The cloth-making town of Hadleigh in Suffolk has often been cited in the annals of the English Reformation as a town that early embraced Protestantism apparently effortlessly. This view owes much to John Foxe's famous description of this ‘Universitie of the learned’, yet a closer examination of the surviving evidence from Hadleigh indicates that the Reformation was as bitterly contested here as it was in many another mid-Tudor community. And the nature of the bitter struggle between the advocates of reform and a group of conservatives in the town may have proved so fierce that the energies for further reform under Elizabeth all but dissipated.

Historians have portrayed the Virginia Company and its colony, the first permanent English settlement in America, as an essentially commercial enterprise. The atmosphere of the colony is represented accordingly as one of proto-capitalist individualism. This paper shows that the Virginia Company promoters described the aims of its colony in civic terms: that is, in terms of a politics of virtue, citizenship, and the pursuit of the common good. Promoters of the colony drew on a civic tradition particularly hostile to commerce; a tradition in which wealth was portrayed as Asiatic luxury and corruption. The civic arguments of the Company were a response to the commercial and human disasters which characterized the first years of the colony and its Elizabethan predecessors. The civic ideology promoted by the Company was an attempt to remedy what were perceived to be the causes of this disastrous situation – corruption, greed, faction, and idleness. The promoters' civic arguments also provided an ideological motivation both for potential investors and colonists who might otherwise have been deterred by the financial and human expense.

This article exonerates Charles I and Attorney General Sir Robert Heath from charges that they tampered with the records of the court of King's Bench in the Five Knights' Case. It refutes allegations made by John Selden in the parliament of 1628 and repeated by modern historians. Selden's attack on Heath and the king's government was based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of King's Bench enrolments and a radical view of the crown's intentions in imprisoning loan resisters. The view that Charles was attempting to establish the prerogative right to imprison opponents without remedy at common law has no basis in either the arguments presented during the Five Knights' Case or the king's behaviour both before and during the parliament. By accepting the most radical critique of Caroline government at face value, historians have concluded that Charles was attempting to establish a ‘legal tyranny’. This article rejects these views.

Daniel Scargill and Samuel Parker have both been regarded as isolated and eccentric disciples of Thomas Hobbes. However, a detailed examination of their views reveals a more complicated relationship with the notorious philosopher. Far from being simple ‘Hobbists’, Scargill and Parker developed ideas close to those of ‘latitudinarian’ clergymen. In the polarizing political circumstances of the later 1660s, the hostile identification of their views with the doctrines of the Leviathan led to public discussion of latitudinarianism and its relationship to Hobbism. In response, writers with latitudinarian sympathies used criticism of Hobbes as a means of reconsidering and redefining their own position. Such criticism accepted some of Hobbes's political conclusions, while at the same time rejecting his controversial methodology. Discussion of Hobbism and criticism of Hobbes were thus important means by which Hobbes's political insights were absorbed by Restoration political thinkers.

This article establishes for the first time the identity of Edward Colman, the Catholic courtier executed for treason in 1678. Discoveries about his background are used to show how he made his way into court circles in the 1660s, at an earlier date than has usually been assumed. It is suggested that his cousin, Richard Colman, may have been the person who introduced him to the duke of York. Another relative, William Battie, also had connections at court, but he and Colman later quarrelled over the issue of religious toleration. Thereafter, Bishop Compton acted as Battie's patron to further the campaign by himself and the earl of Danby against Colman and the other court Catholics.

This article reveals the existence of a hitherto unknown Black Chamber in the Dutch Republic and the identity of its principal codebreaker, Abel Tasien d'Alonne (1646–1723), acting also as private secretary to Grand Pensionary Heinsius. On the basis of an analysis of a number of previously unidentified worksheets, three cases are put together that merited d'Alonne's attention, one related to a French diplomat at the court of the Bavarian Elector during the years 1707–9, one related to an undercover agent of the Bavarian Elector in the Dutch Republic during the years 1711–12 and one related to a French emissary to the state council in Brussels during the period 1714–15. The emergence of a Black Chamber in The Hague is remarkable because the Dutch could always call upon the Black Chamber of Hanover for the solution of any intercepted, coded documents. This indicates that the development of inter-allied relations during the war played a more important role in the rise of the Dutch Black Chamber than one would expect.

