In August 1914, as war broke out, socialist parties across Europe offered support to their own governments. The Socialist International was shattered. This rush to defencism has traditionally been seen as a volte face in which the International's frequent protestations in favour of peace and international working-class solidarity were suddenly abandoned. The collapse has been variously ascribed to socialist helplessness, betrayal, or ideological incoherence. This article examines the International's attitudes to war and peace as developed and espoused in the decades before 1914, and finds that the decisions of the constituent socialist parties in 1914 were understandable within this context. Socialists were not abandoning past ideals, but attempting to put them into practice. The circumstances of modern war, however, made traditional distinctions – between aggressor and defensive belligerents, and between ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’ nations – difficult to maintain. For some socialists, this meant that socialists of every country had a certain justification in rallying to their nation's defence. For Lenin and the Bolsheviks, however, if no capitalist country could be considered innocent, then all must be guilty.

The connection between ideologies of nation, alcohol abuse, and social engineering have not received systematic attention from historians. This article offers a case-study from the history of apartheid South Africa. Working around a fragment of apartheid history, a bureaucratic panic that excessive white drinking threatened the stability of the racial order, it explores geneaologies of state responses to white drinking in South Africa. It then concentrates on the role of Geoffrey Cronje, an intellectual / bureaucrat who not only drove the panic but then used it to implement new forms of social engineering in white South African society. Drawing on penal and welfarist traditions as well as medical models of treatment, he introduced a system for the discipline and correction of whites who drank heavily that drew on both state and private resources. I examine how the defiance of those incarcerated for drinking helped shaped subsequent, lighter-handed responses that managed the drinking of greater numbers of whites. This article may provide avenues for investigating alcohol abuse, state intervention, and social engineering in a range of mid-twentieth-century societies.

The provenance of the dreadnought battle-cruiser and its significance with respect to the Anglo-German naval rivalry has generated sharp scholarly disagreement. This article reviews the work of four historians who have wrestled with the battle-cruiser issue in order to evaluate their different approaches to the evidence and conflicting conclusions. It then identifies hitherto unnoticed connections between the battle cruiser, a redefinition of the two-Power standard, and the financing of the 1908 Old Age Pensions Act.

The importance of the honours system as an institution in British politics and public life has frequently been underestimated. At the end of the First World War, the British government prioritized voluntary service to the state as an area which the honours system should reward more than others through the newly created Order of the British Empire. However, after the war the Order changed to focus more on civil servants, soldiers, and the broad category of ‘local service’. The latter could include volunteers, but more often did not. Various attempts to democratize honours through reforms from the 1960s focused on rewarding a wider range of service. The most successful of these was John Major's honours reform programme in 1993, which returned volunteer service to the forefront of the public image of honours. While these reforms were not as egalitarian as they seemed, they were successful because they integrated an ideology of crown honours with the other functions of the modern monarchy and opened up the honours system to a wider potential set of recipients. At the same time, they maintained a hierarchical structure that meant that elites who had traditionally enjoyed the exclusivity of high honours continued to do so.

This review revisits the role of race in Ernest Renan's thought by situating contemporary debates in a long perspective that extends back to his texts and their earliest interpreters. Renan is an ambivalent figure: from the 1850s onwards he used ‘race’ to denote firm differences between the ‘Aryan’ and ‘Semitic’ language groups in history; but after 1870, he repeatedly condemned biological racism in various venues and contexts. I show that the tension between these two sides of Renan's thought has continually resurfaced in criticism and historiography ever since the late nineteenth century. Renan's racial views have been subject to particularly close scrutiny following Léon Poliakov's and Edward Said's critiques in the 1970s, but the ensuing debate risks developing into an inconclusive tug-of-war between attack and apologia. I propose three fresh directions for research. First, historians should situate the evolution of Renan's ideas on race in closer biographical context; secondly, they must reconsider the cultural authority of his texts, which is often more asserted than proven; thirdly, they should pay greater attention to his reception outside Europe, particularly regarding his writing on Islam.

Early modern groups did not necessarily proclaim themselves. When they did, they were not necessarily groups. The historian must decide when to analyse people as separate individuals and when their commonalities were great enough that they should be considered together. These judgements have been the source of frequent debate. At times, the disagreement has been over the proper label for a group – whether, for instance, ‘puritans’ should instead be called ‘the godly’. In other cases, the very existence of a group has been called into question, with some doubting whether there was a ‘Ranter’ movement in the 1650s. Often, historians debate the coherence of a group, with one prominent scholar questioning whether the first whigs in the late 1670s were organized enough to deserve the appellation of a ‘party’. The vigour of these debates suggests that some of our most important intellectual labours are done when we assign people to groups.

Michael Mann's last two volumes of The sources of social power are acknowledged to be a milestone in historical sociology. They have not quite reached undergraduate history reading lists, at least in the UK. This is perhaps because his approach does not fit neatly into our common categories. He proclaims himself both an incurable empiricist and a purveyor of ‘macro sociology’. He sees history as a pattern of disrupted equilibria, but this puts him much closer to the ‘historian of events’ than he would perhaps like to be. He is concerned with class, but is no dedicated Marxist, saying that his approach steers ‘somewhere between a Marxian and Weberian position’. He focuses on the nation-state, but is devoid of nationalist commitment of any sort, differing from the position of Jeremi Suri, for instance, whose recent work Liberty's surest guardian broadly promotes a more positive view of America's world role. Indeed, Mann sometimes appears to be rather more hostile to what he sees as the counterproductive ‘imperialism’ of his adopted country than, say, Messrs Chavez and Putin. He wants to inflect history with theory, but has little time for post-modernism. Neither Derrida nor Foucault, let alone Deleuze and Guattari or Zizek, figure significantly in his books, an offence almost worthy of burning at the stake in today's academy. Yet his analysis of key elements of twentieth-century historiography is consistently perceptive and his treatment of the history of the USA and the fall of communism, in particular, outclasses that of any historian I have read.

Recent years have seen an increase in the number of historical studies dealing with the state and its involvement in the process of economic growth, both prior to and during the transition known as industrialization. This is striking inasmuch as for a long time the state as an actor had been absent from the master narratives in history. It is still lacking in most studies on the Great Divergence, i.e. the story explaining the long-run differential growth trajectories between Europe and Asia, c. ad 1500–2000. It has been, likewise, missing in the more ‘Euro-centrist’ accounts on the perceived ‘European miracle’ – models that were to an extent influenced by neoclassical theory about market performance and economic development, which quite naturally saw little room for the pro-active state in the explanation of economic success, and against which much of the Great Divergence narrative was developed as an alternative model. As an actor, the state has also been missing from most of the accounts on Europe's first transition to industrialization. And it has had, until very recently, very little place in modern economic theory explaining long-run growth and economic change. Even the wider public opinion – just think of journalist T. Friedman's early 2000s best-seller The world is flat – had, by the late twentieth century, increasingly subscribed to the idea that free markets, unfettered globalization, and the ‘invisible hand’ were the best means to achieve economic health.