Historians of early modern science face a serious problem, in that there was no science in early modern society. There were, however, other enterprises in the early modern period devoted to the understanding and manipulation of the physical world. This review identifies important trends in historians' attempts to comprehend those enterprises. In particular, it identifies four leading currents. The first is the move to characterize these different enterprises themselves, and in particular to understand natural philosophy and the mathematical sciences as distinct practical endeavours. The second is the attention now being paid to the social identity of the investigator of nature. The third is the attempt to understand the history of science as a history of practical enterprises rather than propositions or theories. The fourth, finally, is the understanding of natural knowledge in terms of systems of trust, and in particular in terms of the credit vested in rival claimants. In a combination of these, the review suggests, lies a future for a discipline that has otherwise lost its subject.

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.

Revisionist and post-revisionist historians alike still discuss politics in nineteenth-century terms, paying little attention to the politics of rhetoric and display that characterized Renaissance states. Literary critics and art historians, however, have focused attention on representations of authority and have developed critical methods to illuminate the performance and reception of texts in early modern culture. This essay reviews recent interdisciplinary work on theatre and poetry, painting and pageant, vital to historians of politics, and suggests a series of negotiations and exchanges over images of rule, and a dialogue about and for authority, between governments and subjects, in early modern England.

L'argent du roi: les finances sous François Ier. By Philippe Hamon. Paris: Comité pour l'histoire économique et financière, Ministère de l'Economie, 1994. Pp. xliii+609. ISBN 2-11-087648-4. 249F.

The king's army: warfare, soldiers, and society during the wars of religion in France, 1562–1576. By James B. Wood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xvi+349. ISBN 0-521-55003-3. £45.00.

One king, one faith: the parlement of Paris and the religious reformations of the sixteenth century. By Nancy Lyman Roelker. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1996. Pp. xiii+543. ISBN 0-520-08626-0. £50.00.

A city in conflict: Troyes during the French wars of religion. By Penny Roberts. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Pp. xi+228. ISBN 0-7190-4694-7. £40.00.

The birth of absolutism: a history of France, 1598–1661. By Yves-Marie Bercé, translated by Richard Rex. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Press, 1996. Pp. viii+262. ISBN 0-333-62757-1. £15.50.

The French sixteenth century has always posed serious difficulties for historians. It was a time of rapid change and, in its later decades, of massive disorder, so that there are many large and complex issues to unravel. The need for close analysis as an antidote to over-hasty generalizations is obvious, yet on many issues the archives are frustratingly scanty or even non-existent. A group of recent books tackles these problems with considerable ingenuity and a fair degree of success, even if some of the gaps in the evidence inevitably defy the authors' best efforts.

Contested boundaries: itinerancy and the shaping of the colonial American religious world. By Timothy D. Hall. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994. Pp. x+196. ISBN 0-8223-1522-X. £10.97.

Original meanings: politics and ideas in the making of the Constitution. By Jack N. Rakove. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Pp. xvi.+439. ISBN 0-394-57858-9 £19.26.

Parades and the politics of the street: festive culture in the early American republic. By Simon P. Newman. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997. Pp. xiv+271. ISBN 0-8122-3399-9. £24.42.

Transatlantic radicals and the early American republic. By Michael Durey. Kansas: University of Kansas, 1997. Pp. xi+425. ISBN 0-7006-0823-0 £25.71.

Parish boundaries: the Catholic encounter with race in the twentieth-century urban north. By John T. McGreevy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. Pp. vi+362. ISBN 0-226-55873-8. $27.50.

What parish are you from? A Chicago Irish community and race relations. By Eileen M. McMahon. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1995. Pp. xii+226. ISBN 0-8131-1877-8. $32.95.

The Boston Irish: a political history. By Thomas H. O'Connor. London: Northeastern University Press, 1995. Pp. xixx+363. ISBN 1-55553-220-9. £23.50.

The New York Irish. Edited by Ronald H. Bayor and Timothy J. Meagher. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Pp. xxii+743. ISBN 0-8018-5199-8. $45.00.

The public city: the political construction of urban life in San Francisco, 1850–1900. By Philip J. Ethington. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xvi+464. ISBN 0-8018-5199-8. £40.00.

Civic wars: democracy and public life in the American city during the nineteenth century. By Mary P. Ryan. London: University of California Press, 1997. Pp. xii+376. ISBN 0-520-20441-7. £16.15.

Few events have had a greater impact on urban America than the Irish Catholic exodus, which eventually brought one third of the Irish to the United States. Irish Catholics were the first ethnic group to immigrate in large numbers to America's cities and to experience overt discrimination. Overcoming that discrimination, they emerged as the consummate political force in urban America. In the late nineteenth century, Irish politicians and their political machines controlled a majority of America's large cities, long before the election of John F. Kennedy as president brought the Irish political presence to the national stage. At once integrated into American culture and proud of their ethnic culture and identity, the Irish in America continue to have a clear cultural presence in both positive and negative ways, in many American cities. The Irish hold the best parades, but sometimes refuse to allow Irish homosexuals the right to parade in them. The Irish are proud of their neighbourhoods, sometimes to the point of physical violence.

