Germany's position among the great powers of Europe had endured numerous setbacks since 1890. No longer could the Germans look at a Europe in which most of the powers were closely associated with her while her rival, France, stood alone and isolated. In 1894 Russia had become an ally of France, in 1904 Great Britain had signed an agreement with the French, and in 1907 Russia and Great Britain had come to terms. After 1904 the probability of an Anglo-German rapprochement decreased. One of the principal items settled in the Anglo-French entente had been the future of Morocco. Great Britain had agreed that France might establish a protectorate in that area when the time seemed propitious. Furthermore, the French had also signed treaties with Italy and Spain concerning Morocco's future. But Germany, who had been a signatory of the Madrid Convention of 1880, the original agreement dealing with Morocco, had not even been officially notified, let alone consulted. Thus, Morocco had become a symbol of Germany's declining prestige.

The negotiations leading up to the Treaty of London of 27 April 1915 afford a classic illustration of Grey's complaints concerning the difficulties of conducting diplomacy in wartime. Though manifold they may be reduced to two headings. In the first place diplomacy was dependent, hopelessly so, upon victory in the field. ‘A diplomacy which was suitable when the Allied armies were having success’, Grey wrote, ‘was hopelessly unsuitable when the Germans seemed to be winning.’ Whereas before the war the Foreign Office had exercised some influence upon the development of British naval and military strategy, now the boot was upon the other foot. Words could not compensate for military defeats: ‘in war words count only so far as they are backed by force and victories. Up to the end of 1916…Allied diplomacy had little enough of this backing’.

Queen Victoria, her court, the embassy in Paris, the prime minister, and the press, led by The Times, were early and impassioned sympathizers with Alfred Dreyfus and bitter critics of his persecutors. This article traces the development of their views and the information available to them, analyses the principal themes as they saw them, and attempts to explain how and why they formed their opinions. It considers why the Dreyfusard position was so congenial to them. It argues that their own principles and prejudices – conservative, patriotic, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant – were confirmed by a critique of French political culture, seen as corrupted by a combined heritage of absolutism, revolution, Catholicism, and demagoguery. This appears to be confirmed by contrast with the few dissenting voices in Britain, on one hand Catholic and Irish, on the other, anti-Semitic socialist, who showed little sympathy with the Dreyfusards, and even less with the views of their British supporters.

In an influential monograph, The greening of Dublin Castle (1991), Lawrence McBride argued that the Irish administration was in a rapid state of transformation between 1892 and 1922. Broadly speaking, he argued that the Protestant and unionist senior administrators were gradually replaced by Catholic and nationalist civil servants during this period. However, a significant body of evidence suggests that McBride may have overstated the changes taking place in the Irish civil service. Using a prosopographical study of the senior civil servants in Ireland in 1891 and 1911, this article suggests that there was significantly less ‘greening’ than McBride claimed. The British state appears to have regarded Irish-born Catholics as potentially disloyal, and to have implemented a subtle system of ethnic discrimination at the upper levels of the Irish civil service. It is argued that the existence of this glass ceiling provided young educated Catholic professionals with a powerful motive for participation in the Irish revolution (1916–23).

This article examines the status of Richard Hofstadter's classic work The American political tradition (1948) as a ‘popular history’. It uses documents drawn from Hofstadter's personal papers, those of his publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., as well as several of his contemporaries, to pursue a detailed reconstruction of the manner in which the book was written, edited, and reviewed, and to demonstrate how it circulated within, and was defined by, the literary culture of the 1940s and 1950s. The article explores Hofstadter's early career conception of himself as a scholar writing for audiences outside of the academy, reframes the significance of so-called ‘middlebrow’ literature, and, in doing so, offers a fresh appraisal of the links between popular historical writing, liberal politics, and the role of public intellectuals in the post-war United States.

