“Imperialism,” an eminent historian has written, “is no word for scholars.” But the study of European political expansion in Asia, the Pacific islands, and Africa in the last quarter of the nineteenth century certainly merits scholarly attention, and recently has been receiving it. Since 1960 an impressive array of books and articles has appeared which present new insights into aspects of the “scramble,” particularly the motives for British action. Most of these studies have been concerned with Africa, and a possible deficiency in the analysis of one of the most notable of them has been that in its preoccupation with Africa it has not taken sufficient account of relevant developments elsewhere.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly after 1870, European influence advanced with a new aggressiveness into the under-powered areas of the world. In the halcyon days of the Pax Britannica, British governments had sought to avoid annexations as unproductive and expensive. This policy continued to be the creed in the 1870's, but some statesmen found it increasingly difficult to apply without serious risk to major British interests. These officials were motivated largely by fear of future challenges rather than of demonstrated peril. But there was a growing conviction, particularly evident in the permanent staff of the Foreign Office, that Europe had entered a new era of great-power rivalries in which Britain must either pursue a more active imperial policy or risk the loss of commerce, prestige, and world power. There was widespread apprehension that expansion into overseas areas by the militant and protectionist German Empire, Spain, and other European states might be ruinous to British trade and dangerous to Imperial security.

“It is very interesting to compare Spencer and Comte,” wrote George Sarton in an essay lauding their efforts to embrace all knowledge in a grand synthesis. The comparison, indeed, was tempting for contemporaries, as it has been for students of ideas. Both Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer were authors of new philosophic systems which, they believed, had been built on the firm foundations of science, and both were convinced that society should be reconstructed in accordance with the truths of their philosophies. The insistence of Positivists and some who were not Positivists that Spencer, consciously or not, had been influenced by Comte, and Spencer's repeated and fervent denials, made for a series of controversies that extended over half a century and ranged from the minutiae of priority to the more important issues of the classification of the sciences and the nature of religion.

The eclipse of both the Positive Philosophy of Comte and the Synthetic Philosophy of Spencer in the twentieth century hardly suggests the interest they aroused in the nineteenth. The unification of knowledge and the discovery of the laws of man and society were dreams which nineteenth-century science and philosophy hoped to realize. Comte and Spencer made their contribution in this area; and while both were attacked for erecting systems on questionable assumptions, and for their weakness in details, their extraordinary ability to amass quantities of information and to come up with penetrating generalizations attracted admirers and disciples. Few of their critics thought that what they had set out to do was not worth doing, or could not be done.

In 1819 Viscount Castlereagh, England's Foreign Secretary and perhaps the most hated member of the Government, complained in parliament that the journalist, T. J. Wooler (1786?-1853), had become “the fugleman of the Radicals.” His weekly journal The Black Dwarf was circulating from radical Westminster to northern colliery districts, where it could be found “in the hatcrown of almost every pitman you meet.”

Early nineteenth-century popular radicalism took form in its journalism and its political tracts, pamphlet satires, caricatures, posters, and ballads. The best of the radical publications were shaped in turn by traditional popular attitudes and forms, including the rich resources of popular humor. Wooler's writing was unmistakably political, and often earnest in the manner of the polemical journalism of William Cobbett and Richard Carlile or the oratory of Henry Hunt. But his favorite tone was satirical, and this made him prominent among those radicals who did the most in the late Regency years to promote a public attitude of anti-authoritarianism rather than deference, of contempt for an unjust government rather than fear of it. E. P. Thompson has shown that it was “not the solemnity but the delight” with which the radicals “baited authority” that made the old order vulnerable. Wooler's journalism is a fine example of the political uses of popular humor, and a key to understanding the distinctive character of Regency radical culture.

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Regency radicalism was a mixture of traditional and Enlightenment political ideas of natural rights and freedoms and an emerging class-consciousness of economics and society.

It has long been a critical obligation for commentators on the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire to remark on Edward Gibbon's failure to explain the reasons for that fall. Historians in particular have been bothered by this: both J. B. Black and D. M. Low have fretted over Gibbon's refusal — or inability — to deal with the ultimate meaning of the events he describes or, in the last three volumes, to “propound and answer questions explicitly.” Readers of the History, on the other hand, may feel that the historian belabors too often the “causes” of events, those “connections in a sequence.” Regularly, Gibbon reminds us that he is dealing with a process of degeneration involving successive stages of decay; and both within individual sections and at the close of units, he carefully recapitulates that the policies of Augustus or Septimius Severus, the strengthening of the Pretorian Guard, the spread of Christianity, the weakening of senatorial authority, monetary and land policies, the invasions of the Goths and Huns were all “causes” for the decline of the Roman Empire.

