Important landmarks, especially on the well-trodden ground of British history, sometimes appear to be so precisely delineated that they leave little room for re-interpretation. Yet if familiar episodes are looked at from perspectives which pose new questions and call for different evidence the result may well be unexpectedly illuminating. The making of the Second Reform Act is a good example. Though the subject of close scholarly investigation in terms of British parliamentary politics, it has not hitherto been viewed as only one of many closely linked domestic and foreign pressures which bore upon the British polity between 1866 and 1868 and which together exercised a decisive influence upon it. Reform, public order, economic recession, integration of the classes, concern about defence, and the challenge to Britain's international standing, were all components of the same crisis, and whether by chance or ingenuity it was the same power groups which had to handle them within the confines of time and circumstance.

While Restoration historians have traditionally assumed that there was little public interest in foreign affairs, and that English attitudes towards Europe were determined either by religious or domestic concerns, this essay argues that there was a lively and sophisticated English debate about Europe which turned on the proper identification of the universal monarch rather than religion. In the later 1660s the English political nation was deeply divided in its understanding of European politics. Enthusiastic supporters of the restored monarchy thought that the republican United Provinces sought universal dominion, while the monarchy's radical critics identified absolutist France as an aspirant to universal monarchy. French success in the early phases of the third Anglo-Dutch war, the failure of the French navy to support the English fleet at sea, and the overthrow of the Dutch republican regime in favour of William III, Prince of Orange, convinced the vast majority of the English that France represented the greater threat. Ultimately popular pressure compelled Charles II to abandon the French alliance. In addition, the popular conviction that Louis XIV had succeeded in corrupting the English court resulted in a new-found desire for popular accountability in foreign affairs, and a consequent diminution of the royal prerogative in that sphere.

Since the late nineteenth century, Western intellectuals have tended to depict ‘modernity’ as being incompatible with ‘enchantment’. Thus Max Weber argued that two aspects intrinsic to modernity, rationalization and bureaucratization, were inimical to the magical attitudes toward human existence that characterized medieval and early modern thought. His gloomy image of the ‘iron cage’ of reason echoed the fears of earlier romantics and was to be repeated by later cultural pessimists through the twentieth century. This article recovers a different outlook that emerged during the fin-de-siècle, one that reconciled the rational and secular tenets of modernity with enchantment and that underlies many forms of contemporary cultural practice. The popularity of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is taken as an exemplary instance of a specifically modern form of enchantment. First, Holmes's own form of rationalism, ‘animistic reason’, offered an alternative to the narrower instrumental reason that cultural pessimists claimed as a defining element of modernity. Second, many adult readers at the turn of the century and beyond were able to pretend that Holmes was real, and his creator fictitious, through the ‘ironic imagination’, a more capacious and playful understanding of the imagination than that held by the early Victorians. Both animistic reason and the ironic imagination made Holmes an iconic figure who enacted and represented the reconciliation of modernity and enchantment, whereas Doyle, unable to accept this reconciliation, resorted to spiritualism, a holdover of ‘premodern’ enchantment.

This article explores the history of crossing the road in Britain from the traffic acts of the early 1930s to the introduction of the Green Cross Code in the early 1970s. It reconstructs this history through the examination of government documents, press releases, newspaper articles, newsreels, public information films, and other road safety materials. Since the interwar period, British governments have become progressively more involved in policing the activity of crossing the road, and there have been two main planks of policy. The first has been to design progressively more sophisticated crossings; the second has been road safety education, including advice about how to use the crossings, disseminated through school crossing patrols, children's clubs, and public information films. Governments have generally relied on appeals to good sense and civic duty rather than legally enforceable rules about crossing the road, and have sought to follow as well as lead public opinion in determining how much to coerce both pedestrians and motorists. The formulation of policy in relation to public attitudes and media responses means that crossing the road during this period has interesting implications for both political and cultural history.