This article is a contribution to the cultural history of English Enlightenment. It examines the formation of a discrete ‘family’ of philosophes in the West Midlands who maintained close links with their counterparts on the continent. Birmingham's role as a magnet for ‘industrial tourists’ in the second half of the eighteenth century helped to propagate the influence of this local intelligentsia who were mostly members of the Lunar Society. None the less, it is argued that the activities of the Society correspond more closely to an Enlightenment than to a proto-industrial pattern of inquiry. The events of 1789 in France disrupted this philosophic ‘family’. Their impact is explored through the medium of a real family; that of James Watt, the engineer, who came to Birmingham to manufacture the steam engine in partnership with Matthew Boulton. The vicissitudes of the Watt family, and of other prominent members of the Lunar Society, are unravelled to illustrate the dilemmas faced by men raised in the values of the Enlightenment when confronted with the reality – and the proximity – of a far-reaching political revolution.

The City of London Poor Law Union in the early to mid-Victorian period was the richest and least populated of all the metropolitan Poor Law districts. A wide range of parochial, livery, and other charities within the City not only attracted vast numbers of applicants for assistance, but influenced the quality and nature of the care given by the local union. This not only meant that provision for the outdoor poor, children, and the elderly tended to be more liberal than elsewhere in the capital, but that vagrants, many of whom took up winter residence in the City, also experienced a higher standard of pauper treatment than that offered by the surrounding unions. The combination of high Poor Law receipts from a low poor rate base, civic pride, competition from City charities, and the willingness of neighbouring unions to off-load this most troublesome class of pauper on to their rich neighbour gave an unparalleled level of choice to those who were truly at the bottom of the heap in Victorian London.

Based on a sample of about 5,000 members, this article offers the first comprehensive social profile of the IRA covering the entire period of the Irish revolution. The picture that emerges is of an organization composed largely of unpropertied, unmarried, young men of the middling classes, increasingly disproportionately dominated by urban, skilled, and socially mobile activists. Officers tended to be slightly older and of slightly higher social status than their men. Sinn Fein activists were older again but otherwise shared these characteristics, as did the IRA in Britain. This dependence on urban and skilled or white-collar members, the reverse of what republicans and most historians have believed, may be attributable to a combination of the greater risks and greater organizational opportunities faced by the IRA in towns. Nevertheless, the movement did attract rural and labouring members, and did to some extent transcend class and geographical boundaries. IRA units were almost never segregated along class lines, and were usually built around familial and neighbourhood networks. Also, as the revolution progressed, activists' previous social identities were superseded by a new and essentially egalitarian identity as comrades and guerrillas.

This is a study of a successful parliamentary campaign led throughout the 1920s by a small group of backbench Labour MPs aimed at abolishing the military death penalty for the offences of cowardice and desertion. It was sustained in the face of opposition from the military establishment, the Conservatives, and finally the House of Lords. The campaigners used the opportunity afforded by the requirement on government to pass, annually, an Army Bill, to challenge the military establishment's insistence that a capital penalty was essential to the maintenance of army discipline. Despite the unwillingness of the 1924 Labour government to confront the military on this issue, the reformers persevered, securing some minor, incremental reform before the coming of the second Labour government in 1929. The new government was prevailed upon by backbench pressure to authorize a free vote in the Commons which approved the abolition of the capital penalty for cowardice and desertion in the Army Act of 1930.

In general it seems to me a primary condition of national health that there shall be free and abundant contact between the most advanced culture and the masses, that due pains shall be taken ‘to marshall well the ranks behind’, and keep the whole army together. Where there is a great residuum of ignorance and stupidity, everything is dragged down... But if ever this contact was needful it is now and here; for evidently what has put the finishing touch to our confusion is the fact that the residuum of ignorance and stupidity has become our master and our judge... Just when the religious tradition had been dethroned by scepticism, and the constitutional tradition by radicalism, a new sovereign was crowned who knew nothing of either. Ignorance was proclaimed king, and an authority set up.