The contradiction between the reactions of critic and casual reader is merely apparent. His commentators grant that Gibbon assayed explanations for the events he recounted; but, they say, his purported “causes” are not primary or even secondary ones. They claim, in fact, that the explanations seldom account for the single chains of events he describes, much less for the long, intricate process that Gibbon sees as steady and unmitigated decline.

The struggle between King and Parliament in 1641-42 for command of the militia was to King Charles I “the Fittest Subject for a King's Quarrel.” As the King himself and a group of pamphleteers, preachers and members of Parliament realized, the controversy was not just a contest for control of military power. The fundamental issue was a change in England's government, a shift in sovereignty from King or King-in-Parliament to Parliament alone. As Charles explained, “Kingly Power is but a shadow” without command of the militia. His contemporaries, representing various political allegiances, also testified to the significance of the contest over the militia. They described it as the “avowed foundation” of the Civil War, “the greatest concernment” ever faced by the House of Commons, and the “great quarrel” between the King and his critics. To some men it was this dispute over military authority and the implications for government which were inherent in it, rather than disagreements about religion, taxes or foreign policy, that made civil war unavoidable.

Concern about military authority first erupted in the fall of 1641 in response to a series of events – rumors of plots involving the King, the presence in London of disbanded soldiers who had returned from the war with Scotland, the “Incident” in Scotland, and above all the rebellion in Ireland which required the levying of an army to subdue those rebels.

During the years 1548 to 1549 England experienced the most serious rebellions since the end of the fifteenth century. Although the worst disturbances occurred in the West of England and Norfolk, few areas of the country were wholly unaffected. In London the Mayor and Aldermen made elaborate military and security preparations to prevent revolt from within the City and to ward off possible attacks from the outside. City authorities succeeded in maintaining order, but in the political crisis that followed, London threw its support to members of the Privy Council who were disillusioned with the leadership of the Duke of Somerset and contributed, perhaps decisively, to the overthrow of the Protectorate.

This paper examines events in London during these troubled years and attempts to assess its influence on national politics. Evidence of discontent in the City is studied to determine whether rebellious parties actually threatened law and order or whether City authorities merely took preventive measures in response to events elsewhere in the country. In addition the City's intensive preparations for defense are considered in detail. As the chronicler, Charles Wriothesley, recorded, beginning on July 3, 1549, “my Lord Mayor began to watch at night, riding about the City to peruse the constables with their watches, and to see that they keep the hours appointed at the last Court of Aldermen holden at the Guildhall, for the preservation and safeguard of the City because of the rebellions in divers places of this realm.”

In January 1919 thousands of delegates, diplomats, and academic experts poured into Paris to redraw the map of the world and to settle its problems, supposedly forevermore. While the confusion attendant upon the negotiations was evident to contemporary observers, who also complained of the delay before the conference began, few considered the magnitude of the job of organizing so vast an assembly and of providing the larger delegations with the facilities for the many tasks facing them. In retrospect, it is indeed remarkable that Paris, after four and a half years of war, so well absorbed so many people and that anonymous officials laboring unobserved behind the scenes were able to provide the essential services necessary to the reasonably efficient functioning of the luminaries in the limelight.

The burden of arrangements for the conference itself fell upon the French, but so far as their own delegation was concerned, they had the inestimable advantage of operating upon home ground and of requiring few special arrangements. For the Americans, who sent the largest delegation, the problem of distance was so great that while an entire boatload of delegates and documents was shipped across the Atlantic, the personnel of the delegation remained stable and facilities for them were obtained largely from the French and from the American army because the oceanic barrier eliminated other alternatives. The Japanese, faced with the difficulty of even greater distance and the added complication of a language barrier, rested upon the French for their facilities and sent a small delegation composed of a few dignitaries from Tokyo and a number of senior officials from their European embassies.

During the last half of the twelfth century the kings of England ruled a vast constellation of lands stretching from Ireland to the Mediterranean, known traditionally, if not quite accurately, as the “Angevin Empire.” While the empire lasted, its rulers were the richest and strongest in Christendom. When King John lost Normandy, Anjou, Maine and Touraine, he also lost much of his income and influence, and the kings of France became the great royal figures of the thirteenth century. It is the purpose of this paper to explore the origins of the Angevin empire, and in particular the union of its two chief components — the Anglo-Norman state and the county of Anjou. Did the empire come about by accident or by political design? And if by design, who was its architect? Was it Henry I, who arranged the crucial marriage between his daughter Maud and Geoffrey, heir to Anjou? Was it Geoffrey, or Maud? Or was it their son, Henry Plantagenet — the ultimate beneficiary of the marriage?

