The history of economic ideas in Britain is dominated by a great tradition which in its early stages focuses on Adam Smith. For the century before the publication of the Wealth of nations in 1776, economic ideas are most often studied in relation to the ‘arrival’ of Smith and commented on with regard to the degree to which they may be considered precursors of his ideas. Though this imposes a sense of order and establishes some principles with which to select from the vast range of economic writings, the dangers of certain whiggishness in this approach are readily apparent. Writers can appear to be winners or losers depending on the extent to which their ideas were denied, adapted or adopted by Smith and the other classical economists.1 Such problems have been acknowledged by many historians, not least by those who have fruitfully examined the political and philosophical bases of the emergence of political economy, particularly with regard to the Scottish enlightenment. Despite this, the force of the great tradition remains very strong. The authors and ideas that are examined are the ‘major’ ones, that is to say contributions that were, or attempted to be, either comprehensive or clearly attached to what, with hindsight, were the main strands of development. The emphasis has been upon theories or systematic explanations of the economic order. Not surprisingly the unsystematic and more casually formulated reflections of non-economists and ‘amateurs’, such as Defoe, are often swept under the carpet, even if their ideas on economic matters were more widely disseminated (and perhaps more influential) at the time. Consequently, our perception of economic ideas between the Restoration and the Wealth of nations continues to be highly and perhaps atypically selective.

The intention of this paper is to look at some of the problems which arise in attempts to provide ‘explanations’ of mercantilism and especially its English manifestations. By ‘explanations’ I mean the efforts which some writers have made causally to relate the historical appearance of sets of economic notions or general recommendations on economic policy or even acts of economic policy by the state to particular long-term phenomena of, or trends in, economic history. Historians of economic thought have not generally made such attempts. With a few exceptions they have normally concerned themselves with tracing and analysing the contributions to economic theory made by those labelled as mercantilists. The most extreme case of non-explanation is provided by Eli Heckscher's reiterated contention in his two massive volumes that mercantilism was not to be explained by reference to the economic circumstances of the time; mercantilist policy was not to be seen as ‘the outcome of the economic situation’; mercantilist writers did not construct their system ‘out of any knowledge of reality however derived’. So strongly held an antideterminist fortress, however congenial a haven for some historians of ideas, has given no comfort to other historians – economic or political, Marxist or non-Marxist – who obstinately exhibit empiricist tendencies. Some forays against the fortress have been made. Barry Supple's analysis of English commerce in the early seventeenth century and the resulting presentation of mercantilist thought and policy as ‘the economics of depression’ has passed into the textbooks and achieved the status of an orthodoxy.

When Adam Smith set out to re-shape the dominant economic policies and assumptions of his time, he knew success in pressing for ‘free trade’ would depend on his ability to imprint his views on the minds of contemporary statesmen and legislators. But he was never confident that this operation might take place during his lifetime. In the Wealth of Nations, he declared that to expect freedom of trade to be accepted entirely in Great Britain was ‘as absurd as to expect that an Oceana or Utopia should ever be established in it’, and this was by no means an offhand remark. Much of the massive book was coloured by Smith's awareness that liberal economic doctrines, whatever their considerable intellectual merits, ran far ahead of actual political and social attitudes in eighteenth-century Europe. In the first half of the nineteenth century, a variety of political and economic developments of course refuted Smith's view that ‘free trade’ was an unattainable ideal. But the historical verification of his economic thinking was a slow, difficult, and limited process.

Mission civilisatnce was one of the bywords of French colonial expansion under the Third Republic. Unfortunately until now there have been few works devoted to its study. Indeed, the notion itself has not been taken very seriously by scholars. As long ago as 1960 when Henri Brunschwig published his seminal work on French colonialism, he stated quite categorically: ‘en Angleterre la justification humanitaire l'emporta’ while ‘en France le nationalisme de 1870 domina’ even if that nationalism ‘ne s'exprima presque jamais sans une mention de cette “politique indigène” qui devait remplir les devoirs du civilisé envers des populations plus arriérées.’ Since then academics both in France and outside have tended to concentrate (in what few works have been written on French colonialism) on the political and economic aspects of the French Empire to the detriment of its cultural components.

