New entrants to the British peerage between 1700 and 1850 included both traditional landed magnates and men from humbler backgrounds. The rate of recruitment accelerated rapidly after 1782. This article identifies and analyses the social and economic backgrounds of new peers and the reasons for which titles were bestowed. While the inclusion of large numbers of Irish and Scottish grandees sustained the longitudinal sinews of the peerage, war and empire produced an increasing number of titles awarded on merit. Men of modest backgrounds had always been admitted to the elite, but ‘Old Corruption’ and the marriage market allowed most of their descendants to blend in with the old peerage after a few generations. The wave of new recruits, especially after 1782, included numerous relatively poor or landless men, and governments increasingly intervened with grants of multi-generational annuities in order to protect the status of the peerage while continuing to use titles to reward new men. Ministers boldly and astutely acted both to preserve the pre-eminence of the old order and encourage the prowess of state servants as Britain bestrode the globe. A new peerage emerged to help save the old.

A valuable window into the world of non-slaveholding whites is provided by Hinton Rowan Helper's The impending crisis of the South (1857). This native North Carolinian purported to articulate the views and concerns of his class in a devastating critique of slaveholders and southern society. Helper was the only southern intellectual to theorize and conceptualize non-slaveholders fully as a distinct class and this article examines his arguments and evaluates his claim to be representative of their thinking. It suggests that although this group was far too diverse for any one opinion to be truly representative, The impending crisis recorded a sense of discontent found within certain sections of the non-slaveholding ranks ignored by consensus interpretations of the Old South reliant upon elite sources of evidence.

The class and gender identities created by male politicians are vital to a proper understanding of how and why parliament increased women's legal rights in the nineteenth century. An examination of the parliamentary debates on the Married Women's Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 reveals that it is misleading to divide men into supporters and opponents of women's rights, because even some of those who supported the most radical reform did so in the belief that the gender hierarchy should be left intact. At the same time, politicians were reluctant to accept that their own homes should be affected by changes to women's rights, both because they feared that these changes would reduce their domestic authority and create discord in their homes, and because they did not think that the critique of male behaviour which justified the reforms should apply to them or their class. Their ability to confine both charges of abuse and the effects of the acts to the poor was essential to the successful passage of the Married Women's Property Acts. Rather than see this as the defeat of a liberal individualist vision, it was in fact the victory of an alternative strand of Victorian liberalism.

While British colonial rhetoric consistently identified tradition as the basis of legitimate authority, colonial practice actually produced far-reaching changes in the nature of government in Britain's African possessions. New institutions, and new holders of power, emerged in African societies in response to the particular needs of colonial administration. This article explores this transformation in one part of Condominium Sudan, which was effectively a British possession but which has often been excluded from historical discussions of the impact of colonialism because of its unique status. The Nuba Mountains have recently gained notoriety as a particularly bloody theatre of Sudan's long post-colonial civil war; while some have sought to explain this as the result of British policies which encouraged racial antagonism, the article suggests that here, as elsewhere in Africa, the real legacy of colonial rule was the creation of new kinds of local government which sat uneasily with enduring local ideas of spiritual power and proper authority.

After the foundation of the Communist International in 1919, leftists within the Socialist Party of Ireland won Comintern backing for an Irish communist party. Encouraged by Moscow, the communists hoped to offset their marginality through the republican movement. The Communist Party of Ireland denounced the Anglo-Irish treaty, welcomed the Irish Civil War, and pledged total support to the IRA. As the war turned against them, some republicans favoured an alliance with the communists. In August 1922 Comintern agents and two IRA leaders signed a draft agreement providing for secret military aid to the IRA in return for the development of a new republican party with a radical social programme. The deal was not ratified on either side, and in 1923 the Communist Party of Ireland followed Comintern instructions to ‘turn to class politics’. The party encountered increasing difficulties and was liquidated in January 1924. The communist intervention in the Civil War highlights the contrast between Comintern and Russian state policy on Ireland, and was seminal in the evolution of Irish socialist republicanism.

This article uses the broad concept of ‘improvement of minds’ to refer to the idea of improving people's sense of morality, their ability and willingness to reason, and the depth of their emotional experiences. Such an objective has been little explored in the context of the history of the British Labour party. Yet, discussion of it is worth integrating into histories of the party for two reasons. First, the goal of improving minds was a strand – though often unsystematically developed – in the agendas of many Labour party politicians, activists, and thinkers. Secondly, the very fact that it was an unsystematically developed strand, the very limits of the party's attention to, and success in achieving, ‘mental progress’ amongst the twentieth-century British population – that is to say, simply, the limits to the party's pursuit and achievement of the objective of making people more caring, rational, and sensitive – is one important explanation for many of Labour's failures. The article begins to explore the aims, processes, and outcomes of Labour's attempts to improve minds, as well as to explain and examine the consequences of the limits of the party's attention to this goal, through the case study of Tony Crosland.