This article examines the role of the House of Lords as the high court from the Restoration of 1660 to the passage of the Appellate Jurisdiction Act in 1876. Throughout this period, lay peers and bishops judged appeals on civil law from the central courts of England and Wales, Ireland (aside from between 1783 and 1800), and Scotland after the Union of 1707. It has long been known that the revolution of 1688–9 transformed the ability of parliament to pass legislation, but the increased length and predictability of parliamentary sessions was of equal significance to the judicial functions performed by peers. Unlike the English-dominated profile of eighteenth-century legislation, Scots constituted the largest proportion of appellants between 1740 and 1875. The lack of interaction between Westminster and Scotland is often seen as essential to ensuring the longevity of the Union, but through comparing the subject matter of appeals and mapping the distribution of cases within Scotland, this article demonstrates the extent of Scottish engagement. Echoing the tendency of Scottish interests to pursue local, private, and specific legislation in order to insulate Scottish institutions from English intervention, Scottish litigants primarily sought to maintain and challenge local privileges, legal particularisms, and the power of dominant landowners.

In the past decade scholars such as Stanford Lehmberg. G. R. Elton, and J. G. Bellamy have increased our understanding of the use of parliamentary attainder in the reign of Henry VIII. Traditionally attainder had been used to punish fugitives in flight, a form of parliamentary outlawry, or to affirm and supplement prior convictions achieved through the common law or the law of arms in order to extend the crown's rights to forfeited estates. At common law a traitor's forfeiture was limited to lands in fee simple, and by the law of arms his lands were totally immune to forfeiture. Passage of an act of attainder, however, enabled the king to seize any or all of a traitor's land, whether held in fee simple, fee tail, or to the use of the traitor. In the crucial decade of the 1530s attainder assumed a new role, condemning and ordering the execution of offenders solely by authority of parliament, without any prior judicial proceedings and despite an absence of obstacles which might have made a trial impossible. Lehmberg emphasizes the significance of this transformation in his detailed study of attainder in the reign of Henry VIII and suggests that the ‘pivotal act’ was the attainder of Elizabeth Barton and her followers in 1534. Certainly Barton's attainder was the first of many utilized by Henry's government to enforce the Reformation, and it did so without recourse to the common law. Lehmberg is mistaken, however, in his belief that this was the first attainder of the reign to attaint an individual without prior common law proceedings, for that distinction belongs to the attainder of Richard Roose in 1531.

In the 1890s the concept of laissez-faire still dominated the attitude of the Foreign Office to the question of overseas loans and investment. Unlike its European counterparts, the British Government had no tradition of interference in the world of high finance, nor were there any formal channels of communication between die City and the Foreign Office whereby a community of interests might be established or policies correlated. In the mid-nineteenth century there had been little need for closer contact. The power of British finance had ensured ample opportunities for British investment in fields where foreign competition was virtually non-existent. Such communication as had been considered necessary could be effected through hints in speeches, social contacts, or personal relationships - strictly informal procedures which, apart from Disraeli&s bid for the Suez canal shares, had produced minor and unspectacular results.

This article is a byproduct of a large-scale research project on the politics of Salford since 1830. In a sense, it shows what can happen to an historian when working amongst political scientists, for the article attempts to apply a few of the latter's concerns, and ways of looking at the world, to a specific historical situation. Though the raw material for the article is almostentirely historical, I hope that its themes will be of interest to people in both disciplines.

