Debating was an important part of schoolgirls’ political education in late Victorian and Edwardian England that has been overlooked in the scholarship on female education and civics instruction. Debates offered middle- and working-class schoolgirls an embodied and interactive education for citizenship. Considering both the content of discussions and the process of debating, this article argues that school debates provided a unique opportunity for girls to discuss political ideas and develop political skills. Debates became intertwined with girls’ peer cultures, challenging contemporary and historiographical assumptions of girlhood apoliticism. Positioning girls as political subjects sheds new light on political change in modern Britain. Schoolgirl debates show how gendered political boundaries were shifting in this period. Within the unique space of the school debating chamber, girls were free to appropriate and subvert ‘masculine’ political subjects and ways of speaking. In mock parliaments, schoolgirls re-created the archetypal male political space of the House of Commons, demonstrating their familiarity with parliamentary politics. Schoolgirl debates therefore foreshadowed initiatives that promoted women's citizenship after partial suffrage was achieved in 1918, and they help to explain how the first women voters were assimilated easily into existing party and constitutional politics.

One of the most serious problems facing Archbishop Laud was the rapid growth of the Lecturer Movement during the 1620s and 1630s. The increasing numbers of graduates available, and the increasing amount of money donated to support them meant that the weekly lectures had become one of the chief “religious … organizations of the opposition”, and were beginning to “undermine the hierarchical principle”. The gravity of the situation was marked by the increasingly stringent regulation of the lecturers. They had originally been allowed to preach with very little control, but from the Canons of 1604 onwards they were made the subject of several new regulations. These culminated in the Directions of March 16296 which, although issued by Archbishop Abbot, were based upon suggestions made by Laud to the king. Soon afterwards the lecturers in London Diocese were curtailed as a prelude to Laud's future work as archbishop. The Directions were reissued in January 1634, and a policy of deliberately reducing certain kinds of lecturer was initiated in several dioceses, pursued in the Metropolitical Visitation, and completed by Laud's supporters amongst the bishops.

This article looks at the membership and organization of the opposition that emerged in the house of lords between 1720 and 1723 under the leadership of William, 1st Earl Cowper. The origin of this new opposition lay in the political reaction to the extensive corruption exposed by the bursting of the South Sea Bubble, which brought together a coalition of dissident whigs and tones (both Hanoverian tories and Jacobites) who proceeded to attack the ministries of the earl of Sunderland and of Viscount Townshend and Robert Walpole for their supposed corrupt administration. The hallmark of the new opposition was the extensive campaign of protests against the opposition's defeat in votes, protests which were entered (with reasons) into the Journals of the House, and which were then published in the form of broadsheets, pamphlets, and newsletters as propaganda in an appeal to public opinion. This was the first time an opposition had indulged in an extensive and sustained campaign of influencing the public outside Westminster. This campaign required a high level of organization. This Cowper provided in imitation of some of the new management techniques being developed by the ministry to control the house of lords, plus a new feature – the daily pre-sitting meetings of the leadership to concert tactics. The legacy of the new opposition was the preservation of the concept of a loyal opposition as an acceptable part of British political life.

No secular institution of the English Church has left behind richer materials for the study of its history in the twelfth century than the cathedral chapter of St Paul's. There is a fine series of original charters, and two important cartularies; fragments of a twelfth-century survey, and a complete survey of the early thirteenth century from which a long stretch of agrarian history can be reconstructed. The letter collections of Gilbert Foliot, bishop from 1163 to 1187, Master David of London and Peter of Blois, and the splendid thirteenth-century inventories give an insight into the activities, characters and tastes of many of the canons. The chronicle and ordinances of Master Ralph de Diceto, the most distinguished of its deans; a sprinkling of hagiographical and theological writings; calendars and obit rolls; and a catalogue of the holders of the thirty prebends, purporting to start in the days of Bishop Maurice (1086–1107)—these and numerous other more incidental sources of information go to make up the tale of the evidence.

British opinion in the East became sensitive to propaganda against slavery and the slave trade surprisingly early. Thus in 1772 the Committee of Circuit in Bengal, when recommending the enslavement of the families of hereditary dacoits, thought it necessary to explain that slavery in India involved only a mild domestic subordination, since ‘the ideas of slavery borrowed from our American colonies will make every modification of it appear to our countrymen in England a horrible evil’. In 1789 Cornwallis prohibited the collection of slaves for export, and was contemplating a gradual abolition of slavery in Bengal.2 David Scott, a hard-headed East-India merchant and a Director of the East India Company, wrote in a private letter in 1796 that the salt workers in Bengal must be freed from compulsory labour, ‘for slaves cannot work so cheap as free men, besides we ought to give all our subjects liberty‘. In 1804 Wellesley ordered proposals to be made for the prohibition of slavery on Penang, since there could be no great difficulty about it on so recent a settlement.

From August 1935 to July 1936 Sir Frederick Leith-Ross, the Chief Economic Adviser to the British Government, was away from Britain on an official mission to the Far East. While accepting that, as Hankey, the secretary to the cabinet, put it, after Leith-Ross had been away for several months, he was a ‘distinguished Civil Servant’ whose ‘services could, with difficulty, be spared from European problems’, the aim of this paper is not to describe in detail what Leith-Ross did during his lengthy Far Eastern sojourn: on that he himself wrote an account which was published just before his death. The purpose is rather, by studying the origins of the mission and the reactions to it in British Government circles concerned with Far Eastern policy, to cast light on that policy during Britain's last few years as a great power in the Far East.3 Within die Foreign Office itself, Far Eastern policy was to a large degree the preserve of die professional staff concerned with it. The most senior of these in 1935 were C. W. Orde, head of the Far Eastern department, Sir John Pratt and Sir Victor Wellesley.