There are, perhaps, in the end only two ways in which a historian may undertake the study of a document in the history of political thought. One may consider it as a text, supposed to have been intended by its author and understood by its reader with the maximum coherence and unity possible; the historian's aim now becomes the reconstitution of the fullest possible interpretation available to intelligent readers at the relevant time. Alternatively, one may consider it as a tissue of statements, organized by its writer into a single document, but accessible and intelligible whether or not they have been harmonized into a single structure of meaning. The historian's aim is now the recovery of these statements, the establishment of the patterns of speech and thought forming the various contexts in which they become intelligible, and the pursuit of any changes in the normal employment of these patterns which may have occurred in consequence of the statements’ being made.

This essay explores the circulation of rumour and news among those at the lower levels of society in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. It does so through an analysis of the court records in which people were indicted for spreading false reports or speaking seditious words and which are now preserved in assize files or amid the state papers. These sources reveal the networks of communication by which information was disseminated nationwide and shed light upon the relationship between oral, manuscript and printed media. They show how wild stories could be whipped up in the act of transmission and were fuelled by the political insecurities of this period. At the same time a more sophisticated awareness of current affairs is evident in some illicit conversations which suggest that even humble people were participating in the arguments which anticipated the Civil War.

The concept of imperialism which Hobson, Lenin and the combined force of the international socialist movement forged into an idée fixe of the twentieth century was roughly handled by Western scholars long before 1945. But since then the attack has grown more precise and its character has altered. Among the first of the post-war historians (writing in English) to attempt the dethronement of imperialism as the demi-urge of the period between 1870 and 1914 was Richard Koebner. He determined on a semantic approach and put the term's linguistic history to rigorous scrutiny. On the philosophical assumption that a term's meaning is to be defined by its actual use and provenance in the political discourse in which it arose, he found that the modern concept of economic imperialism sprang out of a limited, local controversy over the nature of the Boer War. He concluded that it had been illicitly mated with other forms of militarism and economic expansion to spawn a hybrid, mythical monster that had been allowed to sprawl its length over more than half a century of world history.1

This article contributes to the on-going study of modern affective life by exploring the ways in which love was understood, invoked, and deployed within heterosexual courtships. ‘Love’ itself is approached as a highly mutable and flexible concept whose meanings and uses are contingent upon historical moment, gender, status, and generation. Whilst the article does not claim to offer a comprehensive history of love across the central years of the twentieth century, it suggests that some of the everyday meanings and uses of that emotion can be illuminated through consideration of this particular aspect of social life. Rather than placing discursive constructions centre stage, the article uses life history material to effect an analysis embedded in everyday practices. Courtship itself is understood as a transitional stage between youth and adulthood: a life stage during which the meanings and uses of ‘love’ were implicitly or explicitly confronted, where gender relationships were potentially unstable, and where aspiration and desire could conflict in the making of the self. Courtship therefore constituted an important rite of passage which could provide an opportunity to perform, reject, and refine new roles and responsibilities, whilst negotiating future status and identity. The article explores the power dynamics which underlined romantic encounters, but argues that through their everyday practice young women exercised real, if bounded, agency within this sphere of social life.

Historians writing on Victorian spiritualism have said little about the reported phenomena of the séance room, despite such events having been the primary reason given by spiritualists for their beliefs. Rather, such beliefs have been seen as a response to the so-called ‘crisis of faith’, and their expression as part of a broader scientific and cultural discourse. Yet the debate about séance phenomena was significantly problematic for the Victorians, in particular the reported phenomena associated with the best-known Victorian medium, Daniel Dunglas Home. In the attempt to provide a natural explanation for Home's phenomena, two groups of experts were appealed to – stage conjurors and scientists – yet it seems clear that the former were unable to explain the phenomena, while scientists who tested Home concluded his phenomena were real. The overwhelming rejection of supernatural agency, and the nature of the response from orthodox science, suggests that such reported phenomena were less the result of a crisis of faith than the cause of a crisis of evidence, the implications of which were deemed scientific rather than religious.

