The debate about the political allegiance of Pius XII and the Vatican during the Second World War remains unresolved. As more documents become available, they enable historians, detractors and defenders alike, to develop a more nuanced view on this contentious issue. Files recently released by The National Archives1 come within this category. They reveal that during the Second World War the British government systematically intercepted, monitored, and recorded in detail the financial transactions listed in the bank statements of the main financial agencies of the State of Vatican City from 1941 to 1943. These documents provide a detailed, if occasionally incomplete, day by day and month by month record of the Vatican's sources of income, expenditure priorities, investment strategies, and movements of money throughout its global network under the difficult wartime conditions of foreign exchange controls, blocked sterling and dollar accounts, Freezing Orders, and Trading with the Enemy restrictions imposed by the belligerent parties. This article examines the light they shed on Vatican finances throughout that period and what new insights they provide into the role of Pius XII and the Vatican during the Second World War, and, in particular, into the question of where their sympathies lay throughout the duration of that conflict.

At the 1918 general election, Sinn Féin overtook the Irish Parliamentary Party as the dominant political force within nationalist Ireland, a process that has its origins in the aftermath of the Easter Rising of 1916. This article argues that to understand better this shift in public opinion, from an initially hostile reaction to the Dublin rebellion to a more advanced nationalist position,1 it is important to recognize the decisive role played by a political welfare organization, the Irish National Aid Association and Volunteer Dependents' Fund. The activities of the INAAVDF significantly shaped the popular memory of the Rising, but also provided a focus around which the republican movement could re-organize itself. In foregrounding the contribution of the INAAVDF to the radicalization of political life in Ireland between 1916 and 1918, the article argues that this understudied but important organization offers a useful way of charting popular responses to the Rising and its aftermath, as well as laying the foundations for a reinvigorated political and military campaign after 1917.

Venereal disease was commonplace among free and enslaved populations in colonial Caribbean societies. This article considers how contemporaries (both in the empire and metropole) viewed venereal infection and how they associated it with gendered notions of empire and masculinity. It further explores how creole medical practices evolved as planters, slaves, and tropical physicians treated sexually transmitted infections. Yet what began as a familiar and customary affliction was seen, by the late eighteenth century, as a problematic disease in the colonies. As medical theory evolved, placing greater attention on behaviour, British abolitionists focused on the sexual excesses and moral failings of Caribbean slaveholders, evidenced by their venereal complaints. The medicalization of venereal infection and its transition from urbane affliction to stigmatized disease helps explain a key problem in imperial history: how and why West Indian planters became demonized as debauched invalids whose sexual excesses rendered them fundamentally un-British. The changing cultural meanings given to venereal disease played an important role in giving moral weight to abolitionist attacks upon the West Indian slave system in the late eighteenth century. This article, therefore, indicates how changing models of scientific explanation had significant cultural implications for abolitionists, slaveholders, and enslaved people alike.

Liverpool and Manchester have come to typify twentieth-century urban decay and their demise is strongly associated with the perceived decline of local government after 1918. By the 1930s, contemporaries had stereotyped northern cities as places of poverty and deprivation, in comparison to the prosperous south. The divide was reinforced by economic historians who focused on regional variations in unemployment and economic depression. This article challenges stereotypical images of interwar Liverpool and Manchester by illustrating the ambitious programmes of urban redevelopment implemented by their Corporations in response to political and economic instability. Grandiose projects such as the Wythenshawe Estate, Mersey Tunnel and Manchester Central Library aimed to stimulate employment and to boost local economies and morale. Redevelopment was promoted heavily to present new images of Liverpool and Manchester. Crucially, urban transformation was marketed as a way to communicate with the newly enfranchised, classless citizen and suggests similarities with broader strategies employed by the Conservative party to engage with the mass electorate. The level of ambition and innovation demonstrates that local municipal culture thrived and Liverpool (with close American links) is shown to have been at the forefront of innovations in civic design and urban planning.

