From the age of twenty-three until his death at the age of sixty-eight, Lord Acton was or sought to be a member of the United Kingdom parliament. Although Acton remains a subject of scholarly interest, his political career has received relatively little attention. This article examines Acton's search for an Irish parliamentary seat, a search which was twice unsuccessful in 1857, but which resulted in May 1859 in Acton's return as the member for Carlow borough. Although Acton was pushed towards parliament by his family – and particularly his stepfather, Lord Granville – a close examination of Acton's campaigns reveals more dedication to a political career than has previously been accepted.

This review assesses scholarly attempts to synthesize various forms of Scottish philosophy in the context of eighteenth-century America. It suggests potential new directions for the study of Scottish Enlightenment ethical theories on the western side of the Atlantic, and then examines scholarship on a separate and neglected Scottish influence in American thought: an evangelical notion of religious authority that was not opposed to wider incorporation in multi-denominational political unions. The ideological basis for American independence owed much to a tense counterpoise between Scottish moral sense reasoning and Presbyterian evangelicalism, rather than to their singular and starkly binary contributions to colonial American ideology.

This article examines Chen Di's 1603 text Record of Formosa (Dongfan ji), the earliest first-hand account in any language of the indigenous people of Formosa (now called Taiwan). Recent commentators have viewed Chen's text as a key elaboration of Chinese imperial discourse and its various tropes of hierarchical difference. In contrast, I argue that Chen reads the perceived cultural differences between his society and Taiwan's indigenous peoples as evidence of the contingency, rather than inevitable superiority, of a historical story that produces the outcome of ‘civilization’. Building on a broader understanding of Chen's intellectual biography and his extant works, I show that Chen Di places the indigenes along a different timeline in which they forge their own contingent history parallel to, rather than behind, that of a civilizational centre. By doing so, Chen's historical narrative resists aligning their society with Han Chinese forms of development and offers a glimpse of how late Ming syncretic thought could produce an account of legitimate otherness.

Drawing on new archival findings, this article argues that shortly after the outbreak of the Second World War, Vladimir Jabotinsky, founder and leader of the right-wing Revisionist Zionist movement, had begun to advocate for the transfer of the Arab population from Palestine – an aspect of his thought previously unknown. Jabotinsky's support for population transfers runs counter to his lifelong political thought. Prior to the war, Jabotinsky was a staunch advocate of minority rights for Jews in Europe and for extensive autonomy for the Arab population in Palestine. This article argues that Jabotinsky's shift was a product of the war. Jabotinsky believed that millions of Jewish refugees would be prevented from returning to their pre-war homes in eastern Europe and would immigrate en masse to Palestine; to resettle these refugees, the Arab population, he argued, ‘would have to make room’. Attentively following debates on population transfers in Europe, Jabotinsky concluded that the era of minority rights had come to an end and envisioned an increasingly ethno-national Jewish state. By highlighting the eastern Europe context in Jabotinsky's thought, this article emphasizes the importance of studying the history of Zionism alongside the transformation of the nation-state in eastern Europe in the 1940s.

A second Irish Grants Committee met for the first time in October 1926 to deal with claims for compensation from distressed southern Irish loyalists. By the time it had ceased its work, the committee had dealt with over 4,000 applications and recommended 2,237 ex-gratia grants. The surviving files constitute over 200 boxes of near-contemporary witness testimony and supplementary material making them an incomparable, if problematic, source for the study of the southern loyalist experience of the Irish Revolution – a topic of much current historiographical interest. Applicants had to prove that they had suffered loss on account of their ‘allegiance to the government of the United Kingdom’, and by applying labelled themselves as both ‘loyalist’ and ‘victim’. A study of the claim files from one district, Arva in County Cavan, offers unique perspectives on the loyalist experience of revolution in a southern Irish community, personal definitions of loyalty, and the relationship between behaviour and allegiance during war. The Arva applicants often struggled to present their financial losses as resulting directly from their ‘loyalty to the Crown’. Their statements, and the way they were treated by the committee, serve to complicate an often over-simplified understanding of civilian behaviour and popular support.

Let us return to the undying fascination of Bradford and Sheffield. Like Wright before him, Temmel misses the point of my using the Bradford and Sheffield examples. Many schoolteachers often take the line that if the slowest children in their classes understand something the rest can be taken to have mastered it. In a somewhat similar way, I argued that if the Liberal party could be shown to be vastly more catholic than Vincent's definition allowed for in two large places where the structure of society was least favourable to a Right and Centre, then his overall contentions would have been brought most seriously into question. 1874 was a fair date to choose and comprehensive Liberalism was easily to be observed. Examination of the two boroughs showed that British Liberalism was much more broadly-faceted than Vincentian theory allowed; that ‘Whiggery’ was not just a family word, divorced in several respects from a doctrinal context; and that the Centre and the Radicals were in fact varied. If the Centre and Radicals flourished in those places, a fortiori they would elsewhere. The ‘slowest’ so to speak had obliged with data and so the Vincent case fell to the ground. Such an approach makes some intellectual demands upon the reader, not only logical but imaginative and factual. Nevertheless, it should not have proved too much for any able person in any serious profession.

