Recent developments in the history of modern Britain have led to the emergence of a history of intimacy, whether or not it is recognized as such. This historiographical review argues that intimacy is a useful category of historical analysis. Thinking in terms of inter-relationships between different forms of intimacy allows us to think with greater conceptual clarity about these forms, as well as types of intimacy that are difficult to categorize. The first section reviews recent and significant contributions to the literature and seeks to draw out existing connections and crosscurrents between subfields. The second section turns to recent work on the histories of selfhood and the emotions and considers what thinking about intimacy might add to these fields; it then builds on this recent work to propose that one way to ‘do’ the history of intimacy is to think in terms of ‘intimate practices’.

This article seeks to shed light on the Lebanese Study Committee, an overlooked centre of intellectual production and political activity during the Lebanese Civil War. It was comprised of legal experts and Maronite monks of the Lebanese Maronite Order, and emerged at the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik in 1975. The committee was created at the initiative of the Catholic clergy in order to endow the Christian war effort with an ‘intellectual pole’ capable of studying recent developments and provide solutions aimed at defending the interests of the Christian society. By making use of hitherto inaccessible primary sources, its internal and external publications, the article elucidates the activities and ideas of the committee, which worked to counteract leftist discourse and propaganda. By paying attention to the context of the Lebanese Study Committee's emergence, the article also brings to light a history of interaction between lay, clerical, state, and para-military institutions. It concludes that its creation is the direct consequence of the grassroots mobilization of conservative agents, which is reminiscent of the ways in which Western conservatism was revived in the same years.

The term ‘cultural history of science’, as others have observed, is clumsy and imperfect. Cultural history is itself riddled with ambiguities which the addition of ‘science’ is unlikely to clarify. However, the term loosely describes a genre of historical writing which has become a staple of cross-disciplinary research: books which examine science's wider cultural ‘impacts’ and ‘contexts’. The heterogeneity of this field is so great, however, that an examination of methodology is called for.

This article offers a new interpretation of the history-writing produced in Enlightenment Scotland. It argues that after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 was blamed on Scotland's ‘feudal’ institutions, Scottish jurists and historians began to interrogate what it meant to become 'modern'. Instead of accepting the Whig claim that England provided the ideal model for social and political development, they subsumed English history into a broader debate about whether and how modern Europe had emerged from its feudal past. By reconstructing this debate, the article shows how Scots rewrote European history in ways that subverted the English whig tradition while rejecting universal or ‘cosmopolitan’ explanations of social progress. In doing so, the article reopens the question of how the Scottish Enlightenment shaped British imperial culture across the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

This article studies the Hawai‘i tourism industry's efforts to market Hawai‘i as a multi-cultural paradise where positive racial experiences could be bought and sold. With jet travel arriving in Hawai‘i the same year as statehood, the tourism industry, aided by the new state government, exploited Hawai‘i's newfound prominence, luring planeloads of American tourists who thronged its beaches, hotels, and cultural spectacles. Tourism helped turn racial tolerance into a saleable, if intangible, commodity. Marketers invited mainlanders to partake in the islands’ celebrated ‘Aloha Spirit’: an elusive vision of social harmony said to be the defining feature of the Hawai‘i vacation. By attending ethnic festivals, eating exotic food, and interacting with locals, visitors might even bring some Aloha Spirit home with them. Hawai‘i's society thus became not only a site of consumption, but an object of consumption itself. What such utopian ideas obscured was that the broader construction of Hawai‘i as a multi-cultural paradise was part of state efforts both to transform Hawai‘i's economy and to promote US influence in the Pacific. While the limited historiography on multi-culturalism situates its emergence in grassroots protest, this article argues for the elite origins of the multi-cultural ideal, which served the interests of both business and US foreign policy.

This article examines Spanish and Portuguese liberal political thought in the period after the independence of Latin America (c. 1825–50). It argues that while Iberian liberalism undoubtedly reflected broader European and transatlantic debates and intellectual trends, it was distinguished by its robust engagement with literary romanticism. The article proceeds to describe and make a case for ‘romantic liberalism’ through the examination of texts by six politically engaged writers: Spanish statesman, poet and dramatist Francisco Martínez de la Rosa (1787–1862); Portuguese statesman, poet, novelist, and dramatist João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida Garrett (1799–1854); Spanish poet and statesman Ángel de Saavedra (1791–1865), Duque de Rivas; Spanish parliamentarian and literary critic Antonio Alcalá Galiano; Spanish poet, journalist, and parliamentarian José de Espronceda (1808–42); and Portuguese historian, novelist, and journalist Alexandre Herculano (1810–77).

Philip Nye was one of the most important of the early Independents. His youthful allegiance to the cause, and his exile from 1633 to 1640 in Holland, gave him a breadth of outlook and an experience of congregational churches which effected a greater balance of his natural abilities. He has been coupled with John Goodwin as one of the most original minds among later Puritans. Returning from Holland, he soon had occasion to display his talents. As a representative to the Westminster Assembly he became one of the group of dissenting ministers which challenged the validity of the Presbyterian system of church government. The five “Holland Ministers” resisted the alien centralising policy of the Scottish Presbyterians. During the Protectorate, Nye became more prominent in ecclesiastical politics, but the Restoration forced him into the background. He died in 1672, serving an Independent church in London as its “doctor”.

