This article sets out to examine the relationship between party politics and social reform in the Second World War. The issue of government policy towards reform was raised initially by Richard Titmuss, who argued in his official history of social policy that the experience of total war and the arrival of Churchill's coalition in 1940 led to a fundamentally new attitude on welfare issues. The exposure of widespread social deprivation, Titmuss claimed, made central government fully conscious for the first time of the need for reconstruction; the reforms subsequently proposed or enacted by the coalition were therefore an important prelude to the introduction of a ‘welfare state’ by the post-war Labour administration. These claims have not been borne out by more recent studies of individual wartime policies, but as a general guide to social reform in the period the ideas of Richard Titmuss have never been entirely displaced. In fact the significance of wartime policy, and its close relationship with post-war reform, has been reaffirmed in the most comprehensive study of British politics during the war – Paul Addison's The road to 1945. For Addison, the influence of Labour ministers in the coalition made the government the most radical since Asquith's Liberal administration in the Edwardian period. The war, he notes, clearly placed on the agenda the major items of the post-war welfare state: social security for all, a national health service, full employment policies, improved education and housing, and a new system, of family allowances.

The fear of revolution, which was to play such an important part in early nineteenth-century English history, was felt for the first time in 1792. Before that year there had been constant fear of disorder, and frequent riots had demonstrated that the forces of order could at times be set at naught and property endangered. In 1792, however, propertied classes and government began to fear not sporadic and localized outbursts of violence, but an alleged nation-wide conspiracy aimed at the overthrow of both property and government, and the end of social subordination.

The early years of Thomas Hobbes are almost entirely sunk in obscurity. Biographers from George Croom Robertson (1886) to Miriam Reik (1977) have added little, for the period before 1628, to the scant information provided by Aubrey and the Latin Vitae. If to this we add the handful of details which have been gleaned by modern scholarship, the picture remains a bare one, and one that can be briefly summarized.

For many years it was widely assumed that there was a close connection between the rapid expansion of European imperial power and acquisition of territory overseas during the nineteenth century, particularly in Asia and Africa, and the congruent Protestant Christian missionary project to save the ‘heathens’ of these places by persuading them to embrace the ‘redeeming’ message of the Gospels. Over the past several decades, however, the thesis that empire-building and Christian evangelizing were mutually supportive activities has come under sustained attack from a group of British historians led by Brian Stanley and Andrew Porter – to the point where the Stanley–Porter revisionist line now occupies centre-stage. This article shows that, contrary to the dominant consensus, the relationship between church – in the form of the missionary societies – and state – in the shape of the English East India Company, initially cool, gradually warmed as the two parties came to realize that they had a common interest in providing ‘civilizing’ Western education to the Indian elites. Indeed it provocatively suggests that the colonial state might well, in time, have given its endorsement and even its support to the spread of Christianity had not the Mutiny intervened in 1857. However the analysis of the benefits generated by this South Asian partnership finds, paradoxically, that it undermined the Company’s authority, and may well have deterred many Indians from converting to Christianity – which had come to be widely seen as a privileged and imperialist religion.

This essay reconsiders the career of the most famous of Elizabethan false prophets, William Hacket, the illiterate pseudo-messiah who, together with two gentleman disciples, plotted a civil and ecclesiastical coup, and was executed for treason in July 1591. It explores the significance of autonomous lay activity on the fringes of the mainstream puritan movement, demonstrating links between the dissident trio and key clerical figures who later prudently disowned them. Closer inspection of Hacket's exploits sheds fresh light on the relationship between experimental Calvinist piety and the religious and magical culture of the unlettered rural laity – a relationship still widely presented as bitterly adversarial. Relocated in the context of contemporary attitudes to prophecy and insanity, the episode illuminates the eclecticism of early modern belief and the manner in which medical and theological explanations for bizarre behaviour comfortably coexisted and mingled. Variously labelled a witch, visionary, and raving lunatic, Hacket's case reveals the extent to which such roles, diagnoses, and stereotypes are socially, culturally, and politically shaped and conditioned. In exploiting the incident to discredit Presbyterian activism within the Church of England, leading conformist polemicists anticipated the main thrust of the campaign against religious ‘enthusiasm’ mounted by Anglican elites in the Interregnum, Restoration, and early Enlightenment.

Historians face the problem of how to write the history of the eighteenth-century British empire. How can the history of Britain and the history of its empire be brought together? Recent research has demonstrated the value of employing the idea of networks to describe the interrelatedness of empire. In the history of science and economic history such a notion has been quite thoroughly articulated, particularly in relation to the exchange of botanical knowledge and the transaction of goods. Here it is argued that conceiving of empire as a set of networks through which knowledge and ideas were exchanged, trust was negotiated, goods were traded, and people travelled is an avenue worth pursuing in the project to write the history of the eighteenth-century British empire.