This communication responds to Tyler Anbinder's article ‘Lord Palmerston and the Irish famine emigration’ of the late 1840s, published in the HJ in June 2001. Anbinder is incorrect in stating that ‘no detailed account of Palmerston's Irish estate during the famine or of his emigration scheme has ever been written’. There are other inaccuracies in Anbinder. There is also a problem of relevant omissions. Anbinder concentrates on Palmerston's assisted emigration programmes in a single year (1847). But Palmerston helped his tenants to emigrate both before and after 1847. What makes 1847 distinctive is that it was the only year in which Palmerston chartered ships for large-scale transportation of many of his tenants directly from Sligo to British North America. This communication seeks to place Anbinder's article in proper context, and hopes to prevent subsequent researchers from repeating some errors.

In the last two decades historians have been increasingly interested in the modernization of the monarchy, and the nature of the republican threat. This review evaluates some of this recent literature. The first section argues that while Walter Bagehot's views about ceremony in The English constitution (1867) have influenced historical writing, these approaches do not yield much information about what the monarchy actually meant to people. The second section turns to the political powers of the monarchy, and examines the wide range of views about what the constitutional limits of royal power were. It also shows that even radical writers were often unable to dispel the monarchy from their imaginations. Finally, the review suggests that criticism of the royal family was not necessarily republican, and arose more from concern that particular figures were failing to conform to shared public values. Pure republicans were few, and did not usually focus their energies on the monarchy, but rather on the nature of parliamentary representation and the power of the Lords.

The review examines the recent literature on German federalism. This literature has identified a decentralized, federal tradition in German history, dating back at least to the eighteenth century and in striking contrast with the ‘unitary’ traditions of the Prussian state. The review questions the extent to which centralization was indeed a Prussian phenomenon in German history by examining the relatively decentralized nature of the Prussian state and the strongly centralizing tendencies of smaller German states in the nineteenth century. The review also examines the origins of the new ‘federal’ historiography, both in terms of contemporary German politics and in terms of the political debate surrounding German unification in the 1860s. It concludes that the idea of a ‘unitary’ Prussian state tradition is simplistic and reflects the inherent anti-Prussian bias of German federalism in the unification era. In this sense, it is the federal counterpart of the better-known Borussian approach to German history.

The four books under review examine different aspects of the impact of the Protestant Reformation on communities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The study of communal responses to religious reform has become a significant aspect of Reformation research in recent years, and it has served to emphasize that religious reform was a process rather than an event, and that it was a collective concern, which involved families, neighbours, and all those in guilds and congregations at all levels of society, both in town and village. Study of the community in history has, however, raised some problems, principally over definition, for communities were not institutions or geographical areas, but a complex web of overlapping social, economic, and cultural groups, within which there was a range of shared and conflicting interests. Despite the value placed by rulers and magistrates upon unity, communal life was a constantly mutating mix of conflict, concession, and change, to which the Reformation added a dynamic and volatile new dimension. Although the authors here use the notion of community, they attach to it a variety of interpretations, and one might wonder whether such a malleable term has value as a tool for historical analysis. In fact, these works show such flexibility to be a strength, for in the Reformation, beliefs were only gradually defined, and levels of support were variable and unpredictable. Interpretations which recognize the changing secular and spiritual worlds inhabited by the people of the period are particularly useful for providing new insights into how religious reform was experienced by the majority of those living at the time.

If few historians of the French ancien régime and Revolution entirely ignore the role of the Church, most treat it perfunctorily and many make crass errors in writing about it. To start with examples of error, J. F. Bosher declared in his generally admirable The French Revolution: ‘at least nine abbots wrote for the Encyclopédie’. Actually, at least twenty-three abbés did so, but no abbots. J. C. D. Clark, in his recent edition of Burke's Reflections, attempts to explain Burke's discussion of French commendatory abbots by defining commendam as it was used in England, which makes Burke's argument incomprehensible. Until now it has not been easy to find a work, at any rate in English, which would settle such matters authoritatively. McManners's Church and society in eighteenth-century France will certainly do that. A delightful chapter deals with the vast majority of abbés who were not abbots, that is, those who had taken the very first steps towards an ecclesiastical career, probably to enhance their educational prospects, but never taken vows or significant orders. To this group belonged such notorious philosophes as the abbé Diderot and the abbé Raynal.

There are four presidents carved on Mount Rushmore: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt. The case of George W. Bush would seem to suggest that modern Americans do not like their presidents to be complex. If so, among the granite faces, only Washington and Roosevelt answer to this need. The former possessed what his admirers called republican simplicity, what his enemies (and even some personal friends) thought might be a lack of intellectual nimbleness. The latter had a violence of conviction so wondrous in its clarity that numerous psychologists have been enlisted to find something beneath its surface. Jefferson, by contrast, was dizzyingly complex, but he is also inaccessible, especially to modernists who find an eighteenth-century sensibility eerily polished and cold. Abraham Lincoln, however, was satisfyingly messed up. A broken family, a lost lover, an unhappy marriage, dead children, plus years of thwarted ambition, nightmares, melancholy, and suicidal impulse, all combine to make a man of nervous inadequacy, someone whom Oprah Winfrey would be glad to have back, again and again, as an icon of the perennial crises of masculinity.