Some years ago my attention was drawn by Professors Paul Kristeller and William Nelson of Columbia University to two manuscripts – one in the Bibliothèque Publique de Besançon and the other in the Escorial – of a text that appeared to be the last work of Stephen Gardiner, a leading conservative churchman, diplomat and publicist in the Henrician period, and, from 1553 until his death in 1555, Mary Tudor's chancellor. The text is in Italian, and is titled Ragionamento dell’advenimento delli inglesi et normanni in Britannia – ‘ A discourse on the coming of the English and Normans to Britain’. The translator, George Rainsford, worked from an English original now lost, and appended to the Gardiner text his own Ritratto d'Ingliterra or ‘Description of England’; he dedicated the composite volume to Philip II, among whose books the Escorial manuscript had been. The dedication is dated 16 March 1556, some four months after Gardiner's death. Both the Gardiner text and the Rainsford appendix have now been published.

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.

In 1896, the Russian empire established a territorial concession in the Chinese treaty port of Hankou. Russian activity in the treaty ports has usually been subsumed into a wider ‘European’ or ‘Western’ presence, the assumption being that the Russian empire copied existing British and French concessions. This article traces the development of the idea of establishing a Russian concession from its inception to the early years of its development. The various arguments made at different stages in this process make clear that the decision was not a simple case of imitation of existing concessions, but was reached in the context of a broader shift in ideas about the proper relationship between economy, nation, and the Russian imperial state.

This article enhances our understanding of the Ford administration's foreign policy by examining how it sought to react to a changed situation in the Asia-Pacific after the fall of Saigon in May 1975. It shows how changes in regional politics forced the administration to adapt to a situation in which allies began to look to the Communist countries for friendship and to reconsider having American forces on their soil. It illustrates this situation by looking at base negotiations in Thailand and the Philippines, and the administration's search for an alternative arrangement in the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. It then reconsiders two crisis situations in the region to examine the relevance of the superpower competition to the administration's responses. This aids our understanding of the role that regional factors played in tactical foreign policy decisions taken by the Ford administration, extending beyond a focus on the superpower competition that has marked the historiography of the administration in the past.

A previously unknown document reveals the authorship of the most important manifesto produced by the Dutch patriot movement of the mid-1780s and shows that it was originally written in French. This document was published in France in 1788 and may have influenced the drafting of the revolutionary Declaration of the rights of man in 1789.

In his article ‘Semantics and historiography’, published in 1953, Richard Koebner invites historians to exploit the benefits which a semantic approach to history readily offers them. A ‘semantic approach’ he defines as a systematic ‘study of the career of political and historical expressions and slogans’. Koebner is convincing when he explains why such a study is so important – indeed indispensable – to historians who do not wish to become ‘victims of destructive ambiguities and…liable to mistake the expressions of popular historical consciousness for historical realities’. There is probably no period in history, Koebner argues, which may not be enlightened by a pursuit of these inquiries; ‘the semantic approach to history has something to reveal in all periods’

Explanations of local interconfessional relations in post-revolutionary England tend to highlight the role of Catholic quiescence and compromise in allowing Protestants and Catholics to ‘get along’. By examining the interactions of a Catholic family who were far from quiescent in their religious and political practice, this article suggests that these explanations may overemphasize the compromise of religious minorities, obscuring the importance of the wider local context to the shape of interconfessional relations. The subjects of this study, the Rookwoods of Stanningfield, Suffolk, were active in expression of Catholic religion and its political implications. Contrary to patterns suggested elsewhere, the social and economic interactions of this family with their neighbours illustrate that such ardent Catholicism was not enough to prevent cordial relations with local Protestants. The social and economic importance of the Rookwoods within their community is used to make suggestions as to why they were accepted on the local level against a backdrop of wider anti-Catholic polemic. The example of the Rookwoods implies a need to explore the broader factors which shaped the underlying balance of power on a local level before it is possible to understand the nature of compromises that allowed for peaceful co-existence.

This article takes a fresh look at the long-running debate on whether the Unionist party owed its electoral success between the Third Reform Act and the Great War predominantly to ‘negative’ factors: principally, low turnout; poor Liberal organization; and a reliable and consistent middle-class vote. Taking advantage of recently digitized election datasets, it conducts the most extensive statistical study thus far attempted, to argue that recent revisionist historians have dismissed too readily the traditional ‘negative Unionism’ thesis associated with J. P. Cornford. It conducts an extensive analysis of the relationship between turnout and Unionist support on national, constituency, and regional levels, and finds that the much-disputed traditional interpretation that Conservatives benefited from low polls in the late Victorian period is broadly borne out in England. Additionally, this article also investigates the wider impact of uncontested constituencies in this period, arguing that the large number of seats left unfought by the Liberals was even more electorally grievous than the raw numbers imply. Both these findings suggest that the Unionists benefited from a still more substantial structural advantage in the late Victorian period than historians have previously assumed. While important aspects of Unionist language and strategy were undoubtedly positive, they were nonetheless underpinned by negative electoral foundations.

