The revival of the Foxite opposition from the demoralizing effects of its rupture of 1792-1794 and the subsequent secession of 1797 is an important and not fully understood episode in Great Britain's political history. The central feature of that recovery was the alliance struck in January 1804 between Charles James Fox and William Lord Grenville. It was not only to provide the foundation for the “Ministry of All the Talents” of 1806-1807, the whig opposition's sole tenure of office between 1783 and 1830, but it was to have profound effects on the activities of the whig party for at least a decade after the fall of that ministry. The arrangement and reception of the “cooperation,” as it was termed, illuminates the condition and the preoccupations of the Foxite opposition during Henry Addington's tenure in power. The alliance involved the most important political decisions Fox made in the last decade of his life, and the history of its establishment explains many of the workings of his mind after the secession. The actual proposition of association was one of the key incidents in the career of its initiator, Grenville, and it provides much information on a man who remains one of the least understood major politicans of George III's reign. The alliance has as well its own interest as a study of how two opponents with differing aspirations and ideals could form a successful union, each with motivations more complicated than the mere desire for office.

The critical transition in social policy in nineteenth-century Britain, it is still generally believed, was the change from individualism to collectivism. Yet since Dicey came under fire in the late 1950s, there has been no accepted consensus about how and when this transition came about. Dicey himself, who was not strictly a historian but a theorist of jurisprudence, held a naive view of how things happen, how policy changes and is translated into law: a great thinker thinks, and converts disciples, who in turn contrive to turn the master's thoughts into the dominant wisdom or accepted common sense of the age, which then finds its way on to the Statute Book. In this way he arrived at his famous tripartite division of the nineteenth century into three periods of public opinion, government policy, and legislation: the first, up to 1825 or 1830, the period of Old Toryism, legislative quiescence, or Blackstonian optimism, dominated by Sir William Blackstone; the second, from about 1830 to 1865 or 1870, the period of Benthamism or Individualism, dominated by Jeremy Bentham and his disciples; and the last, from 1865 or 1870 to the time of his lectures on Law and Opinion published in 1905, the period of Collectivism, dominated, it seems, by no great thinker of powerful mind and principle, but merely by the pragmatic need to propitiate the emerging and increasingly powerful working-class voter. It is surprising that Dicey could not find a great thinker on whom to serve an affiliation order for fathering collectivism.

“During the late 1830's and 40's two forms of class consciousness were being forged in Britain, not one — middle-class consciousness and working-class consciousness.” Asa Briggs's belief is shared in all its starkness by many students of early Victorian Britain, including R. K. Webb, who has even referred to “the working class point of view,” which middle-class men could adopt only by becoming “traitors to their class.” Such statements have been severely taken to task by various historians, and from the beginning Briggs has seen the need to admit important qualifications. Quoting the nineteenth-century economist W. T. Thornton, he has agreed that “the labouring population … spoken of as if it formed only one class” was “really divided into several,” each distinguished from the other by wage rates, social security, regularity of earnings, climate of industrial relations, status in the local community, prospects of future advancement, and sophistication of political attitudes.

Unfortunately these qualifications are productive of confusion: it is by no means obvious why Briggs's readers should believe that only one form of working-class consciousness existed in such conditions of diversity. Nor is it obvious why similar qualifications should not be made concerning the middle classes. Was the gulf between William Lovett and those whom he called the “vicious many” not similar in extent to that between most members of the Leeds middle classes and their fellow citizen J. G. Marshall, “a millionaire mill-owner, a man aristocratically allied, and the manager of the largest factory in the world”? Nor is it necessary to rely on such an extreme example, if one believes Gibbon Wakefield, who detected the existence of an “uneasy class,” the product of a division within the ranks of the professionally qualified:

At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a widespread effort to reassess Victorian values so that they might be retained, but in a more viable form. The new democracy was the catalyst in this introspective process which affected political thought most of all. Before the Great War the anomalous behavior of the new citizen, in the streets and at the polls, compelled thoughtful attention to political problems in England. In reaction to the unreasonable and unpredictable behavior of the new democracy, a new democratic liberalism and a new elitism came into being. New liberalism, in trying to qualify rationalist assumptions and transform the negative program of nineteenth-century liberalism, largely succeeded. New elitism, like old elitism, in concluding that the great majority were fit only to be governed, largely failed. But the elitist critique of mass urban democracy was as compelling to many people as the new liberal's defense. While liberalism has received critical comment, discussions of elitism have been limited to Fabian methodology or subordinated to analyses of Utopian programs. Yet the most formidable elitist argument came from the infant science of social psychology, developed concurrently by William McDougall, a physiologist, and Wilfred Trotter, a surgeon and neurologist. In prewar Britain, social psychology was the basis for a political critique of democracy presented as a scientific analysis of behavior.

This paper deals with the validity of social psychology as a reading of history which concluded in political elitism. The accuracy and significance of the social psychologists' explanation of behavior are assessed solely in terms of its political implications as a plea for government by an Elect of social scientists, a plea hidden within a purportedly scientific account of social evolution.

