The brief ministerial crisis of June 1844, precipitated by the defeat in the House of Commons of the government's proposals for the temporary adjustment of the duties on imported sugar, and resolved when Sir Robert Peel secured from the House what amounted to a reversal of the decision, has been scrutinized by two historians in recent years. In his earlier work, Dr Stewart cites with approval contemporary observations to the effect that Peel's authority was severely shaken by the affair, and remarks that ‘by 1844 the Tory, nationalist wing of Peel's party was beginning to unite in resistance to the progressive tendency of Peel's government. In 1844 they gave Peel a warning of what they might do.’ His second assessment is more emphatic. He interprets Conservative disaffection on the sugar issue, and on the factory bill three months earlier, as the ‘first challenge to Peel's leadership’, and argues that it revealed that ‘Peel's hold over a large section of his party was at an end, destroyed by his own methods’.

On 23 March 1815 Louis XVIII disbanded die French army. In June Napoleon lost Waterloo and abdicated, and the Bourbons returned to Paris to complete the destruction of the army. It had proved itself loyal only to Napoleon and over half of the 70,000 men of Davout's command preferred desertion to the white cockade. The country at large was hostile and in the royalist south returning officers were arrested and several were killed. In August the King published an ordinance ‘concerning the organization of a new army’. The army was ‘to be formed according to the principles which constitute a truly national army to form a military force in harmony with the liberal nature of our charter… avoiding the separation of die army from the interests of die country‘. It was not an easy task. Financial circumstances placed limitations on size, die Charter forbade conscription, the allies wanted reprisals and die royalists claimed rewards for their loyal service.

The repeal of the sacramental test in the Corporation and Test Acts seemed far more important in later years than when it was carried. In 1828 the event aroused comparatively little opposition, and it is not much of an exaggeration to say that ‘the repeal took place with amazing smoothness. Hardly a dog barked.’ The practical change made by repeal was scarcely perceptible. Repeal merely confirmed and strengthened the liberty enjoyed under Annual Indemnity Acts, while dissenters still found it difficult to enter some town councils until the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 caused a striking influx of them to take place. Despite the lack of concern in 1828, the duke of Newcastle claimed in 1837 that ‘a sure consequence’ of repeal was the emancipation of catholics in 1829; that, as a consequence of this in turn, ‘liberalism, conciliation, and concession, prevailed without limit’ and that, ultimately, by an incredible combination of terms, ‘Jesuitical influence triumphed, and the Reform Bill was carried…Revolution was forcibly established.’ Neither the advocates of repeal in parliament, nor those politicians who acquiesced in it, expected that catholic emancipation would follow as a necessary consequence, though the former hoped that this cause would be encouraged. Even further removed, in 1828, seemed a wide measure of parliamentary reform. When this did come in 1832 it opened to dissenters a share in political power which was not envisaged four years before and gave greater importance to the change of 1828. Members of Oxford university showed this in 1863 when remonstrating with one of their M.P.s, W. E. Gladstone, for favouring the removal of the declaration adopted in place of the sacramental test in 1828

This article explores the role of empire and internationalism in French revolutionary socialist thought at the beginning of the Third Republic. Whilst French revolutionary socialists frequently employed colonial examples and operated within wider traditions of either imperialism or anti-colonialism, the concept of ‘empire’ itself remained vague and undefined in their thought. Previous literature on the subject has focused overwhelmingly on the writings of Communards deported to New Caledonia in the 1870s; however, this article argues that the deportees in fact remained theoretically unconcerned with imperial and international questions. Rather, it was those who remained in Europe that produced more clearly elaborated theories on empire and international engagement. Such ideas subsequently served to demarcate the limits and possibilities of universal equality and solidarity, which were central to revolutionary socialist thought during this period. Consequently, it will be suggested that despite their recent rise in popularity, empire, and colonialism are not the best categories of analysis for approaching such themes, for they cannot be isolated from broader concerns with international and transnational thought.

