The origin and original nature of medieval English palatinates has been a hardy theme of medieval English constitutional history at least since the seventeenth century. Earlier work on the topic by this author was essentially negative, dealing with what palatinates were not rather than with what they were; it is now time to offer the thoughts which follow. This article presents no conclusions based on evidence unexamined by other scholars, but looks at familiar material in new ways.

How subversively anticlerical was late medieval Catholic reform in England? Were Elisabeth Sampson or perhaps John Wyclif the reformer or malcontent at hand, one might expect scholars rapidly to identify reform with subversion. But if John Colet's name is dropped in the conversation, “reform” will generally take on a different meaning. Son of one of London's most popular mayors, Colet was a pluralist who progressed along the familiar and painstakingly protracted route to the doctorate of theology during the final decade of the fifteenth and the first of the sixteenth century. Along the way he struck up close and lasting friendships with Erasmus, Thomas More, and William Warham. To the last of these, he probably owed his appointment in 1504 as Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London where he served until his death in 1519.

Much has been written about the fall of Robert Harley in 1708, little about the fall of the Godolphin ministry in 1710. Yet a comparison of the two events casts a flood of light upon the nature of politics in the reign of Queen Anne. This is especially true if the historian asks the question: why did Robert Harley succeed in 1710 where he failed in 1708? For succeed he assuredly did in 1710 and fail he certainly did in 1708. On the first occasion he suffered loss of office and humiliation; two years later he drove Godolphin and the Whigs from office bag and baggage.

Accounts of human beings as vulnerable have provided powerful reposts to liberal individualism in recent decades. Concurrently, the European Court of Human Rights’ jurisprudence on Convention states’ positive obligations often obliges public authorities to address particular vulnerabilities. These developments reflect elements of different theoretical accounts of vulnerability but lack a coherent approach to the human subject. Exploring the impact of this in the UK Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, we evaluate two case studies in which positive obligations have been imposed on the police; (1) public order in the context of inter-community tensions in Northern Ireland (DB v. Chief Constable of Police Service of Northern Ireland) and (2) police investigations in regard to serial sexual offending (Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis v. DSD). This jurisprudence illustrates how some domestic judges are supplying their decisions with rationalisations which are lacking in the European Court’s case law.

Between the abolition of slavery, 1834, and World War I, more than a half-million laborers were introduced to the British West Indies under terms of indenture. Indenture implies unfreedom, the exploitation of people forced into exile by misfortune or misadventure. It is an alien concept in modern Western society, and the transoceanic transport of thousands of African and Indian workers during the nineteenth century appears a further testimonial to European racism, to the arrogance of great power, and to the political influence of the West India planters and their merchant associates. In recent years, a growing number of scholars have characterized the whole process of nineteenth-century indenture as a “new system of slavery.”

As the royal government in England expanded from the twelfth century onward and touched more aspects of the economy and society, landlords tried to control the administration and to protect their interests by retaining royal officers as their private clients. Simultaneously, lords built their own administrations to manage their estates and households. As clients, administrators could move easily between the royal government and baronial administrations and serve two or more masters, thereby compromising their loyalty and impartiality. The problem of “double allegiance,” as it has been called, therefore worried moralists and became an important characteristic of English government and politics in the fourteenth century.

Resentment of monopoly and purveyance, weariness with the burdens of a long war, and the fears and hopes attendant upon the accession of a new and foreign dynasty were all focussed by the meeting of James I's first parliament in 1604. If there was nothing entirely new in these elements, there was novelty and danger in the concurrence of so many grievances at a time when the sense of external crisis which had unified the country for the preceding quarter century was at last relaxed. The new political climate, parochial, isolationist, and hostile to government intrusion whether of church or state, was soon associated with the term “Country.” In one sense, this climate was merely a moderate intensification of perennial English localism, and as such devoid of ideological implication. But allied with the persistent failures of the early Stuart administration, particularly in dealing with parliament, it became a medium in which genuine political opposition began to develop.

