all of his three kingdoms, a fact that Lauderdale resented but had to live with. Clarendon did not like Lauderdale, who, he wrote, had been a leader of the Covenanters' rebellion “when he was scarce of age, and prosecuted it to the end with the most eminent fierceness and animosity.”

The Annual Bibliography of British and Irish History published for 1991, contains 393 items in section G, “Britain 1714-1815,” a section that excludes works devoted to “long periods” that also cover the period. Of those 393, twenty were in Ga “General,” thirty-six in Gb, “Politics,” eight in Gc “Constitution, Administration and Law,” thirty-two in Gd “External Affairs” and thirty-seven in Ge “Religion.” Though politics is in theory restricted to Gb, in practice it overlaps with these other categories, and, indeed, in part, with the categories Economic Affairs, Social Structure and Population, Naval and Military, and Intellectual and Cultural. Restricting, however, the survey to Gb, the figures for 1988, 1989 and 1990 respectively were fifty-six, fifty-two and fifty-four. It is thus clear that while political history no longer dominates eighteenth-century historiography as it once did, there is still a formidable quantity of it produced. This is not a situation to be regretted, but it does emphasize the subjectivity of any assessment of recent work and of current problems. Such a situation, however, is not simply a question of problems derived from quantity, for any attempt to produce an historiographical account focusing on earlier scholarship would itself encounter many difficulties. The absence of consensus among modern scholars extends to their assessment of historiographical trends. This was demonstrated clearly by Jonathan Clark in 1986. Having, the previous year, in his English Society 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice during the Ancien Regime (Cambridge, 1985), asserted the strength of conservatism and religious identity and the marginality of reform and radicalism in eighteenth-century England, he offered, inter alia, in his Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1986), a combative interpretation of the methodology and historiography of the period.

One of the many problems facing the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 was the future of the conquered German and Turkish territories in Africa, the Pacific, and the Middle East. Widespread anti-imperialist sentiment in Europe and the United States opposed direct annexation of the possessions, but wartime agreements and the security interests of the Allies prevented returning the conquered areas to their former rulers. In particular, many British leaders wanted to ensure that Germany could never again attempt world domination and were convinced that the restoration to Germany of its overseas possessions would pose a “grave political and military menace” to Britain's vital maritime connections with South Africa and India. After a long, often acrimonious debate, the Conference agreed on a compromise that placed the former German colonies and Ottoman provinces under the supervision of the League of Nations. This solution gave the Allies control of their acquisitions as “mandates” within a framework of international accountability. Great Britain received the most mandates, including Germany's largest colony of German East Africa. For the British leaders who had always advocated transforming German East Africa into a British colony, the new system seemed to make little practical difference. For the colonial officials in London and at the highest levels of colonial administration within the conquered possession, however, the mandates system presented serious problems and was not simply a disguise for annexation.