At first glance, the empire would seem to have been conceived in the calculating mind of Henry I, who could hardly have failed to grasp the implications of a marriage joining the Anglo-Norman heiress to the Angevin heir. Indeed, many treatments of the subject, both old and recent, have suggested that the Angevin empire arose from King Henry I's “immensely grandiose designs” to absorb Anjou. But did Henry I have any such desire, or any such intention? The question can only be answered after a careful analysis of Henry I's diplomacy, both in its general contours and in its relation to Anjou.

Some such expression as “the scientific revolution in England” is often used in referring to the period in seventeenth-century history in which, under English auspices and the leadership of mathematical scientists of whom many were English or worked in England (foremost in whose ranks was Isaac Newton), success was finally achieved in formulating quantitative, empirically sound, and predictive laws of motion. In recent years there have appeared several theories of the social and economic causes of this revolution. These theories have had a constructive effect to the extent that they have prompted serious consideration of previously ignored aspects of the history of science. However, without denying their value in this regard, they are at best inadequate. The purpose of this essay is not to review or to dispute these earlier theories but to propose an alternative to them.

Welshmen and Scotsmen provoked their stronger neighbors of England in the late thirteenth century into wars that almost filled the reign of Edward I. Whether in keeping with “Manifest Destiny” or not, King Edward accepted the provocation of the Welsh and sent his troops into their land in an attempt to subjugate them; by a workmanlike series of campaigns he conquered and pacified them between 1277 and 1294. Then began an almost unbroken period of war against the Scots, a period lasting well beyond Edward's own death in 1307. By their persistence and by their tactics the Scots forced Edward and his people to a major effort, one that made every Englishman aware of his obligation, whether to fight, to feed the fighters, or to support the fighters with works.

For medieval soldiers, like their modern descendants, war was mostly a matter of working and waiting. Battles punctuated the wars, then as now, and at these times the combat troops spent their strength. During the long stretches between battles, however, support elements continued to supply the troops and put them into position to fight. The men in the armies of Edward I who kept the war going in this way and kept going themselves were the auxiliaries: the ditchers, woodcutters, smiths, carpenters, paymasters, provisioners, and the engineers. Important as they were in medieval warfare, the engineers have received little credit for it. Their work, bridging, building fortifications, and operating artillery, rarely rates a description in a chronicle and they receive little notice in secondary works.

In ancient Greece the priests of Apollo asserted that freedom of movement was one of the essentials of human freedom. Many hundreds of years later, toward the end of the eighteenth century, people in the Atlantic world again talked of emigration as one of man's natural rights. It was in northern and western Europe that easier mobility was first achieved within the various states. The next step was to use that mobility to leap local boundaries to reach the lands across the western sea. From the “unsettlement of Europe” (Lewis Mumford's phrase) came the settlement of America.

Americans and those who wished to become Americans felt at home in the geographical realm conceived by Oscar Wilde. “A map of the world that does not include Utopia,” he said, “is not even worth glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. Progress is the realization of Utopias.” It was the belief that Utopias were being realized in America that caused millions to leave Europe for homes overseas.

I

A Scottish observer, Alexander Irvine, inquiring into the causes and effects of emigration from his native land (1802), remarked that there were “few emigrations from despotic countries,” as “their inhabitants bore their chains in tranquility”; “despotism has made them afraid to think.” Nevertheless, though proud of the freedom his countrymen enjoyed, Irvine was critical of their irrational expectations in setting forth to America. There were few individuals or none in the Highlands, he said, “who have not some expectation of being some time great or affluent.

Tudor statesmen, in their statutes and debates, and Tudor jurists, in reports and treatises, recorded their awareness of an antithesis between regal power and political law. Political action and juridical argument made them increasingly sensitive to an oppugnancy between executive authority and constitutional control. Medieval men of law, too, had noted this inconsonance in England's polity. Sir John Fortescue, while Henry VI's Chancellorin-exile in 1468, faced the dilemma; but he resolved it only verbally. He wrote: “regal power is restrained by political law.” Then he added, “such is the law of the Kingdom” of England. So facile a formula as Fortescue's might make nice theory, yet it was one easier to prescribe than to apply to a live monarch.

The pragmatic Tudors, however, succeeded in surmounting the antithesis between political law and regal power, paradoxically, by augmenting both. To solve immediate political crises and to enhance the effectiveness of government, Privy Councilors and parliamentarians passed act after act that increased the King's prerogatives. At the same time, moreover, these very statutes afforced, by implication, the principles of political, or public, law. Kings and queens, judges and councilors, Lords and Commons during the sixteenth century formulated a concept of the rule of law and made it transcendant. By the 1590's they had accorded the rule of law statutory, judicial, and regal recognition. For the Tudor time-being, this principle served to balance regal power and political law and to give to this antinomy a congruity.

