Since World War II much emphasis has been placed on the key role which education must play in East African affairs to promote the economic and cultural growth of the new African states. The problems of the intensification and the spread of education in East Africa deserve particular attention because they are different in nature from those of well-established countries and have been complicated by peculiarities in the history of the region.

Between 1900 and 1920 the groundwork for native education was laid by missionary schools. Though limited in their objectives, they achieved tangible results. In spreading the knowledge of reading and writing among a substantial number of natives, they facilitated native contact with western civilization. After 1919 British officials in East Africa, humanitarians, and leaders in missionary movements became concerned with the spread of native education and demanded a change in the existing system. At the same time there emerged new native political movements, the leaders of which took a determined stand on matters of native education. They criticized the existing facilities and demanded the right of the African to be educated. To analyze the complexity of the problems of East African native education, particularly in the period from 1920 to 1950, is the purpose of this paper. It is necessary, however, first to look at the broader picture of the situation in East Africa in the immediately preceding decades and then to examine the achievements and limitations of East African education in the period from 1900 to 1914.

Proceedings of parliament, said Sir Edward Coke in 1624, are of four sorts: by bill, judicature, petition of grace and petition of right. The purpose of this paper is to explore certain aspects of procedure by petition in the reigns of James I and Charles I and to consider the Petition of Right of 1628 in relation to other petitions which preceded it.

The substance of the Petition of Right is well known. It stated that contrary to the laws of the realm, men had been required under duress to grant loans and pay other charges to the crown which had not been voted by parliament. They had been imprisoned without cause shown, tried by martial law in time of peace, and forced to receive into their homes soldiers and mariners billeted upon them. The Petition asked that these practices, which contravened the rights and liberties of the kingdom, should cease.

The form of the Petition, together with its answer, is less well understood than its substance and is often considered unique. It has sometimes been regarded as a declaratory act, sometimes compared to a private bill, or to the petition, also called a petition of right, by which an individual initiated action against the crown. To discover what the Petition meant to men of the seventeenth century, it may be useful first to look at the events that surrounded Charles' several answers to it, and then to examine the petition as a normal form of procedure, of which the Petition of Right was a dramatic example.

Thomas Bilson, in the eyes of his contemporaries, soared like a Jewel or a Hooker above his fellow writers; unlike Jewel or Hooker his fame has not endured. He seems at first sight to be another writer with a tiny talent, overpraised in his lifetime. If this were all that there was to Bilson, then better to leave him to “such as delight in things obsolete and antique” (as an unsentimental critic said of a later, more prolix, writer).

Yet there are curiosities about the rise and fall of Thomas Bilson. He was born in 1547, became Bishop of Winchester in 1597, and died in 1616. He is a shadowy figure, whose fame rests principally on two works: The True Difference Betweene Christian Subjection and Unchristian Rebellion (1585); The Perpetual Government of Christes Church (1593). If one were to plot a graph of his public reputation, it would show a steady rise after his death, reaching a peak as late as the 1640s, and then followed by a precipitous decline. Now this is not what common sense would have led us to expect. If he had been merely an overvalued mediocrity, one would have expected a redress of the critical balance to follow close on his death. Neither the length of time taken up by the rise nor the abruptness of the fall could have been anticipated. It is true that Bilson lacked the stamina for enduring greatness, but he was not exactly shortwinded either.

The royal court known variously as the “court of the verge,” the “court of the steward and marshal,” or the “Marshalsea court,” and which was said to try “pleas of the hall” (placita aule), appeared as a distinct and separate tribunal during the second half of Edward I's reign. It is difficult to trace the process whereby it distinguished its highly specialized jurisdiction over matters of personal interest to the king and his household from the general jurisdiction exercised coram rege and thereby succeeded in separating itself from the undifferentiated Curia Regis. Since at least the early thirteenth century the steward of the household was viewed as having a special judicial role within the household, of which he was the appointed head. As a result of that process of departmentalization which created the other agencies of royal justice and administration, a special household jurisdiction appeared toward the end of the thirteenth century. About the year 1290 the court of the steward and marshal of the household emerged as a separate and identifiable judicial body with its own personnel, procedures, and rolls, and with a jurisdictional competence encompassing pleas of trespass within the verge, cases of debt involving members of the household, and pleas of contempt of the king's rights of purveyance and carriage. In substance, the court claimed to try cases involving the domestic servants of the crown and certain acts affronting the royal dignity and, in geographical terms, breaches of the king's peace within the vicinity of the royal residence, which was assumed to extend twelve miles in every direction from the especially sacrosanct presence of the sovereign.

