This article re-examines Burke's doctrine of intervention by analysing his decades-long interest in the ‘Polish question’. Contrary to the main thrust of existing scholarship, it argues that the French Revolution did not fundamentally transform Burke's assessment of the European state system. Rather, Burke's most famous and controversial 1790s positions on the topic were rehearsed in the previous decades through his practical engagement in long-running eighteenth-century discussions about the Polish state, which acted as a lightning rod for disagreements surrounding the nature and future of European politics. Burke was interested in the Polish state because it raised fundamental questions about the nature of European civilization, the rules of progress, and the conditions for long-lasting peace. The Polish crisis of 1772 led him to reflect on the relationship between internal and external politics, and crystallized his analysis of the Balance of Power as not only the guarantor of continental peace, but also as the very source of the unique ‘spirit’ of European civil society. It was this same framework of analysis that he applied to France in the 1790s, to argue that the expansionist ambitions inherent to democratic republicanism warranted intervention because they threatened the unique nature of European civilization.

It is well known that Gladstone's progress to the leadership of the Liberal party between 1859 and 1868 included the building of an alliance with Nonconformity which lasted, wim some interruptions, to the end of his life. This coalition was remarkable in view of the previous diversity of viewpoint between its participants. In the 1830s Nonconformists had already adopted a policy of disestablishment when Gladstone was airing a diametrically opposite opinion in The State in its relations with the Church; and Gladstone's High Churchmanship was disliked by the evangelical Nonconformists, one of whom wrote a pamphlet entitled The Ritualistic Movement in the Church of England, a reason for disestablishment. In view of these differences, how did there develop a firm and continually reviving political alliance, as intimate as that between Gladstone and Irish Home Rulers in the 1880s?

The puritan pastor and writer, Richard Baxter, and a member of a prominent Derbyshire family, Katherine Gell, exchanged a series of letters between 1655 and 1658. This article highlights the existence of three further items of correspondence in this exchange, located in the Derbyshire Record Office, hitherto believed not to be extant. The additional three letters are all penned by Baxter and include his replies to her first two epistles (dated 28 July 1655 and 4 September 1655) as well as a reply to a non-extant Gell letter (dated 31 July 1658). The correspondence provides valuable insights into Baxter's pastoral methods and the nature of puritan piety. The first two items draw attention to the importance of the dimension of duty within Baxter's pastoral agenda; while expressed in a context of warmth and encouragement, he believes that Gell will find a measure of resolution to her spiritual struggles by careful attention to the obligations of Christian living. The third letter, written some years later, after Baxter has discovered that Gell suffers from melancholia, is couched in a gentler tone and reveals a more reciprocal dimension to their relationship.

The construction of memory in interwar France. By Daniel J. Sherman. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. 448. ISBN 0-226-75285-2. £31.50.

Realms of memory: the construction of the French past, vol. II: Traditions. Under the direction of Pierre Nora, English-language edn ed. by Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Pp. xii+591. ISBN 0-231-10634-3. £29.95.

Vectors of memory: legacies of trauma in postwar Europe. By Nancy Wood. Oxford and New York: Berg, 1999. Pp. 204. ISBN 1-85973-294-1. £14.99.

In the 1650s, after a century of increase, the population of England stopped growing. It was not to increase substantially again before 1750. Over the same interval, and not wholly coincidentally, scholars and theologians were trying to defend the orthodox account of how global population had increased since the Creation and must continue to do so, and the first political arithmeticians were trying to measure and analyse demographic change. This article seeks to throw fresh light on this many-sided discourse by examining William Petty's attempt to write an account of the multiplication of mankind, and the reasons why he failed to complete it. It focuses particularly on Petty's part in developing methods of measuring population density which highlighted the potential for future growth, and on the equally important demonstration by John Graunt that high and rising mortality in cities was hindering population growth in reality. As Petty's cousin Robert Southwell pointed out, Graunt's ‘rule of mortality’ was wholly incompatible with any coherent account of the future multiplication of mankind. At the end of this particular discourse, newly discovered facts about demography triumphed over the presuppositions of divinity.

