This article surveys the expansion of Russian peasant settlement from 1550, when most of the 6·5 million peasants lived in the forest-heartland of Muscovy, to 1897, when around fifty million Russian peasants lived throughout large parts of the immense Russian empire. It seeks to explain how this massive expansion was achieved with reference to different facets of the ‘frontier’: the political frontier of the Russian state; the environmental frontier between forest and steppe; the lifeway frontier between settled peasant agriculture and pastoral nomadism; and the ‘hierarchical frontier’ between the Russian authorities and the mass of the peasantry. The article draws attention to the different ways in which peasant-migrants adapted to the variety of new environments they encountered, and stresses interaction across each facet of the frontier. Nevertheless, by 1897, the coincidence between the two main types of environment and the two principal lifeways of the population had been virtually eliminated in much of the Russian empire outside central Asia. This was a consequence of the expansion of Russia's political frontiers, mass peasant migration, the ploughing up of vast areas of pasture land, and the sedentarization of many nomadic peoples. The expansion of peasant settlement helps explain the durability of Russian peasant society throughout the period from the mid-sixteenth to the late-nineteenth centuries.

Although Mary Tudor had reigned for five years before her, Elizabeth Tudor's reign has often been treated as if it raised issues of English female monarchy de novo. The argument of this paper is that the study of Mary's reign is important in its own right, as well as a necessary introduction for any wider study of English female monarchy. It was during Mary's reign that the accommodations consequent upon the occupation of the traditionally male monarchy by the first female occupant were devised. Those strategies subsequently defined central symbolic forms of Elizabeth's reign and shaped their readings. Moreover, the shifts in ritual and representations during the first queen's reign made to accommodate that other novelty, a king as consort, throw considerable light on the underlying political assumptions of the times, as well as the more gendered aspects of constitutional theory.

Governors always seek to monitor the flow of information and guide its release. Secrecy and tactical publicity are valued aspects of government, boosting authority but also marking limits of participation by restricting access to official words and their written expression. Close attention is given to two ubiquitous institutions in early modern London, guilds and vestries (material illustrating city government is also introduced). A distinction is drawn between concealed information and policy communicated to the people. Attention is given thus to the regulation of meetings, chests and keys, and the selective discharge of information. Secrecy gave rise to vocabularies of ‘public’ and ‘private’. It was a code (a form of protection), but in languages of ‘private’ and ‘public’ as they were used in specific contexts studied here, it also depicted the use of space, the distribution of authority, and the limits of access and participation. The study of secrecy and partial publicity adds another dimension to our knowledge of the formation of opinion, perceptions of authority were partly formed by this enclosure of information, secrecy spawned speculation. It also provides a linguistic indication of the nature of government in institutions which mouthed fraternal tunes while remaining obsessed with formality and secrecy.

After the execution of Charles I in 1649 a series of daring and desperate attempts were made on the lives of agents and ambassadors dispatched to continental Europe by the fledgling republic. This essay explores the evidence relating to these plots, and to the murders of Isaac Dorislaus and Anthony Ascham, in an attempt to show that the royalists responsible were not merely desperadoes seeking revenge for the murder of their king, but the employees and emissaries of prominent exiled courtiers. The complicity of Montrose, Cottington and Hyde in such conspiracy can be both documented and explained, in the context of the struggle for diplomatic recognition and financial assistance in the months of shock, outrage and uncertainty after the regicide. The concerns of diplomacy and high politics which lay behind these plots also helped to determine the reaction of European leaders, as it gradually became clear on whose side fortune smiled in Britain.

George Lockhart of Carnwath is best known for his bitter denunciation of the Anglo-Scottish Union in his Memoirs, concerning the affairs of Scotland, first published in 1714. There Lockhart appears as a wholly Jacobite narrator and moralist, passionately inveighing against the iniquity of his peers. Yet we know that his background was not cut from the same cloth as that of his more stereotypical Jacobite contemporaries. Not for him the brooding presence of a Cavalier ancestor ‘martyred’ while fighting alongside Montrose or ancient traditions of loyalty to the Stuarts. Rather, like many Scotsmen after him, he was converted to Jacobitism in the course of the political crisis gripping early eighteenth-century Scotland. From the point of view of the historian studying the dynamics of political commitment the fact that Lockhart falls into this category is a godsend. Uniquely among his Jacobite peers, in the Memoirs and in his many surviving letters, as well as the correspondence and accounts of affairs penned by contemporaries, Lockhart has left the historian a substantial amount of evidence to work on. This article will explore the social and intellectual background to George Lockhart's adherence to the Stuart cause, focusing in particular on the interplay of social forces that shaped his childhood and teenage years, before going on to trace the key features of his understanding of politics and society. Lockhart was not a natural convert to Jacobitism, and the fact that he and many like him moved in that direction merits close analysis. By better understanding why a man like Lockhart embraced the exiled Stuarts we can gain a more general insight into the revival of the Jacobite cause in Scotland in the early eighteenth century.

In France during the period 1830–1905, the very boundaries of the debate on the social question were dictated by a foreign example, the English Poor Law. French fears of national public assistance programmes were grounded in a widespread disdain for the Poor Law. In this article I examine many of the major French works on charity and assistance written between the 1830s and 1900s and the debates surrounding reform proposals. I argue that the opponents of compulsory, tax-financed public assistance created a negative image of the English Poor Law in order to discredit attempts to introduce, first, the ‘right to assistance’ in 1848–1851, and later, bills providing for free medical assistance for the poor and aid to the elderly indigent in the 1890s and 1900s. I conclude with a discussion of how the proponents of mandatory, national assistance programmes defeated a carefully orchestrated and misleading public relations campaign led by some of the opponents of social welfare during the 1890s and 1900s.