Mr. Cheyette's remarks require at least a brief comment from the gild of medieval tapestry weavers with whom he disagrees so strongly. On the assumption that the historian cannot derive a definition from the evidence, he has produced an article which is at once interesting, well written, and utterly uncontaminated by contact with an original source. Thus liberated, he has woven a colorful tapestry of his own. Having written much on how feudalism ought not to be defined, he turns at length to its proper definition. Unsure of what an institution is, he defines feudalism as “a medieval way of thinking,” better yet, a “technique,” and, perhaps best of all, a “spirit.” It is not unnatural that the medieval institutional historian would object to such definitions. They have a fine sound in the context of a brief, discursive article, but in the actual writing of history they are ephemeral and, indeed, far more archetypal than the definitions that medievalists ordinarily use.

What is feudalism? Marc Bloch, whose conception of it is about as broad as one is apt to find among medieval historians, defines it as follows:

It is now more than a decade since John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson first challenged the conventional interpretations of nineteenth-century imperial history and employed the term “The Imperialism of Free Trade” to describe the “ever-extending and intensifying development of overseas regions” — a term which characterizes British imperial policy in the middle decades of the last century. The general validity of this thesis has been illustrated by reference to British policies in India in this period. There was the extensive program of railway construction, financed by British capital at favorable rates of interest guaranteed by the Government of India. There was the manipulation of the Indian tariff in response to pressure from the Lancashire cotton manufacturers. There was the cotton improvement program, the object of which was to relieve Lancashire's dependence on the United States as the major source of its raw cotton. In this case, the desired object was not achieved, despite considerable effort and expenditure sustained over more than a decade. But the approach of civil war in America revived interest in India as an alternative source of supply, notwithstanding the many difficulties that stood in the way. Indian cotton was raised on small holdings as a secondary crop every third or fourth year; its quality was poor; climatic conditions were uncertain; demand was irregular; communications between the cotton-producing areas and the ports were bad; and trade was hampered by lack of a contract law and a bankruptcy act. The Lancashire cotton manufacturers demanded energetic action from the state in overcoming these difficulties.

“In normal times the guillotine, luckily, is not at the disposal of historians.”

Paul Valéry

History is a humanly necessary mode of knowing. Every poised epoch is knit together by the imaginative language it uses to expropriate an organized past from whose qualitative contours it then silently, habitually infers its own nature. History as a fact of communal psychology thus maintains a many-layered referential manifold. This referential manifold must have some kind of emotional legibility and be formally intelligible if it is to serve to subordinate the threatening welter of the no longer relevant. A great deal of meritorious historical research and writing is merely propaedeutic or precritical to the maintenance of this self-validating mirror of each poised epoch. When the mirror no longer throws back usefully intelligible images it must be renewed by honest appraisal of the imaginative syntheses of prior epochs. Such enquiry nowadays tends to bewilderment and to the tenebrous by reason of the richness of the available record. In these latter days the historian is a modifier of pre-established images, his fundamental renovations of vision are few. The mirror stands there; it is bequeathed to us; we need it; it is a strenuous, intellectual task to preserve it at a working level of provocative clarity.

Therefore it is especially desirable that higher historiography escape gossip-mongering about the defenseless dead, or that other form of intrusive projection of current frustrations upon past behaviour, the romanticizing of energy potentials of other eras.

The occasional conformity controversy has been the subject of considerable study by historians, both contemporary and modern. However, recent research has tended to concentrate on the parliamentary and electoral aspects of the issue, with somewhat less attention given to its importance as an ideological question. Nevertheless, the latter aspect of the controversy is well worth examining, for aside from its impact upon the struggle for office and power, occasional conformity was also the subject of heated debate on the theoretical and philosophical level. And although this debate often degenerated into partisan diatribes and rhetoric, it also raised questions that transcended the political ploy on the one hand, and the theologian's quibble and the propagandist's stalking horse on the other. The arguments used by both sides during the controversy revealed the basic philosophical differences that lay at the heart of the rivalry between the Whig and Tory parties. Occasional conformity's role as an expression of, and its relation to, this struggle is the subject of this article.