Primarily because of the Reformation, political obedience became an increasingly significant issue in Tudor England. The success of Henry VIII's break with Rome resulted partly because the state could use the established church to inculcate in the populace the notion of loyalty to the civil government as a Christian duty. Despite the vacillations of Henrician ecclesiastical policy and the more radical reforming spirit of the Edwardian years, Protestant views on political obedience remained fundamentally stable. The accession of Mary, however, created a critical dilemma for men who had been stressing the duty of obedience to one's ruler. Exile was only a partial solution, though among the exiles a handful of leaders worked out a theory of tyrannicide. Of those who took this course, John Knox in particular confused the issue by simultaneously raising the thorny problem of gynecocracy. Written while Mary Tudor was queen, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women appeared after Elizabeth's accession, when it was an embarrassment to Protestants. It was left, then, to the Elizabethans to rethink the entire question of political obedience.

Since its introduction in the early 2000s, legislation relating to the voting rights of Italians abroad has enabled millions of residents of voting age outside of Italy to engage in homeland elections and elect their own MPs. The inclusion of Italian citizens abroad in the Italian polity has nevertheless translated into a patchy electoral engagement. This article does not intend to provide an analysis of the voting choices in Italy's overseas constituency. Instead, it delves into external vote dynamics to provide insights into overseas Italians’ abstention in parliamentary elections and referenda. After summarising the history of the introduction of Italy's peculiar model of external voting, drawing on the results of an online survey of Italians abroad, the article examines the factors influencing turnout, with specific attention to the eligible voters’ personal characteristics. It also focuses on the attitude of Italians abroad towards possible reforms aiming at increasing electoral participation. It concludes that country of birth and Italian language skills are among the most relevant variables not only to assess what fosters or inhibits external voting, but also to gauge the opinion of voters residing outside Italy about proposals to reform the procedures regulating the exercise of suffrage from abroad.

Five weeks before the armistice in November 1918 an unprecedented thing happened in Britain. The control of a modern popular newspaper passed from private ownership into the hands of the prime minister of the day. Ever since David Lloyd George assumed the premiership twenty-two months earlier there were signs aplenty that relations between Downing Street and Fleet Street had entered a new era. But the sale of the Daily Chronicle to agents of the head of the government went far beyond custom or precedent. Lloyd George's immediate predecessors had remained old-fashioned even in the face of the press revolution wrought by the likes of Sir George Newnes and Alfred Harmsworth (immortalized as Lord Northcliffe). The phenomenon of mass-circulation newspapers had little appeal to great aristocrats like Lord Salisbury and Lord Rosebery, who were very selective in their dealings with Fleet Street. Likewise Herbert Henry Asquith scarcely troubled to hide his Balliol-bred contempt, ever preferring quality journalism to quantity, while Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman seems not to have exerted himself unduly to cultivate and exploit the good will of editors and proprietors.

In her biographical note on John Ponet, C. H. Garrett observed that although there was “little good” to be said of him as a man, as a political pamphleteer Ponet had attracted less attention than was his due. Although W. S. Hudson and W. Gordon Zeeveld have remedied this deficiency to a considerable extent, the precise connections between Ponet's Short Treatise of Politic Power and the contemporary situation in England have not been delineated. Much of the strength of this work lies in the fact that it was written as a direct response to events in England and on the Continent. In particular, Ponet's theories regarding the natural rights of subjects stemmed from efforts by the crown in 1555 to remove the right of ownership of private property from those it regarded as delinquents: the Protestant exiles. Ponet elevated the possession of property by private individuals to the status of a right. He went on to examine the basis of regal power and its practical limits and, in arguing the legitimacy of resistance to an unjust ruler, postulated a commonwealth in which a substantial measure of power rested with “the people”.

The valence of a life – that is, whether it is good, bad or neutral – is an important consideration in population ethics. This paper examines various definitions of valence. The main focus is ‘temporal’ definitions, which define valence in terms of the ‘shape’ of a life’s value over time. The paper argues that temporal definitions are viable only with a restricted domain, and therefore are incompatible with certain substantive theories of well-being. It also briefly considers some popular non-temporal definitions, and raises some problems for these.