The countries of south-eastern Europe at the beginning of the last war were caught, as they themselves put it with as much self-deprecation as fear, between the Axis hammer and the Russian anvil. There was almost a touch of defiance in their description, as if the extraordinarily high odds against their survival confirmed in their eyes their claim to national independence and to world attention. In fact over the 20 years of their existence they had made a virtue of the politics of Kleinstaaterei, of the fact that their destiny was determined not by themselves but by the Great Powers surrounding them. The Balkan states were creatures of Great Power politics and, with an unerring appreciation of their dependence on powerful neighbours, they looked to London or Paris or Rome or Berlin or Moscow for sustenance and direction. And yet—and this is the crucial paradox—they continued to harbour, side by side with their acknowledged dependence on the Great Powers, a deeply felt longing for collective independence and for political self-sufficiency. This paper is concerned with the desperate attempts of the Balkan countries in the autumn of 1939 to harmonize these conflicting requirements by promoting collective independence in the form of a bloc of neutrals under the leadership of a Great Power.

This article offers a case-study of an early preservation campaign to save the remains of the fifteenth-century Crosby Hall in Bishopsgate, London, threatened with demolition in 1830, in a period before the emergence of national bodies dedicated to the preservation of historic monuments. It is an unusual and early example of a successful campaign to save a secular building. The reasons why the Hall's fate attracted the interest of antiquaries, architects, and campaigners are analysed in the context of the emergence of historical awareness of the domestic architecture of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as well as wider recognition of the importance of this period for Britain's urban and commercial development. The Hall's associations with Richard III and other historic figures, including Thomas More and Thomas Gresham, are shown to have been particularly important in generating wider public interest, thereby allowing the campaigners to articulate the importance of the Hall in national terms. The history of Crosby Hall illuminates how a discourse of national heritage emerged from the inherited tradition of eighteenth-century antiquarianism and highlights the importance of the social, professional, and familial networks that sustained proactive attempts to preserve the nation's monuments and antiquities.

In a recent communication to the Historical Journal, Greta Jones submitted a critique that was largely a commentary on my article ‘Eugenics and progressive thought: a study in ideological affinity’. I am taking the liberty of replying not only because my views have been seriously misrepresented by Dr Jones but also because I believe that she has failed to appreciate important questions of methodology that transcend the particular subject of eugenics and are worth further elaboration. I shall relate in turn to the issues she raises.

Since the breakdown of the Soviet Union and Swedish socialism the Baltic region has attracted more attention, although not perhaps as much as it might deserve, than since the 1930s. English-speaking readers have been presented with a magisterial survey of the northern world over a five hundred years' period. However, many of the old stereotypes of war, pestilence, and the rise of Sweden under Gustav Adolphus, the lion of the north, and of Russia under the delusively attractive despots, Peter I and Catherine II (both of whom were essentially Baltic animals), remain unchallenged. Over the past decade much new work has appeared in northern Europe to open a more intriguing and understandable vista – of Baroque vibrancy in art, literature, and architecture; remarkably resilient small towns and efficient manor economies; and powerful interacting religious and political mythologies that combine in a vision of ‘Gotho-Sarmatian’ unity.

Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler: the diplomacy of Edvard Beneš in the 1930s. By I. Lukes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. xii+318. ISBN 0-1951-0267-3. £22.50.

Carpatho–Ukraine in the twentieth century: a political and legal history. By V. Shandor. Cambridge, MA: distributed by Harvard University Press for the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University, 1998. Pp. xvii+321. ISBN 0-9164A-5886-5. £21.95.

Czechoslovak national interests, Part I: A historical survey of Czechoslovak national interests, Part II: Reflections on the demise of Czechoslovak communism. By Oskar Krejčí. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, distributed by Columbia University Press, New York, 1996. Pp. 193, 167. ISBN 0-8803-3343-X. £31.00

This article explores the last instance of mass public oath-taking in England, the tendering of the oaths of allegiance, supremacy, and abjuration in the aftermath of the Jacobite Atterbury Plot of 1722. The records of this exercise, surviving in local record offices, have been little examined by historians. The returns are, however, unusual not only in the level of detail they occasionally provide concerning subscribers (place of abode, occupation, and social status) but also in the consistently high numbers of women who can be found taking the oaths. Prior to 1723, the appearance of female subscribers on oath returns was exceptional and usually assumed to be accidental. As this article seeks to demonstrate, the targeting of women in 1723 was intentional and represented a recognition of women's economic and political influence in early Hanoverian England. Even so, the presence of women on these oath returns represented a breach in the normal exclusion of women from formal political participation. The article suggests that other means of presenting public loyalty, namely the loyal address, were subsequently preferred which both seemed more the product of popular enthusiasm rather than state direction and which could informally represent women without conferring a public political identity.

