During the three great nineteenth-century debates on the charter of the East India Company, Whiggery's finest orators arraigned the system of patronage by which the Directors nominated civil servants to appointments in India. In 1813, Lord Grenville, in a speech to which for decades men turned for ‘inspiration and guidance’, advocated the appointment of writers ‘by free competition and public examination from our great schools and universities’. Defeated at the time, the case for the competitive principle was revived twenty years later by Macaulay in an address before the House of Commons which, it was said, would ‘console the young people for never having heard Mr. Burke’. That ‘universal genius’, as Sir Charles Trevelyan, his brother-inlaw, once described him, carried into legislation a plan for selecting by competitive examination the students for Haileybury, the Company's training college for civil servants. Nominees, four times as numerous as the places at the College, would be examined and the best of them enrolled. However, as Macaulay's biographer observed, ‘backstairs influence in Leadenhall Street’ contrived to render the plan inoperative, until ‘backstairs influence in Parliament’ effected its repeal.

This article explores some of the tensions and interaction between two rival conceptions of the relationship between citizenship and patriotism in twentieth-century England. The first was widespread among the intellectual elite and greatly qualified the role of patriotism in sustaining a higher ideal of citizenship. The second was generally the preserve of popular writers and activists who conceived citizenship in terms of patriotic attachment to the English and English-British nation. However, the article maintains that the Edwardian intellectual elite often assumed an homogeneous national culture as the basis of successful citizenship, both local and international. In this regard, despite subjection to increasing strain, continuity as much as change is apparent in conceptions of citizenship up to and including the interventions of Enoch Powell in the debate over mass immigration. Subsequent attempts to ground citizenship in difference rather than sameness have greatly intensified the tension with a more persistent culture of patriotism.

Until about fifteen years ago, most modern scholars saw Edmund Burke's thought largely as a reaction to the philosophical and political rationalism of his time: to them, although Burke was reactive, his revolt was original. When scholars did seek the historical ‘origin’ of his thought, it was generally found in Whiggery and that convenient catch-all ‘the’ British tradition of empiricist philosophizing. Of late, two groups of scholars have sought and found other ‘origins’: the first group, larger and perhaps better-known, finds Burke's thought to be rooted in the principles of ‘the’ natural law and, perhaps, also in the dictates of scholastic prudence; the other group, tiny and less well known, finds in Burke's traditionalism a partial continuation of the traditional way of thinking of seventeenth-century common lawyers. One consequence of undertaking this disinterment of Burke's ‘origins’ has been the burial of Burke's originality.

Despite more than thirty-five years of scrutiny, the British policy of appeasement in the 1930s continues to be the subject of discussion and controversy. The search for explanations of Munich has even been intensified in recent years by the opening of the Cabinet papers. This essay does not pretend to make any contribution to the study of the ‘causes’ of Munich - the motives and determinants of British policy - or to decide the issue between the ‘guilty men’ and the ‘terrible times’ schools of explanation. The ensuing international crisis threw into sharp focus the evolving national interests and diplomatic styles of the European powers and serves as an illuminating case-study of a particular technique of conflict resolution.

In the 1960s a comparative approach, covering different continents and periods of time, was common in the study of witchcraft. During the 1970s it fell out of fashion because of criticism by some anthropologists, and collusion between the disciplines of anthropology and history over the subject more or less ended. In the 1990s, unnoticed by virtually all historians, some anthropologists and sociologists began again to emphasize a global, and interdisciplinary, perspective on the issue. The following article reviews these debates, and then pools research undertaken in various parts of the world to suggest that a supranational model for the figure that English-speakers call the witch is indeed viable. It also distinguishes attributes of the figure that do vary significantly between various cultures, and identifies many peoples among whom the witch-figure does not seem to have existed at all. In doing so, it suggests that anthropology may once again be one of the disciplines with which historians of Europe have the option of collaborating over the subject to mutual benefit.

This article explores the historically specific use of cosmetic commodities as evidence in prosecutions for importuning in interwar London. Taking as its point of departure the story of ‘the man with the powder puff’ told in the journal John Bull in 1925, it moves to consider the discrete but intersecting histories within which cosmetics came to function as a material sign of deviant masculinity, illicit sexuality, and de facto criminality. The process through which a powder puff could be deployed as evidence in court depended upon a particular understanding of sexual difference. It was embedded in the emergence of a vibrant consumer beauty culture in the 1920s. It took shape within the operational practices of the Metropolitan Police, particularly the explosive politics of law enforcement after the First World War. It emerged, finally, in response to profound anxieties about the war's disruptive impact on British culture. In understanding the story of ‘the man with the powder puff’, I argue, we might more fully understand the cultural landscape of post-First World War Britain.

