William Pitt the Younger died in 1806 but had a long afterlife in political argument. Historians have argued that a reactionary cult of Pitt in early nineteenth-century toryism died with Catholic emancipation, but this article suggests that invocation of Pitt's character was more widespread and durable, because linked to the assertion and defence of party identities. Whig hostility to Pitt remained strong even in the middle of the nineteenth century. Lord John Russell attacked his character flaws to celebrate the continued vigour and distinctness of Foxite political culture within the Liberal party. Conversely, use of Pitt in argument about what the tory party should be like did not end with reform. In the 1830s, traditional celebration of Pitt as a stern opponent of revolutionary agitation survived within a supposedly moderate conservatism. In Peel's second administration, arguments about whether Pitt had been firm or flexible, liberal or intransigent, reflected and added to disputes about how much religious and economic liberalism Peel should endorse. It was schism between Peelites and protectionists, the article suggests, which broke the clear link between celebration of Pitt's character and one party, allowing a more wide-ranging, because less politically charged, appreciation of Pitt to develop.

This article examines Irish nationalist attitudes towards electoral reform between 1885 and 1918. It argues that before 1917 mainstream Irish nationalist opinion attached little importance to the franchise, being instead more concerned about the consequences for home rule if the number of Irish parliamentary seats was reduced through redistribution. However, the introduction of wartime legislation to reform the franchise and registration system repoliticized electoral reform in nationalist Ireland. While the Irish parliamentary party vociferously protested at the coalition government's belated attempt to redistribute Irish constituencies, its critics (a coalition of heterodox nationalists, socialists, and suffragettes) accused it of deliberately conspiring to exclude Ireland from the ‘fourth’ reform bill because the young men and women it would enfranchise intended to vote for Sinn Fein. This article argues that the concerns of the Irish party regarding redistribution were genuine and legitimate, while the conspiracy theory was essentially a propaganda device. None the less, the theory gained widespread attention because its underlying assumption about the voting behaviour of the new electorate was shared not only by its exponents, but by sections of the press, the British administration in Ireland, and the Irish party itself. Indeed, so convinced was the party that the cleavage in Ireland was as much generational as ideological that ultimately the franchise was a factor in its defeat at the 1918 general election.

The French have had an ambiguous relationship with liberal democracy, doing much to pioneer it since 1789, but also harbouring substantial minorities hostile to it. This article seeks the historical roots for this relationship in a critical period for the democratization process in France between the 1830 Revolution and the consolidation of the Third Republic late in the nineteenth century. It takes the textile town of Troyes as a case study. In particular, it takes a ‘grass-roots’ approach to the problem, as opposed to the usual focus on ideologies and attitudes to democratization among the elites. The general contention is that the population of the town faced a number of obstacles as it attempted to develop a ‘democratic culture’. The analysis highlights the varying approaches to popular participation in politics taken by successive regimes between 1815 and the 1870s, the slow emergence of a civil society in the town, and the problems faced by militants as they operated under the constraints of universal manhood suffrage.

In one fundamental sense, a British post-war consensus certainly existed: repudiation and denigration of interwar governments and their leaders. Stanley Baldwin was the chief victim, as it became widely believed during the 1940s that he had ‘failed to rearm’ the nation in the 1930s. Examination of the history of Baldwin's reputation after his retirement – precisely why and how it collapsed – reveals a striking case of the contingent construction of historical interpretation. Partisan politics, legitimation of a new regime, a Churchillian bandwagon, self-exoneration, and selective recollection together reinforced hindsight and a wartime appetite for scapegoats to create a public myth, which despite manifest evidence to the contrary was accepted as historical ‘truth’ by historians and other intellectuals. The main indictment was accepted even by Baldwin's appointed biographer, who added a further layer of supposed psychological deficiencies. Attempts to establish an effective defence were long constrained by official secrecy and the force of Churchill's post-war prestige. Only during the 1960s did political distance and then the opening of government records lead to more balanced historical assessments; yet the myth had become so central to larger myths about the 1930s and 1940s that it persists in general belief.