The triumph of Pitt's ministry in 1784 over the Fox-North Coalition is a familiar event in British political history. But the consolidation of the ministry after 1784 has yet to be analyzed in detail. Though the general election of 1784, accompanied by spectacular demonstrations of public opinion in support of the government, clinched Pitt's victory, there was no immediate return to tranquillity. Within two years, Pitt was defeated on four major issues: the Westminster scrutiny, the Irish Resolutions, parliamentary reform, and the duke of Richmond's scheme for the fortification of the dockyards.

The peace treaties concluded at Utrecht in March 1713, and the subsequent related treaties, were made memorable by the controversy which surrounded the British Ministry's part in forcing them through in defiance of the wishes of the Allies. Britain obtained considerable territorial and commercial concessions from France and Spain, together with general recognition of the Protestant succession in the House of Hanover. The Allies had less cause for satisfaction. The House of Habsburg, whose claim to the whole Spanish empire had been recognized by Britain since 1703, had to be content with the Southern Netherlands and a part of the former Spanish possessions in Italy. The United Provinces received a less favourable military barrier against France in the Nedierlands than they had been led to expect. From the point of view of the predominantly Tory Ministry, however, the most dangerous critic of the peace was the eleotor of Hanover, the future George I, who allied himself closely with the Whigs in their efforts to continue the War of the Spanish Succession until the throne of Spain was obtained for the Imperial House. The insistence of the Whigs that the Bourbon incumbent should give up the Spanish throne, compelled if necessary by Louis XIV, had caused the breakdown of negotiations in 1709–10, and, together with their injudicious impeachment of Henry Sacheverell, hastened their own dismissal by Queen Anne in June-September 1710 to make way for the more pacific Tories. The continued alliance of the House of Hanover with the Whigs after Anne's death in 1714 was to prolong the controversy concerning the peace; for one of the first actions of George I's Ministry, after their consolidation in parliament in the general election of 1715, was to impeach Oxford, Bolingbroke and others responsible for the Peace of Utrecht.

This article explores the fierce resistance and controversy that have marked the reception of post-colonial studies in France. In contrast to the anglophone academy, where post-colonialism emerged and was gradually institutionalized throughout the 1980s and 1990s, in France these approaches did not make a mark until much later. The context of social and political crisis over France's post-colonial populations, in which the debate surrounding post-colonial studies emerged, is fundamental to understanding the high stakes and thus the vehemence and polemical nature of their reception. Institutional factors and the particularities of the French intellectual climate, France's strong Republican ideology, and its problematic relationship with its own colonial history, are all explored as reasons for this troubled relationship. The anglocentrism of post-colonial studies is also considered, as are the mutually beneficial outcomes of a dialogue between post-colonial studies and the French debates and context. I outline a specifically ‘French’ post-colonialism that has emerged from these debates, and suggest that whilst positive moves have been made towards a truly inclusive post-colonial studies that would take account of numerous languages, former empires, and former colonies, there remains work to be done in this direction.

This article uses hundreds of letters written by the families of patients committed to Victorian Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum to provide the first sustained examination of the effects of asylum committal on patients’ individual family members. It shows that, despite what historians have previously suggested, the effect on families was not solely, or even necessarily primarily, economic; it had significant emotional effects, and affected family members’ sense of self and relationships outside the asylum. It also shows that family ties and affective relationships mattered a great deal to working-class Victorians. Some found new ways to give meaning to their relationship with, and the life of, their incarcerated relative, despite the costs this entailed. By taking a new approach – engaging with the history of the family, shifting focus from patients to their individual family members, and considering factors including age, class, gender, change over time, and life stage – this article demonstrates the breadth and depth of the effects of asylum committal, and in doing so provides new and significant insights into the history of the Victorian asylum. It also enriches the history of the family by providing an insight into working-class quotidian lives, bonds, and emotions.