The article examines the relationship between quarantine practices and Western European medical notions of the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth-century Mediterranean, as well as the crucial role of quarantine centres in facilitating trade and mobility between the East and the West. I argue that quarantine should be analysed to understand the complexity of the early modern Mediterranean as a shared context that saw both connections and clashes. The first part of the article focuses on Western European ideas concerning the geography of the Mediterranean, medical theories, and related quarantine practices. These theories often presented the ‘healthy’ ‘Christian West’ as opposed to the ‘infidel’ and ‘plagued’ Ottoman Empire. However, the article argues for a more nuanced understanding of the early modern Mediterranean, where both unity and diversity co-existed. Quarantine, despite its association with isolation and the reinforcement of borders, also enabled connections and circulation despite the fear of plague. This article explores quarantine centres as key components of the infrastructure of mobility, with a particular focus on religious diversity, tolerance, and multilingualism. The article also explores the perception of the institution through the eyes of Ottoman passengers, shedding light on their perspectives and attitudes toward quarantine.

The City of London Poor Law Union in the early to mid-Victorian period was the richest and least populated of all the metropolitan Poor Law districts. A wide range of parochial, livery, and other charities within the City not only attracted vast numbers of applicants for assistance, but influenced the quality and nature of the care given by the local union. This not only meant that provision for the outdoor poor, children, and the elderly tended to be more liberal than elsewhere in the capital, but that vagrants, many of whom took up winter residence in the City, also experienced a higher standard of pauper treatment than that offered by the surrounding unions. The combination of high Poor Law receipts from a low poor rate base, civic pride, competition from City charities, and the willingness of neighbouring unions to off-load this most troublesome class of pauper on to their rich neighbour gave an unparalleled level of choice to those who were truly at the bottom of the heap in Victorian London.

In recent years considerable attention has been focused on the role played by the Court and government office in the social and political evolution of Elizabethan and Early Stuart England. Professor Trevor-Roper has treated office under the Crown as a smooth highroad to economic advancement, one of the principal causes of such rise of the gentry as may have occurred. According to this view, the political antecedents of the English Civil War are best interpreted in terms of the polarities of Court and Country: it was reaction against an overgrown and corruptly lucrative Court that inspired the opposition in 1640; it was desire to dismantle the whole centralizing apparatus which inspired the policy of the Independents in the late 1640s and the 1650s. Others, including Professor Aylmer and myself, have subjected officialdom to detailed inspection and have concluded that its rewards were usually modest, especially under Elizabeth and Charles I, its personnel was restricted in numbers, and its more spectacular beneficiaries were a very small minority. The recently published letter of Sir Edward Stanhope to Thomas Viscount Wentworth, advising him to refuse the Deputyship of Ireland in 1631, has cast a flood of light on contemporary attitudes towards the acceptance of at least one high office. Forty-six years before, when Henry Carey, 1st Earl of Hunsdon, was offered the Lord Chamberlainship of the Royal Household, he received a similar letter of warning from a close follower.

Intellectual developments since the mid-1960s have served to assist the efforts of those responsible for American policy in the Vietnam war subsequently to empty the history of that conflict of ethical critique. This article argues for the necessity of ethically informed historical enquiry and, with respect to Vietnam, proposes that there now exists the best opportunity for a generation for scholars to construct a fresh and credible moral history of the war. Increasingly, we have access to the perspectives of the ‘other side/s’: the revolution in the south, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam regime in Hanoi, the People's Republic of China, and the USSR. An examination of the motivations and interactions of these parties, combined with the continuing exegesis of American policy debates, makes clear just how critical concerns (and failures) of ethics were to the development of the conflict. In particular, it clarifies the manner in which US leaders abdicated responsibility in exaggerating the relatively limited strategic challenge that they faced in south-east Asia. Vietnam was not a ‘necessary war’; nor can the decision to fight it – given its predictable consequences for south Vietnamese civilians and American soldiers alike – simply be explained away through the discourse of the honest ‘mistake’.

The causes and consequences of the quarrels between Louis XV and the parlements in the third quarter of the eighteenth century continue to provoke a lively debate amongst historians. In France, the traditional thesis of a reforming monarchy confronted by the selfish obstructionism of the judiciary has many adherents. However, few Anglo-American scholars favour such an interpretation and some have gone as far as to reject the existence of a crisis altogether. Research is also concentrated upon the consequences of these disputes, and their importance to the development not only of parlementaire constitutionalism, but even of a new political culture. In order to contest these conflicting interpretations, this article takes afresh look at the Besançon affair of 1757–1761. In one of the most heated political battles of the reign, thirty judges were exiled from the parlements of Besançon, provoking a lively response from the other parlements, headed by that of Paris. By examining the origins of the dispute in Franche-Comté, and the subsequent reaction of both the government and the Parisian magistrates, this article offers a new picture of the causes of crisis and of how judicial politics actually worked.