Historians have tended to characterize the ‘white ethnic’ identity politics of the 1970s in the United States as a significant feature of the conservative counterrevolution, especially the rise of populist racial conservatism and its splintering of the Democratic New Deal coalition. Seeking to provide a broader, more representative portrait of white ethnic mobilization, activism, and institutionalization in government, with particular focus on the work of Rev. Geno Baroni, the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs, and the Carter administration's Office of Ethnic Affairs, this article challenges that assumption. It posits that the politics of white ethnicity was a far more complex, diverse phenomenon, of appeal to liberals and conservatives in an era of considerable political flux. This reconsideration also reveals that the 1970s were not conservative in the United States, but a watershed decade of uncertainty, volatility, and experimentation, in which ethnic identities and affiliations were reshaped, political norms upended, and new forms of organization and mobilization trialled out, with great significance for today's ‘post-ethnic’ United States. White ethnic politics was of considerable importance to American political development in the late twentieth century, but not in the way usually thought.

An undated document survives, in Thomas Hobbes's hand, urging the royalist side in the Civil War to win over Robert Rich, the second earl of Warwick (the parliamentarian naval commander). By this means, Hobbes argued, not only would the royalists win the war, but also England would be defended against a Swedish invasion, which he expected to accompany or follow the Scottish invasion of the country. This communication presents the text of the document and gives reasons for dating it not to 1648 (when an attempt to win over Warwick was in fact made) but to late 1643 or early 1644. It also discusses the basis of Hobbes's concern with Scottish–Swedish relations, and his misinterpretation of Swedish policy. It comments on his estimate of Warwick's character, in the light of his earlier connections with him; and it briefly discusses both Hobbes's assumption in this document of the role of a counsellor to the king, and the interpretation of the nature of the Civil War that the document implies.

Although Henry Hallam (1777–1859) is best known for his Constitutional History of England (1827) and as a founder of ‘whig’ history, to situate him primarily as a mere critic of David Hume or as an apprentice to Thomas Babington Macaulay does him a disservice. He wrote four substantial books of which the first, his View of the state of Europe during the middle ages (1818), deserves to be seen as the most important; and his correspondence shows him to have been integrated into the contemporary intelligentsia in ways that imply more than the Whig acolyte customarily portrayed by commentators. This article re-situates Hallam by thinking across both time and space and depicts a significant historian whose filiations reached to Europe and North America. It proposes that Hallam did not originate the whig interpretation of history but rather that he created a sense of the past resting on law and science which would be reasserted in the age of Darwin.

After partition, minorities in South Asia emerged as a distinct legal category of citizens who were not fully protected by the states within which they lived. The power of South Asia's nation-states over their ‘minority-citizens’ far exceeds their sovereignty over ordinary citizens, and the capacity of ‘minority-citizens’ to resist this power was broken, this article will show, by a series of draconian executive actions. But ‘minority citizenship’ was not simply a product of ‘bureaucratic rationality’, as some have suggested, or even of ‘governmentality’. On the contrary, it was produced by complex, often violent, interactions between government and a range of non-state actors, who forced their own ideas of nationality, justice, and entitlement on to the statute books. Citizenship in South Asia thus proves to have a complex parenthood, with ‘civil’ and ‘political’ more entangled, and mutually constituted, than some theorists would have us believe. India and Pakistan continued to be bound together by migrants and migration even as their discursive claims seemed to pull them ever further apart.

This historiographical review offers a critical reconsideration of a central component of modernization theory: the model of secularization devised within the sociology of religion, and especially the version sustained by sociologists in the UK. It compares that model with the results of historical research in a range of themes and periods, and suggests that those results are now often radically inconsistent with this sociological orthodoxy. It concludes that an older historical scenario which located in the early modern period the beginnings of a ‘process’ of secularization that achieved its natural completion in the nineteenth or twentieth centuries is finally untenable, and it proposes a broader, more historical conception of ‘religion’ able to accommodate both persistent religiosity and undoubted changes in religious behaviour.

The history of emotion has focused on cognition and social construction, largely disregarding the centrality of the body to emotional experience. This case-study reveals that a focus on corporeal experience and emotion enables a deeper understanding of cultural mores and of transmission to the next generation, which is fundamental to the process of change. In 1914, parents in Dronfield, Derbyshire, attempted to get the headmistress of their school removed because she had taught their daughters sex education. Why did sex education arouse such intense distress in the mothers, born mainly in the 1870s? Examination of their embodied, sensory, and cognitive experience of reproduction and sexuality reveals the rational, experiential basis to their emotional responses. Their own socialization as children informed how they trained their ‘innocent’ children to be sexually reticent. Experience of birth and new ideas relating disease to hygiene reinforced their fears. The resulting negative conception of sexuality explains why the mothers embraced the suppression of sexuality and believed their children should be protected from sexual knowledge. As material pressures lessened, women's emotional responses lightened over decades. The focus on emotion reveals changes that are hard to trace in other evidence.