This article examines conflict between farmers and elephants in the Addo region in 1910s–1930s South Africa to explore the porosity of the concepts ‘wild’, ‘tame’, and ‘domestic’, and their relationship to race, degeneration, nature conservation, and colonialism. In the 1910s, settler farmers indicted the ‘Addo Elephants’, as ‘vicious’ thieves who raided crops and ‘hunted’ farmers. This view conflicted with a widespread perception of elephants as docile, sagacious, and worthy of protection. Seeking to reconcile these views, bureaucrats were divided between exterminating the animals, creating a game reserve, and drawing upon the expertise of Indian mahouts to domesticate them. Ultimately, all three options were attempted: the population was decimated by hunter Phillip Jacobus Pretorius, an elephant reserve was created, the animals were tamed to ‘lose their fear of man’ and fed oranges. Despite the presence of tame elephants and artificial feeding, the reserve was publicized as a natural habitat, and a window onto the prehistoric. This was not paradoxical but provokes a need to rethink the relationship between wildness, tameness, and domesticity. These concepts were not implicitly opposed but existed on a spectrum paralleling imperialist hierarchies of civilization, race, and evolution, upon which tame elephants could still be considered wild.

Investigating the letters, diaries, and memoirs of British officers and enlisted men from the Napoleonic Wars, this article explores the hitherto neglected subject of British soldiers’ perceptions of Napoleon. Soldiers often formed mixed and ambivalent views on Napoleon. At one level, this corresponds with a range of attitudes within Britain, highlighting the important connections between soldiers and domestic culture. Yet these views also reveal what soldiers as a distinct cohort prioritized about Napoleon, and how these perceptions evolved over time. They also reveal tensions and divisions within the army itself, and shed light on British soldiers and patriotism. And finally, they add to our understanding of soldiers’ writing practices, especially their cultural context and the differences between wartime writing and memoirs. A diverse and shifting set of cultural frameworks and lived experiences shaped soldiers’ writings on Napoleon – from the Black Legend and Napoleonic Legend, to the Enlightenment and Romanticism; and from Spain and its battlefields to Restoration Paris and post-Waterloo Britain. Tracing the evolution of British soldiers’ perceptions of Napoleon from the outbreak of the Peninsular War in 1808 to the mid-nineteenth century reveals a growing admiration of Napoleon and the increasing hold of the Napoleonic Legend.

This article explores the praxis of transatlantic snuff- and tobacco-taking and its importance to personal and national identity-making over the long eighteenth century. It focuses in particular on the role of snuff- and tobacco boxes, which uniquely provided white middling-sorts on both sides of the Atlantic with a socialized canvas upon which significant statements of status, personality, and sensibility could be made. However, a closer study of these objects during America's revolutionary period reveals stark contrasts in the social, political, and gendered meanings ascribed to tobacco-taking between Britain and America. The material evidence, it is argued, suggests that for men, and especially for women in revolutionary America, snuff- and tobacco-taking became almost synonymous with loyalty to the republic.

This review examines some of the recent British, American, and Russian scholarship on a series of important international transitions that occurred in the years around 1945. One is the shift of global leadership from Great Britain to the United States, in which, it is argued, the decisive moment was the fall of France in 1940. Another transition is the emergence of a wartime alliance between Britain and America, on the one hand, and the Soviet Union, on the other, followed by its disintegration into the Cold War. Here the opening of Soviet sources during the 1990s has provided new evidence, though not clear answers. To understand both of these transitions, however, it is necessary to move beyond diplomacy and strategy to look at the social, cultural, and economic dimensions of the Second World War. In particular, recent studies of American and Soviet soldiers during and after the conflict re-open the debate about Cold War ideology from the bottom up.

This article analyses the interplay of arguments for religious reconciliation and peace on the one hand and a patriotic vocabulary or programme in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries on the other. Focusing on different phases of irenic debate in the Empire, various types of what will be termed ‘irenic patriotism’ will be identified. Irenic patriotism could employ both utilitarian politique and more principled arguments for a religious peace. Finally, a consideration of Hugo Grotius's irenicism, which drew heavily on German sources, will show how a distinct humanist critique of theological controversies and their political consequences resulted in an emphasis on a minimalist and ethical concept of Christianity, as well as the idea of a total submission of the church and its doctrines to the authority of the magistrate and the patria. The distinctively civil type of irenicism, which arose from this debate, was less concerned with the unity of the church than with the integrity of the civitas, respublica, and patria.

