The events of 1857 etched themselves deeply into the consciousness of the British in India. Throughout the remaining years of British rule the lessons of the Mutiny were never forgotten; indeed they provided the constant backdrop against which British policy was enacted. To a large extent this experience played a decisive role in recasting the whole direction of British policy. Its impact on policy toward the native Indian states was sharp, and lasting in its effects. Canning realized that the native states were ‘break-waters to the storm which would otherwise have swept over us in one great wave’, and he henceforward, by his grant of the right of adoption, committed Britain to their maintenance.1 This post-Mutiny solicitude for the native states stands in obvious contrast with the deprecatory, if not avowedly annexationist, policy of Canning's predecessors.

James I succeeded to the English throne not by act of parliament, not by election, not by the will of his predecessor, but by the will of God in making him an heir. The right by which he ruled was accordingly not less than divine. Further, partly by the circumstances of his succession but in greater measure by the tradition of English public law, he exercised his rule as the absolute king of a free monarchy. On this all Englishmen were agreed. They seem to have taken great pride in the fact that their king had no superior on earth. They shared, as his free subjects, in his greatness. At this time most Europeans did not belong to politically independent nations.

During Italy's ‘two red years’ (1919–20), left-wing catholics challenged the authority of the church and the landowners in large areas of northern Italy. Calling themselves the estremisti (the extremists), left catholic unions organized peasants and workers in land and farm occupations and encouraged a series of radical strikes. Left catholic leaders became national figures, in particular Guido Miglioli at Cremona and Romano Cocchi at Bergamo. This article examines these innovative struggles and their troubled relationship with the traditional socialist Italian left during this turbulent period. No alliances were formed between the estremisti and the ‘red’ unions until 1921–4, when fascism was already rampant and the revolutionary wave had already subsided. The article analyses why alliances were not built earlier, and why the socialists were so hostile towards the catholic left. Both the theory and the practice of the traditional left prevented any positive appraisal of the estremisti. In addition, there are detailed accounts of the extraordinary mass movements inspired by Cocchi and Miglioli in some of the richest and most staunchly catholic regions of northern Italy.

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 explores the actions of Prince Charles in the parliaments of 1621 and 1624. It discusses his role in the electoral process, his activities in parliaments, and the legislation which affected his interests. It begins by exploring the precedents for the heir to the throne being summoned to parliament, before examining his political apprenticeship in 1621, and how his actions in 1624 reveal the difficulties in controlling the reversionary interest. Throughout the two parliaments, Charles was an active participant, taking part in debates in the House of Lords, committee meetings, joint conferences, and in liaising between the king and parliament. The article concludes by suggesting that Charles, although successful in achieving some of his aims, believed that he had been able to manipulate parliament for his own ends when in fact the tide of events ran with him and deluded him. This led to a false assumption that he could control parliament – a notion which had disastrous consequences when he summoned his own parliaments after he had succeeded to the throne in 1625.

The central place occupied by Russia in the calculations of British statesmen after the Seven Years War has long been realized. For ministers in search of a ‘system’ on the continent to set against Choiseul's threatening Système du Midi, alliance with Catherine II seemed to offer an obvious means of providing for Britain's future security. The quest for alliance with St Petersburg, indeed, formed the leitmotif of British foreign policy in the age of the American Revolution. Negotiations with Russia went on infinitely longer, and were pursued with considerably more vigour on the British side, than any comparable discussions for a continental alliance. Even before the treaties of peace were signed in 1763, Britain had made the first move in the direction of St Petersburg, and the negotiations thus initiated continued intermittently for a whole decade. Only in the late spring of 1773 did the British government finally and reluctantly concede that, without a subsidy (which London had long refused to countenance), no firm commitment could be hoped for from Russia.

Focusing on the Franconian margraviates of Brandenburg around 1500, this study argues that the process of state formation engendered an elite of nobles who derived their power and status from the possession of high office. It shows, however, that as the state expanded, and the princely debt mounted, the relationship between ruler and noble elite was transformed: the leading nobles came to control more and more of the state in terms of offices and share of the public debt. To secure themselves in this elevated but unstable position they developed a dense network of marriage alliances among themselves. By the early sixteenth century this consortium of eminent nobles acquired a powerful hold on the princely state to the detriment of the princes and the exclusion of fellow nobles. The article suggests that it is against this background that the notorious deposition in 1515 of Margrave Friedrich by his sons should be seen: his overthrow was, among other things, an outcome of a change in the balance of power between prince and nobles that had been taking place since 1450. Finally, this change played a part in the creation of the Imperial Knighthood by which the nobles constitutionally placed themselves outside the princely states.

Factionalism among the nobility and gentry was a common although by no means universal phenomenon of local politics in Tudor England. During the 1560s it was the foremost fact in the political life of Hampshire. Co-operation among the gentry is at least as significant a phenomenon for the historian as conflict. At the same time conflict is much more likely to have left documen tation. The amiable resolution of local issues would usually be celebrated by silence while a dispute was likely to culminate in a lawsuit. For Hampshire in the 1560s the survival of one of the earliest and most fully preserved disputed election cases in Star Chamber from the reign of Elizabeth provides crucial evidence of the occurrence of conflict and the motivations of the participants. Thanks to the existence of this material, which includes lists of voters for both sides, the members of both factions are clearly identified. In addition the local issues at stake are further clarified. As a result all of the evidence surviving for the entire decade can be tied together to produce a comprehensive picture of the local political situation in Hampshire.

