The documents in this section illustrate the role of the liturgy – the regular round of services in worship of God – as the core of the monastic life.

This chapter provides an outline of the historical development of service allowances and their administration in the period to 1918, their further development during the interwar period and the changes brought about by the advent of the Second World War. Britain was almost half a century late to acknowledge state responsibility for service families compared with its major protagonist in both World Wars. The study elaborates how the government and the armed services ignored any responsibility to provide continuing support for the families of those fighting for their country. Gradually, a slow change took place; provision for families became a particularly important issue when length of service was taken into consideration. The problem now became one of administration rather than conviction.

As a result of the low level of management control over the labour force, the detailed division of tasks in shipbuilding fell largely into the hands of the industry's craftsmen. Employers had no direct control over training, little power to enforce their preferred payment systems, and when new technology was introduced its manning was generally determined by demarcation disputes between the stronger craft unions. Not only were the employers hampered by a lack of unity, but a majority among them recognised that, given their market situation, product types, and devolved management systems, the economic gains of a major confrontation with the craft unions were likely to be marginal. This assessment is broadly confirmed by a preliminary analysis of the relationship between trade unions and labour productivity in the industry which indicates that, rather than increases in union strength being accompanied by decreases in productivity, both union strength and productivity tended to increase together in periods of increased demand and output.

This chapter discusses the information and support provided by charitable and ‘self-help’ agencies such as the Soldiers', Sailors' and Air Force Families Association and local committees. The lack of coherent policy and the competition for superiority between charitable organisations increased and mirrored the confusion caused by the lack of an overall policy between government departments, and motivated the desire to establish their own action groups, whereas the lack of coherent policy regarding the dissemination of information did not explain the rapid proliferation of local prisoner-of-war committees and support groups. The chapter raises the question of possible tensions between various charitable organisations, each of which laid claim to being the organisation primarily concerned with the welfare of prisoner of war families. It reflects upon the difference between two types of support agencies for prisoner-of-war families, namely, local prisoner-of-war committees and national charities.

This epilogue briefly considers where the preceding analyses take and leave us with respect to the War on Terror and the broader problems of relations between life, war, and politics of which this war is an expression. In the context of a war in which liberal regimes are attempting to convince their publics that it is no less than the future survival of the human species which is at stake in a conflict against an enemy stripped of all ordinary attributes of humanity, it is of necessity that we continue to question as rigorously as possible the relations between life, war and liberal modernity. It is of necessity that the problem of liberal modernity no longer be understood as that of how to free life from its subjection to a historical and politically contingent condition of war, but how to free life from its subjection to the means of liberal solutions to the problem of war. There is today not so much a problem with war as such, but more pressingly with prevailing liberal solutions to war. That is to say in the limitations of the ways in which liberal regimes construe social conditions conducive to peace. Understood thus, the imperative question of politics which Foucault specified for us, which the other theorists in this book all seek to respond to, and which nevertheless continues to plague us, is that of how to disengage from the biopolitical techniques and processes through which life comes to be pacified and mobilised as logistical life.

The documents in this section illustrate the character of everyday monastic life in the later middle ages in the form of administrative records, most notably accounts and inventories.

The Reformation in Scotland began as it did across most of the rest of Europe: with books and universities, with merchants and friars. As in many parts of Europe, part of the excitement of evangelicalism lay not in the reformers' specific doctrines but in the open Bible. Religious persecution during the Scottish Reformation was sporadic. Over the course of James V's reign, the reformist movement's rhetoric, its doctrines and especially its social shape did begin to reflect the Scottish situation. James V himself was keen to emphasise that heresy was an alien import, stressing in 1530 that its source was foreign merchants. The ban on vernacular Scripture was Alexander Alesius' chief concern when he protested against James V's religious policies. The eruption of revolutionary heresy in Germany in the early 1520s forced itself onto the attention of every province of Christendom.

Several historians of the European 'revolutionary tradition' have seen radical Protestantism as the begetter of that tradition, looking to the British civil wars of the 1640s or to the Dutch revolt of the 1560s and thereafter. The Scottish Reformation has a good claim to a place in the same tradition. The threat of force had shaped the Scottish Reformation from its beginning: the old Church's heavy-handed treatment of dissidence had helped to generate heresy, and England's more heavy-handed interventions damaged the new religion at least as much as the old. The events of the 1550s had left some Scots uncertain of France's trustworthiness, and the behaviour of Mary of Guise and her troops as the rebellion progressed seemed to confirm the Protestants' accusation of tyranny. The Protestants' English allies managed to avoid the suspicion of imperial ambitions, even as Guise's French support was sapped by growing religious discord in France.

Networking was integral to a diplomat's work, and it could take place in the antechambers of the royal household, the salons of the nobility or the embassies of foreign powers. Courtiers always talked amongst themselves to alleviate the boredom of their duties, but envoys had compelling sociological and psychological reasons for sharing information: to reconstruct events, ascertain motives and reach consensus. Oral communication networks were by no means perfect. The diplomats of the 1790s had also played their part as pamphleteers and advocates of ‘hack’ journalism. The French restoration, though followed with great hope and anxiety, therefore went ahead without any formal endorsement from the British. The breakdowns of consensus and communication between interest groups that permitted extreme solutions to seem attractive and, thus, viable were feared most by envoys.

This book compares the worldviews and factors that promoted or indeed opposed antisemitism amongst Catholics in Britain and Germany. It reviews the sources of attraction or rejection of fascism and National Socialism and the role antisemitism played in this context. It then highlights the hypernationalism in Europe that was further inflamed by the widespread fear of Russian Bolshevism and of indigenous socialist movements. Catholics moved, as well as the strength and density of a Catholic organisational infrastructure, to multiply or counter antisemitism. Furthermore, it argues that there was no universal Catholic antisemitism in Britain and Germany nor can Catholic views of Jews be reduced to a traditional religious prejudice. The Catholic and Jewish communities in Britain and Germany are then explored. The history of Jews both in Britain and in Germany is a story of economic success and social improvement.

This documents in this section illustrate the interaction between monasteries and their patrons and benefactors in this period.

Dublin's approach from the mid-1970s seemed to confirm the thinking of an Irish policy document. The third option open to the British government is to declare that its objective in Ireland is the bringing together of both Irish traditions in reconciliation and agreement. John Hume played a significant role in the conception and propagation of the Anglo-Irish strategy and also guided the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) towards its realisation. ‘The Irish Question: a British problem’ set the co-ordinates of the SDLP's course under Hume, whose article made clear his belief that all parties to the Northern Ireland conflict had much to do to bring about its resolution. He also believed that the primary aim of the two governments (London and Dublin) should be to remove what he and his party saw as the main obstacle to agreement: the British guarantee and the resultant unionist veto.

This chapter revolves around the core context of female public sphere. Female associationalism was the starting point for many middle-class women's public lives. Reforming organisations such as constitutional suffrage societies, temperance unions and Women's Liberal Associations (WLAs) provide more well-to-do women with opportunities to actively engage in the important social and political issues of their day. In Glasgow and Edinburgh, cross-membership knitted together women's organisations, imparting a multi-issue reform programme to a range of women's groups. These organisations, though part of international reforming efforts to enhance women's clout in public affairs, are rooted in local civic life. While it is shown that male associational life and civic involvement were marked by cross-membership within the local sphere, evidence from these organisations suggests a similar pattern among more elite urban women active in the feminine public sphere.