The article examines Scottish discussions surrounding the French revolutionary wars in the early and mid-1790s. It argues that these discussions were not built along the lines of the dispute that set Burke against the English radicals, because arguments about French ‘cosmopolitan’ love for mankind were largely irrelevant in the context of Smithian moral philosophy. The Scottish writers who observed French developments in the period (including the Edinburgh Moderates, James Mackintosh, John Millar, and Lord Lauderdale) were, however, particularly interested in what they interpreted as France's changing notion of patriotism, and built upon the heritage of Smithian moral philosophy in order to offer original and powerful commentaries of French national feeling and warfare. They identified the ‘enthusiastic’ nature of French national sentiment, and the replacement of traditional patriotism with a new form of relationship between the individual and the nation, as the most significant and dangerous element to come out of the French Revolution.

The Yorkshire Association of the early 1780's marked the first effective extension of modern political radicalism in Great Britain from the metropolitan region into the provinces. During what may for convenience be described as the first—the Wilkite—phase of British radicalism, in the early 1770's, the focus of the radical movement had lain in and around London. Attempts to stir up the country provoked only a brief response in a very few constituencies. There was little trace anywhere of sustained radical activity. Provincial apathy at the general election of 1774 caused acute disappointment to the metropolitan radicals. Six years later the situation had changed remarkably, and from 1780 till 1784 politics in Yorkshire were dominated, and in the rest of England considerably affected, by that remarkable political phenomenon, the Yorkshire Association. Starting in December 1779, an extraordinary, widespread upsurge of discontent among the members of the ‘upper class’ in the county, provoked by the North ministry's inept handling of the American crisis, first produced the well-supported petition of 1780 for economical reform, and was then channelled and organized into an instrument of agitation for reform of the parliamentary system. The association proper came into being between its adoption at a county meeting on 28 March 1780 and the middle of the following August, when the parchment copies which had been circulated for signature were gathered in and the roll of some 5800 names was compiled from them.

In 1837 leading reformers in a number of England's rapidly growing but still archaically governed industrial cities began to agitate for the incorporation of their boroughs in accordance with the provisions of the Municipal Corporations Act passed two years before. Up until then little interest had been shown in the subject in the provinces, an attitude which is rather easier to understand than the sudden belated burst of enthusiasm. For, even after it had become clear in 1835 that the great reform bill had made some sort of municipal reform inevitable, Tory opponents of the measure had not given way without a struggle. By strictly limiting the powers of the reformed borough councils, by creating a property qualification for councillors, and by requiring the inhabitants of unincorporated cities to petition the Privy Council for a charter rather than, say, providing for automatic incorporation of parliamentary boroughs, they hoped to emasculate what they dared not destroy. In this they were remarkably successful. The borough councils remained hobbled for years because the powers of the variety of trusts which existed in most cities to take care of such things as paving, water supply, cleaning and general improvements were not handed over to the municipal authorities. And largely because of this even many reformers in the proud industrial cities of the north and midlands were often less than enthusiastic about getting a charter for their city. The prospect of replacing narrowly selected Court Leets and Boroughreeves with semi-democratically elected borough councils and mayors was appealing, but it had to be balanced against the fact that these councils would not supersede but merely take their place alongside already existing boards and commissions, with the result that the cost of local government was likely to go up. Looked at in this way there did not seem to be much in it, or at least not enough to make incorporation worth the fighting that would probably be necessary to secure it.

The degree to which England had already adopted or grown into feudalism by the generation before the Norman Conquest is one of the oldest of historical controversies, and one in which the opposing views, having reached something like a stalemate, seem now disposed to concede a measure of recognition to each other's premisses. Recent treatments of the tenth and eleventh centuries are cautious and compromising. They are apt to speak of “nascent feudalism”, or of the Normans’ mission to develop and give precision to a Saxon feudalism which is never clearly delineated, but which is assumed to be far advanced. I would suggest on the contrary that, given the known components of early English law and the admitted difficulty of bringing this hypothetical Saxon feudalism to definition, the proper approach to the subject should be one not of compromise but of scepticism, and that, as no major passage of Saxon politics can be made to bear that surface appearance of baronial motive and interest which the play of Norman feudalism everywhere presents, any phrase or text of Saxon law which can be made to carry a feudal implication should be tested rigorously to see if it is susceptible of no other interpretation before a strictly feudal meaning is imposed upon it. I must confess that no single term or maxim of the English codes or charters having any claim to genuineness has ever seemed to me to bear a feudal connotation.

This article departs from traditional writing on British economic warfare against the Axis during the Second World War by highlighting the efforts made by the British government to evade German ‘counter-blockade’ measures and secure access to European sources of supply. It does so by examining British efforts to obtain Swiss industrial equipment and manufactures after June 1940, when German military success effectively severed normal communications between the two countries. In practical terms, Britain's smuggling operations were enormously successful. Some £1.8m worth of Swiss contraband reached British hands by October 1944. They also, however, exercised considerable influence over the development of Anglo-Swiss relations and Switzerland's relations with its neighbours. In illuminating the scale of Britain's commercial interest in Switzerland after June 1940, the article lends weight to new writing on the Second World War, which emphasizes the neutrals' importance to the war economies and political ambitions of the two belligerent camps.