This historiographical review assesses recent studies of the development of the modern British empire. It appraises works that explore the transformation of the empire, its changing cultural pattern, and the forces that radically reshaped the empire during the twentieth century. I argue that within the clear shift towards cultural interpretations of the imperial past, three main areas of analytical concern have taken shape: the importance of information and knowledge in empire building, the centrality of cultural difference within imperial social formations, and the place of imperial networks and patterns of cross-cultural exchange in the operation of the empire. The review suggests that the relationships between the economic and cultural domains of empire require close examination and that historians of empire must remain attentive to the weight and significance of pre-colonial structures and mentalities in moulding the shape of colonial political and cultural terrains.

At the outbreak of war in August 1914, the Germans poured out propaganda in the form of posters, leaflets and pamphlets, in an attempt to explain Germany's entry into the war and discredit the motives of the allies. The British government was greatly disturbed by the virulence of the German campaign, which was specially directed towards influencing the United States of America. At the end of August 1914, the matter was raised in the cabinet: ‘Mr Lloyd George urged the importance of setting on foot an organization to inform and influence public opinion abroad and to confute German mis-statements and sophistries.’ On 5 September the cabinet decided that steps were to be taken without delay to counteract the dissemination by Germany of false news abroad. Though there had been no peace-time precedent, the cabinet accepted the need for an organization to co-ordinate propaganda directed at foreign opinion for the duration of the war.

This article reviews the recent historiography of religion in modern Britain, concentrating on the debate about secularization and the work of Callum Brown in particular, but also with reference to Sarah Williams and Simon Green. It endorses, broadly, the criticisms made by these and other historians of older assumptions of a one-way, ‘inevitable’ link between modernization and religious decline, but in turn accuses them of attenuating the concept of ‘religion’ in the modern period to the point where it has lost internal sophistication. It suggests, instead, the compatibility of indices of institutional church decline with the persistence of religious identity and limited church affiliation.

One of the chief features of the history of nineteenth-century England was undoubtedly the increase in the size of cities, and in the proportion of the total population who lived under urban conditions. Since this process turned out to be a long-term trend, the urban communities, especially the larger ones, were always historically more important than the statistics of urban to rural population in any one decade would have suggested.2 They were the growing points of the new society, and decisions taken there were to be of cumulative significance far beyond the borough boundary. The problems of the towns in any one generation became increasingly the problems of the nation in the next. For instance, it was assumed in 1848 that the administrative measures under the Public Health Act of that year were applicable to urban areas only. By 1872 it had been realized that they would have to be extended to the country as a whole.

In the plays and entertainments performed before the queen from 1561 to 1578, the virginity of Elizabeth was not idealized but instead marriage was celebrated as a preferable state to chastity. Robert Dudley in particular commissioned such dramatic works to assist his courtship of the queen, but the earl of Sussex, and possibly others, used masques to press on her the suit of the Archduke Charles of Austria. The iconography of chastity appeared for the first time in 1578 when Elizabeth embarked on the Anjou marriage negotiations. During the queen's visit to Norwich in the summer she was offered entertainments which implicitly criticized the matrimonial project by idealizing her virginity. For the next three years, opponents of the match followed this lead and cultivated the image of the Virgin Queen as a means of sabotaging the royal marriage plans. Thereafter Elizabeth exploited the image for her own political purposes.

This article examines how The wealth of nations (1776) was transformed into an amorphous text regarding the imperial question throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Adam Smith had left behind an ambiguous legacy on the subject of empire: a legacy that left long-term effects upon subsequent British imperial debates. In his chapter on colonies, Smith had proposed both a scheme for the gradual devolution of the British empire and a theoretical scheme for imperial federation. In response to the growing global popularity of protectionism and imperial expansionism, the rapid development of new tools of globalization, and the frequent onset of economic downturns throughout the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, turn-of-the-century proponents of British imperial federation formed into a formidable opposition to England's prevailing free trade orthodoxy – Cobdenism – a free trade ideology which famously expanded upon the anti-imperial dimensions of The wealth of nations. Ironically, at the turn of the century many advocates for imperial federation also turned to Smith for their intellectual inspiration. Adam Smith thus became an advocate of empire, and his advocacy left an indelible intellectual mark upon the burgeoning British imperial crisis.

