John Graunt's analysis of the London Bills of Mortality of 1662 is famous as a pioneering contribution to the study of human populations. But comparatively little attention has been given to his highly influential discovery that the numbers of men and women were evenly balanced. Why did Graunt think that what we now call the sex ratio was important, and why did he see it as essential to contradict received opinion? What can we deduce about Graunt's own attitudes to women? Why was he concerned to discredit polygamy? Further investigation suggests, not that Graunt shared the misogyny of many of his contemporaries, but that he was motivated by the dangers inherent in his own shifting religious views, which included Socinianism and anti-Trinitarianism. The religious controversialist Bernardino Ochino can be detected as a dark influence behind Graunt's thinking. An exploration of Graunt's cultural hinterland confirms that men did indeed believe that they were outnumbered by women, a conviction accentuated by the unnerving upheavals of religious conflict, plague, and civil war, and apparently confirmed by prophecy. Seventeenth-century misogyny seems to present itself to us as qualitative, but it included a numerical dimension which was in effect culturally determined.

Under pressure from the anti-slavery interest in the House of Commons, the British Government undertook, in 1823, to reform West Indian slavery and prepare the slaves for eventual freedom. This policy of amelioration was based on the assumption that the West Indian planters would co-operate with the British Government to improve slave conditions. As George Canning explained to the House of Commons, ‘The masters are the instruments through whom, and by whom, you must act upon the slave population.’ Ten years later the reform programme was abandoned in favour of abolition. This change of policy reflected, in part, the conversion of officials at the Colonial Office who began to urge the need for emancipation in 1831. For eight years the Colonial Office made persistent efforts to induce the co-operation of the West Indian planters; these attempts failed and a mass of evidence accumulated which suggested that the slave system could not be improved, it could only be abolished. This article demonstrates the efforts made by the Colonial Office to effect amelioration in the legislative colonies with particular reference to Jamaica and the nature of the evidence which demonstrated that emancipation was the only viable solution to the problem of West Indian slavery.

The outbreak of the First World War in Europe and the subsequent Ottoman–German alliance presented Great Britain with some severe dilemmas as to her interests in the Middle East as well. Striving to consolidate their position in the Middle East should a war against the Ottomans become inevitable, the British began to search for local allies. In the Arabian Peninsula, three rulers emerged as potential allies: the Sharif Husayn, the guardian of the Holy Places in the Hijāz on behalf of the Ottoman sultan; the Idrisi Sayyid of 'Asīr, the area south of the Hijāz and north of Yemen; and 'Abd al-'Azīz Ibn Saud, the Amir of Najd, who became a Persian Gulf coastal ruler in May to 1913 by virtue of his occupation of Hasa the coastal strip stretching from Kuwayt to the base of the Qatar peninsula.

‘To me he was always the embodiment of Cavalier romance.’ Thus Vita Sackville-West on her seventeenth-century ancestor, Edward Sackville, fourth earl of Dorset. Such labelling indicates the problems which still bedevil any study of Civil War royalism. Brian Wormald's Clarendon brilliantly revealed that the men who joined Charles I in 1642 represented a broad range of opinion. Above all, he made us aware of a coherent group of moderate (‘constitutional’) royalists who throughout sought accommodation. There was a palpable difference of strategy between these people, who favoured royal concessions in order to prevent further military initiatives, and others who favoured military initiatives in order to prevent further royal concessions. Within these two basic matrices, there were further subtle inflections of attitude between individuals and within the same individual over time. But many such inflections remain murky. Wormald's lead was never followed through. Charles's supporters have consistently received less attention than those who remained with parliament; and among the royalists, moderates have attracted fewer studies than ‘cavaliers’ and ‘swordsmen’. There is thus an urgent need to clarify different varieties of royalism and especially to bring the constitutional royalists into sharper focus. However, before we can assess their wider aims and impact, we must first identify them; and here the inappropriate labels bestowed on so many of Charles's supporters create real problems. Anne Sumner has recently ‘de-mythologized’ John Digby, first earl of Bristol, revealing him as more complex and less intemperate than the ‘hawk’ of legend.