Venice has long evoked contrasting images – on the one hand the republican embodiment of Renaissance principles, a rare example of both stability and freedom; on the other, a city of spying and treachery, a government founded on oppression and driven by corruption. Caught between the Scylla and Carybdis of what amounts to a historiographical paradox, historians have found it difficult to escape its reductiveness, taking sides in describing one view as ‘myth’, the other as historical reality. The five books reviewed in this article suggest different but connected ways of sailing out of these straits by emphasizing the utter diversity of the city, the government, and the images they have evoked through the ages. In this interpretation, more than harmony, what is crucial about Venice is the coexistence of the different ‘worlds’ of this early multicultural metropolis. In line with a recent move away from fixed tags and neat developments to an emphasis on diversity in the historiography of early modern Europe, this is a welcome and interesting evolution in the history of Venice, though it is by no means unproblematic, multiculturalism being no easier issue in the Renaissance than in the twenty-first century.

This article explores the origins of the UN's commitment to human rights and links this to the wartime decision to abandon the interwar system of an international regime for the protection of minority rights. After 1918, the League of Nations developed a comprehensive machinery for guaranteeing the national minorities of eastern Europe. But by 1940 the League's policies were widely regarded as a failure and the coalition of forces which had supported them after the First World War had disintegrated. German abuse of the system after 1933, and the Third Reich's use of ethnic German groups as fifth columns to undermine the Versailles settlement were cited by east European politicians as sufficient justification for a new approach which would combine mass expulsion, on the one hand, with a new international doctrine of individual human rights on the other. The Great Powers supported this because they thereby escaped the specific commitments which the previous arrangements had imposed on them, and which Russian control over post-war eastern Europe rendered no longer practicable. But they also supported it because the new rights regime had no binding legal force. In respect, therefore, of the degree to which the principle of absolute state sovereignty was threatened by these arrangements, the rights regime of the new UN represented a considerable weakening of international will compared with the interwar League. But acquiescing in a weaker international organization was probably the price necessary for US and Soviet participation.

This article outlines Richard Wagner's conception of music-drama during the period in which he formulated his intentions for composition of the epic Ring of the Nibelung. Attempting to renew rather than to restore the communal, political nature of Attic tragedy, he wished to transform that model from celebration of the Athenian political order into a savage critique of the contemporary political order, indeed into an incitement to and celebration of revolution. Wagner was determined to restore the dignity of art, a dignity he believed to have been lost in the pursuit of base, commercial considerations; but this determination should not be confused with the idea of art for art's sake. Instead, he wished to renew art in a socialist, even communist, sense as the paradigm of free, productive activity. The direct revolutionary experience of participation in the Dresden uprising of 1849 bolstered his conviction of the necessity of such a transformation. With his magnum opus, Wagner wrote, he intended to ‘make clear to the men of the Revolution the meaning of that Revolution, in its noblest sense’.

The relationship between the ‘growth of professional society’ and the growth of new universities in England from the later nineteenth century is more often asserted than examined in detail. This article examines the policies towards graduates of three large professions, those of schoolteachers, solicitors, and accountants. The crucial first stage was the growth of an examining society during the second half of the nineteenth century; exams were necessary for almost everything and middle-class children, girls as well as boys, stayed at school longer to take them. This process provided the students both for women's colleges and for the new universities. However, graduate employment remained a problem: solicitors resisted large-scale graduate entry until well into the 1950s, accountants for a decade longer. Teaching was exceptional as a large profession that accepted graduates in large numbers. As a result, the secondary school system produced teachers, who produced university students, many of whom had little option but to return to teaching. This applied to Science as well as Arts students, male as well as female. Secondary school teaching rapidly became a graduate profession, while interwar elementary school teaching moved quite rapidly in that direction. The restricted occupations available for graduates created a vicious circle that significantly restrained the Redbrick universities' opportunities for expansion from their foundation until after 1945. Thereafter, with their traditional intake now going to university, solicitors and accountants were increasingly compelled to accept graduates in large numbers. The post-war growth in student numbers was bound up with a widening of social access to universities, particularly within the middle classes.