The inscription on Robert Owen's monument in Kensal Green cemetery, London, begins: “He originated and organized infant schools.” This claim, though disputed during his lifetime, is now generally acknowledged and has become part of the familiar story of Owen. For fifty years after his death in 1858, however, Owen was remembered chiefly as a cooperator, secularist, and Utopian socialist, and Frank Podmore in his definitive biography of Owen published in 1906 observed that “the name of Robert Owen is little known to the present generation as an educational reformer.” Thanks to Podmore's work and later that of another Fabian, G. D. H. Cole, Owen's role as an educator became more fully recognized. Subsequent biographies and educational dissertations elaborated (or, perhaps more accurately, repeated) details of Owen's educational activities and ideas. More recently A. E. Bestor, through a brilliant examination of the American material, showed the close relationship between education and Owenite communitarianism.

In modern evaluations of Owen and his work a large place has thus been rightly accorded to education. The spectacular nature of the experiment at New Lanark, the advocacy of a nonviolent and widely acceptable method of social change, and Owen's repeated emphasis on the importance of education in character formation all contributed to a focusing of attention on this aspect of his achievement. “The basis of Owenism,” wrote Cole, “was his [Owen's] theory of education.” Evidence for this view came from Owen's statements on the relation between education and social reform and from descriptions of the detailed workings of his infant school.

It was Harold J. Laski who said “the road from Constance to 1688 is a direct one,” and he did so when speaking of the constitutional theories enunciated by the Conciliar thinkers and put into practice at the Council of Constance. These closely related theories had their roots deep in the corporative thinking of the medieval canon lawyers but sprang into prominence during the years after 1378, when the Western Church was divided first into two and then into three “obediences” under the sway of rival claimants to the Papacy. Basic to all the Conciliar theories was the central insistence that the final authority in the Church lay not with the Pope but with the whole body of the faithful and that the Pope possessed, therefore, not an absolute but merely a ministerial authority delegated to him for the good of the Church. This belief made it possible to appeal from the obduracy of the rival pontiffs to the decision of the faithful as expressed through their representatives assembled in a General Council of the whole Church, and such a possibility was actualized at the Councils of Pisa (1409) and Basel (1431-1449) and, most strikingly of all, at Constance (1414-1418). There it found expression, not only in the judgment and deposition of popes, but also in the promulgation of the decree Sacrosancta (1415), which declared:

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the role of the East India Company was significantly altered. In the early part of the century, the main thrust of Company activity was commercial, but this began to change as the French challenged British interests in India and conditions on the sub-continent demanded political and military involvement. Lucy Sutherland has summed up these changes succinctly:

One of the distinctive characteristics of the Conservative Party's history has been its ability for a century or more to moult its plumage at the right political season without really altering its gestalt. This comment does not imply an act of deception by Conservative Party leaders. Rather it recognizes that Peel, Pitt, Disraeli and, in the twentieth century, Tory leaders like R. A. Butler, Harold Macmillan, Iain Macleod and before them, Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill, somehow understood the need for social change and the politics of compromise; so much so that they were quite prepared, in the words of New York's Mayor Jimmy Walker, “to rise above principle” where and when it appeared to be necessary. The Conservative Party has endured as a party because of its unusual adaptability compared to conservative parties in other Western societies. Indeed, it has more than merely ‘endured’: the Conservative Party in an apparently hostile atmosphere, has been able to take and hold power for huge blocks of time in the past century.

This adaptation to reality in the interests of power was particularly apparent after the landslide Conservative defeat in July 1945. Some party leaders were determined to adapt to the new realities by attempting to recapture the support of as sizeable a segment of the British working class as the party had enjoyed at the turn of the century. Promulgation of the Industrial Charter through the efforts of a high-powered Tory Committee and the Conservative Research Department was a significant step in that direction.

During the past sixteen years “administrative history” seems to have come and gone as a term of distinction in the historical study of Tudor England. In the later 1940's there were a number of scholars newly aware of the vast wealth of government records in the English archives and enormously impressed by the achievements of the medievalists — of Tout and his school — who deplored the absence of comparable studies for the post-medieval period and, for a time, came to seek salvation in an ever more stringent and particular investigation of the processes of government. But that phase did not last long. Now it can be said by Joel Hurstfield, himself a notable contributor to that flowering of administrative history, that “we have passed beyond recall the stage when the machinery alone, however intimately understood, can answer the questions.” The study of social history is all the rage now, by which is meant the history of a given society in its various aspects and manifestations — or rather, whatever may in fact emerge from that awesome ambition. Fashions change, and nowadays they change pretty rapidly; but one need not regret that not-so-distant dawn or believe that the evening has yet come. Let it be made clear, however, what is meant, or should be meant, by administrative history. Certainly this involves the analysis and description of past administrative processes, the discovery of principles implicit or explicit in the conduct of government, and an understanding of the manner in which the theoretical mechanism operated in practice.