Prostitution has been linked by many historians and social commentators to the industrial development and capitalism of the modern age, and there is no better example of this than the prostitution that developed in mining regions from the mid-nineteenth century. Using research on mining-related prostitution, and other social histories of mining communities where prostitution inevitably forms a part, large or small, of the historian's analysis of the mining region, this article will review, contrast, and compare prostitution in various mining contexts, in different national and colonial settings. From the American and Canadian gold rushes in the mid- and late nineteenth century, to the more established mining frontiers of the later North American West, to the corporate mining towns of Chile in the interwar years, to the copper and gold mines of southern Africa and Kenya in the first half of the twentieth century, commercial sex was present and prominent as the mining industry and mining communities developed.1 Challenging the simplistic images and stereotypes of prostitution that are popularly associated with the American mining frontier, historians have shown that prostitution's place in mining communities, and its connection to industrial development, was as complex as it was pervasive and enduring.

Based on the recently released documents in the Public Record Office, London, this article is concerned with examining the reasons behind the shift in the British approach towards decolonization in Africa signalled by Macmillan's ‘wind of change’ speech to the South African parliament on 3 February 1960. The documents suggest that the British decision to abdicate in Africa was partly due to international considerations, and to Cold War politics and the need to prevent Soviet penetration in Africa. The change from ‘multi-racialism’ to ‘non-racialism’ can be attributed to the influence of the commonwealth relations office under Lord Home, and an initiative from the leader of the Africa Capricorn society, David Stirling. The emphasis on the need for Britain to pursue the same policy in all of Africa can also be traced to the commonwealth relations office. Macmillan, himself was influenced by the ‘moral’ aspect, by the policies pursued by the Belgians in the Congo, but above all by the failure of French policy in Algeria.

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.

In attempting to explain the stability of eighteenth-century Britain, and in particular the maintenance of political, social and economic supremacy by the landed aristocracy, scholars have begun to pay attention to the role of ideology and opinion. They see this not merely as providing an explanation of the way things were, but justifying and reinforcing them. The dominant ideological interpretation of society had emerged from the political and constitutional struggles of the seventeenth century, and in particular from the Glorious Revolution of 1688, an interpretation which might be denominated ‘Whig’, and which faced its most serious challenge at the very end of the eighteenth century from the French revolution. Despite the more tangible threat of French arms, the ruling classes in Britain did not underestimate the danger to social order from the arguments advanced by adherents of the rights-of-man doctrine propagated by the revolutionaries. If, in reply to these views, the status quo could be shown not only to be necessary and inevitable, but also right and good, that is to say correspondent with the true nature of man, then the morality of the existing practices and institutions of civil society would be proven. The problem at its most fundamental level was ethical, and it was a problem which conservatives attempted to solve in a variety of ways.

Perhaps because the subject seemed so obvious, there has been little work done on women under fascism. This omission is unfortunate not only because Fascist policy was more complicated than the general impression of it but also because it offered an interesting example of the interaction between propaganda and reality in an authoritarian society. Women played an important role in several major propaganda campaigns of fascism, such as the ruralization policy and the battle to increase the birth rate. Concern for the role of women was at the heart of the conservative and stabilizing nature of fascism and, in so far as it meant the subjugation of the private lives of citizens to the demands of the State, policy towards women reflected the totalitarian and imperialistic side of fascism as well.

Not the least significant constitutional difference between Britain and many continental states in the nineteenth century lay in the sphere of formal arrangements for the exercise of power during civil emergencies. Britain had no clearly understood concept of notrecht or of 'state of siege’. This omission certainly reflected the absence of foreign invasion as much as the feebleness of domestic revolutionary threats. Internal emergencies occurred, indeed, with a frequency hard to square with the old Whig interpretation; but while they often alarmed the authorities, none of them proved so formidable as not to be amenable to control by the civil power backed up by fairly small numbers of troops. A good deal of emergency legislation was passed until the 1820s, but thereafter a marked decline in the incidence and severity of violent disturbance, and in the violence of the government's responses, set in. The threat of revolution in Britain itself, in so far as it had ever existed, had faded. The terrible uncertainties revealed by the 1831 Bristol riots could be optimistically put aside: magistrates could get by with ‘reading the Riot Act’ and trusting to luck, and perhaps a few dragoons or yeomanry.