This essay deals with the problem of the roots of Ostrogorski's well-known approach to the problem of political parties, showing that: (1) Ostrogorski's approach is highly dependent on the nineteenth-century debate among the English intelligentsia about a supposed ‘American model’; (2) James Bryce was at the centre of an intellectual network assuming that ‘modern politicsxyr could become the subject of a sort of ‘scientific approach to politics’ more up to date than the traditional one depending on Tocqueville's school; (3) Ostrogorski betrayed Bryce's expectation of a balanced research on the transformation of modern politics because of his dependence on an old-fashioned liberal mind (as evident from his correspondence); (4) this cleavage between the two interpretations of political development was perceived and led to a certain discussion among English and American political scholars (and in this framework Lowell's contribution is peculiarly worthy of attention).

This article recovers Buckinghamshire county council's proposal to build a monorail city for 250,000 residents during the 1960s. The project was eventually taken over by Whitehall, which proceeded to establish Britain's largest new town of Milton Keynes instead, but from 1962 to 1968 local officials pursued their monorail metropolis. By telling the story of ‘North Bucks New City’, the article develops a series of claims. First, the proposal should be understood not as the eccentric creation of a single British county, but rather as one iteration of larger state efforts to manage the densities and distributions of growing populations. Second, while the 1960s witnessed the automobile's decisive triumph as a means of personal mobility in Britain, that very triumph ironically generated critiques of the car and quests for alternatives. Third, the monorail was part of a complex social vision that anticipated – and, in part through the facilitation of recreational shopping, sought to alleviate – a crisis of delinquency expected to result from a world of automation and affluence. Fourth, despite its ‘futuristic’ monorail, the plan ultimately represented an effort by experts and the state to manage social change along congenial lines. Fifth, the proposal advanced a nationalist urbanism, promising renewed global stature for post-imperial Britain by building upon its long urban history. Finally, the article concludes by arguing that this unrealized vision points to the limitations of ‘modernism’ in the history of urban planning, and to the problems of teleology in the history of the 1960s.

On 22 June 1897 the Queen-Empress Victoria drove in splendid, imperial state to St Paul's Cathedral, the ‘parish church of the Empire’ there to give thanks for reaching the sixtieth year of her reign. It was, in life, her supreme moment of apotheosis as the matriarch of Europe and mother-figure of an empire of unprecedented size, power and prosperity. Not only in London, but in towns and villages throughout England and around the world, the celebrations extended. ‘From one end of the land to the other’, recalled one provincial newspaper, ‘and indeed wherever the British flag flies, the day was marked in a special manner.’ ‘Everywhere in the Empire that day’, notes James Morris, ‘statues were being unveiled, garrisons were being inspected, thanksgiving services were being held in thatch-roofed outposts of the Anglican communion.’

This article questions the dominant historiographical approaches to understanding the career of Benjamin Disraeli, which view him either as more opportunistic than most of his political contemporaries or as more ‘continental’ in his outlook. It emphasizes his determination to understand English history and values, and argues that a desire to defend and realize his conception of England gave his career coherence. He saw himself as a foe of dangerous cosmopolitan ideas that were damaging the national character and creating social disharmony. This allowed him to cast all his major political initiatives in a heroic, elitist yet restorative light. He conceived those initiatives as a response to the damage inflicted by the domestic and international crises of the 1830s and 1840s. Indeed it is arguable that as a result Disraeli's political strategy in later life was in some ways both quixotic and outdated.

In 1915 and again in 1917 the British government almost decided to buy out the whole of the licensed liquor trade in the United Kingdom. An examination of the circumstances in which this ambitious proposal was contemplated poses serious questions of interpretation for the historian of the first World War. The episode figures in the historiography of temperance as a missed opportunity to use the power of government to solve a longstanding social problem; this, however, was a minor part of the story. In 1915 state purchase was to have helped to reduce industrial absenteeism, and thus to increase munitions production. In 1917 it was to have conserved foodstuffs and saved shipping during the submarine crisis. It can thus be seen as yet another manifestation of ‘war socialism’: but it has two distinctive characteristics. First, the government had little understanding of the economic and social phenomena which it sought to control by assuming ownership of the liquor trade, though much political effort was put into the manoeuvre. Second, the private interests concerned were quite eager, partly because of pre-war conditions, to be expropriated for their own good as much as for the nation's benefit. It is an unexceptionable part of conventional wisdom that the first World War, like the second, was a major catalyst of change, and especially of state intervention in society. The history of state purchase shows how tenuous and haphazard the causal connexion between war and social change could be. The demands of war were (almost) translated into major state intervention, but the process was mediated by the political mythology of drink, by the operation in the political system of a powerful business pressure group, and by the shifting priorities of governments which subordinated all policy to the need to guide a war economy to victory.