This article presents the main findings of the first detailed reconstruction of the pattern of attendance at an early modern German school, based on the exceptionally preserved matriculation records of the Latin (grammar) school of Zwickau/Saxony in the second half of the seventeenth century. It investigates pupils’ social background, their geographical mobility, and reconstructs their educational choices. Prevailing top-down perspectives on early modern education obscure the range of choices available to pupils. This article argues that substantial social mobility into learned professions formed the backdrop to the preoccupation with rank and distinction within the Republic of Letters in the Holy Roman Empire.

Ireland's status as a kingdom or as a colony continues to influence the historiographical debate about the country's relationship with the wider world during the early modern period. Interest in the continent is almost exclusively focused on exiles and migrants, rather than on diplomatic developments. Yet during the 1640s confederate Catholics in Ireland pursued an independent foreign policy, maintaining resident agents abroad, and receiving diplomats in Kilkenny. Following the execution of Charles I in 1649, they sought foreign assistance in their struggle against Oliver Cromwell. In alliance with the exiled House of Stuart, Irish Catholics looked to Charles IV, duke of Lorraine, as a potential saviour. For three years the duke encouraged negotiations in Galway, Paris, and Brussels. He despatched vital military supplies to Ireland, and attempted on at least one occasion to transport troops there from the Low Countries. Although his intervention ultimately failed to turn the tide of the war in Ireland, the English parliamentarians nevertheless believed he posed a serious threat. This detailed study of the duke's role, in the international struggle for Ireland during the early 1650s, largely ignored until now, helps to place the crises of the three Stuart kingdoms in their broader European context.

Naval historians traditionally have been preoccupied with operations at sea. Yet sea power hinges on the dockyards without which there would be no navies and no battles to write about. If Britain's greatness in the eighteenth century depended on a navy greater than any other in Europe, it depended no less on land-based facilities sufficient to create and maintain that navy. Two-thirds of the fleet on the eve of the American Revolution had been built in the navy's own dockyards, and virtually all the ships of the fleet were fitted and repaired in them, although in wartime especially upkeep to some extent devolved on the limited facilities of overseas bases. Moreover, decommissioned ships—the ships in Ordinary—which in peacetime were several times more numerous than those in service, were maintained at the royal dockyards. The requirements of an ever-growing fleet—170 ships of twenty guns and upwards in 1739, 271 in 1775, 360 in 1787—made the yards much the largest employer in eighteenth-century Britain. Slightly more than 5,000 workmen of all kinds were employed in 1754; by 1775 the number had risen to more than 7,500 and exceeded 9,500 in 1782 when, due to the demands of war, the number of sixth-rate ships and above was approaching 500.

Recent writing on early modern London offers new perspectives on a wide range of topics. Interest in the literary and cultural is particularly strong, and much attention has been given to John Stow, London's sixteenth-century historian. This review discusses recent work on three themes prominent in Stow's Survey of London (1598), and its later editions: the character of religious life in post-Reformation London; the importance of place and space to the experience of the city; and the question of civic and business morality in a changing world.

In the provincial cities the existence of protected estates like the Calthorpe Estate, which owned and managed Edgbaston in Birmingham, had a strategic influence on the whole development of the city. The owners of such estates, served by solicitors, and themselves serving as patrons of urban parishes, governors of grammar schools and presidents of charitable associations, often provided the backbone of a ‘conservative interest’ in cities whose flavour was essentially radical (Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities, p. 38).

Queen Victoria made important financial concessions to parliament over the course of her reign. She accepted a smaller civil list and a smaller annuity for her consort than had been paid to any of her predecessors. She disclosed the accounts of the duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall, both of which had formerly been considered private property. She also reduced her income by subjecting it to the newly re-instituted income tax. Despite these concessions, she managed to acquire a considerable private fortune. The principal sources of this fortune were improving incomes from the two duchies and better management of the civil list. Both sources benefited from reforms imposed by the prince consort. The queen used her private fortune to pay for items formerly paid for from public funds. She built houses and erected monuments. She paid partly for the golden jubilee and wholly for the debts that accumulated when the civil list became inadequate from the 1880s. Parliament in turn used evidence of her private fortune to decrease the size and number of public grants to her offspring. Thus, increased parliamentary supervision and better regulation of the civil list improved the queen's private financial position, but also reduced the public burdens.

The launch of the East India Company in 1599 relied on the engagement of an investing public. Despite this, little is known about how and why ordinary individual investors chose to invest in the corporation or what institutional frameworks supported them. While the later ‘financial revolution’ would radically alter the relationship between the state, investors, and financial organizations, this process does not adequately explain the earlier development of an investing public. Using a newly developed dataset of members’ familial, neighbourhood, civic, and business connections, this article reconstructs the social networks of East India Company investors in 1599. This analysis reveals that the company was formulated within an intensely interconnected investment environment – linkages that were used to distribute information and provide access to seemingly illiquid markets. Social networks played a key role in how people decided about where, when, with whom, and how much to invest during the expansion of investment opportunities in early modern England.