The celebrated ‘Cambridge five’ have hitherto been believed to be the first long-term communist penetration agents in HM government, beginning with Donald Maclean in 1935. However, new research indicates that by 1919 another Cambridge man – like four of the ‘five’, a Trinity graduate – had already begun working for Moscow. This article is the first to examine how William Norman Ewer, known as ‘Trilby’ to his co-conspirators, organized networks in Great Britain and France to target the governments of those two powers. Under close Soviet supervision, Ewer's subordinates infiltrated half-a-dozen Whitehall departments, foremost among them Scotland Yard. Operating under the aegis of the home office, the Yard was a vital cog in the machinery of government set up to combat the ‘red menace’ in this country immediately after the First World War. By compromising the lead agency tasked with fighting them, the Bolsheviks thus created the requisite conditions for the metastasis in Great Britain of Soviet espionage in the 1920s.

This article uses the broad concept of ‘improvement of minds’ to refer to the idea of improving people's sense of morality, their ability and willingness to reason, and the depth of their emotional experiences. Such an objective has been little explored in the context of the history of the British Labour party. Yet, discussion of it is worth integrating into histories of the party for two reasons. First, the goal of improving minds was a strand – though often unsystematically developed – in the agendas of many Labour party politicians, activists, and thinkers. Secondly, the very fact that it was an unsystematically developed strand, the very limits of the party's attention to, and success in achieving, ‘mental progress’ amongst the twentieth-century British population – that is to say, simply, the limits to the party's pursuit and achievement of the objective of making people more caring, rational, and sensitive – is one important explanation for many of Labour's failures. The article begins to explore the aims, processes, and outcomes of Labour's attempts to improve minds, as well as to explain and examine the consequences of the limits of the party's attention to this goal, through the case study of Tony Crosland.

This article examines the co-operation between unionists and liberals in inter-war Glasgow. As with the parliamentary challenge of labour, unionists and liberals were confronted at the local level also. The usual response was some sort of municipal alliance or pact. In Scotland, where unionist support for continuing links with liberals was particularly pronounced, this took the form of specific ‘moderate’ parties created to contest local elections. This strategy was markedly successful in keeping labour out of office. The moderates secured their majority in Glasgow by completely dominating the middle-class wards and winning a number of working-class seats. Moderate success is examined through the essential unity of the middle-class vote, the more limited local franchise, and religious sectarianism. However, it became increasingly difficult for the moderates to satisfy both their middle-class and working-class supporters. The sudden emergence of a militant protestant party in the depths of the depression provided a temporary vehicle of protest, which split the moderate vote and allowed labour in to power in 1933.

Since the late nineteenth century, Western intellectuals have tended to depict ‘modernity’ as being incompatible with ‘enchantment’. Thus Max Weber argued that two aspects intrinsic to modernity, rationalization and bureaucratization, were inimical to the magical attitudes toward human existence that characterized medieval and early modern thought. His gloomy image of the ‘iron cage’ of reason echoed the fears of earlier romantics and was to be repeated by later cultural pessimists through the twentieth century. This article recovers a different outlook that emerged during the fin-de-siècle, one that reconciled the rational and secular tenets of modernity with enchantment and that underlies many forms of contemporary cultural practice. The popularity of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is taken as an exemplary instance of a specifically modern form of enchantment. First, Holmes's own form of rationalism, ‘animistic reason’, offered an alternative to the narrower instrumental reason that cultural pessimists claimed as a defining element of modernity. Second, many adult readers at the turn of the century and beyond were able to pretend that Holmes was real, and his creator fictitious, through the ‘ironic imagination’, a more capacious and playful understanding of the imagination than that held by the early Victorians. Both animistic reason and the ironic imagination made Holmes an iconic figure who enacted and represented the reconciliation of modernity and enchantment, whereas Doyle, unable to accept this reconciliation, resorted to spiritualism, a holdover of ‘premodern’ enchantment.

The article examines the reasons for the failure of the Conservative party to offer effective opposition to the independence of India in 1947. It is argued that until the last moment the Conservative stance on Indian independence was much more hostile than is usually recognized. That this opposition did not evolve into a full-scale revolt is explained less by the conversion of Conservatives to acceptance of the Attlee government's Indian policy than by the party leaders' beliefs that it would be hard to sustain a coherent campaign against it. The inability of unreconciled Conservatives to challenge this tactical decision as they had done in the early 1930s resulted from the erosion and disappearance of many of the organizational advantages they had then enjoyed and of the rapid pace of events in India.