James II's grant of religious toleration and his invitation to the whigs to return to office dramatically changed the English political scene and created profound dilemmasfor the crown's former enemies. Although there is ambiguity in their responses, and although Locke himself remained an immovable exile, his circle offriends took advantage of these changes. This included nomination to James's proposed tolerationist parliament, an accommodation which damaged them in the actual elections to the Convention of 1689. Some took office, and in at least two cases Locke's associates published pamphlets in support of the king. By exploring the politics of the Lockean whigs a contradiction in earlier views is resolved. For whilst Richard Ashcraft has argued that Locke's circle remained unremittingly hostile to James and engaged in clandestine plotting, other sources identify the same people as among the king's ‘whig collaborators’. The chief actors in Locke's circle are Edward Clarke, Sir Walter Yonge, Richard Duke and Richard Burthogge.

Jean Mabillon's De re diplomatica, whose importance for diplomatics and the philosophy of history is well recognized, also contributed to the seventeenth-century European debate over the relationship among documents, archives, and historical or juridical proof. This article juxtaposes early works on diplomatics by Mabillon, Daniel Papebroche, and Barthélémy Germon against German ius archivi theorists including Rutger Ruland and Ahasver Fritsch to reveal two incommensurate approaches that emerged around 1700 for assessing the authority of written records. Diplomatics concentrated on comparing the material and textual features of individual documents to authentic specimens in order to separate the genuine from the spurious, whereas the ius archivi emphasized the publica fides (public faith) that documents derived from their placement in an authentic sovereign's archive. Diplomatics' emergence as a separate auxiliary science of history encouraged the erasure of archivality from the primary conditions of documentary assessment for historians, however, while the ius archivi's privileging of institutional over material criteria for authority foreshadowed European state practice and the evolution of archivistics into the twentieth century. This article investigates these competing discourses of evidence and their implications from the perspective of early modern archival practices.

Recent claims about the convergence in methodology between ‘high politics’ and the ‘new political history’ remain unclear. The first part of this review examines two deeply entrenched misunderstandings of key works of high politics from the 1960s and 1970s, namely that they proposed elitist arguments about the ‘closed’ nature of the political world, and reductive arguments about the irrelevance of ‘ideas’ to political behaviour. The second part traces the intellectual ancestry of Maurice Cowling's thinking about politics, and places it within an interpretative tradition of social science. The formative influences of R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott are examined, and Mark Bevir's Logic of the history of ideas is used to highlight how Cowling's approach can be aligned with ‘new political history’.

This review is intended to examine the development of representations of elves and fairies in British culture between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries. It will argue that a very clear two-stage evolution in those representations can be found in literary sources, from an inchoate range found in different kinds of text, with no apparent collective identity, to a coherent sense of a kingdom, to which the common word ‘fairy’ could be applied, to an intense interest in, and discussion of, the nature of fairies. The first development occurred in the late middle ages, and the second after the Reformation, and both were pan-British phenomena. These literary changes were, moreover, paralleled at each stage, and perhaps responsible for, changes in perception in culture at large. The alterations in representations of these non-human beings, with no clear status in Christian theology, may have wider implications for an understanding of late medieval and early modern cultural history.

Some recent studies have highlighted the importance of sounds for social interaction in the early modern period, yet the consequences for deaf members of society are rarely questioned. Those without the ability to hear lived in a world of sounds controlled by those who heard. This article explores the extent to which the deaf were socially integrated in English society between the mid-sixteenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. It also assesses the disadvantages suffered by those born deaf, or who lost their hearing. Crucial to the discussion is an understanding that experiences were not uniform, as the term deafness covered a wide spectrum of conditions, from temporary hearing loss to profound congenital deafness. Clearly some were more disabled than others, but their disadvantages were more to do with traditional social divisions of wealth and status, rather than the extent of their hearing impairment. Fundamentally, the most inhibiting factor was an inability to apprehend words.

The development of government participation in the support of research is one of the most significant characteristics of nineteenth-century science. As public money became available for science, the social framework of research underwent a profound transformation. This process of transformation is not easy to define, but the response of scientific societies and institutions sometimes provides significant clues.

Case-studies of the circle of Samuel Hartlib, one of the most prolific groups of reformers in post-Reformation Europe, are flourishing. The uncovering of rich details has, however, made it difficult to draw a meaningful generalization about the circle's bewilderingly wide range of activities. Focusing on the circle's promotion of ‘useful knowledge’, this article offers an analytical framework for building a new synthesis. The eclectic and seemingly chaotic pursuit of useful knowledge emerged, it will be shown, as differing responses to, and interpretations of, pervasive distrust and the pursuit of reformation. The article thus explores how loosely-shared experience shaped the circle's ambivalent practices of collaboration and exclusion. The study thereby contributes not only to studies of the Hartlib circle, but also to the historiography of post-Reformation culture and burgeoning studies of trust and credibility in the history of science and technology.