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.

David Lloyd George's behaviour in the crucial week between 27 July and 3 August 1914 has commanded much scholarship and more speculation. Nearly every member of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith's Liberal cabinet, including the chancellor of the exchequer himself, has told the story of those agonizing days, by memoir, diary or letter. Yet Lloyd George's part in Britain's decision to declare war upon Germany on 4 August remains unclear; indeed it is less clear now than it seemed to be half a century ago. How could the ‘Pro-Boer’ of the days of the South African war, who had been the object of any number of dangerous personal assaults for his treasonable speeches, the enemy of the dreadnoughts, the slasher of naval estimates, indeed the man who most recently declared at the Mansion House and had asserted again in the House of Commons only six days later – the last coming on the day of the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia – that powerful commercial influences in Germany and Britain were drawing the two nations so close that great arms were unnecessary, how could such a man become the supporter of intervention in a continental war on behalf of France?

Applied to Britain and the First Partition, Campbell's “unwept” is perhaps misleading. Through five generations, despite much European slandering of the Poles, Britain always condemned Dismemberment. In 1772, when three Great Powers completed that “suicide of the old Europe” which the seizure of Silesia had begun, Burke styled their operations “fatal to the rights of mankind.” In the language of diplomacy, Suffolk's “disagreeable” sounds hardly less emphatic. The First Partition, we must remember, was a blow to France, struck by the group to which Britain looked for allies against the natural enemy. Yet our minister in Poland spoke unequivocally of “all this mischief,” and ascribed it to Frederick, the Satan of those behind the scenes. Voltaire, to whom the persecuting Poles were as odious as the persecuting French, sent Catherine the most ambiguous of congratulations. His heroine, he declared, had undertaken a task more useful and noble even than the expulsion of the Turks—that of destroying anarchy in Poland “en rendant a chacun ce que chacun croît lui appartenir, et en commençant par elle-même.” But Suffolk's official utterance was more pungent still. “Le Roi,” he replied to the ministers of the partitioning Powers,” veut bien supposer que les trois cours sont convaincues de la justice de leurs preventions respectives.”

Until 1793, the judicial policy of the Company's Government in Bengal was guided only by expediency and tradition. The tradition was that of the Moghul government which entrusted the management of civil justice to the Executive and those in charge of collection of revenue; 1 and the expediency—that of discharging the responsibilities of the Diwani with as little spending from the profits as possible. This is clearly visible in Warren Hastings's administrative arrangements of 1772 under which the civil judiciary in the mofussil was consigned to the District Collectors of revenue. With few interruptions marked by Hastings's administrative experiments,2 the practice of keeping the revenue and judicial functions united continued for the following twenty years. In 1790, when for the first time the Company took over the administration of criminal justice, the District Magistracy was also vested with the Collector. He thus became the Judge, Magistrate and Collector, all in one. This ‵single officers′ plan for the Districts had been advocated by Sir John Shore as being in conformity with the tradition with the Indians looking up to a single despotic authority for the redress of all their grievances,3 and had found favour with the Directors4 for the economy involved.

Ernst Nolte in his Die Epoche des Faschismus writes that Hitler undoubtedly in principle had wanted war ‘but hardly that war at that time’, meaning the war of 1939. This somewhat muddled thesis conceals two distinct issues, namely the argument that in 1939 contingencies were not entirely to Hitler's liking and the argument that in 1939 contingencies were so little to his liking that we must conclude that Hitler took no conscious steps to risk a general war.

This article examines the experiences of university elites in Britain and France during and after the First World War. It compares the elite network of the École Normale Supérieure with that of Trinity and King's Colleges in Cambridge, arguing that these communities functioned and understood themselves as families. The war, which suspended normal intellectual practice and placed mobilized university elites (as junior officers) at an increased risk of wounds or death, was seen as a threat to the very existence of the family. The article traces the responses of these groups to the outbreak of war, to the cessation of normal scholarly life, and to the shocking death rate; in so doing, it demonstrates the resilience of these networks. To date, historians have drawn on the writings of members of these families to make broader arguments about the war experience. This study is the first to examine the self-perception of these groups, and in so doing, provides a new context for scholarly activities during and after the war, bereavement, and remembrance, as well as for academic practices in the post-war period. As a Franco-British comparison, it argues for great similarities of experience between two superficially disparate university cultures

In the year 1582 William Camden the antiquary was about to venture into a remote country beyond the mountains, called Lancashire, ‘which’, he wrote, ‘I go unto (God speed me well) after a sort somewhat against my will…but I will proceed, in hope that God's assistance, which hitherto hath been favour-able unto me, will not now fail me'. Such qualms might well assail any professional historian who plans an expedition into Shakespeare country; for the trail is marked by his predecessors’ whitening bones and, in one case, by bones which the vultures have not finished picking clean.

The mutual antipathy which arose between Ramsay MacDonald and Arthur Henderson during the First World War is often acknowledged to the point of exaggeration. Historians have however done little more than to note its presence and attempt to minimize its importance to the party's development; they have rarely sought to investigate its causes. During the war the strains in their relationship lay not in any long-standing personal mistrust and cannot be explained by Henderson's acceptance of office in the Asquith and Lloyd George coalitions or MacDonald's unremitting opposition to government policy. They lay in the fact that both men believed the other to have abandoned the Labour party in its hour of crisis. That crisis occurred between August and October 1914 in the first instance and this article will argue that the debate over the future of the Labour party and of the trade union movement which occurred during that period, rather than concern for the fate of the nation, determined the decisions taken by MacDonald and Henderson, by the parliamentary Labour party (P.L.P.), and by the wider Labour movement in the first months of war.