The emergence of conferences in the late nineteenth century significantly changed the ways in which the international scientific community functioned and experienced itself. In the early modern Republic of Letters, savants mainly related through print and correspondence, and apart from at local and later national levels, scholars rarely met. International conferences, by contrast, brought scientists together regularly, in the flesh and in great numbers. Their previously imagined community now became tangible. This paper examines how conferencing reshaped the collective of international scientists by zooming in on the massive meetings of the International Congress of Applied Chemistry, 1893–1914. Drawing on Emile Durkheim's studies of religious gatherings it analyses the ritualization of routine conference practices, such as plenary ceremonies, toasts, ladies’ programmes and committee meetings. It looks at how roles were distributed as participants performed as hosts and guests, and in masculine and feminine and national and international identities. Importantly, it shows both how the sacralization of chemistry as a higher aim served to instil senses of dedication in order to organize labour and mitigate conflict, and how the self-perception of the international chemical community was based on contemporary understandings of parliament, democracy and representation.

It is now more than six years since Professors D.C. Moore and R.W. Davis battled it out, toe to toe like a pair of heavyweights, over the “other face of reform” in Buckinghamshire. The controversy began, it will be recalled, when Davis in his book on Bucks electoral politics addressed himself to Moore's conclusions about a country-based reform movement. Moore suggested that it was composed of ultra-Tories and rural Whigs, who eventually influenced the framing of the First Reform Act. Davis labelled Moore's “other face of reform” an “hallucination,” at least so far as Bucks was concerned. Whereupon the latter launched a vigorous counterattack in the pages of this journal. Both scholars defended their conclusions about events in Bucks, as well as the sources upon which they were based. When the final bell rang each stood bloodied but unbowed, still convinced of the validity of his viewpoint. Since then no challengers have come forward to join the battle. The arena has remained empty, the spotlights dimmed, as if mourning a memorable brawl.

The Imperial Japanese Army imposed martial law (gunritsu) in areas occupied during each of the full-scale conflicts it fought between 1894 and 1945. This article traces changes and continuities in the purpose, function, and content of martial law during the First Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the Asia-Pacific War to advance our historical knowledge of a much-understudied aspect of Japanese warfare. In so doing, it details the development and evolution of martial law as an instrument of military power showing how regulations were also influenced by and, therefore, tended to reflect the different wartime priorities and macro-level policies of the (military) leadership. It also highlights that the character of martial law remained largely unchanged and reveals that many of the legal practices utilized during the Asia-Pacific War were rooted in earlier conflicts. It ultimately argues, however, that wartime context and immediate military objectives took precedence over any longer-term political ambitions in Asia and, more crucially, over the welfare of civilians under occupation.

Between the accession of Charles I in 1625 and the restoration of Charles II in 1660 Calvinism lost its hold over English religious life. The effect of Arminianism on this decline has yet to be fully understood. The impact of the early English Arminians, the circle of Archbishop Laud, is, to be sure, well known. Less appreciated is the emergence of an Arminian critique of Calvinism from within the culture of nonconformity. This “radical” or, preferably, “new” Arminianism was a phenomenon of the Cromwellian era, the 1640s and 1650s. By reconstructing the origins of the new Arminianism of its chief exponent, John Goodwin (1595-1666), this essay will try to demonstrate its pivotal place as a link between the Puritanism of the pre-civil war decades and the rational theology of the early English Enlightenment.

On April 26, 1846, Ahmad Bey signed a historic emancipation decree making the Regency of Tunis the first in the modern Islamic world to formally abolish the longstanding institution of slavery. While the decree marked the first of such unprecedented measures, attracting a barrage of compliments from anti-slavery societies around the globe, it conflicted with the local notions of enslaving practices and thus prompted an earnest process of legitimation for the formal abolition of slavery before the Majlis al Shari (Sharia Council for Judicial Ordinance), without which abolition would have remained culturally and politically contentious. The paper will assess the socio-cultural context and the plural Islamic legal framework that informed both Ahmad Bey's argument favoring abolition and the divergent responses and attitudes of the religious establishment toward the abolition decree.

William Pitt had no desire for a war with France in 1793. While the French had lurched from bankruptcy to revolution to war, he had kept England at peace for a decade and successfully repaired the damage done to government finance by the American War. Such had been Pitt's intention from the start, according to his Cabinet colleague, Lord Grenville, who later wrote that “his views and measures…were in the outset purely oeconomical and pacific. It was his first ambition to restore by moderate and peaceful councils the strength and confidence of his country….” He had no desire to risk either the financial or political equilibrium he had achieved.