All persons concerned with the Benthamites are indebted to William Thomas's ‘James Mill's Politics’ for reopening a crucial, complex and much-debated question and for offering a number of thought-provoking opinions on die subject. Despite the ingenuity of his essay, however, many of Thomas's conclusions merit further consideration. Most of the questionable points in his argument centre on three basic issues: the meaning of the Essay on Government; the import of James Mill's distinctive theory of propaganda; and the general perspective from which James Mill's politics should be studied. Thomas's position on these issues casts doubt on his entire approach to James Mill's political theory.

‘Let the past bury its dead, but for God's sake let us get down to earnest endeavour and hold this line until … the end.’ No other words can more adequately express, after four years of war, the sheer agony of the Canadian Prime Minister, Sir Robert L. Borden. These words also suggest both his attitude to the war in general and his intense frustration with die supreme direction. Like Lloyd George, Borden was an exponent of total war and of victory. His proclamation that Canada was ‘fighting not for a truce but victory’, was strikingly similar to Lloyd George's own declaration that ‘the fight must be to a finish—to a knockout’. The objective, proclaimed at die conclusion of the Somme battles, seemed no less remote in the middle of 1918. Over the last two, and most critical, years of the First World War there was constant contention within Britain over how the objective was to be secured. One aspect of the contention was the direct involvement of Dominion leaders, especially Sir Robert Borden.

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.

Although after the peace of Ryswick it was generally expected that the sea powers would renew the Grand Alliance, by April 1698 King William had already concluded that he was free to embark on the Partition negotiations without infringing any obligation towards the emperor. At his audience on 13 June the imperial ambassador Count Leopold von Auersberg still brought up the question of the allied undertaking to lend a fleet to convey the Archduke Charles and a German army to Catalonia, but fortunately the emperor himself had freed the king from this outstanding obligation by telling the king of Spain that he would be unable to provide for an expeditionary force, until he had made peace with the Turks. So although Auersberg put several awkward questions they could all be answered by general and rather non-committal assurances.

Almost forty years have passed since the UN mediator for Palestine, Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden, was assassinated in Jerusalem on 17 September, 1948 by the ‘Freedom Fighters of Israel’ (Lohamei Herut Yisrael. Hebrew acronym: LEHY), the smallest and most extreme of the three military organizations of the Yishuv (as the Jewish community in Palestine was called before the state of Israel came into being). The announcement made after the assassination was issued by ‘The Fatherland Front’ (Hazit ha-Moledet), a ‘front’ brought into being for the purpose by LEHY and which disappeared immediately afterwards. It declared that Bernadotte had been ‘an obvious agent of the British enemy’. Now that the British and American documents have been made available, this serious allegation can be examined, and as a result it can now safely be affirmed that the mediator acted in complete independence. He had no contact whatsover with British or American diplomacy over the political proposals that sealed his fate. These proposals he presented in his first Report on 28 June 1948.

History in a literary form was a remarkably late growth in Roman letters. Cicero declares several times in unmistakable terms that in his day “History is absent from Roman literature.” Twice he discusses the previous writers of Roman history, the annalists such as Fabius Pictor, Cato and Piso. He makes it clear that he found them very unpalatable because of their jejuneness: “erat enim in historia nihil aliud, nisi annalium confectio…unam dicendi laudem putant esse brevitatem.” Only Coelius Antipater stood out from the rest as one who made some attempt to achieve a pleasing style, but even he “ut homo, neque doctus, neque maxime aptus ad dicendum, sicut potuit, dolavit.” It is obvious that the basis of this criticism is purely literary and not historical, and that the demerits which Cicero censures in the older school of annalists, when considered as literature, may to a certain extent be considered as merits, if their historical value is to be weighed amongst the sources of Livy.

The eighteenth century was a great age of pamphleteering. Subjects were legion and authors innumerable. Every question of substance – and many of none – attracted writers to such a degree that in the world of politics one is tempted to establish the scale of pamphleteering as one of the yardsticks against which the importance of an issue should be measured. The American revolution fully conforms to this criterion, for during a twenty-year period beginning in 1763 it stimulated the publication of well over a thousand pamphlets in England alone. A good number of those pamphlets originated in America and their subsequent reappearance in England was a matter of considerable significance; some were written by Americans resident in London. This paper will examine the mechanics by which American revolutionary tracts were published and distributed in England, and their circulation among the radicals who proved themselves to be the patriots' best English friends during the difficult years of the revolution. They included among others Thomas Hollis, John Wilkes, Major John Cartwright and Granville Sharp; the Dissenting ministers Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, and one of the most brilliant women of her generation, Catharine Macaulay. Such an examination is not only an integral component in the analysis of the English side of the revolution; it also serves as a useful case-study in the mechanics and function of political propaganda.