Across monsoon Asia, salt is of such vital necessity that controlling its production or supply has historically been connected to the establishment and expression of political authority. On the one hand, rulers maintained the allegiance of their subjects by ensuring their access to salt of suitable price and sufficient quantity. On the other hand, denying rebels their salt was a strategy of conquest and pacification, while the necessity of salt meant it could reliably be taxed to raise state finances. This article first sets out this connection of salt and sovereignty, then examining it in the context of colonial Burma, a province of British India from its annexation until its ‘divorce’ in 1935 (effected in 1937), and thus subject to the Government of India's salt monopoly. Focusing on salt brings into view two aspects of the state (while also permitting analysis of ‘Upper Burma’, which remains rather marginal in the scholarly literature). First, the everyday state and quotidian practices constitutive of its sovereignty, which was negotiated and contested where indigenes were able to exploit the chinks in the state's administrative capacity and its knowledge deficits. Second, in turn, the lumpy topography of state power. The state not only failed to restrict salt production to the extent it desired (with the intention that indigenes would rely on imported salt, whose supply was easier to control and thus tax), but conceded to a highly complex fiscal administration, the variegations in which reflected the uneven distribution in state power – thicker in the delta and thinnest in the uplands.

This article addresses the development of the British government's policy towards the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy in France, which arose from the British occupation of Toulon from 28 August to 19 December 1793. The discussions conducted by prime minister William Pitt and foreign secretary Lord Grenville on the shape of Toulon's civil government under occupation clarify official British perceptions of an ‘ideal’ Bourbon monarchy in France. British thoughts on this subject were determined, not only by traditional English whig beliefs about the institutional foundations of political, constitutional and civil liberty, but also by consideration for the upheavals that the French Revolution had witnessed. Alhough Pitt and Grenville were interested in establishing a model government capable of healing the French social and political conflicts that had emerged since 1789, their deliberations on the fate of Toulon reveal that the French ancien régime was still a negative entity in British minds despite the advent of the French Revolution and Revolutionary Wars.

Studies of German philhellenism have often focused upon the idealization of Greece by German intellectuals, rather than considering the very real, at times reciprocal, at times ambivalent or even brutal, relationship which existed between contemporary Germans and the Greek state from the Greek War of Independence onwards. This review essay surveys historiographical developments in the literature on German philhellenism which have emerged in the past dozen years (2004–16), drawing on research in German studies, classical philology and reception studies, Modern Greek studies, intellectual history, philosophy, art history, and archaeology. The essay explores the extent to which recent research affirms or rebuts that notion of German cultural exceptionalism which posits a Hellenophile Sonderweg – culminating in the tyranny of Germany over Greece imposed by force of arms under the Third Reich – when interpreting the vicissitudes of the Graeco–German relationship. The discussion of new literature touches upon various themes, including Winckelmann reception at the fin-de-siècle and the anti-positivist aspects of twentieth-century philhellenism, the idealization of ‘Platonic’ homoeroticism in the Stefan George-Kreis, the reciprocal relationship between German idealist philhellenism and historicism, and the ways in which German perceptions of modern Greece's materiality have constantly been mediated through idealized visions of Greek antiquity.

Rebuilding plans submitted after the Great Fire of London in 1666 have been widely treated by historians of the Great Fire and in wide-scope histories of London and modern city planning. However, few attempts have been made to assign an overarching logic to all of them, while paying attention to their texts as well as to their maps. The following article highlights certain common features in these abortive efforts to plan London, assigns a common logic to all of them, and traces the origins of this logic. Such an analysis illuminates the economic principles in plans that are usually examined for their architectural features, and places them in a different historical context. Rather than seeing them as manifestations of contemporary architectural trends, or as a continuation of ongoing attempts to regulate London's cityscape, the plans are presented here as a response to emerging ideas in mid-seventeenth-century England about the nature of value and the economic function of cities within the world of commerce. Such a view reveals the complex interplay between London's early modern growth and the emergence of new forms of knowledge in seventeenth-century England and reasserts the importance of these plans as forerunners of present-day city planning.

The ocean is a central site of escape, danger, and rescue for refugees. It is also a place where oceanic humanitarianism is enacted. In histories of refugee migration, the combination of the ocean, weather, and climate in determining the fate of refugees has not been adequately examined. This article provides a critical analysis of a Vietnamese refugee boat journey in 1982, to demonstrate the paradoxical nature of the ocean as both a site of danger and saviour. Conventional historical methodologies alone cannot capture the complex role of the ocean and the weather in determining boat refugee journeys and rescues. Interdisciplinary research between historians and ocean engineers provides new evidence and understanding of how the ocean and weather influences the outcomes of refugees seeking asylum by boat. Numerical model predictions of sea state and ship motion – which enables the vessel's journey in past environmental conditions to be understood – integrated within historical analysis contributes to a fuller and more complex understanding of the nexus between environmental conditions and forced migration journeys. Ocean engineering produces a scientific narrative that historians can use, alongside oral histories and other sources, to theorize the ocean as an active agent.