Beyond the repression of the national waves of food rioting during the subsistence crises of the 1790s, workers in the English countryside lost the will and ability to mobilize. Or so the historical orthodoxy goes. Such a conceptualization necessarily positions the ‘Bread or Blood’ riots of 1816, the Swing rising of 1830, and, in particular, the agrarian trade unionism practised at Tolpuddle in 1834 as exceptional events. This article offers a departure by placing Tolpuddle into its wider regional context. The unionists at Tolpuddle, it is shown, were not making it up as they went along but instead acted in ways consistent with shared understandings and experiences of collective action and unionism practised throughout the English west. In so doing, it pays particular attention to the forms of collective action – and judicial responses – that extended between different locales and communities and which joined farmworkers, artisans, and industrial workers together. So conceived, Tolpuddle was not an exception. Rather, it can be more usefully understood as a manifestation of deeply entrenched cultures, an episode that assumes its historical potency because of its subsequent politicized representations.

It is curious that in the abundant literature produced in the greatest democracy of Greece there survives no statement of democratic political theory. All the Athenian political philosophers and publicists whose works we possess were in various degrees oligarchic in sympathy. The author of the pamphlet on the ‘Constitution of the Athenians’ preserved among Xenophon's works is bitterly hostile to democracy. Socrates, so far as we can trace his views from the works of Xenophon and Plato, was at least highly critical of democracy. Plato's views on the subject are too well known to need stating. Isocrates in his earlier years wrote panegyrics of Athens, but in his old age, when he wrote his more philosophical works, became increasingly embittered against the political régime of his native city. Aristotle is the most judicial in his attitude, and states the pros and cons, but his ideal was a widely based oligarchy. With the historians of Athens, the same bias is evident. Only Herodotus is a democrat, but his views have not carried much weight, partly because of his reputation for naïveté, and partly because his explicit evidence refers to a period before the full democracy had evolved. Thucydides is hostile: in one of the very few passages in which he reveals his personal views he expresses approval of a régime which disfranchised about two-thirds of the citizens, those who manned the fleet on which the survival of Athens depended. Xenophon was an ardent admirer of the Spartan régime.

It is now more than twenty years since Peter Laslett argued that the Exclusion controversy and not the Revolution of 1688 was the occasion of the composition of Locke's Two treatises. Nevertheless, scholarly interpretations still resist treating Two treatises as mainly an activist tract and persist in characterizing it always as something loftier, viz. ‘political philosophy’, ‘systematic moral apologia’, and the like. Resistance to the implications of a rigorous historical mode of interpretation is surely part of the problem. The perennial or transcendent purposes with which the classics are haloed often get diminished in too specific an historical location of the motives and situation of the author. Oddly, however, even critics friendly to a strictly historical approach have hesitated before the implications of Laslett's dicta that Locke wrote as a whig pamphleteer and for Shaftesbury's purposes. This, in turn, parallels the widespread contempt felt by many contemporary English historians (Locke's interpreters among them) for the early whigs. Righteous indignation against the whigs is even detectable in those modern writings from which we take our view of the whig Exclusion pamphleteers.

This article uses the debate over environmental and human health effects of nuclear testing to shed light on the ambivalent relationship between scientists, the public, and the state in Britain during the crucial, but often overlooked, period leading up to the first cycle of anti-nuclear weapons mass protests. In this, it examines how members of Britain's main organization of nuclear scientists – the Atomic Scientists’ Association (ASA) – used their expertise in their engagement with both the public and the state to assess these effects of fallout from nuclear testing. What made the ASA stand out from other groups of the atomic scientists’ movement was its ambivalent relationship with the government. This was, by and large, the result of several ASA members’ occupational backgrounds in government employment and the association's self-imposed adherence to an ambiguous principle of scientific ‘objectivity’ in political matters. The ASA's role in the debate over fallout thus exemplifies a basic dilemma that many scientists in Britain and other Western liberal democracies faced between their roles as ‘objective’ and ‘unpolitical’ scientific experts, on the one hand, and socially responsible scientists, on the other, illustrating the ambivalent position of experts and uses of their knowledge.

This historiographical review offers an overview of new approaches to the global history of the First World War. It first considers how, over the last decade, there has been a move to emphasize the war's imperial dimensions: in reconsiderations of the war in Africa, the experience of soldiers and workers from across Europe's colonial empires, and the German ‘global strategy’ of fomenting unrest within the Allied empires. It then suggests that new global histories of the First World War give further attention to its economic aspects, particularly in two ways: first, by recovering understudied global financial aspects of the war, including the effects of the 1914 financial crisis and wartime inflation on economies and societies far outside of Europe; and second, by investigating wartime histories of primary production, both in colonial territories and sovereign states in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia. It argues that these approaches can offer an important corrective to common assumptions that the First World War led to a dramatic break with pre-war globalizing trends.