This communication responds to Tyler Anbinder's article ‘Lord Palmerston and the Irish famine emigration’ of the late 1840s, published in the HJ in June 2001. Anbinder is incorrect in stating that ‘no detailed account of Palmerston's Irish estate during the famine or of his emigration scheme has ever been written’. There are other inaccuracies in Anbinder. There is also a problem of relevant omissions. Anbinder concentrates on Palmerston's assisted emigration programmes in a single year (1847). But Palmerston helped his tenants to emigrate both before and after 1847. What makes 1847 distinctive is that it was the only year in which Palmerston chartered ships for large-scale transportation of many of his tenants directly from Sligo to British North America. This communication seeks to place Anbinder's article in proper context, and hopes to prevent subsequent researchers from repeating some errors.

This article explores the official motivation behind the authorization in 1960 of research into the activities of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) during the Second World War by M. R. D. Foot, leading to the publication of SOE in France in 1966. The work has traditionally been viewed as the official response to critical investigative works on SOE published during the 1950s, combined with the vocal campaign of Dame Irene Ward, who made several calls in the House of Commons for an official account of SOE to be published. Material now available at the Public Record Office reveals that these were not the sole considerations in official minds, nor the most significant, concerning the possibility of publishing such a work. The foreign office was particularly concerned that Britain's contribution to wartime resistance in Europe, exemplified by SOE, was being overshadowed by both soviet propoganda, emphasizing the communist contribution to resistance, and the publicity being given to SOE's American counterpart, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The ‘campaign’ of Dame Irene Ward, supported by the negative slant given to SOE in the books of Jean Overton Fuller and Elizabeth Nicholas, unknowingly gave support to a frame of mind that was already in existence in favour of an unofficial account of SOE activity, albeit for different reasons.

The term ‘policing’ is often used to refer to a broad range of regulatory practices, which have been associated with the development of educative and social work frameworks in the modern state. The relationship between the concepts of ‘welfare’ and ‘penality’ (or ‘care’ and ‘control’) has been the subject of a number of recent studies of social intervention in twentieth-century Britain. However, the role of police officers themselves in the ‘policing of families’ has rarely been elaborated. From their initial appointment to London's Metropolitan Police in 1919 until their official integration on the same terms as male officers in the early 1970s, women police officers played a significant role in the detection and prevention of child abuse, neglect, and female delinquency. Through a case study of the work of the Metropolitan Women Police branch, this article considers the negotiation of a social work ethic within policing as well as the shifting configuration of the ‘care’/‘control’ nexus in welfare legislation and professional practice. The Metropolitan Women Police tended to see ‘care’ and ‘control’ as mutually reinforcing rather than conflicting concepts. Such a formulation was resonant with the rhetoric of social work and official legislation until the early 1960s. It also reflected the philosophy of crime prevention laid down as the principal object of policing, enabling women to justify involvement in child protection and welfare as an aspect of police work.

The purpose of this review is to take stock as the historiography of rural France pauses for breath following the headlong expansion of the post-Second World War decades. It examines some of the themes that continue to exert an attraction on scholars, and also some of the most recent attempts to challenge and reformulate the research agendas inherited from the Annales historians. The works discussed below raise questions concerning growth and stagnation in the rural economy, the basic characteristics of the rural community, and the role of quantification in rural history.

In the last two decades historians have been increasingly interested in the modernization of the monarchy, and the nature of the republican threat. This review evaluates some of this recent literature. The first section argues that while Walter Bagehot's views about ceremony in The English constitution (1867) have influenced historical writing, these approaches do not yield much information about what the monarchy actually meant to people. The second section turns to the political powers of the monarchy, and examines the wide range of views about what the constitutional limits of royal power were. It also shows that even radical writers were often unable to dispel the monarchy from their imaginations. Finally, the review suggests that criticism of the royal family was not necessarily republican, and arose more from concern that particular figures were failing to conform to shared public values. Pure republicans were few, and did not usually focus their energies on the monarchy, but rather on the nature of parliamentary representation and the power of the Lords.

Over the last thirty years, the absolute monarchy in France has been a subject of much controversy among historians. The traditional view, which can be traced back to Tocqueville, sees it primarily as an ‘administrative monarchy’, an essential step in the formation of a centralized French state. More recently, this approach has come under sustained attack from (mostly Anglo-American) scholars, who have emphasized in contrast the limits of absolutism, and in particular the persistent power of local and central elites in relation to the crown. In the light of these disputes, this article argues that the French absolute monarchy was above all a political compromise, in which neither crown nor elites had the definitive upper hand, but which could only function effectively through the co-operation of both sides. An aspect that has not sufficiently been stressed, however, is the fragility of the arrangement: it was ambiguous in practice if not in theory, and ultimately unable to deliver the resources necessary to sustain France's great-power status in the eighteenth century.

