The Independent State of Croatia (Nezavisna Država Hrvatska, NDH), which came into being during Hitler's Blitzkrieg against Yugoslavia in April 1941, was nominally included in the Italian sphere of influence in the Balkans. It soon turned into an uneasy condominium, however, between its formal Italian mentors and the Germans. Italian influence was largely symbolic, while German officers, experts of all profiles, businessmen and officials were prominent in Zagreb from the outset. Mussolini was deeply mistrustful of German intentions, and suspected that Germany sought a leading role in Croatia in spite of Hitler's assurances to the contrary. Nevertheless, the Italians could not devise a strategy to bring their nominal Croatian protégés to heel.

While there is no evidence of a German ‘grand design’ to undermine Italy's aspìrations in the Balkans, it is certain that the Germans never intended to give up their leading role in the economic sphere. By early 1942 they secured control over all key natural resources of the NDH and most of its industrial capacity, often acting behind their Italian partners' backs in pursuit of their objectives.

Also in 1942 the Wehrmacht made a strong bid to bring Croatian armed forces under its command and control. While this caused some intra-German disputes, and was resisted by the foreign ministry, it proved ultimately successful due to the rise of insurgency which threatened strategic interests of the Axis. Again, Italian claims to precedence were disregarded.

The most serious dispute between Italy and Germany in the NDH concerned large joint antiinsurgency operations in the first half of 1943, and the Italians' refusal to give up their links with the Četniks. The breakdown of Italo-German military co-operation in the NDH reflected a deeper malaise of the intra-Axis relationship. It was founded upon different assumptions and objectives, but such differences remained unstated. The rivalry between Germany and Italy in Croatia vividly reflected this deeper schism between the ultimate objectives of Mussolini and his brutal Teutonic friend.

The law had always been deployed by the police to regulate traffic, but the development of motor vehicles, travelling at much greater speeds than previous road traffic, constituted a problem of a new dimension. By the early 1920s the use of the law to control motor vehicles was jamming the magistrates' courts and creating friction, hitherto unknown, between the police and the middle classes. The paper explores the way in which, and the extent to which, the criminal law was used to control the motorist in the first third of the twentieth century. It takes issue with the whiggish view of law making, which understands laws as logical remedies for readily identifiable problems; it rejects equally the idea of seeing laws as inspired by class interest. Rather the motor traffic legislation fits better with the concept of the ‘policeman state’ which, according to V. A. C. Gatrell, developed from the late nineteenth century. At the same time the paper suggests that a scapegoat – ‘the road hog’ – was created as the focus for criticism in much the same way that other criminal scapegoats have been established; the offender thus ceased to be a member of society and became an outsider, threatening respectable law-abiding citizens.

The attempted introduction of a new rationalist Lutheran hymnal into Brandenburg-Prussia in 1781 was largely a failure due to the successful popular opposition towards it. This opposition was inaugurated by four parishes in Berlin. They petitioned the monarch in January 1781 with the request to continue using the old hymnal. Similar petitions were submitted from the Landstände of Pomerania, Magdeburg and East Frisia. Frederick II immediately granted this concession to all parishes in Brandenburg-Prussia. The strength of this opposition – which also occurred in other German lands where new hymnals were introduced – indicates the limitations of the religious Aufklärung as a popular movement. Traditional religious beliefs could not be easily replaced by more rationalist doctrine that stressed only Christianity's ethical tenets. While Frederick was indifferent to questions of doctrine, he would not allow any religious reforms to be imposed upon his subjects. For the first time this central feature of his religious policy was influenced by the force of public opinion. He was persuaded to halt the implementation of a measure that enjoyed the support of both enlightened clergy and laymen.

