This article analyses the relationship between imperial expansion and popular visual culture in late seventeenth-century Venice. It addresses the impact of the military on the marketplace of print and examines the cultural importance of commercial printmaking to the visualization of colonial motifs during the 1684–99 war with the Ottoman Empire. Through a broad array of single-sheet engravings and illustrated books encompassing different visual typologies (e.g. maps, siege views, battle scenes, portraits of Venetian patricians, and representations of the Ottomans), the article re-examines key questions about the imperial dimensions of Venetian print culture and book history. In particular, it shows how warfare and colonial politics militarized the communication media, and highlights the manner in which prints engaged metropolitan viewers in the Republic's expansionist ventures. In so doing, the analysis demonstrates how the printing industry brought the visual spectacle of empire onto the centre stage of Venetian cultural life.

This article argues that projects to make Britain's imperial history visible to the public through the display of statues, the establishment of a history museum, and the renovation of historical markers solidified a colonial narrative about the British empire's permanence in India during the first two decades of the twentieth century, decades in which anticolonial unrest threatened the British occupation of the subcontinent. The monumental scale expressed permanence. An imperial aesthetic linked the cities important to showcasing the empire in Calcutta, New Delhi, and London. Contrary to mainstream assumptions that commemorations should be preserved for the sake of documenting history, these markers enacted a British story of triumph at a moment when mass campaigns against British rule were occurring. Coming at the end of a long nineteenth century of statue mania, when many European nations installed memorials to national heroes, the installation of monuments in India presented a colonialist public history of events such as the Black Hole incident of 1757 or the rebellions of 1857. Drawing from Viceroy George Curzon's ambitions in historical preservation and monumentalizing, the article shows how he stabilized a British narrative of India amid anticolonial campaigns of protest.

Why people trust is a question that has preoccupied scholars across many disciplines. Historical explorations of trust abound, but we know relatively little about the workings of trust in the history of investment. Despite becoming increasingly mediated and institutionalized in the nineteenth century, the market for stocks and shares remained local and embedded in personal relations to a significant extent. This created a complex trust environment in which old and new forms of trust co-existed. Investors sought information from the press, but they also relied upon friends to help them navigate the market. Rather than studying trust in the aggregate, this article argues that focusing on the particular allows us to appreciate trust as an emotional and ultimately imaginative process depending as much on affective stories as rational calculation. To this end, it takes the case of a Bath clergyman and workhouse schools inspector, James Clutterbuck, who solicited investments from a wide network of friends and colleagues in the 1880s and 1890s. By capturing the complex interplay of friendship, emotions, and narrative in the formation of trust, the article offers a window onto everyday financial life in late Victorian provincial England.

Several British statesmen have also been historians: Clarendon, Russell, Rosebery, Churchill—and Charles James Fox, although he produced only one volume. His History of the early part of the Reign of James II is a fragment of what might have been a much larger work; it was published posthumously, with a preface by his nephew Lord Holland, in 1808. Although it was given a mixed reception by the critics, it was regarded for several decades as something of a classic. It was translated into French, German, and Dutch; and was republished several times in England during the nineteenth century (most recently as a threepenny paperback in Cassell's National Library in 1888).

It is the purpose of this essay to explain the background and nature of proctorial representation and plural voting in the early Tudor period; to deter-mine the extent of absenteeism and proctorial representation in the House of Lords during the reign of Henry VIII; to single out and briefly discuss the principal procurators in the upper house; and to demonstrate how the Crown utilized and perfected the proxy system to manage the House of Lords. Just as an earlier essay dealt with the origin and evolution of proctorial representation in pre-Tudor times, so subsequent articles covering the late Tudor and Stuart periods will follow in due time.

What is Enlightenment? Few questions in the history of ideas can have given rise to more controversy, sustained over more than two centuries and extending into the furthest reaches of contemporary thought. In comparison, the ‘where’ of Enlightenment – the sites from which philosophes garnered their evidence, the settings in which their ideas took shape, the networks through which they were disseminated, the contexts in which they were interpreted – has received much less attention. It is not that these geographies have been altogether neglected. Distinctions between different ‘national’ Enlightenments (French, Scottish, English, and so on) are familiar, perhaps all too familiar, to historians of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. At a smaller scale, it is difficult to imagine historical accounts of the Enlightenment world without some sort of tour of those paradigmatic sites – the coffee house, the botanic garden, the lecture theatre. There is a geography here, of sorts: but in truth it is often simply a stage for action, a passive background (sometimes ‘national’, sometimes ‘local’) to the real business of social and intellectual change. In recent years, however, intellectual historians in general, and historians of science in particular, have begun to pay more attention to these and many other sites, not simply as inert contexts but as vital components of the making and communication of new knowledge. Thus is a genuine geography of knowledge in the making.