Although the first decade of the German Empire has long been a central topic of historical research, the question with which this essay is concerned—Bismarck's relationship to the pressure groups at this time—cannot be answered satisfactorily on the basis of the material known hitherto. This is due to the fact that until very recently historians have concentrated on the diplomatic-political occurrences. Bismarck's eastern policy, the Livadia affair, the ‘war-in-sight crisis’, the Berlin Congress, and the change from the Three Emperors' Alliance to the ‘Eternal’ Treaty with the Danube monarchy—these are the events always used to demonstrate Bismarck's ‘genius’ in the field of foreign policy. On the problem of the ‘Kulturkampf’ much less effort has been expended. Here Bismarck's outstanding political skill was not as apparent as it was in his judgement of international relations. Moreover, this question was bound up from the very beginning with a strong ideological bias which only slightly weakened after World War II for the first time. Even less attention has been paid to the problems of domestic and social policy and economic developments have been almost totally neglected. It is true that these items have recently obtained new historical relevance from the new socio-political point of view, but up to the present day they have not been clarified. The chief general contributions of this kind have been published by non-German historians (e.g. Rosenberg, Lambi, and Pflanze) in the United States or in Canada. These studies, however, give inadequate answers to specific questions, as do the detailed essays of Karl-Erich Born and Wolfgang Zorn with their systematizing way of reflexion. They do not deal with our formulation of the question: the relationship between economic development and political events in a comparatively short period. Nevertheless, the essays of Born and Zorn will serve as a starting-point for our own investigation. Born in particular realizes the urgent need for more detailed research in the social and economic sphere, and pleads for a ‘supplementary’ approach (Ergänzungsgeschichte). He states that

the history of the aristocracy during the industrial age has to be completed by studies dealing with the history of the trade unions; by dissertations on the history of industrial branches, commercial centres, and companies; and last but not least by works on the disintegration of the old bourgeoisie. Then we shall be able to extend the political history of the German Empire, which is largely clarified, to a comprehensive view of a German historical epoch by adding the social and economic history of the late nineteeth century.

Between 1907 and 1984 unearned income in Britain was taxed at higher rates than wages and salaries, a bias that was supported intermittently by limiting shareholders’ dividends and attempting to tax capital wealth. Although apparently accepted as part of the fiscal order until 1979, Margaret Thatcher's government was able to complete the dismantling of the bias in favour of earned income by 1984. This article examines the events and politics of the 1970s to explain the volte-face. The article initially charts the role of political prejudice against rentiers in maintaining higher taxes on unearned income in the context of 1970s economic turmoil and inflation. The article then considers the 1970s fiscal shift from the perspective of equity shareholdings, juxtaposing the use of tax and dividend restraint as a mechanism for control of investment capital with pressure for wider share ownership, particularly for employees. Finally, Avner Offer's theories on prudent financial behaviour are imported as a backdrop for the trend away from tax relief for long-term, illiquid savings towards market-driven incentives. Ultimately, the article detects a change of approach in both main political parties which in turn creates a more stable environment for future policy formation.

This article analyses the emergence of politically motivated acts of left-wing terrorism in Britain between 1967 and 1972. Through the case of the ‘Angry Brigade’, an ill-defined grouping which claimed responsibility for a number of attacks against property between 1970 and 1971, it analyses how protest and political violence emerged from discourses and events in the British New Left, the anti-war protest movements, the counterculture, and the underground press. Against common interpretations of ’68 as a watershed of naïve hopes that waned into inaction, this article identifies a consistency of political activity that developed beyond traditional party and class politics towards a more internationally aware and diverse network of struggles for civil equality. Among the shared political and cultural commitments of the counterculture, campaigns around squatting, women's liberation, or the necessity of ‘armed propaganda’ each became possible and at times overlapped. It analyses the group's development, actions, communications, as well as surrounding media discourses, subsequent police investigation, and the criminal trials of ten individuals for their involvement in the Angry Brigade. The article reappraises their overlooked historical significance among the wider countercultural militancy and discourses of political violence of the late 1960s to early 1970s.

American local history has been much studied, but rarely integrated into the general history of the country. Although greater attention is now being paid to the connexions between local political, social and economic developments and national trends, there is still a very real disparity in historiographical emphasis between national issues and the problems of community life experienced by Americans in the past. For no period, perhaps, is this disparity so graphic as for the mid-nineteenth century; the years from about 1840 to the 1870s or the 1880s were convulsed by sectional rivalries, civil war and reconstruction, to which matters historians have devoted their attention. Steadily, however, the local communities themselves have come under scrutiny. But the major interpretation currently accepted reinforces, rather than qualifies, the general picture we have of that period, since the North, at least, is regarded as buoyant and expansive in the mid-century, pursuing with relentless self-confidence such aims as help to explain the coming, and the winning, of the Civil War; reform, moral and educational improvement, and the opening of economic opportunities to yeomen farmers, artisans and small merchants.