This article traces the history of women's participation in consumer politics and the gendering of the consumer in twentieth-century Britain. It does so by focusing on two important moments in the official discussion of the consumer interest: the Consumers' Council of the First World War and the Molony Committee on Consumer Protection, 1959–1962. It argues that notions of consumer-citizenship have been varied and forever in flux and that the involvement of women in consumer issues within the state apparatus has always been at once both disputed and encouraged. Within this complex history, however, a number of discernible trends are apparent. In the first half of the twentieth century, consumer issues were articulated by women's organizations on the political left and the consumer was considered largely a working-class housewife within official consumer politics. By mid-century, an increasingly dominant view of the consumer was that of the middle-class housewife, and a host of socially conservative women's groups came to speak for the consumer. By the 1950s, while the definition of the consumer remained contested, it had increasingly become a gender-neutral category, as business groups defined consumer interests in government committees and an emerging affluent consumer movement inscribed consumerism with the values of a male professional class.

Around the middle of the nineteenth century, the Hungarian conservatives made a number of attempts decisively to influence the course of events in the Austrian empire and in the kingdom of Hungary, but failed on each occasion. What exactly had they wanted, and why did they fail to achieve it? How did they try to appear to others, and how did they see themselves? What political identity, if any, did they have? Was there anything special about the way their political activity and their perception of themselves bore on one another as compared to other nineteenth-century conservatives? What follows is an attempt to give answers to these questions.

Diplomatic documents which record the relationship between France and the court of the bey of Tunis from the late seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century offer a unique source to understand the way in which cultures with very different assumptions meet and adapt to each other. The ceremonies of submission and reverence had to be adapted to meet European understandings of the state and nation while taking account of Muslim attitudes to infidels. The French Revolution introduced new criteria and new tensions which continued to vex relations into the nineteenth century. This double mirror of ‘Otherness’ raises interesting questions about the nature of culture and how cultures prove to be very flexible in practice. In spite of the dichotomization of the Others as strangers, there was agreement on common norms governing social situations where actors effectively interacted.

The historiography of religion in modern Britain has been dominated in recent years by controversy over the sociological theory of secularization. This review of the literature on secularization in modern Britain traces its apparent persuasiveness in part to assumptions about religious decline and renewal which are central to Christian soteriology. Recognition of the nature of secularization theory discloses a monolithic notion of religion itself. Closer attention to the complexity of religious experience may yield an account of religion more attuned to the contours of social change in modern Britain.

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.

This article seeks to re-examine the intellectual context of commercial policy and regulation in seventeenth-century England. It questions a common assumption about so-called ‘mercantilist’ writers: that they saw trade as in some way finite and therefore won by one nation at the expense of another. Instead, it proposes that the often belligerent attitude of the ‘mercantilists’ towards trade was rooted in an understanding of the nature of international commerce as both communication and competition. Although writers acknowledged the mutual aspect of trade, they did not see this exchange as automatically equal, but saw it as possible for one party to exploit the other. This situation demanded state action to protect national trading interests in the disputed area of commerce, and thus this ‘discourse of trade’ was linked to political and juridical discourses about international relations. The article shows how this understanding of trade influenced debates about commercial governance in the critical middle decades of the seventeenth century, culminating in the attempt to create a national monopoly through the navigation acts, ‘securing sovereignty’ over the nation's trade. The second half of this article examines this in more detail with reference to the ideas of a prominent defender of the 1651 Navigation Act: Benjamin Worsley.

There has recently been much debate about social policy in Britain during the Second World War. This article takes up Jose Harris's suggestion that historians should look not at large-scale forces, but at ‘those minuscule roots of idiosyncratic private culture’. As a way into the complex amalgam that comprised ideas on social policy in the 1940s, we look in particular at the report on the evacuation of schoolchildren entitled Our towns: a close up, published by the Women's Group on Public Welfare in March 1943. Of course it is undeniable that one report is unrepresentative of all the many surveys that were produced on the evacuation experience. However, the initial wave of evacuation in September 1939 was the most significant, and the Our towns survey, along with a famous leader article in The Economist, has already received some selective attention from historians. Here we subject the survey to a more intensive examination, looking at the backgrounds of its authors, its content, and its reception by various professional groups. The article argues that it was the apparently contradictory nature of the report that explains its powerful appeal – it echoed interwar debates about behaviour and citizenship, but also reflected the ideas that would shape the welfare state in the post-war years.

