This article uses the broad concept of ‘improvement of minds’ to refer to the idea of improving people's sense of morality, their ability and willingness to reason, and the depth of their emotional experiences. Such an objective has been little explored in the context of the history of the British Labour party. Yet, discussion of it is worth integrating into histories of the party for two reasons. First, the goal of improving minds was a strand – though often unsystematically developed – in the agendas of many Labour party politicians, activists, and thinkers. Secondly, the very fact that it was an unsystematically developed strand, the very limits of the party's attention to, and success in achieving, ‘mental progress’ amongst the twentieth-century British population – that is to say, simply, the limits to the party's pursuit and achievement of the objective of making people more caring, rational, and sensitive – is one important explanation for many of Labour's failures. The article begins to explore the aims, processes, and outcomes of Labour's attempts to improve minds, as well as to explain and examine the consequences of the limits of the party's attention to this goal, through the case study of Tony Crosland.

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.

This article examines the history of the German Fürstenbund prior to the Prussian take-over of the scheme in 1785. In charting the union's initial conception as a small-state alliance designed to resist both Prussian and Austrian expansionism, the article reveals the cultural dimension of imperial diplomacy. Exclusive concentration on the straightforward diplomatic sources produced by Prussian-style bureaucracies has led historians to underrate the contribution of smaller German principalities, which typically employed more indirect, metaphorical means of political communication. A prominent example of such ‘cultural politics’ is the process by which Prince Franz of Anhalt-Dessau drew on English precedents in shaping the Fürstenbund. Its participants were to be united not just by formal agreements, but by a shared spirit. Under the leadership of a ‘Patriot king’, they were to act as champions of ancient regional liberties, thus resembling the English aristocrats of the anti-Walpole opposition whom Franz admired. At the same time, an English-inspired rhetoric of sentimentalism was employed to suggest that this political union would function in analogy with sentimental friendships, creating a firmer bond whilst preserving that small-state ‘individualism’ which was the source of so many reform initiatives in the late eighteenth-century German Empire.

Recent developments in the history of modern Britain have led to the emergence of a history of intimacy, whether or not it is recognized as such. This historiographical review argues that intimacy is a useful category of historical analysis. Thinking in terms of inter-relationships between different forms of intimacy allows us to think with greater conceptual clarity about these forms, as well as types of intimacy that are difficult to categorize. The first section reviews recent and significant contributions to the literature and seeks to draw out existing connections and crosscurrents between subfields. The second section turns to recent work on the histories of selfhood and the emotions and considers what thinking about intimacy might add to these fields; it then builds on this recent work to propose that one way to ‘do’ the history of intimacy is to think in terms of ‘intimate practices’.

The period from 1550 to 1640 saw a tremendous rise in the amount of litigation initiated in England. Although the pattern of this great expansion is known, its social meaning is not yet clear. Litigation has, paradoxically, been interpreted as both the barometer of a breakdown in social relations, or alternatively as a functional means of dispute settlement. Here this problem will be addressed by placing the initiation of litigation within the context of the social practices and events which led to disputes, and also by looking at how contemporaries reacted to, and interpreted these events, both publicly and privately. Most litigation arose out of economic disputes concerning credit and contracts, and this was a result of the growth of marketing in the period. Such disputes were seen as threatening to the social order, and were something which contemporaries took very seriously. The primary means of dealing with disputes was to attempt to initiate a community negotiated Christian reconciliation between the disputing parties in order to maintain social peace and concord. But as the market grew more complex, and disputes became more difficult to resolve, increasingly the authority of the law had to be invoked. This in turn led to the development of a more pessimistic language of social relations which stressed that any form of positive sociability could only be maintained under an institutional umbrella created by the threat of authority. As a result, community relations and reconciliation, although still defined in terms of Christian love and charity, came to be seen as more functional than normative because of the massive interjection of the civil law into day to day life.

