This article utilizes the metaphor of the post-war Lost Generation to investigate the chronology of middle class political realignment and Liberal decline. It suggests that the Liberalism of twentieth-century Norwich owed its existence to the perpetuation of a closed culture based on business, chapel and urban residence. It questions the degree to which dissenting Liberals had been assimilated into the dominant ideology before 1914 by reference to marriage ties and associational links such as the freemasons. It asserts that the downfall of this Liberal culture in the long run, though not immediately, was the result of the Great War, which allowed the younger generation to break out of their insular world and mix more freely with the Anglican upper-middle class. However, it also demonstrates that the closed culture was such that those of the Edwardian political generation, although affected by the War, did not reject their Liberalism. Most continued to actively support the party into the 1930s, questioning the view that the middle classes had largely deserted the Liberals by 1924. Rather, it was the political maturation in the 1930s of the War generation which heralded the end of urban Liberalism and the triumph of middle class Conservatism.

The crisis of legitimacy following Spain's loss of empire in 1898 combined with the effects of a longer-term crisis of modernization to undermine efforts to reform the political system and regenerate the social and economic life of Spain. Rising social agitation, middle-class movements for national regeneration, Catalan bourgeois nationalism and military reaction all interacted to block the development of a modernizing alternative to the Restoration regime. As a result, the gap between the established order and society grew wider and the potential for peaceful change diminished. Events in the first decade of the century thus established the pattern of conflict that was to dominate Spanish politics until the Civil War.

The period 1929–33 was perhaps the most traumatic in the inter-war history of the British Labour movement; the ignominious collapse of the second Labour government led the Labour party to question not only the role of its former leaders but also its ideology. This article will reassess the role of the Oxford academic and socialist intellectual, G. D. H. Cole, in this period and will argue that his contribution to the reshaping of the party in the wake of the 1931 financial crisis and the formation of the national government was of much greater significance than has previously been acknowledged. In addition, it will analyse the effects that the political events of the 1920s and the failures of the Macdonald government had upon Cole's socialist ideology and will illustrate that his move away from his earlier guild socialism to a collectivist philosophy was more profound than he himself, and many commentators since, have been prepared to concede.

The main purpose of this case study of an abortive entente in the Lyon silk industry in 1935 is to show that corporatism, often depicted by historians as a vague intellectual doctrine with little or no appeal to real business, was in reality a key category, linking business, politics and ideology. It is suggested that the problems of the silk industry must be seen in the context of a crisis of the Lyonnais liberal tradition and of the economic and ideological contradictions of French society as a whole. These tensions help in turn to explain the authoritarian potential of corporatism in the 1930s and the attraction of many business people to anti-parliamentary political movements. The example of the silk industry also reveals that corporatism cannot easily be categorised in terms of a traditional/modern dichotomy and that the impetus for the transformation of the French economy originated as much in the ideas of business people themselves as in the actions of the elite groups emphasised by some historians.

Liberalism in Devon and Cornwall before 1914 pursued a traditional ‘democratic’ rhetoric based on a class division which associated the Liberal party with ‘the people’ and Unionism with a privileged aristocracy. The ‘new Liberalism’ and social reform were unimportant. In the 1920s, the Gladstonian trinity of peace, retrenchment and free trade comprised easily the most common theme in Liberal candidates’ speeches. The Gladstonian tradition remained central to Liberalism because it accurately reflected the preoccupations of the party's core supporters in the region. There was apparently no belief amongst Liberals that the party's policies after 1918 were out-dated and irrelevant; their view is supported by an analysis of the 1923, 1924 and 1929 contests and their results.

Throughout the period, Liberal candidates were as ready and able as their opponents to use the coarser arts of electioneering. Liberalism was not wedded to a restricted Edwardian electorate with a relatively high level of political intelligence. The argument that it was is contradicted by contemporary accounts that the electorate of the 1920s was more thoughtful and less susceptible to emotional appeals than were pre-war voters.

This article takes a fresh look at Anglo-American nuclear relations between 1946 and 1958. It concentrates on the relationship between the military establishments of the two countries in general and the ties between the United States air force and the Royal Air Force in particular. The article argues that an understanding of military relations is essential for an understanding of the high politics of the nuclear relationship. It is shown that senior officers in the armed services were the main ‘functional elite’ dealing with nuclear delivery systems and the planning for their use. Relations between these groups were personally and institutionally close and on the whole cordial. In Britain the link sustained optimism about the possibility of close nuclear co-operation in the 1940s and early 1950s and suppressed fears about the loss of nuclear independence in the late 1950s. In the United States it was recognized that military relations were an important channel through which to influence British nuclear policy. The article offers accounts, based on new archival research, of the nuclear aspect of the October 1947 Pentagon talks on the Middle East, Churchill's visit to the United States in January 1952 and the first Anglo-American joint nuclear targeting agreement – the Wilson/Alexander agreement of 12 March 1954. It reveals for the first time details of Plans E and X which equipped the RAF with American atomic and thermonuclear weapons between 1955 and 1958. The article concludes that the British nuclear force was becoming subordinated to the United States even before negotiations about Thor, Skybolt and Polaris missiles became central to the relationship.

This article seeks to demonstrate the structure of attitudes in British colonial officialdom through a case study of Mauritius from the governorship of Sir John Pope Hennessy to decolonization. It suggests that officials consistently saw Mauritians as a whole as ‘the Others’, while seeking both to divide and rule them – into an émigré French elite left over from the French colonial period at the time of British conquest (1810), a Creole community, and an Indian community – without assimilating them; and to suspect each in turn of disloyalty and treachery. By a grim irony, many of the governors and their officials were suspected by the colonial office of joining the Others. This is thus a story of an adaptable imperial paranoia.

Based on the recently released documents in the Public Record Office, London, this article is concerned with examining the reasons behind the shift in the British approach towards decolonization in Africa signalled by Macmillan's ‘wind of change’ speech to the South African parliament on 3 February 1960. The documents suggest that the British decision to abdicate in Africa was partly due to international considerations, and to Cold War politics and the need to prevent Soviet penetration in Africa. The change from ‘multi-racialism’ to ‘non-racialism’ can be attributed to the influence of the commonwealth relations office under Lord Home, and an initiative from the leader of the Africa Capricorn society, David Stirling. The emphasis on the need for Britain to pursue the same policy in all of Africa can also be traced to the commonwealth relations office. Macmillan, himself was influenced by the ‘moral’ aspect, by the policies pursued by the Belgians in the Congo, but above all by the failure of French policy in Algeria.