The Fischer controversy of the 1960s was a major landmark in post-war West German historiography. Surprisingly few historians to date have devoted their attention to the East German reception of Fischer's work, however. This article seeks to fill this gap by looking at some of the critical reviews published in East German academic journals and also at internal records from the Socialist Unity Party archive. Particular emphasis is placed on the period after 1965 when East German scholars began to explore the historiographical and national implications of the Fischer controversy with a greater degree of sensitivity but also with a greater degree of caution (for strategic political reasons). A mutually beneficial exchange of ideas between Fischer and German Democratic Republic scholars working on the First World War continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s, although ironically this was at a time when both sides were moving ever further away from the idea of a possible reunification of the two Germanies in the future.

This article explores the response of the moderate wing of the civil rights movement to the war in Vietnam. The moderates, made up of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League, and leaders such as Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, were initially opposed to the civil rights movement taking a stand against the war. This reluctance was the result of a number of factors, including anti-communism and their own closeness with the administration of President Lyndon Johnson. Crucially, it also resulted from their own experiences of the black freedom struggle itself. The article also documents and analyses the growing anti-war dissent amongst the moderates, culminating in the decision of both the NAACP and the Urban League to adopt an anti-war stance at the end of the 1960s. Despite this, they remained unenthusiastic about participating in peace movement activities, and the reasons for this are explained. Finally, the article suggests that the war was important in exposing existing divisions within the civil rights movement, as well as in generating new ones.

The review examines the recent literature on German federalism. This literature has identified a decentralized, federal tradition in German history, dating back at least to the eighteenth century and in striking contrast with the ‘unitary’ traditions of the Prussian state. The review questions the extent to which centralization was indeed a Prussian phenomenon in German history by examining the relatively decentralized nature of the Prussian state and the strongly centralizing tendencies of smaller German states in the nineteenth century. The review also examines the origins of the new ‘federal’ historiography, both in terms of contemporary German politics and in terms of the political debate surrounding German unification in the 1860s. It concludes that the idea of a ‘unitary’ Prussian state tradition is simplistic and reflects the inherent anti-Prussian bias of German federalism in the unification era. In this sense, it is the federal counterpart of the better-known Borussian approach to German history.

The crisis that gripped the three kingdoms of England, Ireland, and Scotland in the mid-seventeenth century continues to fascinate historians. The sheer variety of names attached to these events reveals the diversity of interpretations and preoccupations that scholars have brought to them. ‘The English Civil War’, ‘the English Revolution’, and ‘the British Civil Wars’ are just three of the different labels found in the titles of the eight books under review. Between them, these books offer a valuable cross-section of current work on the period. They present a range of perspectives, principally on the 1640s and 1650s, and give a flavour of the experiences of very different individuals living through these extraordinary events. They also indicate the variety of approaches that historians are now adopting to the period, ranging from finely focused work on particular figures to the reconstruction of British (or un-English) dimensions, and the use of interdisciplinary methods. Rarely in this field can such a wide range of tools have been simultaneously applied to so many different areas or individuals or types of source material. Such varied approaches are essential for recovering the experiences and mindsets of those who lived through these events, and between them these books offer a vivid sense of the richness, diversity, and drama of the period.

This article reviews the recent historiography of religion in modern Britain, concentrating on the debate about secularization and the work of Callum Brown in particular, but also with reference to Sarah Williams and Simon Green. It endorses, broadly, the criticisms made by these and other historians of older assumptions of a one-way, ‘inevitable’ link between modernization and religious decline, but in turn accuses them of attenuating the concept of ‘religion’ in the modern period to the point where it has lost internal sophistication. It suggests, instead, the compatibility of indices of institutional church decline with the persistence of religious identity and limited church affiliation.