Men and women who wish to uphold the interests of the textile trade should “make fashion follow the trade, and not trade the fashion,” declared Daniel Defoe in 1705. But long before this time the East India Company had discovered that the exploitation of fashion for profit is a more artful business than a mere dictatorship exercised by the “trade.” After 1660 the Company's policy regarding the import of cotton textiles was particularly concerned to influence the type and design of goods produced in India to make them serve current English needs and trends in taste. Striking success was achieved by the end of the century, but thereafter the flow of cotton manufactures was impeded by serious difficulties, chiefly the restrictions imposed on the trade by prohibition acts in 1701 and 1721, together with the competitive development of domestic calico-printing.

The English had of course been familiar with cotton for several centuries before 1660, although the acquaintance brought little opportunity to build up technological skill in the processing of pure cotton goods from the raw state to the finished piece. Imports had included raw “cotton-wool” from the Levant for use in stuffing and quilting and fustians of European manufacture containing cotton. But probably it was not until the sixteenth century that a cotton weft was used in the production of domestic fustians, and not until the seventeenth that cotton was brought into linen and smallwares manufacturing. The early history of pure cotton fabrics in England is debatable ground, partly because of confusing terminology; so-called “cottons,” for instance, were produced in England before 1660, but the term is descriptive of the finishing process, or “cottoning,” rather than of content.

Most of the scholarly works on British policy in the years preceding World War II have neglected events in the Far East in favor of those in Europe. Any study of recent British diplomacy is, of course, seriously hampered by the lack of Foreign Office documents and by the generally uninformative nature of British memoirs. Nevertheless, the sources which do exist give a picture which, while still incomplete, is interesting for its own sake in showing how the Chamberlain Government met the problems of the Pacific, and also for the light which it sheds on Anglo-American relations in this period. Perhaps nowhere else was there as much consistent misunderstanding and disappointment between London and Washington as over the questions raised by the Sino-Japanese War. The Manchurian episode had left a legacy of distrust between the two countries; just enough was known about the approaches made by the Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, to the Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, so that many on both sides of the Atlantic believed that Britain had rejected American offers for joint action against Japan in 1932, and that as a result nothing had prevented the Japanese advance. When Stimson's The Far Eastern Crisis appeared in 1936, it was read by many with more enthusiasm than accuracy, and seemed to confirm these views. In Britain it provided ammunition for the critics of the Government, while in the United States it increased the suspicions of those unwilling to trust Britain, and strengthened the trend to isolation.

In her recent book On Liberty and Liberalism — The Case of John Stuart Mill, Gertrude Himmelfarb is temporarily annoyed at Mill's use of the “negative argument” in the opening pages of his Subjection of Women. “It is astonishing, at first reading,” Himmelfarb writes, “to find Mill devoting so much space to what is essentially a negative argument.” What Mill does in his introductory chapter to prove that “the legal subordination of one sex to the other — is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement,” which “ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other,” is attack as strongly as he can the prejudicial nature of that subordination which had hardened into rigid and implacable legal barriers vastly inimical to that perfect equality Mill wanted to achieve. Here is a portion of Mill's summation of that legal subordination against which married women, in particular, had to contend:

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, for example, British imperialists were inspired with fervour and confidence. Nowhere was the inspiration stronger than amongst Australian colonists, who were beginning to thrill not only with the vicarious agony of exiles, but also with the virility of frontiersmen. Although the pull to the heart of the Empire was strong, the void beyond the red pale of civilization was beckoning too. In an increasingly hostile world it was encouraging to measure one's strength as part of the force of an Empire greater than Greece or Rome had known, and inspiring to feel that a colony's achievements were part of the historic mission of an imperialist power. It is not surprising, although it has been overlooked by European-centred historians of empire and by parochial historians of emerging nations, that the convinced and practising colonial imperialists were a significant force in shaping the ideals if not the strategy of European expansion, and in popularizing the creed, to the great comfort of the planners at “home” and the discomfort and bewilderment of local republicans.

The Boer War has become a symbolic episode in British imperial history and the spontaneous colonial participation a notable feature of it.

The British Liberal Party underwent a succession of crises in the years 1886-1905 which nearly destroyed it as a coherent political entity. Perhaps the most critical divisions in the 1890s were those concerning the leadership struggle, so well described by Peter Stansky in his Ambitions and Strategies, and the search for a domestic policy which would qualify the party as the major force for reform in the face of the emerging Labour alternative. But both of these problems and the divisions which stemmed from them were linked with the perennial and highly visible divisions over foreign and imperial policy. Stansky has shown how the imperial question was tied to the Harcourt-Rosebery struggle for the leadership in succession to Gladstone and how concentration on this issue detracted from attention to the more pressing question of finding a viable and attractive domestic program. Jeffrey Butler, Bernard Semmel, and Bernard Porter have illustrated other aspects of the problem of imperial policy.

Historians have long recognized the seriousness of the crisis in the party during the Boer War, when divisions of opinion concerning the war and general imperial policy were formalized in competing organizations, and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman fought a frustrating campaign to consolidate his leadership and maintain the party as a functioning unit. Most of the attention, however, has centered on the leaders of the party and on the organization — the Liberal League, which grew out of the Imperial Liberal Council in 1902 — which represented the Liberal Imperialist wing inspired by Lord Rosebery.