This article looks at one of the less frequently examined contests in the parliamentary borough of Westminster – the election of 1796, in which Charles James Fox, Admiral Allan Gardner, and John Horne Tooke vied for the borough's two seats. This election offers an opportunity to investigate the patriotic discourses, representational strategies, and styles of political leadership available to loyalism and popular radicalism in the early years of the war with Revolutionary France. The period of the election spanned the second anniversary of Admiral Richard Howe's victory of 1 June 1794, creating significant opportunities for links to be made between Gardner's naval position and the necessity of electing a loyalist candidate. The article investigates electoral politics with an eye towards reconstructing some important features of Westminster political culture in the 1790s. While Gardner's electoral posture is revealed to depend on a series of stereotypes operating around the image of the ‘political’ admiral, Tooke's is shown to have been heavily informed by his philological studies. Given the long history of admirals serving as MPs for Westminster and the persistent presence of naval officers as members of parliament between 1790 and 1820, the article concludes by suggesting that political admiralship played a role in the development of nineteenth-century styles of political candidacy and leadership.

‘Wee can neither Swear a new Allegiance nor Transfer ye Old; nor Assist at any Coronation while K.[ing] James the second Liue's. In these few words penned on 17 February 1689, within days of the proclamation of William and Mary, Bishop Turner of Ely scaled the heights and plumbed the depths of the loyalists’ dilemma. The unexpected manner in which the Revolution had been accomplished entailed upon churchmen a deep and bitter conflict of loyalties. Certainly none were more afflicted than the Cavalier politicians, prelates and magnates of the Church of England party, who less than a decade before had drawn together in defence of the lawful succession, the established religion and the privileges of the governing classes. As one might suspect, the re-emergence of the Cavalier leaders in the autumn of 1688, from the isolation into which they had been ungenerously thrown by the King's espousal of Indulgence, had important repercussions on events following James's abandonment of government. Yet, while contemporary attitudes to civil obedience have received close study, curiously little attention has been given to the role of James's supporters in the practical politics of the crisis, especially in its initial stages.

The historian, Hannah Lawrance (1795–1875), played an important role in nineteenth-century public debate about women's education. Like Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft, she argued that virtue had no sex and she promoted the broad education of women in order to increase their opportunities for employment. But unlike her bluestocking predecessors, she derived her argument from a scholarly reappraisal of women's history. Whereas the Strickland sisters' Tory Romantic histories celebrated the Tudor and Stuart eras in particular, Lawrance's ‘olden time’ celebrated the medieval period. This is when she located England's civilizational progress, driven by the education of queens and the wider state of women's education, allowing her to evade the potential conflict of a feminine creature in a manly role. Using the condition of women to measure the peaks and troughs of civilization was a familiar approach to historical writing, but Lawrance's radical argument was that women were often responsible for England's progress, rather than passive bystanders. Her emphasis on women's contribution to public life complemented the Whig-nationalist narrative and secured her a high reputation across a range of political periodicals. Above all, it appealed to other liberal reformers such as Thomas Hood, Charles Wentworth Dilke, and Robert Vaughan, who shared Lawrance's commitment to social reform and helped to secure a wide audience for her historical perspective.

This article examines the role that Ireland and Irish people played in the geographical construction of British colonial rule in India during the nineteenth century. It argues that as an important sub-imperial centre, Ireland not only supplied the empire with key personnel, but also functioned as an important reference point for scientific practice, new legislation, and systems of government. Occupying integral roles within the information systems of the colonial state, Irish people provided much of the intellectual capital around which British rule in India was constructed. These individuals were part of nineteenth-century Irish professional personnel networks that viewed the empire as a legitimate sphere for work and as an arena in which they could prosper. Through involvement and deployment of expertise in areas such as surveying and geological research in India, Irishmen and Irish institutions were able to act decisively in the development of colonial knowledge. The relationships mapped in this article centre the Irish within the imperial web of connections and global exchange of ideas, technologies, and practices during the long nineteenth century, thereby making a contribution towards uncovering Ireland's multi-directional involvement in the British empire and reassessing the challenges that this presents to existing British, Irish, and imperial historiography.

