One of the more difficult practical questions raised by the English Reformation was just how to support its clergy and its fabric. Despite extensive resistance from the godly members of church and state, the Elizabethan church maintained the pre-Reformation system of impropriations, lay ownership of ecclesiastical tithes. This article examines the historical, practical, and ideological stakes of these everyday economics in the late sixteenth century. It argues that the majority of impropriators were responsive to the needs of the church, sustaining rather than undermining the nascent English church. In the space opened up by the Reformation's rents in the social and physical fabric of the parish, new bonds between church, state, and society were knit. This process of building the post-Reformation church thus tied the laity closer to the interests and activities of the church in England.

Following the rediscovery of the ‘Christ's copy’ in 1944, Peter Laslett's decision to use it as the copy-text of his edition of John Locke's Two treatises of government (1960) was, in more ways than one, a landmark event. It not only revitalized an entire generation of academic study in the field of Lockean scholarship and, more broadly, in the history of political thought, but has also had a lasting impact in as much as Laslett's edition has remained, since then, the reference text that scholars use, persuaded as they have been by Laslett that it represents ‘the version which would have satisfied Locke at the time of his death’. However, by re-examining the Christ's copy in the light of a near contemporary testimony unknown to Laslett, this article reveals that, with its three layers of corrections, the Christ's copy seems to be a richer palimpsest than what has so far been supposed, belonging as much to the francophone world of Huguenot exile as to an anglophone publishing schedule, and represents, as such, an artefact of transcultural relations. This article therefore challenges Laslett's interpretation of the nature and purpose of the Christ's copy, and thereby questions his editorial decision.

A number of late eighteenth-century English parliamentary reformers synthesized arguments based upon reason and natural law with appeals to the ‘ancient constitution’. This article aims to examine how such reformers were able to move to a democratic view of political agency while maintaining a rhetorically powerful appeal to constitutionalist precedent. It will examine how three of these radicals, John Cartwright, Granville Sharp, and Capel Lofft, collaborated in their utilization of the latent natural law maxims of the English common law, reviving the rationalist potential of the jurisprudence of Edward Coke and Christopher St Germain to democratize the seventeenth-century Whig conception of the ancient constitution. It will thereby show how reformers in the 1770s and 1780s challenged the domestic and imperial political status quo by exploiting the underlying ambiguities of the intellectual resources of their own ‘respectable’ legal and political tradition.

This article throws light on how the issue of conservation stood in tension with imperial hunting and exploitation in colonial India. The indiscriminate slaughter of wildlife and the declining numbers of game species in nineteenth-century India gave rise to a need for conservation, but with a caveat. Wildlife conservation, consequently, was aimed at the expansion of colonial economy and infrastructural development. Thus, in colonial India, wild predators that posed a threat to such interests were ruthlessly decimated and those animals that were useful for the smooth functioning of the British colonial rule were overlooked. This, in part, was also necessitated by the British seeking to establish their credentials as rulers, which explains the reason the colonial government's conservation programme was fundamentally selective and guided by expediency. The comparative perspective on elephants and tigers elucidates how the former were protected by the law because of the critical role they played in the colonial economy and administration, whilst the latter were ruthlessly exterminated for the threat they posed to the same. This article especially argues that the reasons for conserving elephants and decimating tigers in colonial India were more practical and economic than a mere reflection of cultural sensitivity on the part of the colonizers.

Most of the existing literature on the ‘Repeal Year’ agitation in Ireland explains the rise in popularity of the 1842–3 campaign for repeal of the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland in political and religious terms. This article argues that, in addition, the British government's economic policy of reducing tariffs in 1842 damaged Ireland's agricultural economy and increased popular support for the Repeal movement. Using both qualitative and quantitative analysis, this article shows that the tariff reductions and import relaxations of the 1842 budget had an immediate negative impact on Irish real incomes by reducing agricultural prices. A negative relationship between these prices and the Repeal rent, together with the economic rhetoric of Repeal in favour of protection, indicate a link between the economic downturn and the rise in the popularity of Repeal. This article concludes that Peel's trade policy changes of 1842 should therefore be added to the traditional religious and political explanations as a cause behind the sudden surge in popularity of the Repeal movement between 1842 and 1843.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, British social purity campaigners framed the pornography trade as a major source of cultural and moral pollution. As in their anti-prostitution efforts, purity campaigners presented the abolition of pornography as an attempt to protect women, children, and impressionable members of the lower classes from sexual immorality. Their rhetoric and policy efforts, however, reveal deeply entrenched fears of middle-class vulnerability to the negative effects of pornographic literature and images. Building on existing obscenity studies scholarship, this article explores the role of class and gender tension in nineteenth-century pornography regulation. In contrast to the majority of work on Victorian pornography, this article focuses on the British lower classes as producers and distributors rather than consumers of pornography. In addition, this article argues for a higher level of female participation in the pornography trade than has been previously recognized. By focusing on the contradictions and biases at the heart of campaigns against pornography, this article explores the ways in which regulation efforts and discourses of obscenity were shaped by the class and gender dynamics of the pornography trade.