The Suez crisis is widely believed to have contributed significantly to Britain's decline as a world power. Eden's miscalculation of American reaction to the attack on Egypt was damaging to Britain's reputation and fatal to his career. However, his actions were contrary to received wisdom in Whitehall. The crisis merely confirmed Britain's dependence on the United States and had no lasting impact on Anglo-American relations. Britain's relationship with its informal and formal empire was already changing before 1956, and the turn from the commonwealth to Europe owed little to Suez. Examination of policy reviews in Whitehall before and after the Suez crisis shows that the Foreign Office, Commonwealth Relations Office, and Colonial Office were slow to accept the need for change in Britain's world role. Insofar as they did from 1959 it was because of Treasury arguments about the effect of high defence expenditure on the economy, and slow growth of the United Kingdom's population compared with the United States, the European Economic Community, and the Soviet Union.

Between 1907 and 1984 unearned income in Britain was taxed at higher rates than wages and salaries, a bias that was supported intermittently by limiting shareholders’ dividends and attempting to tax capital wealth. Although apparently accepted as part of the fiscal order until 1979, Margaret Thatcher's government was able to complete the dismantling of the bias in favour of earned income by 1984. This article examines the events and politics of the 1970s to explain the volte-face. The article initially charts the role of political prejudice against rentiers in maintaining higher taxes on unearned income in the context of 1970s economic turmoil and inflation. The article then considers the 1970s fiscal shift from the perspective of equity shareholdings, juxtaposing the use of tax and dividend restraint as a mechanism for control of investment capital with pressure for wider share ownership, particularly for employees. Finally, Avner Offer's theories on prudent financial behaviour are imported as a backdrop for the trend away from tax relief for long-term, illiquid savings towards market-driven incentives. Ultimately, the article detects a change of approach in both main political parties which in turn creates a more stable environment for future policy formation.

In reply to the comment by Andrew Farrant and Edward McPhail on Ben Jackson's article ‘At the origins of neo-liberalism’, this communication briefly examines the development of the political thought of Friedrich Hayek in the 1940s. It argues that the chronology of Hayek's critical analysis of the ‘Keynesian welfare state’ is more complex than Farrant and McPhail suggest. Farrant and McPhail underestimate the extent to which neo-liberalism in the 1940s was a body of ideas in flux, trying to come to terms with a changing political context, but not yet achieving a mature and stable ideological statement.

After 1945, neo-liberal thinkers and think-tanks in the US and UK outlined different state welfare systems for the poor, such as Milton Friedman's negative income tax. These were underpinned by a rational, economistic conception of human nature. Between 1975 and 1979, Thatcher's Conservative party abandoned attempts to develop comprehensive, state-led, paternalistic schemes to tackle poverty. Thatcherites focused instead on creating what they saw as a rational tax/benefit system which would provide a safety-net for the poor, but encourage effort and thrift. They attempted to marginalize the importance of state welfare for the middle classes, to re-invigorate the ‘bourgeois virtues’ which had flourished in Victorian Britain. A family-centred, moralistic individualism underpinned Thatcherite policies; this individualism was not precisely congruent with that of neo-liberal theorists. Its roots lay in personal sources (particularly Methodism), as well as home-grown discourses on poverty and a Hayekian fear of the state. Though Thatcherites took ideas from diverse sources, their political project had a single guiding purpose: the moral (and, secondarily, economic) rejuvenation of Britain. Thatcherism was, thus, an ‘ideology’ in the sense used by Michael Freeden.

The historiography of religion in modern Britain has been dominated in recent years by controversy over the sociological theory of secularization. This review of the literature on secularization in modern Britain traces its apparent persuasiveness in part to assumptions about religious decline and renewal which are central to Christian soteriology. Recognition of the nature of secularization theory discloses a monolithic notion of religion itself. Closer attention to the complexity of religious experience may yield an account of religion more attuned to the contours of social change in modern Britain.