For the first time in over two centuries, however, Irish immigration patterns have reversed. Over the last two years, 13,000 more Irish moved back to Ireland from America than went the other way. This watershed change provides a good opportunity to reconsider the history of the Irish in America's cities, as the authors of some recent publications demonstrate. This review will examine six current studies that illuminate the Irish urban experience in America. The authors of these histories document the role of the Irish and the Catholic church in urban racial disturbances in the twentieth century; they reconsider the importance of the Irish to urban political culture; and they explore the contested meanings of being Irish in urban America.

This article subjects a variety of works on nineteenth-century politics to critical analysis, focusing on recent work in biography, popular politics, and on those works that have shown an interest in post-structuralist approaches. Mostly it examines texts produced between 1993 and about 1997 with a view to sensing an historiographical mood. Although the argument urges an open-minded reception to the linguistic turn in historical work, it brings the work of some of its adherents – perhaps especially James Vernon – under critical scrutiny and concludes that a price has been paid for the attempt at constructing a ‘cultural politics’. In particular the article expresses alarm at the apparent incoherence and sub-literacy of some post-structural statements.

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’.

Restaurationssystem und Reformpolitik: Süddeutschland und Preußen im Vergleich. Edited by Hans-Peter Ullmann and Clemens Zimmermann. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1996. Pp. 272. ISBN: 3-486-168-5. DM 98.

Von Wien nach Königgrätz: die Sicherheitspolitik des Deutschen Bundes im europäischen Gleichgewicht, 1815–1816. By Jürgen Angelow. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1996. Pp. 418. ISBN 3-486-56143-X. DM 88.

Stadt und Bürgertum in Frankfurt am Main. Ein besonderer Weg von der ständischen zur modernen Bürgergesellschaft, 1760–1914. By Ralf Roth. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1996. Pp. 804. ISBN 3-486-56188-X. DM 128.

Life and religion at Louisbourg, 1713–1758. By A. J. B. Johnston. London: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1984, paperback edition, 1996. Pp. xxxii+227. ISBN 0-7735-1525-9. £12.95.

The New Orleans Cabildo: Colonial Louisiana's first city government, 1769–1803. By Gilbert C. Din and John E. Harkins. London: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Pp. xvii+330. ISBN 0-8071-2042-1. £42.75.

Revolution, romanticism, and the Afro-Creole protest tradition in Louisiana, 1718–1868. By Caryn Cossé Bell. London: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. Pp. xv+325. ISBN 0-8071-2096-0. £32.95.

Hopeful journeys: German immigration, settlement and political culture in colonial America, 1717–1775. By Aaron Spencer Fogleman. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996. Pp. xii+257. ISBN 0-8122-1548-6. £15.95.

Britannia lost the war of American independence but still reigns over the historiography of colonial North America. This is a problem now that historians of early America have embarked on an attempt to apply an Atlantic world perspective to colonial development. The complex web of human, cultural, economic, and political encounters and exchanges among Europe, Africa, and the Americas spreads well beyond the familiar terrain of Britain and its thirteen mainland colonies. While the histories of Indians and enslaved Africans are beginning to find their way into the historical narrative of early America to challenge the British hegemony, non-British Europeans remain virtually invisible, except as opponents in the imperial wars that punctuated the colonial era. These four books illustrate obstacles that must be overcome to remedy this gap and offer glimpses of the rewards to be gained by drawing the history of continental Europeans previously treated as peripheral into the centre of the major debates currently shaping early American history.

The end of the Spanish empire, 1898–1923. By Sebastian Balfour. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp. xi+269. ISBN 0-19-820507-4. £35.00.

From mobilization to civil war: the politics of polarization in the Spanish city of Gijón, 1900–1937. By Pamela Beth Radcliff. Cambridge: University Press, 1997. Pp. xviii+354. ISBN 0-521-562139. £40.00.

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.

Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler: the diplomacy of Edvard Beneš in the 1930s. By I. Lukes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. xii+318. ISBN 0-1951-0267-3. £22.50.

Carpatho–Ukraine in the twentieth century: a political and legal history. By V. Shandor. Cambridge, MA: distributed by Harvard University Press for the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University, 1998. Pp. xvii+321. ISBN 0-9164A-5886-5. £21.95.

Czechoslovak national interests, Part I: A historical survey of Czechoslovak national interests, Part II: Reflections on the demise of Czechoslovak communism. By Oskar Krejčí. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, distributed by Columbia University Press, New York, 1996. Pp. 193, 167. ISBN 0-8803-3343-X. £31.00