The English occupation of Tournai has recently generated far-reaching claims about its importance; allegedly Tournai provided a foretaste of certain developments of the Henrician Reformation. This article argues that Tournai was treated as an integral part of Henry VIII's ‘kingdom of France’ and its status consistently distinguished from that of the English kingdom. It was not, as has been suggested, granted representation in the English parliament. The argument that advanced ideas of ‘sovereignty’ derived from fifteenth-century French thought entered into English political discourse through Tournai is also countered. Important jurisdictional points were raised, notably over the administration of the bishopric, involving three powers, England, France, and the Habsburg government of Flanders. But Henry's insistence on his rights as a sovereign prince were directed against France, not, as has been claimed, against the papacy. Nothing in Henry's dealings with Tournai transcended well-established English doctrine and practice about the relationship between the political authority and the church. Nor did Henry's treatment of the conquered town evoke novel doctrines of royal power; it followed closely precedents set by Henry V. The conquest of Tournai increased the self-confidence of Henry VIII's government in both domestic and international affairs; but largely through Henry's belief that he was successfully emulating the military achievement of Henry V, not through any input of novel political doctrine.

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.

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.

In 1591 Julius Caesar, then judge of the High Court of Admiralty, initiated ‘ an important experiment…in the Admiralty court's continuing quest for greater respect and authority’. Despite high expectations on the part of Caesar, however, the experiment, a circuit of the west and southwest of England undertaken ‘in hopes of forcing the local authorities in those regions to submit to the supremacy’ of the Admiralty, was abortive. Caesar, beset by corrupt local officials and profiteering inhabitants, abandoned his circuit when only half completed and after obtaining results far less than he had anticipated. Caesar's failure, according to Lamar Hill, the historian of the ill-fated experiment, was not merely that of one Westminster bureaucrat unable to impose his authority in the provinces.

Barclays: the business of banking, 1690–1996. By Margaret Ackrill and Leslie Hannah. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xxi+481. ISBN 0-521-79035-2. £45.00.

The worlds of the East India Company. Edited by H. V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002. Pp. xvii+246. ISBN 0-85115-877-3. £45.00.

Kingship and crown finance under James VI and I, 1603–1625. By John Cramsie. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2002. Pp. xi+242. ISBN 0-86193-259-5. £50.00.

Mammon's music: literature and economics in the age of Milton. By Blair Hoxby. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Pp. xii+320. ISBN 0-300-09378-0. $45.00.

Usury, interest, and the Reformation. By Eric Kerridge. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Pp. 206. ISBN 0-7546-0688-0. £55.00.

The rise of commercial empires: England and the Netherlands in the age of mercantilism, 1650–1770. By David Ormrod. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xvii+400. ISBN 0-521-81926-1. £55.00.

The rhetoric of credit: merchants in early modern writing. By Ceri Sullivan. London: Associated University Presses, 2002. Pp. 217. ISBN 0-8386-3926-7. £38.00.

The unshackling of the European economy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries was achieved, ironically, by the forging of new and stronger chains of trade and credit within nations, across regions, and around the globe. The seven books under review explore that process from different disciplinary standpoints, but chiefly as it affected England, the country that would become emblematic of commercial advancement and under whose sway the modern capitalist system emerged. How England managed this feat financially and commercially, politically and culturally, amidst the shifting opportunities and perils of these centuries is answered with an often impressive sophistication and imagination that take us well beyond hackneyed analyses prompted by the Weber–Tawney thesis.

This article questions the assumption that the earl of Cork was at the forefront of the attack on the earl of Strafford in England. It is argued that, before the opening of the Long Parliament, Cork had much to gain by securing Strafford's favour because of his continuing need to secure his Irish estates and his increasing social ambitions within the English court. The earl's decision to stand as witness against the lord lieutenant in 1641 was made with great reluctance, and the trial itself was fraught with unexpected dangers for Cork as well as Strafford. Throughout the crisis of 1638–41, the earl of Cork was motivated by political and financial concerns, not by a single-minded hatred of the earl of Strafford.

The general election of 1885 has been described as ‘the nearest point ever attained to the accomplishment of disestablishment in England’; and it is a curious fact that the very considerable part played by the Church question in this election has largely escaped notice. For this the suddenness with which the issue of Irish Home Rule came to dominate the political scene after the election is primarily responsible. Yet for all its brevity - it was effectively only during the last few weeks of an extended election campaign that the controversy over disestablishment became dominant — the agitation over the question was both fierce and ferocious; and was closely bound up with the name of Joseph Chamberlain.

The law of 21 March 1884, which legalized the formation of syndicats for the defence of ‘economic, industrial, commercial and agricultural interests’, was not intended to apply to civil servants. They were not thought to have such interests. There was, it is true, some dispute as to which categories of public employees were covered by this legal prohibition, and the Chamber of Deputies maintained in 1894 that the law applied to workers in industrial enterprises run by the state. But governments steadfastly refused to allow postal officials or schoolteachers, for instance, the right to form syndicats. They did not, however, contest their right to form associations under the law of 1 July 1901, and conflict became acute in the period after 1905 as these associations began to transform themselves into syndicats or to claim rights associated with the syndicat The postal strikes in Paris in 1909 and the rail strike of 1910 were particular causes célèbres