As a result of the Great War, the Zionist movement came of age. For the first time since its inception as a political organization, Zionism gained a backer of international and worldwide repute. The political charter which Herzl had hawked around the chancelleries of Europe found its consummation in the Balfour Declaration. The British Empire, in its moment of supreme crisis, stamped its seal of approval on the concept of a Jewish National Home in Palestine.

The decline in prosperity of the British West Indies after 1815 was so rapid as to obscure their importance during the Napoleonic War; but of their commercial pre-eminence among British colonies at that time there are many proofs. Thus, on 12 September 1804, while watching Toulon, Nelson, who knew them well, wrote in a lately published letter, “…I think the French will some day send their fleets to sea, and that the West Indies … is (sic) more likely for them to hurt us in than this country. We have but few troops to defend our islands and recent conquests; 10 or 12,000 French troops would injure us more there than in any other part of the world.” Herein he agreed with Dundas, who in August 1796 stated to Earl Spencer, First Lord of the Admiralty, that far more harm would result to our commerce and credit from a French invasion of Jamaica than of Great Britain or Ireland. As is well known, Nelson in April 1805 acted on his conviction recorded above, and, despite the perilously scanty news as to the course of the Franco-Spanish fleet, he chased it to the West Indies because of his conviction of the immense importance of those colonies. Lord Barham, now First Lord, approved his action; for he himself had come to the conclusion from the French moves against those colonies, “that depredation and the destruction of our trade is their grand object,” and that the invasion of England was now a secondary object. This view was for the present somewhat exaggerated; for Napoleon, who overworked his admirals even more than his generals, expected Villeneuve and Gravina first to devastate our Leeward Islands (with Tobago thrown in) and then to fly back, along with Ganteaume's fleet, to cover the invasion of England.

In Nigeria, Britain asserted its post-colonial security role during and immediately after the transfer of power, and remained responsible for assisting the Nigerian armed forces. While the Americans recognized Nigeria's potential as an important partner in the Cold War, they preferred to focus on development aid. Washington was thus supposed to complement British assistance, while leaving the responsibility for the security sector to London. But with the escalation of the Cold War in Africa, the Nigerians’ efforts to reduce their dependency on the United Kingdom, and Nigeria's growing significance for the United States in African affairs, this Anglo-American burden-sharing was increasingly questioned in Washington. The United States thus eventually decided to militarize its aid policy towards Nigeria. In analysing the militarization of US aid policy towards Nigeria, this article will, first, assess the Anglo-American relationship in the early 1960s; secondly, position Nigeria in American Cold War policy towards Sub-Saharan Africa; thirdly, question the role of military assistance in Washington's policy towards Nigeria and Africa; and fourthly, discover the regional and local factors that influenced policy-makers in Washington and London.

Most writers have taken Frederick II at his word and interpreted his sparse and generally derogatory comments about the Holy Roman Empire as indications of its low priority in Prussian policy after 1740. This article offers a reappraisal, based on a re-examination of his writings and his policy towards the Empire and its principal dynasties. Despite his distaste for the imperial constitution, Frederick swiftly appreciated its significance to his goals of security and international recognition. Certainly, relations with the imperial Estates remained secondary to diplomatic and military engagement with Austria and the other major European powers. Nonetheless, the Empire remained more than an arena in which Austro-Prussian rivalry was played out. The imperial constitution offered a means to neutralize threats to Prussia's more vulnerable provinces and a framework to constrain Habsburg ambitions, while ties to minor German dynasties offered avenues to maintain or improve relations with Europe's leading monarchies that were likewise bound within the elite kinship of the Christian old world. For this to be effective, however, Frederick had to engage in all aspects of imperial politics and not just representation in formal institutions.

Students of history are well aware of the ambiguity of the term medieval. Although it may be true that for some thousand years, between c. 500 and c. 1500 A.D., the social, economic, political and religious life of Western Europe had characteristics easily distinguishable on a broad view from the ancient Greco-Roman civilization that preceded, and from what we call the modern world of nation-states that followed, yet within that millennium the developments are so great, and the changes and declines so numerous, that the careful historian distrusts anything approaching to a general judgment which might confuse century with century, and region with region. Yet in spite of this, many, whose knowledge of the social or artistic life of past ages is very wide, forget such distinctions, and speak readily of the medieval papacy, the medieval village, the medieval craftsman or medieval philosophy, as if each of these expressions denoted a single clear-cut system or institution.

In spite of a welcome and ever growing academic interest in the lives and work of twentieth-century women writers the Yorkshire novelist, Phyllis Bentley, has remained resolutely hidden from view. This article seeks to demonstrate her importance as a ‘middlebrow’ novelist, particularly in the 1930s, and to examine the ways in which her career sheds light on contemporary relationships between the ‘provincial’ and the ‘metropolitan’. Through consideration of both her private papers and her fiction, it analyses Bentley's complex relationship with both her home town of Halifax and the West Riding more widely. It argues that Bentley played a major role in creating a greater space within the national culture for the representation of provincial, especially northern, life, while also displaying a profound ambivalence toward that very life. While in many ways a passionate and articulate interpreter of the region in which she spent virtually all of her adult life, she also clearly felt constricted by her provincial location and cultural setting, especially when in contact with the London-based literary elite; her relationship with Vera Brittain was particularly highly charged in this regard.