The emergence of a coherent narrative history of England, based upon the critical use of authorities, and written in a connected fashion rather than assembled from reproduced earlier materials, is a much slower process than such a simple statement or its requirements might suggest. The process begins in earnest in the late seventeenth century, after the historian ceases being a principal protagonist in the political pamphlet warfare of the time. The narrator must take account of advances in source criticism, and he must also cope, on the level of interpretation, with national myths that his forbears among the Tudor chroniclers and the seventeenth-century contenders had created. Miss Thompson has remarked that the main purpose of Tudor chroniclers, notably Hall and Holinshed, was to praise ‘the king's illustrious ancestors, reign by reign’.

In the year 1906, Abbot (later Cardinal) Gasquet published Lord Acton and his Circle, which contained 178 letters of Lord Acton, all of them except fifteen being addressed to Mr Richard Simpson. The bulk of the manuscripts passed into the archives of Downside Abbey, possibly in 1914, when Gasquet left England on becoming a Cardinal; though the fifteen letters addressed to Mr T. F. Wetherell are not there, and it has not been possible to discover whether the originals of these are still in existence. At the request of an American scholar the original holograph letters at Downside were recently re-examined for the first time, for the purpose of discovering whether any material concerning Lord Acton had been left unpublished. The inquiry revealed the fact that the volume was in many respects unsatisfactory as a work of scholarship.

One of the most interesting features of modern historical work on the Anglo-Saxon settlements in recent years has been the tendency to admit a possible connexion between the Jutes and the Franks; or even to stress the possible associations, either of race or culture, between the Germanic conquerors of Kent and the mixed Germanic races of the middle Rhine and northern Gaul. That the language of the Cantware, or whatever they called themselves, was not very different from that of the subjects of the kings of Paris is suggested by the sending of Frankish interpreters along with the Italians of Augustine's mission. Linguists admit this, and they have been delighted to find remnants of the Frankish gau embedded in Kentish placenames. Archaeologists tell us that the early Kentish kings minted no coins of their own, but used Frankish ones, or else used their own rings and bracelets for money; when they did begin to have mints of their own, they copied Merovingian coins in weight, though not in design. Frankish coins, for that matter, were used farther afield than Kent: the coins found at Sutton Hoo were all Merovingian. It is in this pleasantly pro-Frankish context that the subject of the court officers of king Æthelberht of Kent is here offered for consideration. Someone may say: Æthelberht I know, and queen Bertha I know, and Augustine I know, and, in fact, all that Bede tells us about Æthelberht I know: but who are these officers of the court of Æthelberht that you are speaking of? We know, they say, that Æthelberht's law speaks of eorlcund men who had a wergeld of 300 shillings, and ceorls, who had a wergeld of 100 shillings: but we cannot remember that the individual officers of Æthelberht's court are mentioned by anybody; or at least, by any source that is reliable.

In his article ‘Semantics and historiography’, published in 1953, Richard Koebner invites historians to exploit the benefits which a semantic approach to history readily offers them. A ‘semantic approach’ he defines as a systematic ‘study of the career of political and historical expressions and slogans’. Koebner is convincing when he explains why such a study is so important – indeed indispensable – to historians who do not wish to become ‘victims of destructive ambiguities and…liable to mistake the expressions of popular historical consciousness for historical realities’. There is probably no period in history, Koebner argues, which may not be enlightened by a pursuit of these inquiries; ‘the semantic approach to history has something to reveal in all periods’

The place where the University of Edinburgh now stands was once the site of the church of St Mary in the Fields or, as it is usually called, Kirk o'Field. On a February night in 1567, in the small house close to the church, there occurred what is certainly the most frequently discussed event in the history of Scotland, the murder of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, consort to Mary Queen of Scots. Much discussed it has been, but since it is still not properly resolved it merits another look.

