Labour's victory at the general election of 1945, the first in which the party won an absolute majority in the house of commons, had fundamental implications for Britain's post-war history. Despite this, historians have failed to examine the popular political temper which made Labour's term of office possible. Instead, they have largely assumed that the Second World War radicalized the public, turning an unprecedented number into enthusiastic Labour voters. Whilst not denying that the war had a profound impact on the politics of some sections of society this article proposes a rather different perspective to that normally offered. Instead of promoting pro-Labour sentiment it seems that the conflict left many members of the public disengaged from the political process and cynical about the motives of all politicians. As a consequence, rather than have Labour hold office by itself the generally favoured outcome appears to have been the formation of a progressive coalition committed to the implementation of the Beveridge report. However, in reality, electors who did not want to see the return of a Conservative government had no choice but to vote ‘straight left’.

The real significance ofthe Representation of the People Act, 1918, for the Liberal and Labour parties lay in its mundane and little discussed financial provisions, not in its extension of the franchise. Despite the electoral reforms of 1883–5, election contests before 1914 were still expensive enough effectively to exclude the Labour party from politics outside the industrial centres. In 1918 the politicians of the older parties took the opportunity to relieve their pockets of a substantial part of the expense of elections. However, Labour was the main beneficiary: its new strategy of contesting seats nationwide was only made possible by the changes in and underlying the Fourth Reform Act. These changes, in turn, enabled Labour to benefit from being a ‘national’ party and ‘alternative government’, during a period when the established leading ‘progressive’ party was divided and weakened. The Fourth Reform Act also assisted Labour's strategy of eliminating the Liberal party as a parliamentary force: Liberals could be denied election victories in the countryside and the suburbs by hopeless but inexpensive Labour interventions.

This is an article highlighting the limitations of Lord Salisbury as foreign secretary in an age when foreign policy was for the first time taking on a truly global character, and yet its practitioners still possessed a rather parochial, almost exclusively European experience, and distrusted ‘experts’. It was of course the late nineteenth-century spread of European imperialism that first called for such global policy making, and thus most of this Europe-dominated world was still for the time being quite susceptible to a Eurocentric approach.

But if any area was the exception it was eastern Asia, in due course to be mainly responsible for decline of Western imperial world hegemony. And in the vanguard of this counter-challenge was to be Japan, a country with which Salisbury personally was to find himself all at sea. By contrast, Ernest Satow, more than any other figure of his time, found the key to Japan, and it is a sign of how poorly general Western understanding of that country has progressed since then that his voluminous diaries and papers sit in the Public Record Office, still largely untouched by researchers.

The mercurial rise of Venizelos, the most prominent Greek statesman of this century, has been a hotly debated issue of modern Greek history. The tendency until recently has been to explain his success in terms of social changes, and to see the rise of the Liberal party as the triumph of modernizing bourgeois forces in early twentieth-century Greece. This article, however, compares Venizelos both with the generation of politicians which preceded him, and with his leading contemporary, Gounaris. It argues that Venizelos's enormous popularity hinged upon his response to the nationalist, quasi-messianicfervour which gripped Greece after its humiliating defeat by Turkey in 1897. Parliamentary government came to be seen as passive and elitist, political parties as causes of national decline. Using his rhetorical skills and the press, Venizelos presented himself as the agent of national regeneration. His attitude towards class politics, and to the very idea of political parties, was complex and ambivalent. Hence, his rise should be interpreted, not in terms of a simple Marxist or whiggish schema, as the product of Greece's bourgeois revolution, but as the expression of a new more confident nationalism, which reinforced the personality-centred quality of Greek politics.

This article examines the role which education played in church/state relations during the Occupation. It begins with an evaluation of catholic reactions to the defeat and explains why so many church leaders were quick to blame military collapse on the laïcité of the republican educational system. It then investigates the policies which the church wanted to see pursued in regard to schools and assesses how these were received by the Vichy government. Analysis of these issues reveals that Vichy was not as pro-clerical as is sometimes believed. Although initially sympathetic to church requests, by 1942 the regime had become reluctant to introduce any measure that might provoke religious division. At the same time, the article illustrates that French Catholicism was not a monolithic bloc. Arguments over education served only to intensify divisions already present within the church and soon led to catholic disenchantment with the Vichy regime.

This is an account of one of the more controversial Irish conspiracies of 1641 which allegedly involved Charles I and the earl of Antrim, a prominent Gaelic warlord with extensive connections in all three of the Stuart kingdoms. No irrefutable contemporary documentation to the plot appears to have survived and so the ambiguous and scrappy evidencefor the conspiracy, dating from the 1640s, 1650s and 1660s, has been examined here in an attempt to establish whether the ‘Antrim plot’ was a myth or a reality.

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.

On September 4, 1939, a special bureau was established within the legal department of the Wehrmacht with the task of ‘ascertaining violations of international law committed by enemy military and civilian persons against members of the German armed forces, and investigating whatever accusations foreign countries should make against the Wehrmacht’. The purpose of this article is to provide a brief overview of the material collected by the Germans during the war, to test the credibility of the German investigations, review case-studies and inquire into the integrity of the judges carrying out the investigations. The Wehrmacht bureau functioned from the very beginning until the final days of war. It investigated some 10,000 war crimes, of which the files for perhaps some 4,000 have survived. Half the files contain investigations of war crimes in the Soviet Union; the other volumes refer to war crimes allegedly committed by American, British, French, Polish, Yugoslav and other Allied nationals. After a careful review of the bureau's records and methods of operation, the conclusion is warranted that the investigations were carried out in a methodically correct manner and that many of the reports present prima facie cases that deserve further investigation. There remains thefundamental question of the judges' integrity, how it was possible for them to carry out investigations into Allied war crimes, when the German government, the SS, the Einsatzgruppen and the Wehrmacht were engaging in various degrees of official criminality. In search of an answer, the author reviews the testimony of numerous witnesses at the Nuremberg trials, including SS judge Georg Konrad Morgen, who had the commander of Buchenwald arrested on corruption charges, but was prevented from completing investigations into concentration camp killings. Hitler's order no. I concerning secrecy appears to have been largely observed, thus frustrating investigation attempts and keeping knowledge of the Holocaust relatively limited.