The official biographers of H. H. Asquith believed that his sole difference of any importance with Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman in the period when Asquith served as his principal lieutenant rose in connexion with the Trade Disputes Act of 1906. In fact, another important difference divided them in the following spring, this one rising out of their respective views on the proper mode of limiting the veto of the house of lords. That of Campbell-Bannerman is well known. He sponsored a plan of suspensory veto that could conceivably limit the period in which the lords' veto operated to little more than six months. Under its terms a bill sent up to the house of lords would go to a small conference representing each house equally when the two houses were in disagreement. Should the conference fail, the bill or another like it could be reintroduced in the house of commons after an interval of at least six months, passed under drastic closure, and sent once more to the house of lords. The impasse continuing, a second conference might be held; and a second failure at this juncture could entail a repetition of the whole process. But if a third conference proved unsuccessful, the bill could become law without the consent of the house of lords. Known subsequently as the C-B veto plan, it was made public by the Prime Minister in a speech in the house of commons, on 24 June 1007, when he also introduced and carried by a large majority a resolution asserting that the power of the house of lords to alter or reject bills should be so restricted by law as to secure that the decision of the house of commons should prevail within the limits of a single parliament.

Studies of the Grand Tour conventionally focus upon the art and antiquities of Italy rather than the urban environment in which the tourists found themselves, and they generally stop short in the 1790s. This article examines the perceptions and representations of Florence amongst British visitors over the course of the long eighteenth century up to c. 1820 in order to establish continuity between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It considers why it was that British travellers appeared to be particularly attracted to Florence: initially they responded to congenial and pleasant surroundings, the availability of home comforts, and a sparkling social life. In the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Florence acquired new meanings for the British, who began to identify and admire a civilization which had been based upon mercantile wealth and liberty: the foundations for the Victorian celebration of Florence were laid. But the experience of Florence as a city had also changed: it was no longer simply the showcase of the Medici dukes. As a consequence the buildings, monuments, and paintings of the republican period, as well as the history which they embodied, came into focus for the first time.

Based on long-term oral historical research in the Mandara Mountains, this article traces the ways in which memories of slavery have been preserved in songs which are usually not part of the more formal oral historical narratives. It historicizes this process by focusing on the selective memories of different generations as well as on the influence of colonial and post-colonial politics, particularly post-1990 democratic politics in Cameroon. The major change over time is the shift from the shameful memory of slavery to be repressed – or treated only obliquely – to its public claim as a political resource after the democratic transition of the 1990s. In retelling the history of being sold as slaves, the residents of the Mandara Mountains reversed the negative meaning of slavery to use it to celebrate their resistance to Islam and to voice political claims. This new narrative congeals around being kirdi, a new regional and trans-religious identity claimed by Christians and pagans in the mountains.

Hitler's foreign policy is still an area of widespread interest - particularly the question of its inner coherence. The present consensus goes back to the early 1950s and 1960s, when the German attack upon Russia was viewed as one stage in Hitler's quest for European hegemony or even world domination. While Alan Bullock viewed Hitler as an opportunist, Hugh Trevor-Roper in his essay on Hitler's war aims interpreted Hitler's invasion of Russia as a systematic step in Hitler's programme. Since then this model has been highly refined and systematized, notably by Andreas Hillgruber, who argues that Hitler's foreign policy programme had already been formulated long before he came to power, particularly in Mein Kampf and Hitler's Second book. On this model National Socialist foreign policy was programmatically fixed and Hillgruber goes as far to say that Hitler's programme ‘alone determined the great line of German policy in general’ and that he devoted all the energies available to him to realizing it. Yet even before Hillgruber had formulated his model, case studies were available which appeared to contradict its inner coherence and logic. Serious objections have also been raised by Martin Broszat, who describes Hitler's idea of an eastern empire as a ‘metaphor and Utopian figure of speech’.