Historians of the Edwardian tariff reform movement have disagreed about its aims. This article examines the motivations of the leadership of the Tariff Reform League, which was by far the most influential organization in the tariff lobby. It argues that the League's leaders were more empire-minded than often allowed, and that it was the preferential tariff which they were most determined to promulgate and defend. Indeed, attempts by the Balfourite wing of the Unionist party to twist tariff reform away from its imperial origins were strongly resisted by the League, and the forces of protection within the organization were also carefully controlled. When the Tariff Reform League finally gave way on the issue of imperial preference in January 1913, it was not because it had suddenly ceased to be concerned about the unity of the empire. Rather, the widespread public hostility to the imposition of food duties showed no sign of diminishing, thus making it difficult to persuade a critical mass within the Unionist party that tariff reform was a politically viable strategy of imperial federation.

Although returning shellshocked soldiers constitute a specific subgroup, their situation also illustrates the wider difficulties of Great War returnees. Whether disabled or fully fit, each veteran faced a cluster of problems related to the psychological and social readjustment to civilian society. Rightly or not, many felt that the promises for the postwar world were unfulfilled. War neurotic ex-servicemen faced two areas of difficulty. First, like all returnees, they had to deal with a large and unwieldy bureaucracy that paid little attention to the needs of individuals. Second, Ministry of Pensions policy for war neurotic ex-servicemen, guided by Sir John Collie, tended to exacerbate the faults in the system. Substantial political objectives were implicit in the establishment of the Ministry of Pensions, not least because of the appointment of Collie – an influential expert on malingering – as one of its leading authorities. His approach conveniently fitted into the government's agenda. Its objectives were to uphold and support a restrictive military view of shellshock and thereby limit financial liability; and above all to preserve the existing distribution of wealth while maintaining a visible response to public concern.

This article reinterprets the post-Suez British role in the Middle East through a comparison of the military interventions in Jordan in 1958 and Kuwait in 1961. Moreover, it places these operations in the broader context of the debate about British decline. It is argued that in addition to the familiar constraints on British action imposed by limited resources and the changing international climate, the projection of power in the region proved to be a great test of nerve for British ministers and officials. Paradoxically, this proved to be true as much of the successful interventions in Jordan and Kuwait as of the earlier failure over Suez. Utilizing very recently released documents from British and American archives, the article aims to shed light on the dynamics of decline at the microcosmic level, in the belief that insights gleaned here may well be of value in revising macrocosmic theories of the process.

French naturalization of the Scots appears to have evolved from lands granted to individual Scots by Charles VII during the Hundred Years War, and it would seem that the libertas testandi associated with these grants in the fifteenth century was an early form of what were later called lettres de naturalité in the sixteenth century. French naturalization was granted not only to individual Scots but to all Scottish subjects by certain French monarchs from Charles VII to Louis XIV and had its origins in the ‘Auld Alliance’, as the Scots referred to their relationship with France, and the establishment of the garde écossaise by Charles VII in 1445. The sixteenth century saw a continuation of Scottish military service to the kings of France as well as a continuation of grants of lands, pensions, titles and privileges accorded by grateful French monarchs to Scottish soldiers in the main, but other Scots as well, many of whom were, and others who became by letters patent of naturalization, loyal subjects of the king of France.

The Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth-century. By J. R. Jones. London: Longman, 1996. Pp. 242. ISBN 0-582-05631-4. £42.00.

Oliver Cromwell. By Peter Gaunt. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996. Pp. 263. ISBN 0-631-18356-6. £25.00.

Cromwellian foreign policy. By Timothy Venning. London and New York: St Martin's Press and Macmillan, 1995. Pp. 324. ISBN 0-333-63388-1. £47.50.

Protestantism and patriotism: ideologies and the making of English foreign policy, 1650–1668. By Steven C. A. Pincus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. 512. ISBN 0-521-43487-4. £45.00.

William III and the godly revolution. By Tony Claydon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. 288. ISBN 0-521-47329-2. £35.00.

A miracle mirrored: the Dutch republic in European perspective. Edited by Karel Davids and Jan Lucassen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. 559. ISBN 0-521-46247-9. £55.00.

The revolution in provincial France. Aquitaine, 1789–1799. By A. Forrest. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. vi+377. £45.

Fair shares for all. Jacobin egalitarianism in practice. By J.-P. Gross. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xv+255. £30.

Europe under Napoleon, 1799–1815. By M. Broers. London: Edward Arnold, 1996. Pp. xii+291. £15.99.

Nicholas II. Emperor of all the Russias. By D. Lieven. London: Pimlico, 1995. Pp. 292. ISBN 0-719-54994-9. £10.00.

The Russian Revolution, 1917–1921: a short history. By J. D. White. London: Edward Arnold, 1994. Pp. 312. ISBN 0-340-53910-0. £12.99.

The origins of the Russian civil war. By G. Swain. London: Longman, 1995. Pp. 296. ISBN 0-582-05968-2. £13.99.

Behind the front lines of the civil war: political parties and social movements in Russia, 1918–1922. By V. N. Brovkin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Pp. 455. ISBN 0-691-03278-5. £40.00.

America's secret war against Bolshevism: U.S. intervention in the Russian civil war, 1917–1920. By D. S. Foglesong. Chapel Hill and London: North Carolina University Press, 1995. Pp. 386. ISBN 0-807-82228-0. $45–00.