William III's military and political career was marked by a sustained tension between his obsessive struggle against France and the fear caused by his accession to enhanced titles of power. Crucial to William's shift from stadholderate to kingship was his assumption of emergency powers in 1672 to defend his country against French invasion. Throughout his stadholderate (1672–1702), he came to be seen by his Dutch republican opponents as a Roman dictator intent on using military power to break the harmony of the constitution, while Orangist propaganda tried to present the rule of the One as the best remedy to the recurrent danger of civil war and anarchy. Spurred by the Ryswick treaty of September 1697 and fuelled by a deeply engrained tradition of resistance to any expanded military establishment, the standing army debates of 1697–9 came as an effort to understand a major political controversy in the light of the history of republican Rome. The political theorists of the New Country Party strove to reassert the superiority of civil over military power by showing how the decay of the Roman Republic had been caused by a departure from the civic militia paradigm and a drift towards military monarchy which fostered the growth of tyranny. It was thought that England's commitment to a prolonged war effort would entail a similar process and imperil the age-old balance between king and parliament. The contention of this article is that the standing army debates of 1697–9 can be construed as an encounter between Dutch and English neo-Romanism, crystallizing in the controversial figure of William. An overall view of William's military and political career and the search for elements of continuity in his supporters' and his opponents' arguments will serve to look at the role of historicism in the construction of a late seventeenth-century Anglo-Dutch ideological space.

In February 1839 Lord John Russell put before the House of Commons a set of proposals for governmental action in the field of popular education. It was a contentious move by the Home Secretary, and the bitter political tussle which it provoked was predictable. In the context of a flagging ministry facing an opposition already scenting office, it seems almost cavalier. The well-known outcome was the formation of a new executive agency for the management of the state's role in the education of the people, the Committee of Privy Council on Education. The whole incident attracts notice in several dimensions of historical commentary. Social and political narratives must record it; students of Whiggery, Russell, reform or radicalism, must give it place and plausibility; it is a turning point for the historian of education; and it provides a case study for the investigation of government growth in the nineteenth century.

This article seeks to illuminate significantly our understanding of the link between abolitionism and evangelicalism by considering the debate at the formation of the Evangelical Alliance in 1846 surrounding the propriety of Christian fellowship with slaveholders. The leading critic of the pro-slavery faction was the Revd Isaac Nelson, an orthodox Presbyterian minister from Belfast, Ireland. Nelson's importance to anti-slavery was recognized by abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic at the time, but has not yet been adequately analysed by historians. Hence, this article will examine Nelson's role in the dispute with the defenders of the American slaveholders at the London meeting in 1846 and in further debates within the Alliance on the slavery question. The article will conclude by examining Nelson's claim that the Alliance was a failure owing to its alleged compromise on the slavery question.

This article traces the British relationship with Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in the decade and a half after independence. The first part of this article shows how, within the context of the arrangements made at independence, the events of the years 1956–9 under the premiership of S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike marked an important turning point in Britain's political and strategic relationship with the island. Then in the second part, British diplomatic records relating to Ceylonese politics are used to analyse the British response to Ceylon's ethno-political crisis during the early 1960s. Britain's reluctance to respond to this crisis was an outcome of the changed relations with Ceylon brought on during the Bandaranaike era.

Historians have long debated which continental sources gave a major impetus to the early Elizabethan religious reform. While many have examined the alleged Reformed influence on the English church, that of the Lutherans has also been discussed by some. However, these have in the main failed to appreciate the full implications of this German influence which was linked closely with ongoing diplomatic developments on the continent. During the early years of Elizabeth's reign, political considerations more than religious actually dominated the minds of politicians like William Cecil in formulating the nation's ecclesiastical policy. In fact, some key decisions on religion were the direct result of contemporary diplomatic talks with Lutheran princes.

On the eve of the Henrician Reformation, the law of treason was markedly less well developed than one might suppose. Over a century of dynastic war, party violence, and the vigorous extermination of opponents had left strikingly little deposit in the law which was still essentially defined by the famous act of 1352, the first, and to this day the basic, treason statute. Minor attempts to vary the law may here be ignored, and the only serious alteration—the act of 1397 which omitted the demand for an ‘overt deed’—was repealed in 1399. The reasons for what might at first sight seem a surprising reluctance to extend the grasp of the treason law are not obscure. For one thing, most of the so-called traitors of the later fifteenth century were men who had had the misfortune to fight on the losing side in a civil war. Their treason grew out of the see-saw of politics and was committed in open war. They were therefore commonly amenable (if not already killed in battle) to the summary procedure of treason trials under the law of arms and did not come within the purview of the law of England at all. This method of dealing with the vanquished had one disadvantage: conviction by a constable's or marshal's court did not involve forfeiture of lands. The Crown therefore had recourse to the authority of the high court of parliament, and acts of attainder followed each turn of the wheel in the civil wars.