In the summer of 1920, as the I.R.A.'s guerrilla campaign against the Royal Irish Constabulary and the British Army approached its climax, the British government attempted to reinforce the R.I.C. by raising a force of ex-officers to act as a mobile police striking force. The new organization was called the Auxiliary Division of the R.I.C, and its members, though officially referred to as ‘cadets’, were popularly called Auxiliaries or Auxis, a denomination which suggests a kind of subconscious analogy with their I.R.A. opponents, who were generally known as ‘Volunteers’. In the subsequent mythology of the Irish ‘Troubles’ the Auxiliaries were generally lumped together with the ‘Black and Tans’ but were in fact a more elite body. The ‘Black and Tans’ were ex-servicemen recruited to serve as R.I.C. constables and initially kitted out in a motley of R.I.C. dark green and Army khaki. The Auxiliaries on the other hand were nattily dressed in tarn o'shanters, khaki tunics and puttees (or officer's gaiters) and were paid a pound a day — twice the R.I.C. constable's rate — which made them the most highly-paid uniformed force in the world at that time.1 Altogether only 2,214 were recruited (with perhaps two-thirds that number in service at the peak of the formation's strength), but they did more than their fair share to discredit the British regime in Ireland.

Although Conservative M.P.s were instrumental in defeating equal pay proposals in parliament in 1936 and 1944, it was a Conservative government which in 1954 decided to proceed with equal pay for female civil servants. Previous explanations for this reversal of traditional Conservative policy have focused on the need to increase the supply of female applicants for civil service positions, and the equal pay campaigns by white–collar unions and by the feminist Equal Pay Campaign Committee. Drawing upon previously unused sources, including P.R.O.files, this article offers a more overtly political explanation.

Within four weeks after the Labour party announced in January 1954 that it would ‘immediately’ implement equal pay when the next Labour government was formed, R. A. Butler, the chancellor of the exchequer, informed his treasury advisers that he wished to proceed with equal pay. With a general election looming in the near future, and believing themselves engaged in a close race with the Labour party, the cabinet reluctantly endorsed reform, fearing that a failure to act might tip sufficient female voters toward Labour to determine the outcome of a close election.

This article uses recently released documents from the Soviet diplomatic archives to examine the Merekalov–Weizsäcker meeting of April 1939. It argues that these documents show that western historians have been mistaken in assuming that this meeting was the occasion for Soviet signals of a desire for détente with Nazi Germany. The significance attached to the meeting in this respect is part of the cold war myth that the USSR's negotiations for a triple alliance with Great Britain and France in the spring and summer of 1939 were paralleled by secret Soviet–German discussions which eventually lead to the Nazi–Soviet pact of August 1939. The article seeks to demolish those elements of the myth that concern the Merekalov–Weizsäcker encounter and to present an alternative interpretation of the provenance and meaning of the so-called political overture by the Soviet ambassador at the meeting.

The article seeks to establish the reasons why Conservative governments in the 1950s decided not to proceed with legislation to restrict immigration from the Commonwealth in the 1950s. It is thus particularly concerned with the debates about proposals that were put before the Eden cabinet in 1955 and the subsequent postponement of any decision to take action.

The various constraints such as the need to placate opinion in the African and West Indian colonies, a strong desire to present an enlightened view of conservatism at home and abroad and uncertainties about possible reactions which could be exploited by their Labour opponents, are examined. It is argued that these factors outweighed the arguments of senior figures in government urging a speedy response to pressures building up for restrictions within the parliamentary backbenches and in a number of constituencies. The significance of the race riots that took place in Nottingham and the Notting Hill district of London are discussed.

The article concludes that many of the factors which had contributed to a delay in imposing restrictions were seen, at the beginning of the 1960s, to possess less relevance than in the previous decade. This paved the way to the passage of the Commonwealth Immigration Act in 1962 which finally ended unrestricted entry.

This paper deals with the history of French social history. Social history was not created once and for all; it is an historical construction; it had a beginning and may come to an end. Hence, its history may be written. However, two preliminary qualifications are needed. I shall not comment on ancient or medieval social history, but on the only social history which I know a little, that of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Secondly, for the same reason, I shall only discuss French social history written by French historians.

This article surveys the debate on the ‘General Crisis’ of the seventeenth century in the light of hitherto neglected research. Firstly, most theories of the crisis fail to combine its economic and socio-political aspects. Secondly, few explanations of the crisis take account of evidence from the local and regional levels. Thirdly and most seriously, theories of the crisis have ignored Germany, while historians of Germany have ignored the crisis debate. This article seeks to Jill these gaps. It puts Germany at the centre of a comprehensive theory of the crisis that takes existing crisis theories as its starting point, but also shows how the Thirty Tears War, largely caused by the peculiar institutional structure of the Holy Roman Empire, in turn wrought significant institutional change, not just in Germany, but throughout Europe.

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’.