The most important elements of Vichy industrial organization were the comités d'organisation (CO). The procedure for the establishment of these bodies was laid down by decree on 16 August 1940. In practice the functions assumed by them varied considerably. But broadly a CO was to oversee one particular industry and to liaise between that industry and the authorities (both German and French). One of the first of these bodies to be established (on 9 November 1940) was the comité d'organisation de l'industrie des combustibles minéraux solides (COH).

The 1931 General Election reduced the Parliamentary Labour Party to forty-six. Though a disappointing result, there was substantial evidence for confidence in the eventual revival of the Party; it had received over six and a half million votes and thirty per cent of the total vote cast, only seven percent less than the total vote it had received in 1929 when Labour formed a government. The departure of Ramsay MacDonald, Philip Snowden, and J. H. Thomas to join the National Government freed the Parliamentary Labour Party from the domination of an important section of its older generation. The 1931 election marked the slow transition of power from one generation to another, often an awkward moment for any political party. There was wide agreement in the party that the years after 1931 should be an interregnum period.

This article takes a fresh look at the long-running debate on whether the Unionist party owed its electoral success between the Third Reform Act and the Great War predominantly to ‘negative’ factors: principally, low turnout; poor Liberal organization; and a reliable and consistent middle-class vote. Taking advantage of recently digitized election datasets, it conducts the most extensive statistical study thus far attempted, to argue that recent revisionist historians have dismissed too readily the traditional ‘negative Unionism’ thesis associated with J. P. Cornford. It conducts an extensive analysis of the relationship between turnout and Unionist support on national, constituency, and regional levels, and finds that the much-disputed traditional interpretation that Conservatives benefited from low polls in the late Victorian period is broadly borne out in England. Additionally, this article also investigates the wider impact of uncontested constituencies in this period, arguing that the large number of seats left unfought by the Liberals was even more electorally grievous than the raw numbers imply. Both these findings suggest that the Unionists benefited from a still more substantial structural advantage in the late Victorian period than historians have previously assumed. While important aspects of Unionist language and strategy were undoubtedly positive, they were nonetheless underpinned by negative electoral foundations.

The City of London Poor Law Union in the early to mid-Victorian period was the richest and least populated of all the metropolitan Poor Law districts. A wide range of parochial, livery, and other charities within the City not only attracted vast numbers of applicants for assistance, but influenced the quality and nature of the care given by the local union. This not only meant that provision for the outdoor poor, children, and the elderly tended to be more liberal than elsewhere in the capital, but that vagrants, many of whom took up winter residence in the City, also experienced a higher standard of pauper treatment than that offered by the surrounding unions. The combination of high Poor Law receipts from a low poor rate base, civic pride, competition from City charities, and the willingness of neighbouring unions to off-load this most troublesome class of pauper on to their rich neighbour gave an unparalleled level of choice to those who were truly at the bottom of the heap in Victorian London.

If the year 1792 has come to be remembered for political crises which made it one of the turning-points in English history, it has been famous also for the auspiciousness of its commencement, the optimism and the promise that characterized its earliest months. In January and February Pitt repeatedly drew the attention of parliament to the increasing prosperity of the country and the flourishing state of the public revenue; and opposition did not pretend to deny this, but merely said that the prosperity ‘was no feather in the minister's cap’, since it was due to circumstances independent of government. Even that aggressive admirer of the French Revolution, Earl Stanhope, wrote to a Frenchman: ‘We are already free… and England is now the richest, the most prosperous and—climate apart—the happiest country in Europe.’ Even that determined reformer, the Rev. Christopher Wyvill, joined the crowd of witnesses to the country's good fortune, though he speculated that if a great European war should break out, ‘the English people would probably then renew, but in a louder tone’, the cry for parliamentary reform. Pitt attributed the prosperity to the rise of machinery, the credit facilities, the ‘exploring and enterprising spirit of our merchants’, and the mode in which money was continually being fed back into industry. He claimed that something was due, however, to the internal tranquillity of the nation and ‘the natural effects of a free but well regulated government’. The correspondence of the year 1792 often gives evidence of the sense of rising prosperity; and to this would be attributed on the one hand the general attachment to the constitution, and on the other hand the indifference of the nation to matters of foreign policy.