The English Reformation was not a specific event which may be given a precise date; it was a long and complex process. ‘The Reformation’ is a colligatory concept, a historians’ label which relates several lesser changes into an overall movement: it embraces a break from the Roman obedience; an assertion of secular control over the Church; a suppression of Catholic institutions such as monasteries and chantries; a prohibition of Catholic worship; and a protestantization of services, clergy and laity. Though the political decision to introduce each phase of change and the legislative alteration of statutes and canons may be dated easily enough, it is much harder to ascribe responsibility and motive for such measures. Moreover, as the interest of historians has in recent years moved on from such political issues towards the administrative enforcement of new rules and popular acceptance of new ideas, so the identification and explanation of change have become even more difficult: the pace is likely to have varied from area to area, and the criteria by which progress should be measured are far from clear. It is therefore not surprising that there has been much dispute over the causes and chronology of developments in religion, and recent interpretations of the Reformation in England can, with some simplification, be grouped in relation to two matrices. One matrix relates to the motive force behind the progress of Protestantism: at one extreme, it could be suggested that Protestant advance was entirely the result of official coercion, while at the other it could be said that the new religion spread horizontally by conversions among the people. The second matrix relates to the pace of religious change: on the one hand, it could be suggested that Protestantism made real progress at an early date and had become a powerful force by the death of Edward VI, while on the other it could be said that little had been achieved in the first half of the century and the main task of protestantizing the people had to be undertaken in the reign of Elizabeth. These two matrices provide us with four main clusters of interpretations.

Interest in energy transitions has accelerated in recent years due to rising concerns about global warming and resource scarcity, but the drivers of these phenomena are not well understood. To date, scholars have primarily focused on commercial and technological factors, highlighting that oil was ‘better’ than coal – more powerful, cheaper, cleaner, and more practical to use – and that the internal combustion engine made it more advantageous to use in transportation. Yet oil was also a strategic commodity that powerful states sought to acquire for military reasons. This article contends that geopolitics, military decision-making, and energy security hastened the transition from oil to coal prior to the First World War. It argues that Britain, Germany, and the United States sought to transition their naval fleets from coal to oil to gain a military advantage at sea, which created, for the first time, the problem of oil-supply security. Through government-led initiatives to address oil-supply security, vast new supplies of oil came online and prices fell, the ideal environment for oil to eclipse coal as the dominant source in the global energy system.

‘The Black in the West Indies will.… receive his Emancipation at the expense of his Brethren in Africa.’ So the Lieutenant-Governor of the Gambia had forecast before the 1833 Act, and he was right, although for the wrong reasons. Emancipation cramped the sugar production of the British Caribbean, but it did not affect the sweet tooth of the sugar consumer, and as West Indian output fell, sugar production in Cuba and (less noticeably) in Brazil rose sharply. Outproduced, undersold and overcultivated, the West Indian plantations began to lag as competitors, a result inevitable in the long run, but accelerated by the freeing of the slaves.

Why was Thomas Hobbes never made a Fellow of the Royal Society? The question has been asked and answered in nearly all the intellectual biographies and other such studies of Hobbes, as well as in several of the histories of the early Royal Society itself. Since I wish to discuss the same question again, it is worth pausing first of all to neutralize two possible doubts about the value of this exercise.

As a professional and bureaucratically organized institution of social control, the police in the United States originated less than 150 years ago. Traditionally, this development has been explained as an inevitable response to a dramatic rise in felonious crime. According to this type of account, a criminal reaction was a natural by-product of such factors as urbanization, immigration, and industrialization. Other investigators have disputed this interpretation, arguing that there is little evidence to support the occurrence of a crime wave. Rather, the municipal police in America originated as part of a larger class control apparatus designed to regulate working class social and political activities, including ‘subversive’ speeches, strikes, riots, and daily breaches of the ‘public order’. Those who argue that the ‘new police’ developed as a crime fighter typically neglect to discuss one of the oldest forms of professional policing in die nation, the private detective agency.

This article examines the impact of the urban social movement active in Lisbon on the Portuguese transition to democracy (1974–6). Academic and public discourse over the last three decades has tended to characterize the movement either as an embryonic form of a participatory society, or an illusion created by the manipulation of a minority of activists. Conversely, this article argues that the movement was largely autonomous and powerful enough to win valuable concessions for the urban poor, in the context of increasing competition between political elites, although more moderate than many have assumed. As the contending political forces fought for supremacy, the urban movement became a coveted ally and potential source of legitimacy. With the political arena becoming increasingly polarized during the course of 1975, movement supporters were faced with a stark alternative between revolution and moderation. It is suggested that their choices were instrumental in making the victory of the moderates possible, revealing the contradiction between the street and the ballot box as a false dichotomy.