Recent historians have highlighted the importance of the web of illicit commercial transactions which connected competing imperial networks to create an integrated Atlantic economy but have paid little attention to how co-operation worked across borders. Of necessity, participants acted without the legal institutions which are often afforded a central role in narratives of modernization. In the case of Jamaica, a hub of illicit trade, most merchants found it difficult to survive in this high-risk environment but members of the Sephardic diaspora, a traditional, communitarian group, had competitive advantages which they exploited with vigour. They did not rely on innate attributes of kinship, ethnicity, or religion. They closed entry and built on a favourable historical and geographical legacy to cultivate attributes which maintained high levels of social discipline with credible rewards and punishments which were reinforced by their outsider status. Their competitive advantages did stimulate retaliation but also allowed the Sephardim to combine with the Christian elite to capture rent-seeking opportunities. Far from falling away as modernization gained pace, the Sephardic diaspora survived and flourished by constructing the strong private-order institutions needed in large swathes of the economy where neither impersonal corporations, nor state enforcement mechanisms, were able to manage risk.

The following notes were put together in response to a suggestion that workers in other fields might be interested to hear something of our problems and the solutions we are finding for them. I have addressed myself to such readers and have tried to avoid both the minute and the technical. I have confined myself to four topics largely from considerations of space. An article that covered the whole ground could have been little more than a select bibliography, and what I thought was wanted in this case was an indication of what the books contained. The selected topics have been chosen partly with reference to the amount and importance of the work that has recently been devoted to them, and partly because of their special relevance to the subject in hand. Thus much could have been said of the very interesting development of views as to origins and the pre-conquest period in general or of the important advances that have been made in the understanding of revenue, taxation and finance, but it will probably be agreed that these had to make way for such subjects as constitutional theory and parliament. Reasons for certain other obvious omissions will be given later.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the extent and character of the early legitimist opposition to the Orleanist regime. It seeks to demonstrate the secondary importance of their political loyalties for most of those with a significant material stake and status in the existing society. The basic theme is thus one of the effective formation of a conservative alliance pursuing the politics of selfinterest and prepared to sacrifice its ideals to do so. The cause of the legitimate monarch after 1830 could only have succeeded, and only came close to succeeding, if and when it promised to serve as the most efficient guarantor of social order. It failed because it appeared too concerned with ideology and ideals and not sufficiently with compromise, conservative unity and material progress. Its weakness was evident in 1830 in the manner in which its potential supporters reacted to the change of government.

This article reviews recent research investigating the impact of societal culture on combat performance in the western world during the first half of the twentieth century. It identifies two main strands of historiography. One group of studies has focused on societal culture's influence in shaping the form and functioning of military institutions. A second approach adopted by current scholarship has been to examine societal culture's effect on individual soldiers' resilience and motivation. The article compares and evaluates the results of this research. It concludes that, while sometimes overstressed at other factors' expense, especially combatants' common humanity and the complexity of militaries' own cultures, societal culture has proved to be a subtle yet important influence on martial performance.

On 24 April 1547 the forces of the leading protestant princes in Germany were annihilated at Miihlberg by Charles V, and the political wing of protestantism received a blow from which it never entirely recovered. Events during the preceding year had moved with a startling rapidity. Diplomats had widely expected a drawn contest in the summer of 1546, while John Frederick of Saxony and Philip of Hesse had sent a series of missions to France and England to request the military aid and intervention which might tip the balance decisively against the emperor. The diplomatic experts of the Schmalkaldic League had expected France to take advantage of the emperor's difficulties in Germany. The outbreak of war there might seem to have brought to fruition decades of French efforts to cripple the emperor by embroiling him with his German subjects, and 1546 certainly saw a culmination of French diplomatic activity across the Rhine. Yet the outcome of the frenetic negotiations which accompanied the war showed, on the part of the French, a lack of decisiveness at this critical time which is not easy to explain. Four years before, a grand anti-Habsburg coalition had been the pivotal point of French foreign policy. Now, in 1546, any chances of such a coalition were frittered away in petty negotiations with the English and a marked lack of faith between the French and the Germans.

During the early years of the nineteenth century the distribution of patronage n i Ireland—‘the spoils system’—reflected current English practice, but with peculiarly Irish overtones. The duke of Wellington's observation in 1830 that the government was losing its control of patronage to private members of Parliament may well have been applied to the Irish scene at any time after the Union. The men who benefited from the Irish system were drawn almost exclusively from the Ascendency party, that group of upper class Anglo-Irish Protestants long favoured by law and custom. Their pre-eminence had been assured during the negotiations prior to the Act for the Union of Great Britain and Ireland in 1801. In the same manner that Pitt and Castlereagh had achieved their objective by exploiting Irish ambitions for titles, pensions and sinecures, Ascendency politicians established themselves as the dominating force in domestic politics. Commonly referred to as ‘Irish tones’, these men consistently exalted their special religious and economic needs far above any comprehensive British tory interests. Within the permanent Castle staff their influence was all pervasive. They shared a sense of power and the overriding confidence which characterized generations of Anglo-Irish families. Their satisfaction with ‘Orange’ politics served to compliment their pre-occupation with their own self-interests and the maintenance of the status quo.