King Henry I “created men,” the novi homines of the chronicles. He also sustained, supported, and rewarded the “old men,” those men, or their descendants, who had held substantial estates in Normandy or in England prior to 1100. The “old men” who remained prominent in the reign of Henry I, however, were those willing to accept his authority, to lay down anarchical broadswords and seek peace through their loyalty to a nascent idea of the Crown, an Anglo-Norman regnum personified in the King. Loyalty was the stern arbiter, and Henry's feudal justice could be deaf to the entreaties of both family members and friends. While military organization was essential to peace and lawful order in Anglo-Norman society, the Conquest was past and soldierly virtue alone was not sufficient; Henry's kingly task was to mold the energies of his barons into administrative and judicial talents, and to cast those talents into a coherent framework of government. The paternal inheritance, as he viewed it, was an Anglo-Norman polity, its ruling class a nobility with cross-channel relationships in estates and blood ties. Whether or not the link with Normandy was deleterious, it was real to the King and his contemporaries, at the heart of the problems of the reign.

Henry drew upon his nobility for the work of governing, but “new men” also rose to prominence. The degree of attention given to the “new men” has created a congregate conception for assessments of the reign.

The late Sir Lewis Namier seems to have the highest, or nearly the highest authority of historians, chiefly for his work on English politics in the 1760's. This article attempts to make a judgment of his authority by examining the truth of his findings about English politics in the 1760's. Namier's authority is in great part based upon his seeming care in his researches, since people suppose that those who are occupied with details are careful with details. The results of his researches must therefore be considered in their presentation. But these researches need not be redone, at least for the purpose of understanding Namier's findings; for his findings rest upon an argument — an argument constructed not only from the results of researches but from general statements that are not results of his researches. Indeed, it happens that Namier's general statements fall within political science, as that subject has been understood since Aristotle. The present writer is a political scientist, and proposes to concentrate on Namier's argument.

Namier's principal conclusion is that there was no danger of tyranny in Britain in the 1760's. His argument has two parts, or he has two arguments: the apparent danger of tyranny is explained and deflated, first by the heir-apparent cycle, and second by the superiority of modern party government. He reaches his conclusion by denying effect to the source of danger usually identified by historians and thoughtful contemporaries, the influence of Bolingbroke — so that he seems, to one critic, to ignore the importance of “ideas.”

The crown's tenuous control over remote regions of the realm created a persistent problem in sixteenth-century England. Feudal ties and social unrest presented greatest danger in the North, but the early Tudor monarchs worried about the West as well. For one thing, the western counties were especially vulnerable to possible foreign invasion. Secondly, the internal power structure in the West included a loyal but independent gentry and a commons far from passive. In such circumstances, royal control in the West might have disappeared entirely without solid aristocratic support. King Henry VIII depended upon his cousin, Henry Courtenay, Marquis of Exeter, to provide such support during the first three decades of his reign. Until Courtenay's execution for treason in 1538, his lands and offices ensured his position as the leading aristocrat, the role which John, Lord Russell assumed in 1539.

It seems impossible to begin an article these days without invoking, either as saint or devil, the shade of Sir Lewis Namier. Those who inhabit regions remote from the classic years around 1760 are absolved from acquiring more than a general understanding of the reversionary interest, the Court and Treasury party, and the rest of the Namierite stock in trade. Yet the merits and limitations of the methodology must concern and fascinate scholars who reassess the traditional interpretations of other periods of English history. They should not, as the Master of Peterhouse has warned, swallow the Namier method whole. But used with due caution, it may offer valuable insights for other centuries besides the eighteenth. The rigorous compilation and analysis of biographical data, the penetration of ideological smokescreens to the deeper motives behind them, the ruthless discarding of outworn shibboleths like “party,” the careful use of sociological criteria: at their best the Namierites have much to offer historians of other periods. Sir John Neale has applied the method, with modifications, to the reign of Elizabeth I, Norman Gash has carried it into the age of Peel, while the authentic members of the school proceed with their task of cleaning up the eighteenth century.

The winds of Namierite change have begun to blow only fitfully, however, in the seventeenth century. One reason for this, perhaps, is that historians of the Stuart period have generally been absorbed in destroying each other on the gentry battlefield, or attempting in more constructive ways to solve the politico-economic problems of the “Century of Revolution”; there has been less effort applied to the details of parliamentary affairs.