This article considers the intersection between polite manners and company in eighteenth-century England. Through the laughter of gentlemen, it makes a case for a concept of occasional politeness, which is intended to emphasize that polite comportment was only necessary on certain occasions. In particular, it was the level of familiarity shared by a company that determined what was considered appropriate. There was unease with laughter in polite sociability, yet contemporaries understood that polite prudence could be waived when men met together in friendly homosocial encounters. In these circumstances, there existed a tacit acceptance of looser manners that might be called ‘intimate bawdiness’, which had its origins in a renaissance humanist train of thought that valorized wit as the centrepiece of male sociability. This argument tempers the importance of politeness by stressing the social contexts for which it was – and was not – a guiding principle. Ultimately, it suggests that the category of company might be one way of rethinking eighteenth-century sociability in a more pluralistic fashion, which allows for contradictory practices to co-exist. As such, it moves towards breaking down the binary oppositions of polite and impolite, elite and popular, and theory and practice that have been imposed on the period.

Histories of the late Victorian working-class family focus overwhelmingly on mothers. When men feature in family dynamics, it is within the context of their obligation to provide. Despite the familiarity of this model of family life, it is problematic, not least because it is partial. Written from a women's history perspective, such analyses have inevitably, and understandably, focused on the ‘dark side’ of breadwinning and privileged women's experiences as wives and mothers. Further, they have tended to make husbands synonymous with fathers. Drawing on working-class autobiography, this article revisits the cliché of the ‘good provider’ to suggest that children could invest the normative paternal obligation to provide with intimate and individual meaning, reimagining breadwinning as an act of devotion that distinguished particular father–child relationships within a context of more general working-class values. It does not suggest that women were not oppressed by the breadwinner ideal, or that attachment to mothers and fathers was the same. Rather, it calls for recognition of the fluidity of a sexual division of affective labour whereby, in memory at least, fathers' obligation to provide could be deeply embedded within an understanding of the emotional dynamics of everyday life.

While recent work has shown that interwar Asian civic associational culture was becoming more plural than previously understood, scholars focus mostly on transnational networks and neglect local associations co-existing in the colonial urban space. We also know little about how internationalist and liberal ideals interacted with notions of racial and national exclusion prevalent in the wider society. To overcome this, this article examines local organizations alongside transnational networks in interwar Hong Kong to understand fully how global trends in the interwar period affected colonial civic culture. Drawing on Freemasonry, Rotary, the League of Fellowship, and the Kowloon Residents’ Association, I discuss the aspirations of multi-racial urbanites in interwar Hong Kong and their limits. I argue that, while internationalism and colonial hierarchies allowed solidarity to be forged amongst multi-racial urbanites and encouraged their civic engagements, racism embedded in the society, rising nationalism, and constitutional constraints put limitations on their aspirations.

Why people trust is a question that has preoccupied scholars across many disciplines. Historical explorations of trust abound, but we know relatively little about the workings of trust in the history of investment. Despite becoming increasingly mediated and institutionalized in the nineteenth century, the market for stocks and shares remained local and embedded in personal relations to a significant extent. This created a complex trust environment in which old and new forms of trust co-existed. Investors sought information from the press, but they also relied upon friends to help them navigate the market. Rather than studying trust in the aggregate, this article argues that focusing on the particular allows us to appreciate trust as an emotional and ultimately imaginative process depending as much on affective stories as rational calculation. To this end, it takes the case of a Bath clergyman and workhouse schools inspector, James Clutterbuck, who solicited investments from a wide network of friends and colleagues in the 1880s and 1890s. By capturing the complex interplay of friendship, emotions, and narrative in the formation of trust, the article offers a window onto everyday financial life in late Victorian provincial England.

We are currently witnessing the emergence of global humanitarianism as a fully fledged historical field. Eighteenth-century transatlantic abolitionists, nineteenth-century imperial missionaries, twentieth-century aid workers, and twenty-first-century activists inhabit the pages of more and more published books and articles. Global humanitarianism denotes a sphere of action as well as an object of study. Questions as to where or what the global is persist. The books under review all operate within the sphere of Western influence: North America, the British empire, or former colonies. They also have similar protagonists. They are largely populated with practitioners of humanitarianism, rather than the objects of their beneficence. This raises some questions. Where does global humanitarianism take place and who does it encompass? Is global humanitarianism inherently enmeshed with Western expansionism and unequal power dynamics?