Historians have commonly described John Evelyn's pamphlet about London smoke pollution, Fumifugium, as a precocious example of environmental concern. This paper argues that such an interpretation is too simple. Evelyn's proposals are shown to be closely related to political allegory and the panegyrics written to welcome the newly restored Charles II. However, the paper also shows that Fumifugium was not simply a literary conceit; rather it exemplified the mid-seventeenth-century Ėnglish interest in the properties of air that is visible in both the Hartlib circle and the early Royal Society.

It has been the standard wisdom of historians that whereas the rebel Dutch continued to trade with Spain and the Spanish possessions throughout the Armada war, the English did not. As the letter-writer John Chamberlain resentfully complained, ‘We for their sake and defence entering into the war, and being barred from all commerce and intercourse of merchandise, they in the meantime thrust us out of all traffic to our utter undoing’. The evidence assembled here suggests instead that English trafficking with the enemy was much greater than has been assumed, although it probably never reached the huge proportions of the Dutch effort. Moreover the substantial volume of illicit trade should point to a re-consideration of some important Elizabethan attitudes to Anglo-Spanish relations both before and during the war, and hence also more generally to religious attitudes.

Of the popular societies that government repressed in the 1790s, the public debating societies in London are probably the least known although some of them had been meeting without interruption for over fifty years. Since these societies admitted all who paid the weekly entrance fee and allowed anyone to stand up and speak, they were quite different from the private, limited debating clubs where new members had to be approved and where the speeches were often prepared orations. Because of their size, the public debating societies attracted men who wanted to practise speaking before a large audience. Burke is said to have gained his first experience in public speaking at one of these debating societies. Pitt not only spoke at them; he helped found one. Boswell and Goldsmith attended them. Most of the speakers and auditors, however, were men of a lower class; and in the 1790sin reaction to the French Revolution, these societies were repressed. Although they constitute a significant social phenomenon, their history has not beenj traced, as has that of the London Corresponding Socie-ty (LCS) or the United! Irishmen (UI). In a sense the debating societies form an adjunct to, and complement the history of the declared reform societies of the 1790s: Members of the Corresponding Society might go from their meeting to a debating society in order to hear an LCS member speak. The few known managers of debating societies were also prominent members of the LCS or the UI or both; 1 and when a political topic was debated, most of the speakers would take a reformist position.

The past two decades have witnessed a burgeoning of the history of the body and sexuality. Seeking to historicize sex differences, historians have widely incorporated the study of the body and sexuality into the history of women and gender. This review considers the place of the body and sexuality in women's and gender history. Recent work posits the long eighteenth century as the century of change in the ways in which bodies were understood, sexuality constructed, and sexual activity carried out. Yet in turn, the incorporation of such new topics also reinvigorates older narratives of economic and political transformation. This historiographical review assesses this recent work, arguing that key facets of the historiography need to be reconsidered. Explanatory models of historical change need to incorporate issues such as life-cycle changes and historical persistence. Approaches to cultural exchange have to develop which can accommodate cultural diversity, and the complexities of cultural transmission. Finally, analyses of the material contexts of the body and sexuality – both corporeal and textual – need to be undertaken.

The debates between ‘rationalism’ and ‘traditionalism’ and between ‘organization’ and ‘community’ 1 which are such a striking feature of contemporary political thought may be traced back in their modern form to the eighteenth century. Men like Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Bolingbroke, Hume, Bentham and Burke recognized the relevance of these debates to theory and practice and they attempted to link the issues by exploring the conceptual and practical connexions between rationalist politics and the theory of community. The problems were not, of course, discussed in either an intellectual or a political vacuum. The intellectual context was produced by the impact of the discoveries of natural science on social investigation. Students of social affairs hoped to discover behind the apparent diversity and complexity of actual societies a framework of uniform, consistent and, above all, predictable rules which would be analogous to the laws of the planetary system.