The emphasis on class, industrial structure and workplace relations proffered by Foster and others as an explanation of the nature and development of popular politics in this period is rejected. Continuities in personnel, values, motivation, policies and strategies suggest that militant grass-roots liberalism of the 1850s, and the culture of self-improvement which pervaded it, were essentially continuations of a radical platform of the 1830s which was preserved, even enhanced, through the Chartist period. Radicals' emphasis on retrenchment, tax reform, democratic accountability and local self-government represented a commitment to a democratic, capitalist environment capable of sustaining material progress and promoting moral and spiritual self-improvement and individual responsibility. They sought, rather than rejected, cooperation with more moderate reformers, seeing no contradiction in combining support for Chartism with more limited campaigns to repeal the corn law or to reform local government. Radicals, however, were also divided amongst themselves. This was particularly evident in Oldham with Cobbettism drawing support from an extensive semi-rural hinterland and a more aggressive petit bourgeois artisan, nonconformist radicalism, associated with respectability and moral reform, based in the town itself. Cobbettism was progressively marginalized from the mid-1830s, however, drifting, for a variety of reasons, into the tory camp. For urban radicals, the liberalism of the 1850s represented a logical extension of their campaign, not a betrayal.

Two very powerful stories structure the history of the changing roles of English women. The tale of the nineteenth-century separation of the spheres of public power and private domesticity relates principally to the experience of middle-class women. The other story, emerging from early modern scholarship, recounts the social and economic marginalization of propertied women and the degradation of working women as a consequence of capitalism. Both narratives echo each other in important ways, although strangely the capacity of women's history to repeat itself is rarely openly discussed. This paper critically reviews the two historiographies in order to open debate on the basic categories and chronologies we employ in discussing the experience, power and identity of women in past time.

An exploration of the origins of the Arbitration Act of 1698 and an analysis of court-related arbitration during the next century. Principal conclusions: (1) that the act originated at the board of trade, with John Locke drafting and drawing upon judicial practice of the later 1600s; (2) that use of the act's provisions was limited before the 1770s even though extra-judicial arbitration was proliferating; (3) that thereafter, with the Court of King's Bench under Lord Mansfield taking the lead, rules of court under the act multiplied; and (4) that arbitration under the act was increasingly ‘legalized’ in procedure and in the qualifications of the arbitrators.

Queen Victoria made important financial concessions to parliament over the course of her reign. She accepted a smaller civil list and a smaller annuity for her consort than had been paid to any of her predecessors. She disclosed the accounts of the duchies of Lancaster and Cornwall, both of which had formerly been considered private property. She also reduced her income by subjecting it to the newly re-instituted income tax. Despite these concessions, she managed to acquire a considerable private fortune. The principal sources of this fortune were improving incomes from the two duchies and better management of the civil list. Both sources benefited from reforms imposed by the prince consort. The queen used her private fortune to pay for items formerly paid for from public funds. She built houses and erected monuments. She paid partly for the golden jubilee and wholly for the debts that accumulated when the civil list became inadequate from the 1880s. Parliament in turn used evidence of her private fortune to decrease the size and number of public grants to her offspring. Thus, increased parliamentary supervision and better regulation of the civil list improved the queen's private financial position, but also reduced the public burdens.

The article attempts to show that Bonar Law had an effective and coherent strategy towards home rule. Previous interpretations have stressed his weakness and inexperience, either his ‘pandering’ to the extremists in the Tory party or his readiness to seek a compromise, when civil war began to loom large, in the autumn of 1913. Much of the blame for the political stalemate from 1912 until 1914 is directly, or implicitly, laid upon Bonar Law. Yet the tory leader was a more consummate politician. He sought to use the home rule crisis not only to reinforce his own fragile leadership but to return the Conservatives to office. This he proposed to do by allowing the political system to reach an impasse over home rule, by not helping the Liberals reach a compromise and yet inciting Ulster to resist the bill on its implementation. This left Asquith, the Liberal prime minister, with the impossible choice of imposing the bill onto Ulster (so provoking civil war) or of holding a general election when his government was perceived as unpopular. Bonar Law counted on Asquith preferring to hold an election though Asquith was saved from such a decision by the outbreak of war. It was, then, a ‘high-risk’ strategy to win office for the party he led.