There is no stronger proof of the stability of the Empire which Charles V and Philip II had built, and of the vitality of the monarchic idea in the seventeenth century, than the ability of the Spanish Monarchy to survive the crisis of the years 1647 and 1648. In a dispatch to his Senate the Venetian ambassador in Madrid characterized Spain's history in those years as a string of disasters: Portugal and Catalonia in open revolt; Andalusia in the grip of corruption owing to the treachery of the Duke of Medina Sidonia; the East Indies with Brazil (a country large enough for four kingdoms) lost with Portugal; the West Indies hard-pressed by the Dutch; the royal revenues mortgaged, credit extinct; friends become enemies or vacillating neutrals, and the Government abandoned to the inexperience of a new favourite. Thus the Spanish Monarchy resembled that great colossus which for many years had been the wonder of the world and which during an earthquake had collapsed in a few moments while every one hurried along to enrich himself with the fragments.

‘For the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead.’ Peter Laslett's remark of 1956 is well known. His lament was echoed in 1962 in Bernard Crick's extended plea In defence of politics. They surveyed a wasteland laid bare by a sociology which announced the exhaustion of political ideals, and a philosophy, logical positivism, which declared that nothing significant could be said about ethics or politics. According to Laslett, one of the original culprits of the former kind was Karl Mannheim, because he had taught that all thinking and all knowing were sociologically determined.

During the War of American Independence, the Treasury Board contracted for a wide range of army supplies. Opposition, both in parliament and the press, persistendy criticized the methods employed in the allocation of contracts. It was widely believed that contracts were awarded in the interests of ministerial influence, not public economy; contractors were the friends of government and enjoyed excessive profits. The most frequendy proposed alternative was to contract through public advertisement and accept the lowest tender received. This method was normally referred to as open contracting. Isaac Barre was the main opposition spokesman on matters relating to army supplies and it was his view, expressed in the House during April 1778, that ‘contracts ought to be open, and offered to the lowest bidder'. Government spokesmen and contractors sitting in the House regularly countered this argument with the assertion that open contracts’ would be prejudicial to the public service. Men inadequate to the accomplishment of the contracts, would at all times bid lower than men of ability and reputation, and they would do much more injury by serving the public badly, than the difference of expense. 'Although neither Lord North nor John Robinson, the Treasury Secretary mainly responsible for contract business, were fully satisfied with existing contract methods, they sought economies within those methods and even the Shelburne ministry, when it radically altered the contracting system for supplying the army in America in 1782, decided against the open contracts championed by friends of Shelburne when in opposition.

The focus of this article is upon the extensive debate in France that surrounded the concept, content and application of the rights of man in the years between 1789 and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. Beginning with a detailed analysis of the discussion that surrounded the formulation of the Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen attention turns to two broad strands of criticism directed at the discourse of rights: that articulated by the defenders of counter-revolution (most notably Montlosier, Rivarol and de Bonald) and that associated with the idéologues (Daunou, Roederer and de Tracy). Amongst the former rights were associated not only with a new species of revolutionary government but also with the political, social and moral disintegration of France itself; for the latter, emphasis, via the logic of utilitarianism, fell upon seeking to deprive the language of rights of its radical dimensions and implications. It was left to Benjamin Constant to point out the possible contradictions between the claims of utility and those of rights.

Most historians have assumed a fundamental antagonism between Marxism and theism. In practice, the relationship between the two world-views has been far more complex than simple hostility – a complexity admirably illustrated by the experience of the Marxist Parti Ouvrier Français (POF) between 1882 and 1905. While the Marxists of the POF developed a vicious socialist anti-clericalism that made its own original contribution to France's long tradition of anti-religious polemic, they none the less experimented with a rudimentary Christian socialism designed to attract the proletarian faithful, and also developed an agnostic programme of religious indifference which sought to insert the circuit-breaker of class conflict into the highly charged link between militant secularism and Catholic clericalism. This article examines the intricate and, in the end, incoherent, pattern of engagement between Marxist socialism and French religion during the fin de siècle, and suggests that this incoherence contributed to the eventual frustration of the Parti Ouvrier's revolutionary purpose.

It is commonly thought that one of the ways in which Protector Somerset expressed his idealistic consideration for the lower orders was by his involvement with a court of requests - either a private court supposedly established in his own house, or the official court of requests - which he used not merely to safeguard against injustice but also to implement social views out of keeping with the aristocratic assumptions of the age, particularly in the interests of agrarian reform. This paper examines the evidence for the existence of a private court and for Somerset's connexion with the official court. Its aim is to question the persisting view, to redefine the Protector's social concerns and to illuminate the operation of Requests in the early years of Edward VI's reign.

Over the last two decades, noticeable progress has been made towards a more complete understanding of the political dynamics of Wilhelmine Germany. The older emphasis on the ‘high politics’ of Bismarck and his successors has given way to a much more differentiated picture of a political system in constant flux as it attempted to cope with the complexities of a rapidly industrializing society. Old orthodoxies concerning the weakness of German liberalism have been subjected to new examination and scholars have become increasingly aware of the potential of powerful interest groups to challenge as well as to buttress the Establishment. The overall effect of this general advance in the historiography of the Second Empire has been to direct attention away from the motives of individual decision-makers, at least at the ‘high-political’ level, and to investigate the structural constraints on the formulation of policy. Despite certain recent attempts to reinstate a more personalistic approach, it seems clear that no future history of late nineteenth-century German politics can afford to neglect these developments.