The ideological debate over occasional conformity was necessarily stimulated by the parliamentary struggles during the first decade of the eighteenth century over the various bills which were designed to discourage the practice, and many of the tracts on the subject were written in response to these and other political maneuvers. But the pamphlet war had its own distinct existence, and the writers involved fought with their pens a battle that was parallel to the one that the politicians were fighting with votes and influence.

By any measure, the National Insurance Act of 1911 ranks among the major legislative achievements of the Liberal administration that held office in Great Britain before World War I. One section of the act founded the world's first national system of compulsory unemployment insurance. Another section brought government-sponsored health insurance to five sixths of the families of the nation and established the precedent of state concern for the physical welfare of the individual citizen, of which the National Health Service Act of 1946 would be only an extension. By requiring beneficiary contributions toward welfare programs, the act settled the financial pattern for most of Britain's present social legislation. In a less crowded period, the National Insurance Act would rank as an imposing parliamentary monument, comparable, for instance, to the Education Act of 1902. Sandwiched between the Parliament Act and the Home Rule Act, it has been lost from sight. The measure is not mentioned in the standard biography either of Asquith or of Balfour. It earns one sentence in G. M. Trevelyan's History of England in the Nineteenth Century, where through successive editions and revisions it is called “the National Health Insurance Act of 1912.” R. C. K. Ensor's England, 1870-1914 gives it a couple of paragraphs.

This study is an examination of an important, perhaps crucial, aspect of the evolution of the health insurance section of the National Insurance Act that has remained unnoticed for half a century: the lobby activity of the British commercial insurance industry by which the companies modified health insurance proposals for their own benefit.

Recently one of the most distinguished historians of Tudor and Stuart England, Lawrence Stone, distilled his extensive study and careful analysis of this era into a compact, persuasive, up-to-date account of The Causes of the English Revolution, 1529-1642. Abounding in shrewd insights, it appears destined to became the standard short introduction to the background of that event and a popular starting point for comparative studies. For these reasons, the framework of historical interpretation expounded in the Causes bears careful, explicit examination and assessment. Stone himself stressed the need for such inquiry and indicated its direction by pointing out that “the main thing which distinguishes the narrative from the analytical historian is that the former works within a framework of models and assumptions of which he is not always fully conscious, while the latter is aware of what he is doing, and says so explicitly.” One must add that the analytical historian rarely escapes from the category reserved for his narrative colleague. However, the Causes opens the way for reappraisal of a whole historiographical tradition precisely because Stone explicates portions of his explanatory framework.

Normally most historians operate from hidden assumptions which enclose the perimeters of an historiographical tradition and provide it with needed stability. While excluding other approaches, these presuppositions make detailed research possible by singling out particular hypotheses, problems, and even evidence as especially significant or legitimate. From the days of Samuel Rawson Gardiner to the present, historians as different as Gardiner and Stone have shared a set of basic assumptions about the movement of history in general, about the long term causes of the “English Revolution”, and about its nature and timing.

For the British, the Anglo-Russian Convention was the culmination of repeated efforts, first begun by Lord Salisbury's government in the 1880s, later reiterated by the ministry of Arthur Balfour after the turn of the century, to come to terms with Russia in Asia. What was the effect on the British position in Asia of the agreement which the Liberal administration of Henry Campbell-Bannerman finally obtained in 1907? The actual working of the Convention in Asia has not received close attention. Since Britain and Russia were wartime allies, it appears to have been taken for granted that, before World War I, the Anglo-Russian Convention produced no major disenchantment or dangers for either partner. One purpose of this essay is to show that for the British, the Convention eventually generated serious dissatisfaction, that it failed to fulfill the British aim of halting Russian expansion in areas strategically crucial to the defense of India, and that in Central Asia after 1912, the Anglo-Russian Convention hindered rather than furthered the British quest for security. Further, a thesis of this paper is that Anglo-Russian relations dominated British policy in Central Asia, and that it was British anxiety about Russian expansion in Central Asia which led the British after 1912 to attempt to establish a veiled protectorate in Tibet. This view diverges from that of a recent major work on the once obscure history of Central Asia: in The McMahon Line, Professor Alastair Lamb emphasized the importance of Sino-Indian relations to the formulation of British policy in Central Asia.