Before whose fell approach and secret might

Art after art goes out, and all is night!

It is well worth pondering Seeley's gloomy cultural assessment delivered to the Ethical Society of Cambridge a few years before his death in 1895. It is not so much the pessimism attendant upon the era of mass politics and society that is so arresting. He was quick to acknowledge a brighter, more hopeful prospect in the passage which followed. It is more the idea, so fervently expressed, that national life is best served by the existence of an intellectual elite whose abiding concern is to tend the cultural well-being of the less advanced majority – to furnish and communicate moral truths, a vibrant atmosphere of thought, and a body of ideas that would at once provide unity and direction to society as a whole. He was not alone in entertaining these hopes, but instead expressed a common outlook among the leading thinkers of his day: despite very real divisions in the intellectual elite centring on such questions as free thought versus religion, tradition versus radicalism, imperialism versus ‘little Englandism’, all sought a prominent role for intellectuals in defining the central ‘public’ values and identities of their society through their scholarship and personal conduct alike.

Thinking with demons: the idea of witchcraft in early modern Europe. By Stuart Clark. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xvii+827. ISBN 0–19–820001–3. £75.00.

The darker side of the Renaissance: literacy, territoriality, and colonization. By Walter D. Mignolo. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Pp. xxii+426. ISBN 0–472–10327. $39.50.

Oedipus and the devil: witchcraft, sexuality, and religion in early modern Europe. By Lyndal Roper. London: Routledge, 1995. Pp. ix+254. ISBN 0–415–10581–1. £13.99.

As Professor Richard Evans's spirited In defence of history attests, postmodernism continues to arouse strong passions and suspicions among distinguished practitioners of the discipline. This is hardly surprising: in their most extreme and undiluted form, the theories of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Hayden White, and more particularly their many disciples, are stubbornly corrosive of the ethos and rationale of history as conventionally taught and written. To insist that the production of knowledge is inherently – indeed insidiously – political, and to claim that the veil of language which divides us from the past can never be pierced is to unsettle many traditional epistemological assumptions. And yet postmodernism and the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ have posed timely and fundamental questions about truth, discourse, and objectivity which historians can ill afford to ignore. They have also helped to generate some of the most innovative and provocative historical writing in recent years. In different ways, each of the books under review engages with and reacts to the swirling debate about this influential and controversial body of ideas. All three make strenuous demands upon their readers; all three challenge us to reflect critically upon the methodologies we employ and the categories, concepts, polarities, and narrative paradigms to which we instinctively resort. Taken together they highlight both the potential strengths and weaknesses, the rewards and dangers of injecting theory into the study of witchcraft, sexuality, and colonization in early modern Europe and the New World.

Becoming a revolutionary: the deputies of the French National Assembly and the emergence of a revolutionary culture, 1789–1790. By Timothy Tackett. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Pp. xvi+355. ISBN 0-69-104384-1. $29.95.

Elections in the French Revolution. By Malcolm Crook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xiii+221. ISBN 0-521-45191-4. $35.00.

The notion of a revolutionary change in collective psychology has long been present in certain master narratives of the French Revolution. Georges Lefebvre deployed this concept in his analysis of the psychodynamics that propelled revolutionary crowds. He also introduced the notion more casually in discussing the ‘patriot’ elites who experienced a psychological upheaval when the parlement of Paris ruled in September 1788 that the forthcoming Estates General should be organized as in 1614, meaning that the third estate would be submerged under the weight of the two privileged orders. While William Doyle's revisionist synthesis has plausibly argued that the parlement's intention was less nefarious (it wished to prevent the king from using new ground rules to pack the Estates with pliant deputies), it does not change the fact that public opinion would never be the same after that consciousness-raising event. More broadly, R. R. Palmer, in trying to convey the uniquely revolutionary thrust of the French experience in 1789 – having already contextualized it in relation to other European and American upheavals – wrestled with that issue in a section that he called ‘The formation of a revolutionary psychology’.