One of the most profound challenges facing the Labour party in the post-war period was its ability to understand and make policy to reform the private sector. Before the Attlee government, Labour had little to say on this issue, but that government's experience exposed the dangerous ‘vacuum’ this involved. In the 1950s the nature of the capitalist firm ranked alongside the alleged ‘embourgoisement’ of the working class as an issue framing Labour's ideological and policy debate. The centrality of this issue reflected the fact that understanding the firm was inextricably linked to a raft of broader arguments within the Left about the nature of modern capitalism. The benign view of the corporation that flowed from the revisionist wing of the party was challenged by the ‘declinist’ politics of the 1960s, and in office after 1964 Labour pursued a modernizing agenda which centrally involved seeking to shape the behaviour of the private sector in order to deliver the higher economic growth that Labour so much desired. The failure of this growth to materialize led to great disillusion across the party about the policies pursued by the Wilson government, and this in turn led to a fundamental rethink of policy that was to underpin the radical agenda of the party in the 1970s.

In 1848 one of the first female inspectors appointed by the French state argued that ‘the inspection of nursery schools can be done usefully and correctly only by women … Inspectresses will intimidate less and will persuade more readily than men can.’ Her statement points to the ambiguous position of many working women in the nineteenth century. Working outside what was perceived as a feminine domestic sphere, their employment was justified with reference to a domestic ideal of femininity. Though each has a different focus, the three books reviewed here all demonstrate how ideas about the nature of women served both to extend and to limit women's opportunities in nineteenth- and twentieth-century France and Europe.

Historiographical accounts of Harry Truman's recognition of Israel have placed undue importance on this apparently sudden act on 14 May 1948. US Palestine policy has not been placed in the correct historical context of the Cold War. As a ‘Cold War consensus’ developed in Washington in the early post-war period, Palestine emerged as a secondary issue to the major concern that was the ‘Northern Tier’ of Greece, Turkey, and Iran. The US was guided by broad but clear objectives in Palestine: the attainment of a peaceful solution, a desire not to implicate US troops, and the denial of the region to the Soviets. Disagreements between the White House and the State Department were all expressed within these broad policy objectives. Israeli sources have been significant by their absence in the existing historiography of recognition. These sources reveal that for the Jewish community in Palestine, diplomatic victories were of secondary importance to the practical achievement of statehood. From both a Washington perspective, and the perspective from Palestine, US recognition was not regarded as a crucial issue at the time. It was a decision taken within the context of broad US objectives in Palestine, and it did not influence the decision of the Yishuv to declare statehood.

Attention is drawn to five parallel passages as between Francis Bacon's unpublished Aphorismi de jure gentium maiore sive de fontibus justiciae et juris and A discourse of laws, which was published anonymously in 1620. It is suggested that around 14 per cent of A discourse consists of unacknowledged translations from Bacon's Latin. Questions are raised as to when, where, and why A discourse was composed. These questions bear on, though fail to resolve, the debate over the identity of A discourse's author. The two names discussed most often in this connection are those of William Cavendish and Thomas Hobbes.

Twentieth-century Germany's (military) history has been the subject of heated, sometimes acrimonious controversies in the Federal Republic. In recent years, historians and the German public have been engaged, for example, in debates over the relative merit of different kinds of German resistance against National Socialism, and over the place of deserters in German history of the Second World War. Such soul-searching has culminated in angry debates over the role of the Wehrmacht in crimes against humanity which followed in the wake of the exhibition ‘Verbrechen der Wehrmacht’ (crimes of the Wehrmacht) in Austria and Germany. The books under consideration here all have a contribution to make to our understanding of this troubled and contested past, and in particular to the question of the role of the military in German history.

In the 1960s a comparative approach, covering different continents and periods of time, was common in the study of witchcraft. During the 1970s it fell out of fashion because of criticism by some anthropologists, and collusion between the disciplines of anthropology and history over the subject more or less ended. In the 1990s, unnoticed by virtually all historians, some anthropologists and sociologists began again to emphasize a global, and interdisciplinary, perspective on the issue. The following article reviews these debates, and then pools research undertaken in various parts of the world to suggest that a supranational model for the figure that English-speakers call the witch is indeed viable. It also distinguishes attributes of the figure that do vary significantly between various cultures, and identifies many peoples among whom the witch-figure does not seem to have existed at all. In doing so, it suggests that anthropology may once again be one of the disciplines with which historians of Europe have the option of collaborating over the subject to mutual benefit.