This article analyses the historical conditions for, and implications of, the attitudes and conduct of a number of prominent or influential public intellectuals in the United States during the Great War. It argues that many intellectuals, particularly those who supported American entry to the war, shared a general lack of concern with the realities of full-scale warfare. Their response to the war had little to do with the war itself – its political and economic causes, brutal and industrial character, and human and material costs. Rather, their positions were often based on their views of culture and philosophy, or on their visions of the post-war world. As a result, relatively few of these intellectuals fully considered the political, social, and economic context in which the catastrophe occurred. The war, to many of them, was primarily a clash of civilizations, a battle of good versus evil, civilized democracy versus barbaric savagery, progress versus backwardness, culture versus kultur. The article describes several manifestations of American intellectual approaches to the war, discusses the correlation between intellectual and general public attitudes, and concludes with some implications for thinking about the relationship between intellectuals and war in more recent American history.

Zeroing in on private garden plots, the article discusses the manner in which Germans portrayed themselves in relation to displaced persons (DPs) – former foreign workers, Allied prisoners-of-war (POWs), and concentration camp inmates – in immediate post-Second World War Hanover. Challenging the notion that a coherent narrative of German victimization truly emerged only in the 1950s, the article reveals how German gardeners already articulated loudly a discourse through which they sought to depict themselves as decent, hard-working sufferers, while portraying displaced persons as immoral and dangerous perpetrators. The plots of garden owners, as foci of German yearnings for Heimat, came particularly under threat. Germans cherished such sites, not only because they provided the opportunity for procuring additional sustenance amidst a post-war world of scarcity, but because they symbolized longings to inhabit a peaceful, productive, and beautiful space into which the most turbulent history could not enter, and upon which a stable future could be constructed. Only with the removal of DPs could Germans claim for themselves the status of victims, while branding DPs perpetrators, and reaffirm past patterns of superiority and inferiority in both ethical and racial terms. In so doing, Germans could realize the innocence integral for achieving Heimat and establish democratic stability after 1945.

This article looks at central government's role, focusing on the parliamentary terms 1959–64 and 1964–6, in directing the way in which local authorities enacted the central area redevelopment schemes of the 1960s. The first two sections review the substantial but little-studied literature produced across the political spectrum about central area urban renewal in the period 1959–64. Section III uses the Joint Urban Planning Group, a group set up within the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, as a case-study to show how modernist approaches to redevelopment became operative within a government department. The Joint Urban Planning Group has received no attention from historians. Section IV discusses the fate of these ideas during Labour's first term after the 1964 election.

This article uses new archival evidence and the growing literature on religion and the foreign relations of the United States to reinterpret the Peace Corps. The religious revival of the 1950s continued into the 1960s, and the Kennedy administration saw ‘spiritual values’ as part of the national interest. Church–state politics and Kennedy's public conception of the role of religion in foreign relations dictated that this aspect of the cold war would change in form. The Peace Corps should, in part, be seen as a continuation of the religious cold war, one that drew on the precedents of missionary and church-service organizations. The Corps was a counterpart to church groups working abroad, and hoped to subcontract much of its work to them. Kennedy hoped to work with religious groups in ecumenical fashion. As Catholic organizations were most visibly interested in receiving Corps funds, funding church groups proved politically unworkable, leading to church–state arguments that Kennedy wanted to avoid. The Kennedy administration struggled to separate the secular and the sacred, as confused definitions of ‘religion’ and a tough constitutional stance narrowed policy options. The Peace Corps fight shaped, and was shaped by, contemporary debates over church and state.

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.

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.

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.