City Bankers, 1890–1914. By Youssef Cassis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xv+350. ISBN 0-521-44188-9. £40.00.

John Bullion's empire: Britain's gold problem and India between the wars. By G. Balachandran. Richmond: Curzon Press, 1996. Pp. xii+252. ISBN 0-7007-0428-0. £40.00.

The banking panics of the Great Depression. By Elmus Wicker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xviii+174. ISBN 0-521-56261-9. £30.00.

The front cover of Cassis's book shows the heavily bearded and mustachioed directors of the Bank of England, gathered in 1903 in the magnificent Court Room. The City was at its peak, the undisputed financial capital of the world. Its interests were the major determining influence on British economic policy. The Bank of England directors were selected, according to ancient tradition, from the City's most prestigious trading houses, including the merchant banks. Towards the end of the nineteenth century it had become obvious that banking was undergoing a radical transformation. A revolution in the structure of English banking had caused the near-disappearance of the old country banker; private family-owned banking firms were under severe pressure and many had been absorbed by the joint-stock banks. However, much had remained the same. It is one of the virtues of Cassis's book, which focuses on the top layer of City bankers, that it shows how much continuity there was. The old private banker fitted smoothly into the new, larger banks. The occupation of private banker, carried out within a family firm, continued to represent the ideal. Banking remained a not particularly onerous job. The typical City banker was a part-timer, who used his position and representation on the boards of other financial companies as a means of furthering his own business interests – he had to, because a board position alone did not pay enough to live like a gentleman. Banking was a respectable way of building up a fortune. The City's strength was its private information network of social and business relationships which made the highly specialized financial system possible but also created opportunities to make money privately. The author shows that the distribution of tasks within the City, as well as the reluctance of the big joint-stock banks to develop into continental-style investment banks, eminently suited the private interests of the board members, ‘as though the primary aim of the big deposit banks... was to make possible the activities of the private banking and trading firms and the overseas ventures of the partners of these firms’. What is now considered insider trading was an accepted form of business. There were few professional bank managers; those there were had generally risen through the ranks and had a lower social status. The City's playing field was never intended to be level and appears to have become even more slanted in the period before the First World War.

Purchasing power: consumer organizing, gender, and the Seattle labor movement, 1919–1929. By Dana Frank. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xii+349. ISBN 0-521-38367-6. £50.00. Paperback 0-521-46714-4. £16.95.

New Deals: business, labor, and politics in America, 1920–1935. By Colin Gordon. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xii+329. ISBN 0-521-45122-1. £40.00. Paperback 0-521-45755-6. £15.95.

The long war: the intellectual People's Front and anti-Stalinism, 1930–1940. By Judy Kutulas. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Pp. xiv+334. ISBN 0-8223-1526-2. $39.95 Paperback 0-8223-1524-6. £16.95.

The invisible empire in the West: toward a new historical appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. Ed. by Shawn Lay. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992. Pp. 230. ISBN 0-252-01832-X. $32.50.

‘We are all leaders’: the alternative unionism of the early 1930s. Ed. by Staughton Lynd. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Pp. 343. ISBN 0-252-02243-2. $44.95 Paperback 0-252-06547-6. $17.95.

Stalin's famine and Roosevelt's recognition of Russia. By M. Wayne Morris. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994. Pp. ix+224. ISBN 0-8191-9379-8. $34.50.

Building a democratic political order: reshaping American liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s. By David Plotke. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xi+388. ISBN 0-521-42059-8. £40.00.

Forging new freedoms; nativism, education, and the constitution, 1917–1927. By William G. Ross. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994. Pp. x+277. ISBN 0-8032-3900-9. $35.

Liberals and communism: the ‘red decade’ revisited. By Frank A. Warren. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993; originally published 1966. Pp. xxiii+276. ISBN 0-231-08444-7. $45.00. Paperback 0-231-08445-5. $19.00.

Frank, Lay et al., and Ross all deal with the aftermath of the United States's brief involvement in the First World War, and some of its enduring effects – political reaction with devastating results for the labour movement and progressive politics, brutalization of America's then-normal nativism, directed at members of the recent immigrant communities making up about a third of its population.