We have recently been reminded of the existence of a ‘missing dimension’ in national security affairs, namely the whole question of secret intelligence and clandestine operations. It can also be suggested that the question of internal security has traditionally represented another gap, though one that occurs for very different reasons. Traditionally, secret intelligence was often unavailable as a subject for comment or academic study precisely because of its secrecy. Internal security included some areas of sensitive political surveillance that fell into the same category; but continued across the spectrum to regular uniformed police work, a subject apparently too mundane and obvious for inclusion in accounts of political history. Police of all categories belong, it seems, to social rather than political history – the world of ‘history with the politics left out’.

The American publisher Charles Francis Hall had no previous experience with the Arctic before he travelled there in 1860. Yet, Hall transformed himself into an Arctic authority, and was given command of a United States governmental funded expedition in 1870. Hall was only able to undertake his work in the Arctic because of his relationship with Tookoolito and Ipiirvik, a married Inuit couple from Cumberland Sound, and this article examines the structural processes that enabled Hall to rescript their expertise as his own. Tookoolito and Ipiirvik travelled with Hall for over a decade, a relationship where the unequal power-dynamic was continuously transformed and renegotiated in the United States and the Arctic. Drawing on recent historiographical insights on the construction of exploration knowledge in the imperial context, this article interrogates the epistemic and physical violence involved in Hall's erasure of Tookoolito and Ipiirvik's expertise and personhood. In doing so, I highlight the structural function of the erasure of Indigenous knowledge and labour in the production of nineteenth-century European and Euro-American Arctic science, and its enduring influence on the historiography.

The recent bicentennial commemorations of the Napoleonic empire have witnessed a proliferation of new studies. Scholars now possess much more sophisticated conceptual tools than in past decades with which to gauge the problems faced by French imperial administrators throughout Europe. Well-trodden concepts, like centre/periphery or collaboration/resistance, have been reinvigorated by more sophisticated understandings of how rulers and ruled interacted in the early nineteenth century. This article argues that, while much progress has been made in understanding problems of ‘resistance’, there is more to be said about the other side of the same coin, namely: ‘collaboration’. Using the micro/local history of a scandal in Napoleonic Bologna, this article wishes to reaffirm that collaboration was an active agent that shaped, and often shook, the French imperial project. The biggest problem remained that, despite ‘good intentions’, collaborators sometimes simply did not collaborate with each other. After all, imperial clients were determined to benefit from the experience of empire. The centre was often submerged by local petty squabbles. This article will use a specific micro-history in Bologna to highlight the extent to which Napoleonic empire builders had to thread a fine line between the impracticalities of direct control and the dangers of ‘going native’.

This article addresses the role of Protestant military humanism in early Stuart Ireland. The central argument is that Protestant military humanism as embodied in the works of such authors as Geoffrey Gates (fl. 1566–80) and Barnabe Rich (1541–1617) played a vital role in the Jacobean plantation of Ulster. These authors combined a strong commitment to the Protestant religion with the conviction that martial virtue was essential for the preservation of the commonwealth against the threats of domestic rebellion and foreign domination. The example of the soldier-planter Sir Thomas Phillips of Limavady (c. 1560–1636) and his criticisms of the City of London's plantation in Derry during the 1620s demonstrates that military humanist values not only offered a persuasive rationale for colonization, but also significantly shaped the course of plantation on the ground. Phillips's lengthy conflict with the City of London demonstrated a fundamental disjuncture between his own Protestant military humanist outlook, and the City's own understanding of its civilizing mission in Ireland; however, rather than a conflict between aristocratic and civic values, close study reveals instead a struggle grounded in competing hierarchies of civic values.