Lucca was the smallest and least important of the three Italian republics that survived the Renaissance. Venice and Genoa still command the attention of historians. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for all that it might seem out-of-the-way, Lucca developed an extraordinary political literature. The regular election of senators was marked by the musical performance of a text, generally drawn from Roman history, that illustrated the way citizens of a republic were to behave. The poet and composer were natives and the event was a lesson in citizenship. A close look at the content of these serenades, or operas, makes clear that the republic's motto might have been Libertas but its teaching emphasized constantia. The themes and the heroes of Lucca's political literature were those we associate with neo-Stoicism. The relationship between neo-Stoicism and citizenship in early modern Lucca is the focus of this article. These texts present us with the self-image of an early modern republic and its understanding of what it meant to be a citizen. They are an important source for anyone interested in early modern debates about citizenship and in the political ideas that are conveyed in the commonplaces of baroque visual and musical culture.

Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan offers the fiercest modern indictment against pride. Yet seventeenth-century polemicists and contemporary historians of political theory agree that arrogance is one of Hobbes's stylistic signatures. Does Hobbes, the author, fail to practise the modesty which he preaches to political subjects? Against critical consensus, I argue that Hobbes devises protocols of literary self-presentation consistent with his arguments for modesty. I make this argument by way of a close reading of Hobbes's Latin verse autobiography. Although the autobiography is usually cited as evidence of Hobbes's vanity, I read it as Hobbes's perverse profession of modesty. In the autobiography, Hobbes shuns the role of hero, casting himself as a ‘poor worm’ whose endeavours are motivated by fear. Acute consciousness of mortality, rather than lust for renown, moves Hobbes to philosophize. With this account of the affective springs of his own philosophy, Hobbes redefines the political theorist's vocation. Breaking with traditions that define political theory as a vehicle for heroic self-display, Hobbes defines political theory as a vocation for ordinary mortals.

The emergence of London as a major site of political murder caught the British state by surprise in the early 1970s. Assumptions about assassination – as an event linked to the British empire – built up over seven decades – had to be abandoned in under a decade. The change in Britain's understanding of its vulnerability within the international system was traumatic. This change took place in three stages, beginning in 1971, 1978, and 1984. There were strong elements of continuity between the Callaghan government and the first Thatcher government. It was the second Thatcher government that made a more radical break with the past. A new understanding of assassination conspiracies altered fundamentally the state's approach to security.

On 10 May 1791 the British house of commons was divided on an unsuccessful attempt to move the repeal of the Test Act as it applied to Scotland. Since then this has been one of the more neglected of the many religious issues which were deeply embedded in late eighteenth-century British politics. It might be described as the ‘Scottish sequel’ to the movement in 1787–90 for the general repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. Yet it had its own distinctive features and reverberations which were by no means confined to Scotland. It is proposed here to examine the background, nature, progress and outcome of the Scottish application, to consider how it differed from the events of 1787–90, to investigate the role of its sponsor and leading parliamentary advocate Sir Gilbert Elliot and to look closely at the voting on the subject of the Scottish M.P.s. The aim will then be to consider the episode against the background of contemporary parliamentary politics.

Sidney and Beatrice Webb, in their book The State and the Doctor, which was submitted in the first instance as a memorandum to the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws in 1909, dismiss the work of the free dispensaries and medical missions in one short paragraph.

During the 1670s, the navy was the focus of increasingly critical scrutiny from parliament and the political nation. This article considers the causes and nature of this criticism, which had its roots in the perceived dominance of the catholic James, duke of York, in the field of naval appointments, and examines the political context of the various inquiries into the state of religious affection in the fleet. By so doing, the article identifies a dilemma which confronted the crown's opponents in the period 1678–81, namely the conflict between the requirement for a strong navy to oppose France and the risk that, because of York's influence over it, that same navy might in fact be an instrument of French and catholic designs. Finally, the response of the officers and men of the navy to the events of the popish plot, exclusion crisis and ‘tory reaction’ is examined, placing the navy in the mainstream, rather than on the periphery, of the political and religious history of the period.

The Action Française dates from 1898—the year when the agitation for the revision of the trial of Dreyfus was at its height—and was an offshoot of the Ligue de la Patrie Française, one of the many anti-Dreyfusard organisations. The leaders of the Patrie Française having announced that in their agitation against Dreyfus they would do nothing illegal, the more extreme members, led by Henri Vaugeois, seceded and founded the Action Française, declaring that where the salvation of the country was at stake they would stick at nothing.