In 1620 Thomas Scott published a notorious pamphlet entitled Vox Populi. This purported to recount the proceedings of the Spanish council of state and denounced the devious machinations of Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador, and by implication the pro-Spanish policy of King James. Once Scott's authorship became known he took the traditional way out and fled to the Low Countries. There he served as a preacher with the English regiments and as a minister at Utrecht. He also continued his pamphlet commentary on events in England. Scott, then, was that well-known figure, the radical puritan opponent of the Jacobean regime. He has certainly been cast in that role and until recently such a view of his career would have seemed unexceptionable enough. However, of late there has emerged a corpus of work which might be thought to render any such view of Scott untenable. On the one hand, the existence within the mainstream of English protestantism of anything approaching a coherent body of puritan attitudes has been challenged, at least until the emergence of Arminianism polarized religious opinion and almost created a self-conscious and aggressive puritanism where there had been none before. In the political sphere it has been claimed that within the predominant view of constitutional and political propriety any attempt at concerted opposition to royal policy was both conceptually and practically impossible.

Henry Sidgwick was one of the most prominent university reformers in later Victorian Cambridge. His resignation of his Trinity fellowship in 1869 helped to precipitate the final abolition of religious tests in 1871, and, in the following decades, he was the leader of those who wished to develop research and to open up new branches of study. In national politics he was, as might have been expected, a Liberal, yet, when the Home Rule crisis of 1885–6 came to a head, his allegiance veered over sharply. In 1885 he voted Liberal ‘after some hesitation’; the next year he voted for the Tory candidate for the borough of Cambridge who was elected by an increased majority. That summer he wrote: ‘Unionists gaining slowly but steadily. Dined in Hall, and was surprised to find the great preponderance of Unionist sentiment among the Trinity fellows—a body always, since I have known Trinity, preponderantly Liberal.’ In the history of Victorian politics more attention might be given to the change which converted a large part of the educated classes from the Liberal side to the Conservative. J. F. Stephen, writing in 1880 to the first Earl of Lytton, said of the Conservative leaders that they were ‘all of them people whose political creed was chosen when the Conservative party was emphatically the stupid party, and when to be a Conservative meant to be opposed to pretty well all the main intellectual movements of the time’. The phrase, ‘the stupid party’, comes from J. S. Mill, whose books had been the chief intellectual influence in triumphant mid-Victorian Liberalism. By the end of his life Mill himself was becoming sceptical of the results achieved by democracy. In Representative Government (1861) he had pointed out that a popular assembly was not fitted to conduct administration or to frame laws, and that one of the great problems of democratic government is to combine popular rule with the skilled administration of the modern state. The need for increased efficiency in a more competitive age was worrying many Englishmen by 1870, and, although their criticisms cut across party and sectional boundaries, they were hostile to much in conventional Liberalism. One answer was the ‘social engineering’ of the Fabians; another approach was Matthew Arnold's assault on our educational system and on the Philistinism of our semi-educated middle classes. The only remedy for the anarchic individualism of English life lay, he thought, in the positive activity of the state, which should purify and deepen the national culture and give it direction and purpose.

The achievement of universal suffrage after 1918 stimulated new forms of democratic participation in Britain. These decades witnessed not only renewed efforts by political parties to mobilize the mass electorate, but also the establishment of new kinds of civic association, often secular in character, strongly invested in a discourse of active citizenship, and committed to creating and defending a space within associational life which was free of partisan or sectarian conflict. This article presents a fresh perspective on the political culture of interwar Britain by comparing and contrasting the experiences of four voluntary associations active during this period: the National Federation of Women's Institutes, Rotary International, the British Legion, and the League of Nations Union. It analyses their relationship with conventional party politics, rejecting the argument that these associations served as vehicles for middle-class anti-socialism, and concludes, instead, that their pluralist values and political centrism formed part of a wider response by political, religious, and educational elites to the challenge of class conflict, economic instability, and political extremism in the post-war decades.