The Comité de l'Afrique française, founded in 1890, is often regarded as the epitome of colonial nationalism. On closer examination, however, the Comité and its signature policy, the Chad plan, can be shown to have acted as instruments of choice for financial and commercial lobbies with particular interests in the Congo. The Chad plan and its successor and complement, the Upper Nile policy, were primarily intended to advance the interests of King Leopold and his French sympathizers. The unavoidable clash with British strategic and commercial interests in the region that ensued helped to unleash the forces of nationalism and led, ineluctably, to the Fashoda crisis and the conquest of Chad.

Gender relations in German history: power, agency, and experience from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Edited by Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth Harvey. London: UCL, 1996. Pp. x+262. ISBN 1-85728-485-2. £12.95.

Adultery and divorce in Calvin's Geneva. By Robert M. Kingdon. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard UP, 1995. Pp. ix+214. ISBN 0-674-00520-1 (hb). £18.50.

Housecraft and statecraft: domestic service in Renaissance Venice, 1400–1600. By Dennis Romano. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Pp. xxvi+333. ISBN 0-8018-5288-9. £37.00.

The European nobility, 1400–1800. By Jonathan Dewald. New approaches to European history, ix. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xvii+209. ISBN 0-521-42528-x (pb). £12.95.

Garden and grove: the Italian Renaissance garden in the English imagination, 1600–1750. By John Dixon Hunt. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1996. Pp. xix+268. ISBN 0-8122-1604-0 (pb). £23.50.

Like an ancient woodsman or a guide through the Amazonian jungle, the ideal historian possesses at least two kinds of expertise: enough familiarity with the general terrain to plan successful expeditions and enough experience in the field to make inevitable adjustments to ‘the big picture’ when underway. Of course in the real world (of both geography and history) the tasks of exploration and cartography are often bifurcated, without necessarily disastrous results. The historian who is equally skilled at both close-up description and large-scale theorizing is consequently celebrated as a rare and valued anomaly. Meanwhile, for most of us stumbling scouts, the world beyond our familiar trails remains largely one of learned lore, with connections to our own limited forays often vague at best. Unless, of course, we are fortunate enough to come across something which provides an almost magical link between the narrow and the wide, the micro and the macro.

This article examines the control of outdoor advertising in Britain, tracking its development as a mirror of the practices of spatial governance. It evidences both a largely forgotten, yet radical change in the urban environment, whilst also functioning as a lens through which we might examine local government's role in driving change in the visual environment of cities and towns. The article argues that, despite important early work by preservationist organizations, local corporations and councils were the principal drivers of legislation, altering attitudes in central government that ultimately led to stringent control of outdoor advertising in urban space. Beginning in the nineteenth century, but coming to the fore during the interwar period, corporations and councils pushed for ever greater controls over the size and siting of billboards, hoardings, and posters. In doing so, they deployed a language of amenity, and conjured with seemingly social democratic notions of citizens’ rights to push their agenda. The study is thus revealing of the ways in which town planning, patterns of holistic control in the visual environment, and the philosophy of urban modernism shaped even the most mundane, extant urban areas and left a lasting impression on the urban landscape.

I have been asked to speak to-day on the ‘new philosophy’ which arose and gradually triumphed in the period between the birth of Bruno in 1548 and the death of Descartes in 1650. I propose to put a fairly wide interpretation on the word ‘philosophy’, as did all the great thinkers of our period. And I propose to begin by giving a fairly full, though necessarily very imperfect, synopsis of the old philosophy against which the new doctrines reacted and which they superseded. What I shall describe with the name of the ‘old philosophy’ is the theory of the universe which St Thomas had elaborated on the basis of such knowledge of the works of Aristotle as was available to him.

Of all the institutions that grew up in the medieval church none has received so little attention from English scholars as the chantries. That they played an important part in the religious life of this country before the Reformation is indeed generally recognised; but our historians have done little more than to indicate the purposes for which chantries were founded, and to point out that their numbers increased greatly towards the end of the Middle Ages. In the present essay an attempt is made to render our knowledge of the chantries less vague by discussing at length some of the more important problems of their history, giving a detailed account of them during a single half century. For this purpose the reign of Edward III has been chosen, partly because its close is practically contemporaneous with our most important literary references to the chantries, those of Chaucer and Langland, but mainly because, since the Black Death occurred within a few years of the middle of this period, it affords an opportunity of studying the effects of the pestilence on this phase of English life.