The text for this essay comes from Sir Lewis Namier. “One has to steep oneself in the political life of a period,” so the decree reads, “before one can safely speak, or be sure of understanding, its language.” This article is an attempt to supply, not a complete grammar of Augustan politics, but a minor lexicographical entry. Historians sometimes talk as though the most urgent need were for an advanced glossary. The assumption behind this essay is that a more elementary gradus is required. The two key words under review, “party” and “faction,” have always occupied neighbouring berths in the British synonymy. Unfortunately, in the eighteenth-century vocabulary of politics, they became overlapping concepts. Or rather — this is the trouble — they sometimes merged, partially or completely; sometimes they did not; and sometimes they were even employed as antonymous terms. Examples of all these contrary applications are found in the work of Swift and Bolingbroke. As with other lexicographical enquiries, then, usage and abusage must be considered, as well as the simple dictionary definition of these terms.

I

Edmund Burke is still, in some quarters, valued more highly as a prophet than as a political thinker. His forecasts of the likely course of the Revolution have brought him a reputation for the occult among those who hold his moral views in little esteem, even though he may be regarded, most unfairly, as a sorcerer's apprentice who was engulfed by his own charmed vision.

“Imperialism,” like “empire,” is a word with many connotations; briefly, it describes an attitude of mind to the possession and use of dependent territories by the metropolitan power and the effect of colonization on the society and polity of the colonized. Despite attempts to discover a common basis to imperialist thinking at all times in history, most historians perceive differences, both in degree and kind, between different empires and at various times in the history of a single empire. They approach their task either with a definition of “imperialism” or a theory about the phenomenon it is meant to describe, and are concerned primarily with the effects of policies rather than how and why they were made; or they ask why something happened when it did, in the way it did, and are concerned primarily with the making of policy and the motives of the policy-makers.

Following the second approach, this paper explores one of the most crucial and continuous questions that imperial administrators had to resolve: the problem of self-government in colonies of European settlement, leading to the ultimate transfer of power; and by looking at the “University Question” in Upper Canada during the half-century after 1791, it examines how the perpetual adjustment that was “policy-making” actually happened. More specifically, in answering the question, “Who ran the British Empire?”, it is concerned not so much with the effects of Britain's control over subject peoples as with the method by which it exercised that control.

Political history is the record of the pursuit and exercise of state power. In a democracy the search for such authority usually begins with the contest of elections. Elections, as a consequence, are of great importance and their systematic analysis, particularly the extrapolation of conclusions about popular attitudes from their results, has achieved in the last few years the status of a separate scholarly craft.

Historians have their own way of explaining elections. Traditionally, they tend to concentrate upon comparisons of programs and of party leaders. They assume the electorate made a choice between platforms and personalities and they tend to explain observable results in terms of most easily demonstrable causes. In dealing with the British General Election of 1945, for instance, they argue that the Labor party won because voters found its program more believable than that of the other party. This explanation, of course, is tautological. One is reminded of Calvin Coolidge who explained his victory in the race for governor of Massachusetts by saying that he received the most votes.

Yet of all elections in the twentieth century, the poll of 1945 needs critical investigation. The importance of its results have obscured the complexities of the election itself; historians have been so fascinated by what Labor did in office that they have ignored how the party got there. Labor's victory was as unprecedented as it was unexpected. As neither Churchill nor the leaders of the Labor party could believe, even in the face of much evidence to the contrary, that the electorate would dismiss the man who had led Britain through the war, the mystery of the election derives not from the Labor victory but from the breakdown of understanding between the leaders of the nation and its citizenry.

The career of Ernest Belfort Bax provides a special perspective on the early development of British Socialism when, as someone observed, “generals without soldiers” were using Marxist ideas to scout a new path into the future. For Bax, as the only philosophical thinker among the early British Marxists, set out to develop the broader meaning of the new theory for his countrymen. This article will examine Bax's interpretation of Marxism with particular attention to his view of history, his approach to ethics, and his metaphysical position. It will also consider Bax's role in the movement and his relations with the three central figures in the early development of British Marxism — Henry Mayers Hyndman, William Morris and Friedrich Engels. Finally the article will attempt to explain the reasons for Bax's departure from a strict Marxism and suggest its implications for the development of Marxism and for late Victorian society

Bax, like so many of those figures who assumed the leading roles in the early development of European Socialism, grew up in a prosperous middle class family. His social background combined the economic affluence and evangelical piety which gave such a distinctive stamp to mid-Victorian life. For the young Bax, as for numerous other spirited sons of the English bourgeoisie, family wealth provided access to a wider world of culture and ideas. He soon discarded the simple piety and religious dogmatism of his upbringing. Indeed, he developed a deep hatred of middle class beliefs and conventions.