Drawing its information from different documents in Portuguese and French archives, this article examines the evolution of Portuguese colonial policies towards Islam, focusing on the special case of Mozambique. Such policies evolved from an attitude of neglect and open repression, prevalent in the early years of the colonial war that broke out in 1965, when Muslims were perceived as the main supporters of the anti-colonial guerrilla in northern Mozambique, to an approach that tried to isolate ‘African Muslims’ from foreign influences in order to align them with the Portuguese. The article analyses the latter strategy, assessing its successes and failures, and the contributions made by several of those who were involved.

Recent scholarly debate about the Glorious Revolution has put renewed focus on the fear of a new aggressive Catholic confessionalism that was widespread among English and European Protestants. One important example is the threat of an imminent French-led joint Catholic aggression against the Netherlands and other Protestant states. This fear was shared by William of Orange and contributed to his decision to risk invading England in the autumn of 1688. Thanks to new archival sources, it is clear that Emperor Leopold contributed substantially to increasing this fear. In July 1688, the imperial government informed William of Orange about unprecedented French offers to Leopold to win over the emperor for a new Catholic alliance. Almost certainly these offers were fictitious, but nevertheless they had an alarming effect on William: he was convinced that an autonomous, ‘uncontrolled’ development in England (regardless of whether it would lead to a ‘popish’ despotism or to a Protestant republic) would only benefit France and should be avoided in this decisive situation. Consequently, after July 1688 William and his diplomats repeatedly referred to the supposed ‘indiscretions’ from Vienna to demonstrate the necessity of intervening in England.

This article reviews the current state of historical writing on British political culture in the interwar period, with a particular focus on the character of the democratic society which emerged from the franchise extensions of 1918 and 1928. It takes as its starting point the influential interpretation advanced by Ross McKibbin in his two most recent books, Classes and cultures (1998) and Parties and people (2010). This holds that Britain's interwar democracy came to be shaped in the image of the anti-socialist middle class, buoyed by the centrist appeal of Baldwinite constitutional Conservatism. Anti-socialism's interwar hegemony, McKibbin further argues, had serious consequences for the progress of social democracy after the Second World War. Whilst this narrative is, in many respects, highly compelling, this review suggests that much recent literature on the period points to a range of alternative interpretative possibilities which offer different answers to McKibbin's core question: what kind of a democracy was Britain between the wars? Drawing on these studies, the review argues that Britain's political culture was rather more ‘democratized’ during these years than McKibbin allows, before finally identifying some directions for future research.

According to the textbook version of history, the Enlightenment played a crucial role in the creation of the modern, liberal democracies of the West. Ever since this view – which we might describe as the modernization thesis – was first formulated by Peter Gay, it has been repeatedly criticized as misguided: a myth. Yet, as this paper shows, it continues to survive in postwar historiography, in particular in the Anglophone world. Indeed, Gay's most important and influential successors – historians such as Robert Darnton and Roy Porter – all ended up defending the idea that the Enlightenment was a major force in the creation of modern democratic values and institutions. More recently, Jonathan Israel's trilogy on the Enlightenment has revived the modernization thesis, albeit in a dramatic new form. Yet, even Israel's work, as its critical reception highlights, does not convincingly demonstrate that the Enlightenment, as an intellectual movement, contributed in any meaningful way to the creation of modern political culture. This conclusion raises a new question: if the Enlightenment did not create our modern democracies, then what did it do? In answer to that question, this paper suggests that we should take more seriously the writings of enlightened monarchists like Nicolas-Antoine Boulanger. Studying the Enlightenment might not allow us to understand why democratic political culture came into being. But, as Boulanger's work underscores, it might throw light on an equally important problem: why democracy came so late in the day.

This essay is a critical historiographical overview of the recent literature on the writing of sacred history (history of the biblical Jews and early Christians) and history of religion in early modern Europe. It considers the rise of interest in this branch of intellectual history in the last decade, placing it in the context of the rise of the history of scholarship as a historical discipline. It then charts how the characterization of early modern history of religion as stale, pedantic, and blandly ‘orthodox’ until it was swept aside by a critical and heterodox ‘enlightenment’ is being revised, first in new approaches to early modern histories of biblical Judaism and historicizations of the Old Testament, second in new readings of early modern scholarship on primitive Christianity. It concludes by suggesting new avenues of research which divorce narratives of intellectual change from the linear and inconclusive emphasis on ‘enlightenment’, favouring an approach that conversely emphasizes the impact of confessionalization in creating a newly critical scholarly culture.