The inter-war period saw the decline of the Liberal party, the traditional political ally of the free churches, and the rise of the Labour party. This article traces the responses of the free churches to these developments. The relationship of the free churches with the Labour party in this period is examined at three different levels; that of the free church leadership, that of the chapels and the ordinary people in the pews and that of the nonconformists who became active in the Labour party. Whilst attitudes towards the Labour party changed within free church institutions during the inter-war years they did not become important supporters of the party, or greatly influence it. The number and proportion of individual nonconformists who were active and influential in the party in this period was however considerable. In the process not only did Labour M.P.s become the main carriers of the nonconformist conscience on issues such as drink and gambling. They also made a distinctive and important contribution to the development and ideals of the Labour party.

When I had the pleasure of reviewing Nicholas von Maltzahn's study of Milton's History of Britain, I had nothing but praise for the scholarship he brought to the whole intellectual background of the work, and for his judicious placing of it in the Miltonic canon. His book gives an excellent account of the state of British historiography in the first half of the seventeenth century, and shows how Milton's essentially humanist and literary conception of what a history should be, and his exclusive interest in narrative sources, made him already out of date in his method at a time when Spelman and Selden were pioneering a recognizably modern form of historical scholarship. He carefully traces the development of Milton's ambition to write a great national history, explaining why his first conception of a verse epic, singing the heroic past, gave way to that of a lofty prose narrative that would culminate in a celebration of God's presence with his elect nation in the struggle for religious and civil liberty in his own time. He deals fully and learnedly with the influences upon the style and content of the History, from Sallust (Milton's favourite exemplar) and Tacítus through Bacon (possibly) to the preachers of the Fast Sermons before the Long Parliament. He is illuminating about the close association in Milton's mind between eloquence and virtue, and about the ways in which his beliefs about the operation of divine providence modified his predominantly classical approach to the writing of history. He is thoroughly informative about the textual history of the work, and especially about the fragment published in 1681 as Mr John Miltons Character of the Long Parliament, whose editor he convincingly identifies as the arch-Tory Roger L'Estrange.

This article analyses how, in the last half-century, scholars have differed over the nature of Italian foreign policy under the fascist regime. It examines the debate between orthodox and revisionist historians over Mussolini's foreign policy in general, and also over three specific areas of Italian policy in the interwar years: Franco-Italian relations, Italian participation in the Spanish Civil War, and the alliance with nazi Germany. The author concludes that much of the debate has arisen because of conceptual befuddlement; writers have been primarily concerned with questions of coherence and continuity, and not with understanding Italian foreign relations. Historians have also disagreed over whether Mussolini had a ‘programme’, but a closer look shows that many of them were engaging in a semantic debate, and did not differ over the nature of fascist policy.

I should first thank Professor Woolrych for his attention to my book, and also for his generous conduct in anticipating debate over his views. In particular I am grateful for his correction of a historical point on which my book proves in error: the readmission of conformist members in the first weeks of the Rump Parliament did not much extend to secluded members, and thus the backsliding of the revolutionaries after Pride's Purge and the king's trial may have been less troubling to Milton than I supposed. On this point I had mistaken Underdown and Worden's description of the revolutionaries' compromise, and had partially misunderstood their conclusion that ‘the damage to the revolutionary cause…had already been done by the end of February’. Here Woolrych now shows me wrong. But although this changes the balance it does not change the substance of my argument about Milton's stern note in the History. For as Woolrych renews the issue of the dating of the Digression from Milton's History, he again misreads that text and its context in the larger work. He believes it an expression of despair, and thinks such despair on Milton's part could only be occasioned by the national apostasy at the Restoration. But Milton, both in the contemporary Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649) as well as in later tracts, proves much less sanguine about English hopes than even the passages Woolrych cites will support. The Presbyterians, whom the Tenure attacks in the same terms as the Digression, were not the only problem faced by the ‘uprighter sort’ of magistrates and those ‘people, though in number less by many, in whom faction least hath prevaild above the Law of nature and right reason’.