In 1938, the Reverend Digby Bliss Kittermaster, who became chaplain at Rochester Borstal after retiring as a housemaster at Harrow public school, started a diary in which he recorded everyday interactions with inmates and staff. The reputation of the borstal system was at its height in the 1930s owing to Alexander Paterson's reforms, based on the structures and character-building ethos of British public schools. Young people's voices were rarely heard in this progressive discourse of borstal reform and Kittermaster is unusual for articulating them, recording what he heard, teasing out the contradictions of Paterson's reforming aspirations and the reality of humiliation and intimidation that borstal boys often experienced. Kittermaster's public school background made him well placed to question the rhetoric of the public school reform model. His complex personal perspective suggests how humane emphasis on individual potential was subverted at Rochester by coercive structures of traditional prison improvement. Kittermaster's growing frustration at his own powerlessness supports a more nuanced interpretation of how the borstal system has usually been depicted in the Paterson era of reform, especially in relation to damaging mental and emotional costs to inmates and staff, which have been largely neglected in the scholarship of borstal in the 1930s.

This article addresses the perennial debate over the origins and nature of female power by examining the significance of ‘Women of Discord’ in Aztec (more properly, Mexica) culture. Influential, but often troublesome, these formidable figures embody the complex significance of female power, rooted in women's privileged access to the awesome earth forces through childbirth. This chaotic energy lent cosmological and dynastic significance to the mytho-historical Women of Discord, but also led to a persistent female association with disorder which had tangible (and often overlooked) consequences for the lives of ‘real’ women in Aztec culture. This article explores the ways in which beliefs about the female capacity for disruption both reflected and shaped reality, ensnaring all women in a cycle of myth and history which made femininity a source of both authority and apprehension. Importantly, in Tenochtitlan ideas about ‘disorderly women’ did not lead inevitably to their practical subordination or suppression; women held practical markers of influence and esteem in Aztec culture. Thus, the Women of Discord challenge our assumptions about gender by offering a distinctive perspective on the ways in which femininity and fertility may be seen as disruptive, without necessarily debasing women or depriving them of individual agency.

The years immediately after the Glorious Revolution saw the Irish parliament establish itself as an active legislative body. Local government in the country then received something of a fillip, both through legislative action in Dublin, and by reason of the extended period of social and political stability that followed the end of Queen Anne's reign. This essay seeks to outline the responsibilities and functions of the grand jury in Ireland, and thus to establish its position as perhaps the most important component in the governance of provincial Ireland. Further to this it attempts to analyse the social composition of juries through a study of the methods of selection, and the attendant qualification criteria. The available evidence suggests that despite its extensive power and influence, membership of the grand jury was not completely monopolized by the land-owning Anglican elite. Rather, service on the grand jury reached some way down the social scale, and could be undertaken by men from outside the established church. Over time, however, jurors came to be selected from a diminishing pool of candidates : a practice which led to the creation of a largely homogeneous local administrative elite.

This article aims to locate English republican thought and writing in a wider European context and to understand the personal connections that aided the distribution and reception of English republican ideas abroad. It does so through the case-study of a little-known pamphlet published by the English regicide Edmund Ludlow during his exile in Switzerland after the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660. Les juges jugez, se justifiants (1663) was a French translation of the dying speeches and other miscellaneous texts of some of the English regicides, produced in Geneva and subsequently printed in Yverdon with the help of Ludlow's local Protestant network. Rather than propagating a secular republican ideology, Ludlow offered his work to a European Protestant audience in the language of Geneva, promoting a primarily religious cause in an attempt to make martyrs out of political activists. It is therefore to Ludlow's Protestant networks that we need to turn to find out more about the transmission of English republican ideas in francophone Europe and beyond.