Political economy suffered a sharp decline in prestige and influence in Britain after 1870. The methods, doctrines and policies of the classical school were called into question by a younger generation of economists, eager to respond positively to the sudden appearance of the ‘ social problem’ in politics. The most dramatic break with the old school took place in the sphere of policy, where the link between laissez-faire and political economy was severed. Economists such as Jevons, Cairnes, Sidgwick, Toynbee and Marshall led the assault on the orthodox school.1 Unfortunately, the very success of their attack has conditioned historians to assume that they spoke for all their generation. Such was not the case. Below the level of the leading academic economists and liberal social reformers a strong current of opinion ran in the opposite direction; it feared the growth of socialism and looked to a re-juvenated ‘science’ of political economy as the only counterpoise to it.

Everyone knows that Edwin Chadwick wrote the New Poor Law; or, rather, that he wrote the report – issued in 1834 by the royal commission appointed two years earlier to inquire into the poor laws – which formed the basis for the New Poor Law. The well-informed among us might add the name of the political economist Nassau Senior as Chadwick's co-author. But few would be able to supply any of the further seven names which stood with Chadwick's and Senior's as co-signatories to the report. These seven royal commissioners were Bishop Blomfield of London, Bishop Sumner of Chester, William Sturges Bourne, M.P., the Rev. Henry Bishop, Henry Gawler, Walter Coulson, and James Traill.

The international diffusion of ideas has often been described as an abstract process. John Bowring's career offers a different insight into the practical conditions that permitted a concept, free trade, to spread across national borders. An early advocate of trade liberalization in Britain, Bowring promoted free trade policies in France, Italy, Germany, Egypt, Siam, and China between 1830 and 1860. He employed different strategies according to local political conditions, appealing to public opinion in liberal Western Europe, seeking to persuade bureaucrats and absolute rulers in Central Europe and the Middle East, and resorting to gunboats in East Asia. His career also helps to connect the rise of free trade ideas in Europe with the ‘imperialism of free trade’ in other parts of the world. Bowring upheld the same liberal ideals as Richard Cobden and other luminaries of the free trade movement. Yet unlike them, he endorsed imperial ascendancy in order to remove obstacles to global communications and spread civilization outside Europe.

This article examines the historiographical debate over federalism between the 1930s and 1960s. In their most sweeping iterations, revisionists have sought to unravel the history of the nation-state, by using the history of anti-colonial federalist demands for equal incorporation into imperial states as evidence against a teleology of nationalist independence. In perceiving the democratic potentialities embedded within imperial state forms, revisionists argue that anti-colonial federalists therefore belong within a cosmopolitan tradition of seeking democratic supra-national governance beyond empire and nation. Some iterations of ‘post-colonial cosmopolitanism’ have unfortunately channelled debate into an opposition between federalism and nationalism, while also generating methodological republicanism, the tendency to view proto-republics within imperial formations. This review challenges these interpretive shortcomings and argues instead that federalism ought to be understood as part of a contest about the state as such. By integrating scholarship on French and British imperial federalism with recent work on regional federalisms in European and African contexts, this essay centres a whole range of ideological variations of ‘cosmopolitanism’ that adapted federalism to their critiques of the state. Ultimately, this reframing of federalist historiography enables new insights into contests about, and not just over, twentieth-century states.

Historians have always assumed that what has to be explained about Peel is his flexibility or constant ‘fluctuation of opinion’. Few would accuse him of having practised ‘long meditated deception’ against the party he betrayed in 1829 and 1846; it is a charge which Peel's ghost would complacently deflect by a ritual appeal to ‘conscience’. Hostile commentators have preferred to follow Disraeli in attacking Peel's most sensitive spot – his intellect. Disraeli's analysis is familiar but worth quoting because it established a context for much of the subsequent discussion.