This article examines radical and socialist responses to Malthus's Essay on population, beginning with the response of William Godwin, Malthus's main object of attack, but focusing particularly upon the position adopted by his most important admirer, Robert Owen. The anti-Malthus position was promoted and sustained both by Owen and the subsequent Owenite movement. Owenites stressed both the extent of uncultivated land and the capacity of science to raise the productivity of the soil. The Owenite case, preached weekly in Owenite Halls of Science, and argued by its leading lecturer, John Watts, made a strong impact upon the young Frederick Engels working in Manchester in 1843–4. His denunciation of political economy in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, heavily dependent upon the Owenite position, was what first encouraged Marx to engage with political economy. Marx initially reiterated the position of Engels and the Owenites in maintaining that population increase pressured means of employment rather than means of subsistence, and that competition rather than overpopulation caused economic crises. But in his later work, his main criticism of the Malthusian theory was its false conflation of history and nature.

The critic and philosopher Hippolyte Taine is presented here as one of the pioneers of the theory of the unconscious in European social thought: a source of the more explicit writings on unconscious motivation in the works of Nietzsche, Pareto, and others. Preceding forms of French liberalism – particularly those of Guizot and Cousin – had depended upon an underlying belief in a number of ideas – in God, in our ability to understand his will, and in reason. A representative regime would be able to mobilize rationality in society and give it effective sovereignty. Taine's life can be interpreted as one of increasing conservatism, but it was consistent in his rejection of such a conception of rationality; first through his technical philosophy, then through the discussion of psychological motivation in mass political movements set out in the Origines de la France contemporaine. It is argued that such a rejection of rationalism was a crucial first step in the elaboration of new forms of liberalism – technocratic, welfarist, and economically individualist. Taine's work represents the passage from one type of liberal theory to another at a crucial moment in French history, the consolidation of universal male suffrage as a foundation of the Third Republic.

François due de Guise, commander of the French catholic forces, was assaulted by Poltrot de Mérey (or Méré) before Orléans on 18 February 1563. He succumbed six days later, on 24 February, to the attentions of his surgeons, whose lethal ministrations are horribly retailed by the Spanish ambassador, Chantonnay. On that fatal day, Guise had gone to inspect his camp in the suburb called Portereau from which his forces were sapping and mining the stronghold of Orléans, occupied for the past year by the protestant confederates of the prince de Condé. The capture of this city, then considered imminent, would have been the fourth military episode of the first French civil war. But, instead of the expected collapse of Orléans and the continuation of war, France was rocked by the unexpected death of Guise which effectively interrupted hostilities.

This article reassesses the electoral decline of British Liberalism in the 1920s, especially the catastrophic defeat of 1924. A leading explanation for this disaster is that the Liberals were ‘fighting to lose’ by leaving nearly 250 constituencies uncontested. David Lloyd George is widely seen as deliberately seeking to destroy his party by refusing to finance candidates through his infamous ‘fund’, so he could lead what remained after electoral evisceration. His actions are widely credited with stymieing prospects of a Liberal recovery in the next election, 1929, which confirmed the party's permanent replacement by Labour. Through a wide-ranging statistical reanalysis, supported by a study of grassroots constituency campaigns, this article argues that the lack of candidates was a negligible contributor either to Liberal annihilation in 1924, or to Liberal failure to recover in 1929. The sharply deteriorating health of the party was already felt keenly at the grassroots before, not after, the seemingly freak result of 1924 was known. We thus argue that, contrary to the judgement of historians and contemporaries, the 1924 result represented the truer reflection of the party's fundamental interwar strength, with 1923 the exception. The inaction of Lloyd George in 1924 thus can be interpreted as pragmatic rather than Machiavellian.

In 1787, Frederick William II of Prussia made substantial changes to the urban excise. These changes were largely the result of public pressure. Urban tax-payers had resisted the tax in different ways since Frederick II had reformed it in 1766 in order to extract more revenue from Prussia's towns. The article explores the motives that led to tax-payer criticism and resistance and the ways in which urban tax-payers opposed the state's growing fiscal appetite. The success of urban tax-payers in this political conflict with the Prussian state suggests that Prussia's burghers were important actors within the Hohenzollern polity and that they wielded considerable political power. The events described here resembled not only other contemporary conflicts over fiscal matters in the Atlantic world, but were also interconnected with debates and events outside Prussia through exchanges of individuals, arguments, and publications.

In June of 2019, millions of Hong Kongers took to the streets. What began as a protest against an extradition bill quickly evolved into a broader movement to safeguard Hong Kong’s autonomy from the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Protesters pointed with increasing alarm to the fast disappearance of Hong Kong’s distinct legal system, political system, and civic culture as well as the erosion of the borders, both physical and abstract, that separated the territory from the mainland. The 1997 handover was designed to safeguard Hong Kong’s local autonomy after the end of British colonialism, these demonstrators claimed, and Beijing’s government was threatening that promise.