The historiography of the eighteenth-century Church of England remains peculiarly preoccupied with vindicating that institution from the condemnation heaped upon it by Anglo-Catholics and Evangelicals in the nineteenth century. The chapters of Jeremy Gregory's Restoration, reformation, and reform characteristically begin with quotations from Victorians on the somnolence and negligence of the Hanoverian Establishment. The starting point is, as it were, a Hogarth cartoon of a corpulent curate and a snoozing congregation. In part this preoccupation is indicative of how little has been done on the subject since the Victorians. Norman Sykes, writing between the 1930s and 1950s, remains an almost solitary beacon for the church's institutional history, though much of his work was biographical, dwelling on clerical high politics rather than on the social fabric of the church in the parishes. About the Hanoverian parish we know little, and probably care less, because without Reformation or Revolution – or nuns or witches – there is little to move the secular-minded to take an interest. It would not, of course, be true to say that nothing has recently been done. There has been something in the field of intellectual history. One thinks of Brian Young's fine Religion and enlightenment in eighteenth-century Britain (1998), a filling out of John Pocock's sketch of an English ‘clerical Enlightenment’ – though most intellectual history of that era prefers the wilder shores of deism, freethinking, and the radical assault on priestcraft. There have been valuable probings of the early eighteenth-century politics of religion (the Sacheverell affair, the charity school movement, the Societies for the Reformation of Manners) and of the late Hanoverian roots of nineteenth-century high churchmanship.

The four books under review examine different aspects of the impact of the Protestant Reformation on communities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The study of communal responses to religious reform has become a significant aspect of Reformation research in recent years, and it has served to emphasize that religious reform was a process rather than an event, and that it was a collective concern, which involved families, neighbours, and all those in guilds and congregations at all levels of society, both in town and village. Study of the community in history has, however, raised some problems, principally over definition, for communities were not institutions or geographical areas, but a complex web of overlapping social, economic, and cultural groups, within which there was a range of shared and conflicting interests. Despite the value placed by rulers and magistrates upon unity, communal life was a constantly mutating mix of conflict, concession, and change, to which the Reformation added a dynamic and volatile new dimension. Although the authors here use the notion of community, they attach to it a variety of interpretations, and one might wonder whether such a malleable term has value as a tool for historical analysis. In fact, these works show such flexibility to be a strength, for in the Reformation, beliefs were only gradually defined, and levels of support were variable and unpredictable. Interpretations which recognize the changing secular and spiritual worlds inhabited by the people of the period are particularly useful for providing new insights into how religious reform was experienced by the majority of those living at the time.

The appearance of J. R. Oldfield's study, Popular politics and British anti-slavery, first published by Manchester University Press in 1995, now in paperback and therefore available for a student market, is much to be welcomed. The book is already well established in its field. As James Walvin writes in his preface, ‘Oldfield's research serves to clinch a simple but critical issue, namely that in the attack on the slave trade, popular revulsion was crucial’ (p. vi). Building on the work of earlier scholars, notably Seymour Drescher, Hugh Honour and Clare Midgley, Oldfield has demonstrated the ways in which the abolition movement turned to mobilizing public opinion after 1787 against the slave trade. At the centre of his investigation are the petition campaigns of 1788 and 1792. In analysing anti-slavery sentiment he successfully brings together approaches which focus on the eighteenth century as a period of expansion in commercial society and popular forms of politics with the agenda of historians of the slave trade and slavery. The abolition movement, he argues, provided the prototype for modern reforming organizations. It was peopled by practical middle-class men who understood the importance of the expansion of the market and consumer choice. It succeeded in capturing the imagination of those, predominantly middle-class men and women, who were increasingly interested in engaging in forms of public debate and who had the resources, both in terms of time and money, to do so. His book, he argues, is a piece of ‘thick description’ which offers ‘fresh insights into the increasingly powerful role of the middle classes in influencing Parliamentary politics from outside the confines of Westminster’ (p. 5).

Geoffrey Elton's model of Tudor politics, which emphasized the importance of political institutions and which dominated our understanding of Tudor politics for much of the second half of the twentieth century, has been challenged by a number of historians for over twenty years. They have re-emphasized the importance of social connections and cultural influences and turned attention away from studying the privy council to studying the court. In doing so, they have gone back to re-examine earlier approaches by Sir John Neale and Conyers Read which Elton had challenged. Yet, these new socially and culturally derived approaches, recently labelled ‘New Tudor political history’, remain varied and its practitioners sometimes at odds with each other. Focusing on both established seminal works and recent research, this review considers the different elements of these approaches in relation to Tudor court politics. It assesses the methodological problems they raise and identifies what shortcomings still remain. It demonstrates that Tudor politics are increasingly defined as based on social networks rather than institutional bodies, making issues of access to, and intimacy with, the monarch central. Our understanding has been further enhanced by exploration of political culture and its relationship to political action. However, the review points to the need to integrate more fully the political role of women and the relationship between the court and the wider political community into our understanding of Tudor politics, as well as place England into a European context.