The history of the intendants, so important to the understanding of France during the latter two centuries of the ancien régime, remains unwritten. There are of course particular studies of various great intendants of Louis XIV and of Louis XV, but the institution as a whole remains astonishingly ill-known, and this is especially true of its early years. Gabriel Hanotaux did make a brave attempt in 1884 to work out the Origines de l'institution des intendants des provinces, but his arguments have been severely criticized by subsequent writers, whose strictures have most recently been summarized by Roger Doucet in Les institutions de la France au XVIe siècle. As Doucet points out, the source-material used by Hanotaux was limited to a few Parisian manuscripts and, for the reign of Henri IV, essentially to the Lettres Missives of that king. For the reign of Henri III, Doucet adds, his work is weak in that he ignores the increase in the traditional chevauchées (tours of inspection) of the maîtres des requêtes, surely one of the most suggestive of early institutions in our present context. This in turn springs from a more basic weakness, that of using only a titular and not a functional definition for his subject; in refusing to consider any officers other than those who actually held the title intendant (usually de justice). Doucet himself does not carry the investigation any further for, as he remarks, the only way to do this would be by undertaking a series of studies in local archives.

It is really deplorable that until quite recently there still existed in Western academic circles a number of serious misunderstandings about Chinese historiography, particularly the Chinese theory and practice of historical method and critical techniques. Many well-known academic figures still do not know, or refuse to face the fact, that the Chinese tradition of pursuing an objective knowledge of history can be dated back as far as the first century and that the quality of critical scholarship had reached a level equal, either in terms of textual criticism or higher criticism, to any found in the West up to the beginning of the nineteenth. To cite a few examples of Western ignorance. An American sinologist specializing in Chinese traditional historiography firmly asserts that ‘the Chinese are not a whit behind Western scholarship in the exacting domain of textual or preparatory criticism’, but ‘in the field of historical criticism... Chinese historians of the old school did not evolve those principles which are now regarded in East and West alike as an indispensable part of scientific historical method’, although ‘since the seventh century, a few bold, independent spirits have evolved the elements of historical criticism’.1 Another sinologist holds nearly the same position by stating that ‘what was missing’ in traditional Chinese historiography until the sixteenth century was a ‘systematic method’ of criticism, while recognizing that ‘there was an almost continuous line of doubters’ from the early eighth century onwards, and that under the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) attempts were ‘made to bring all the doubts together into one publication’and so to lay‘ the basis for organized study’, an active role being played by ‘ancillary studies of all’ including philology in the development of the Chinese textual criticism of history.2 The most bigoted and dogmatic verdict passed on Chinese historiography which I have ever read in the Western literature is Professor J. H. Plumb's assertion that Chinese historians ‘never attempted, let alone succeeded, in treating history as objective understanding’, and that ‘Chinese scholars were using historical materials for the same purposes in the early twentieth century as in the T'ang and Han dynasties’. Professor Plumb's bias is further reflected in the affirmation, which was added after his reading of Professor E. G. Pulleyblank's remarkable essay Chinese historical criticism: Liu Chih-chi and Ssu-ma Kuang,3 that ‘I would maintain that the Chinese were concerned solely with creating an educative past - subtle, highly detailed, accurate in commission, but not history’4.

One of the more absorbing events in the great drama of the Popish Plot, which swept through English political life in the autumn of 1678, was the discovery of the corpse of a Westminster magistrate, Sir Edmund Berry Godfrey, in a ditch near Primrose Hill on 17 October 1678. This event, which sparked off a great deal of panic in London and gained some notoriety at the time, has continued to perplex historians, both professional and amateur, ever since. The speculation as to how Godfrey met his death and who did the deed, has tended to obscure the fact that we still know surprisingly little about this prominent Westminster merchant and justice of the peace before his demise. Despite an intensive historical investigation of Godfrey's murder, if murder it was, a lack of evidence has always been the main problem for any historian attempting to analyse Godfrey's character and career prior to his death. This was compounded by the allegation that on the night before his disappearance Godfrey burnt a large number of his personal papers. However, located in the collections of the National Library of Ireland is a small white leather-backed volume containing seventeenth-century copies of the correspondence of Sir Edmund Godfrey to his close friend the Irish healer and stroker Valentine Greatrakes. This letterbook is a significant addition to the historical record in that it contains what may be the only surviving personal letters of the ‘murdered’ magistrate during the late 1660s and early 1670s.

Thinking with demons: the idea of witchcraft in early modern Europe. By Stuart Clark. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xvii+827. ISBN 0–19–820001–3. £75.00.

The darker side of the Renaissance: literacy, territoriality, and colonization. By Walter D. Mignolo. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. Pp. xxii+426. ISBN 0–472–10327. $39.50.

Oedipus and the devil: witchcraft, sexuality, and religion in early modern Europe. By Lyndal Roper. London: Routledge, 1995. Pp. ix+254. ISBN 0–415–10581–1. £13.99.

As Professor Richard Evans's spirited In defence of history attests, postmodernism continues to arouse strong passions and suspicions among distinguished practitioners of the discipline. This is hardly surprising: in their most extreme and undiluted form, the theories of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Hayden White, and more particularly their many disciples, are stubbornly corrosive of the ethos and rationale of history as conventionally taught and written. To insist that the production of knowledge is inherently – indeed insidiously – political, and to claim that the veil of language which divides us from the past can never be pierced is to unsettle many traditional epistemological assumptions. And yet postmodernism and the so-called ‘linguistic turn’ have posed timely and fundamental questions about truth, discourse, and objectivity which historians can ill afford to ignore. They have also helped to generate some of the most innovative and provocative historical writing in recent years. In different ways, each of the books under review engages with and reacts to the swirling debate about this influential and controversial body of ideas. All three make strenuous demands upon their readers; all three challenge us to reflect critically upon the methodologies we employ and the categories, concepts, polarities, and narrative paradigms to which we instinctively resort. Taken together they highlight both the potential strengths and weaknesses, the rewards and dangers of injecting theory into the study of witchcraft, sexuality, and colonization in early modern Europe and the New World.