In explaining Britain's post-war relative economic decline, contemporary historians have concentrated upon ‘government failure’: not enough, too much, or too much of the wrong sort of government intervention. Implicitly, such explanations conceive the British state as both centralized and powerful. Recent developments in political science have questioned this traditional view. Using this insight to structure its historical analysis, this article examines the wide array of policy changes that flowed from the British government's adoption in the early 1960s of an explicit target for higher growth. It finds that the principal reasons for the failure of these policies can be found in the fragmentation and interdependence of Britain's economic institutions – the source of which lay in the particular historical development of Britain's polity. These issues of governance required new conceptions of both policy making and policy implementation able either to strengthen the power of the centre to impose change, or to promote consensus building. However, lacking a sufficient shock to the system, and imprisoned in a mindset in which the British state was conceived as both centralized and powerful, elites saw little need for fundamental institutional change.

This article examines the relationship between the consumer and the citizen from the eighteenth century to the present in Europe and the United States. Part I highlights the political narrative underlying the opposition between courtly consumption (absolutism) and the inconspicuous consumption of the middling sorts, and explores early formulations of the relationship between consumption and democracy. Part II looks at the first half of the nineteenth century, defined by the opposition between consumers (coded feminine, and as ‘despised’) and citizens (coded masculine, and as ‘restrained’). Part III goes from the 1860s to the 1930s. American historians have emphasized the positive political agency of consumers in this period, and their contribution to the notion of social citizenship. This article emphasizes the less democratic aspects of consumer politics, and the contributions of anti-liberal movements on the extreme left and right to a stronger tradition of social citizenship in Europe. Part IV takes Lizabeth Cohen's claim that a ‘Consumers' Republic' was forged in the US in the post-war period, and casts the Marshall Plan and the Cold War as the context that gave rise to an international negotiation over the relationship between consumption and democracy that continues to the present.

Jimmy Carter's response to stagflation, the unprecedented combination of stagnation and double-digit inflation that afflicted the American economy during his presidency, made him the subject of virulent attack from liberal Democrats for betraying New Deal traditions of activist government to sustain high employment and strong economic growth. Carter found himself accused of being a do-nothing president whose name had become ‘a synonym for economic mismanagement’ like Herbert Hoover's in the 1930s.1 Liberal disenchantment fuelled Edward Kennedy's quixotic crusade to wrest the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination from Carter. ‘[H]e has left behind the best traditions of the Democratic Party’, the Massachusetts senator charged, ‘We are instructed that the New Deal is old hat and that our best hope is no deal at all.’2 A quarter-century later a more dispassionate analysis would suggest that Carter was neither a do-nothing president nor a throwback to the past in terms of economic policy. Far from being the ‘Jimmy Hoover’ of liberal obloquy, Carter was really ‘Jimmy Clinton’ because in seeking solutions for stagflation his administration laid the foundations of a new political economy that the next Democratic president would build upon.

Hardly two decades old, historians of gender and colonialism might well claim to have invented a whole new field of scholarship: gender and colonialism specialists draw as much of their intellectual inspiration from each other as they do from the nation- or region-bound fields in which they research and teach. As the field of gender and colonialism has developed and expanded, it has been faced with two significant challenges. One is whether the concerns of gender and colonial history have affected the concerns of older fields in history, such as economic, political, labour, and military histories; recent assessments of imperial history suggest that gender is considered a marginal category of analysis. Another challenge is how to define and study gender and colonialism so that it does not replicate the inequalities and hierarchies of colonialism, so that we study colonizing and colonized societies in equal measure.

Recent writing on early modern London offers new perspectives on a wide range of topics. Interest in the literary and cultural is particularly strong, and much attention has been given to John Stow, London's sixteenth-century historian. This review discusses recent work on three themes prominent in Stow's Survey of London (1598), and its later editions: the character of religious life in post-Reformation London; the importance of place and space to the experience of the city; and the question of civic and business morality in a changing world.