Studies of Europe's Enlightenment have been enriched by attending to its real and imagined impacts on indigenous peoples and of indigenous peoples on Europeans. Applying these methods to new-settled eighteenth-century societies offers another standpoint on the Enlightenment. This study is a sample: a civic history of a relatively new – in European terms – place suggests the possibilities. In 1792, a bourgeois, Vasilii Krestinin, from Russia's White Sea shore, published a history of Archangel, founded in 1584. Krestinin's view from a new Arctic society is as far from Europe's elegant metropoles and eloquent lumières as the ship captains, Pacific Islanders, and cat killers in influential recent studies of the Enlightenment. Just as these studies – and others on readers and reading – transformed studies of the Enlightenment, historians can use sources from new societies to observe answers and actions of people casting themselves as Enlighteners. This study of enlightened sensibility in an Arctic society suggests how the Enlightenment – viewed from settler societies – became anxious, how it fanned nationalisms, and how it was ensnared by naïve presuppositions that progress was a prerequisite of power.

Early modern groups did not necessarily proclaim themselves. When they did, they were not necessarily groups. The historian must decide when to analyse people as separate individuals and when their commonalities were great enough that they should be considered together. These judgements have been the source of frequent debate. At times, the disagreement has been over the proper label for a group – whether, for instance, ‘puritans’ should instead be called ‘the godly’. In other cases, the very existence of a group has been called into question, with some doubting whether there was a ‘Ranter’ movement in the 1650s. Often, historians debate the coherence of a group, with one prominent scholar questioning whether the first whigs in the late 1670s were organized enough to deserve the appellation of a ‘party’. The vigour of these debates suggests that some of our most important intellectual labours are done when we assign people to groups.

Recent writers have pointed out that the 1834 act often made little immediate difference to the practice of local poor-law authorities. The poor-law commissioners lacked the means or the will to enforce their programme. Poor law unions did not replace the township as the effective unit of administration. The same men (albeit with different titles) remained in control. Authorities continued to vary greatly in efficiency and generosity, strong determinants of leniency or harshness being the fortunes of the local economy and the strength of local impulses towards paternalism or frugality. In Nottinghamshire, for example, relief policy became steadily more stringent from the 1820s onwards, largely owing to the work of cost-conscious magistrates; 1834 speeded the current, rather than changed its course. On the other hand, in the Durham unions surveyed by Peter Dunkley, relief was generous throughout the 1830s, but stingy when the local economy was hit by slump after 1840; in the Hungry Forties, the Durham unions were as ruthless as the poor law commission in their attitude towards the poor – and sometimes, indeed, were more so, the commission protesting vainly against the overcrowding of workhouses. Even local authorities' generous phases reflected a shrewd assessment of the ratepayers' best interests: Rhodes Boyson has shown how the north-east Lancashire unions' insistence on continuing outdoor relief was due in part to a realisation that to enforce indoor relief in all cases would be much more costly.

Historians have in recent years used several approaches to explain the first Reform Act. Michael Brock's elegant account sets the whole Reform crisis in its political context. D. C. Moore has attempted a ‘sociological’ explanation of ministers’ intentions, while John Milton-Smith has offered a more traditional analysis of their private papers. This emphasis on the men who framed and steered the measure through parliament perhaps obscures the role of the ordinary members in whose hands its fate rested. Like the ministers, the backbenchers also suffered intense periods of indecision, soul-searching and calculation based on a confused mixture of pragmatism and principle. This is especially true of the moderates, the men of the parliamentary centre, who provided the vital votes for the government's hair-breadth majority on the second reading in February 1831, but who deserted them to support General Gascoyne's motion a few days later. Only fifteen M.P.s voted both for the Bill and for Gascoyne's motion, thus locating themselves - at least temporarily - at the very centre of the political spectrum.

This article examines the exodus down the Rhine in 1816 and 1817 of tens of thousands of German migrants, who attempted to reach the United States after the Napoleonic Wars. It establishes the episode as an important link between the mass-migration periods of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which saw more Germans land in North America than any other European group. The article focuses on the active commercial, logistical, social, and religious networks, produced in the eighteenth century, which made the exodus possible, and how it in turn changed future migration patterns. This integrates the exodus into an evolving German Atlantic movement, where previous historiography has treated it as an isolated episode, produced by extraordinary post-war conditions.

Archives of the scientific revolution: the formation and exchange of ideas in seventeenth-century Europe. Edited by Michael Hunter. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998. Pp. xii + 216. ISBN 0–8511–553–7. £45.00.

The peasantries of Europe from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Edited by Tom Scott. London: Longman, 1998. Pp. xi + 416. ISBN 0–582–10131-X. £19.99.

Civil society and fanaticism: conjoined histories. By Dominique Colas. Translated by Amy Jacobs. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Pp. xxx + 480. ISBN 0–8047–2736–8. £14.95.

The quest for compromise: peacemakers in Counter-Reformation Vienna. By Howard Louthan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xvi + 185. ISBN 0–531–58082-X. £35.00.

Each of the four volumes at hand examines a different yet vital aspect of European society between the late middle ages and the beginnings of industrialization. The field is far too diverse and the approaches too complex to expect a commonality among these works, excepting a shared temporal and geographic concentration. Still, the themes and subjects reveal some of the issues that have captured recent attention and show how scholars propose to go about exploring them. They suggest the interests of historians of early modern Europe, their distinctive perspectives, and varying methodologies. The collective reach extends from deciphering the papers and manuscripts left by participants in the scientific revolution to an exploration of the immense yet largely reticent peasant world, an attempt to establish the origins and trace the development of today's ongoing discussion over civil society and fanaticism, and finally a study of four peacemakers who urged religious moderation at the imperial court of Counter-Reformation Vienna. Put slightly differently, these studies raise fundamental questions about the sources upon which scholars depend, the nature and utility of historical models, and the relationship between contemporary concerns and our collective past, whether they be issues of civil society or irenic accommodation.