In 1546 the members of Lincoln's Inn beheld a most peculiar sight in their communal hall. The traditional midsummer light of St John had been replaced with the ridiculous head of a horse. Three young members were charged by the benchers. Two who refused to confess were expelled from the house and imprisoned in the Fleet by the lord chancellor, Thomas Wriothesley, and Sir Roger Cholmley, the chief baron of the Exchequer and a former bencher. The other culprit, who confessed and made humble suit to the bench, was merely excluded from commons. After the inevitable petitions, all were forgiven ‘their said lewd and nowghtie mysdemeanours’ and shortly remitted into the house.

The wars in Ireland in 1689–91 have attracted considerable attention from historians, most recently in the fine study by Dr Simms, but what happened in Ireland while James II was still on the English throne has been comparatively neglected. One major reason is that evidence on this period is patchy and often unreliable. Of the state papers, the last letter in the Public Record Office from one of James's chief governors is dated 31 August 1686, although the second earl of Clarendon's own copies of his letters while lord lieutenant continue until his return to England early in 1687. Only a handful of Tyrconnel's letters from this period survive. Copies of Irish letters sent by James and his secretary of state, the earl of Sunderland, can be found in the secretaries' letter books, but copies of their more confidential letters were not entered. Sunderland was careful to destroy incriminating material at the Revolution, so much of what survives is routine and innocuous. For the rest, the Ormond papers, a mine of information for half a century of Irish history, peter out after 1686. Thomas Sheridan's ‘Narrative’ is well informed and, I think basically reliable, but its usefulness is reduced by its imprecise chronology. Strict control of the press in 1685–8 ensured that few pamphlets of Irish interest were published, while few of those produced after 1688 have much other than polemic to offer the historian of James's reign.

On returning to England in 1900 after an absence of some thirty-two years, James Ford Rhodes was much surprised by a number of changes he observed, and more particularly by the novel attitude of a number of newspapers and journals which had previously reflected more traditional assumptions and beliefs. Radicals, from Paine and Cobbett, Bentham and the Mills to Cobden, Bright and the Manchester School had traditionally identified America as the precursor of the new millennium. In contrast to this radical tradition was a conservative counter-theme that insisted that within its revolutionary and republican origins lay the seeds of American self-destruction. All such convictions seemed confirmed by the civil war, and The Times under Delane – the apogee of this conservative tradition – continued to prophesy the imminent collapse of the Union throughout most of the war. Yet in 1901 Rhodes noticed a far more sympathetic approach to American matters by the conservative Times and Spectator, and their formerly denigrating tone now echoed ironically in the pages of the radical Speaker. The purpose of this article is to try to explain some of the intellectual origins of this fundamental realignment, with reference to changing English interpretations of the American race, of the American revolution and of the American constitution, particularly as reflected in James Bryce's American Commonwealth, the classic exposition of this reinterpretation. This realignment was effected by a small body of academics, jurists and intellectuals whose writings in learned journals, legal textbooks and works of comparative politics lacked extensive appeal.

This is a study of a colonial situation in its making, at ground level. It offers an analysis of a forcible process of political accumulation, the means whereby their British conquerors came to terms with the peoples of western Kenya, and a prerequisite for the pursuit of capital accumulation, the appropriation of economic resources from the native peoples of Kenya to the benefit of its British colonists. The case of western Kenya offers no paradigm for the European occupation of the rest of the African continent. Nor can any other case. The relative weights of subjugation and accommodation, of rupture and continuity within conquest – of such great influence on the structure and texture of the colonial era which followed – were governed by too many variables. Brief mention of only four of them will be enough to indicate some of the pitfalls of generalization, even generalization about difference.

The mutual antipathy which arose between Ramsay MacDonald and Arthur Henderson during the First World War is often acknowledged to the point of exaggeration. Historians have however done little more than to note its presence and attempt to minimize its importance to the party's development; they have rarely sought to investigate its causes. During the war the strains in their relationship lay not in any long-standing personal mistrust and cannot be explained by Henderson's acceptance of office in the Asquith and Lloyd George coalitions or MacDonald's unremitting opposition to government policy. They lay in the fact that both men believed the other to have abandoned the Labour party in its hour of crisis. That crisis occurred between August and October 1914 in the first instance and this article will argue that the debate over the future of the Labour party and of the trade union movement which occurred during that period, rather than concern for the fate of the nation, determined the decisions taken by MacDonald and Henderson, by the parliamentary Labour party (P.L.P.), and by the wider Labour movement in the first months of war.

Successive governments in Britain took great steps towards a more democratic form of government between 1911 and 1928. Universal suffrage, first proposed tentatively by a government in the former year, was completed in the latter. In the same period, the house of lords - the rejuvenation of which was treated at least nominally as vital by both the Liberal government and the Conservative opposition in 1911 - was effectively relegated even by Conservatives to an unimportant role. The attitudes and policies of Conservative politicians towards these changes deserve study for diverse reasons. They were part of a national debate about the wisdom of progress towards democracy; and so they form an important chapter in the development of political attitudes. They also do much to explain both how the process of democratization occurred, and how post-war governments viewed the electorate, as Conservatives participated in or dominated governments for most of the years from 1915 to 1945. Finally, the importance of Conservative views has been overlooked by historians, because they have persistently pre-dated the trend to democracy in Britain and so underestimated the scale of controversy about it. These historiographical tendencies are illustrated by the still lingering myth that the franchise before 1914 was close to manhood suffrage, or by the hitherto general assumption that the reform bill of 1917–18 was uncontroversial.

In December 1930 Sir Victor Wellesley, the deputy under secretary at the Foreign Office, and its expert on Far Eastern finance, circulated a 29-page ‘Proposal for the establishment of a Politico-Economic Intelligence Department in the Foreign Office.’ This memorandum was prompted by the growing importance of tariffs, and various forms of investment, as instruments of foreign policy, and concern at his colleagues' failure to understand the political consequences. With economic nationalism in the ascendant, Wellesley recognized that Britain soon would have to consider whether she would ‘take part in the scramble for economic hegemony’. He hoped Cabinet would decide against tariffs and imperial preference, but was worried that the Foreign Office would be ill-equipped to defend this viewpoint. It was not that the Office lacked adequate sources of economic information, but rather that the division of duties between the Department of Overseas Trade and the Foreign Office precluded their assimilation with political appreciations. Although seventy five per cent of the work of the average mission was economic or commercial, this was generally left to the commercial counsellor, who reported directly to the Department of Overseas Trade. Political dispatches were forwarded to the appropriate Foreign Office department and there examined in virtual isolation. Moreover, the dominant attitude of mind among senior diplomats was, if not actually predisposed against economic work, at least so lacking in understanding that their efforts were often misdirected.