Historians have not been kind to Henry Rich, earl of Holland. When they have noticed him, it has been to express moral disapproval. William Godwin spoke austerely of his ‘superficial and gaudy levity’; Clarendon imputed mercenary motives for his trimming in the English civil war; other writers have deplored his general unreliability or his frivolity and cowardice; and his career has been magisterially dismissed:

The personal beauty and untimely fate of Holland [have] thrown an interest over his history which neither his capacity nor his conduct would otherwise have justified.

The eighteenth century was a great age of pamphleteering. Subjects were legion and authors innumerable. Every question of substance – and many of none – attracted writers to such a degree that in the world of politics one is tempted to establish the scale of pamphleteering as one of the yardsticks against which the importance of an issue should be measured. The American revolution fully conforms to this criterion, for during a twenty-year period beginning in 1763 it stimulated the publication of well over a thousand pamphlets in England alone. A good number of those pamphlets originated in America and their subsequent reappearance in England was a matter of considerable significance; some were written by Americans resident in London. This paper will examine the mechanics by which American revolutionary tracts were published and distributed in England, and their circulation among the radicals who proved themselves to be the patriots' best English friends during the difficult years of the revolution. They included among others Thomas Hollis, John Wilkes, Major John Cartwright and Granville Sharp; the Dissenting ministers Richard Price and Joseph Priestley, and one of the most brilliant women of her generation, Catharine Macaulay. Such an examination is not only an integral component in the analysis of the English side of the revolution; it also serves as a useful case-study in the mechanics and function of political propaganda.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the Marathas and the British confronted each other in India like two finalists after a series of elimination bouts. The East India Company had reduced the native princesBengal and the Carnatic to ciphers, crushed Mysore and emasculated Oudh and Hyberabad. The Marathas, under the leadership of the Sindia dynasty, of Ujjain, had extinguished the last pretensions of the Mughal emperor and reduced the Rajput states to surly submission. The defeat of Sindia and the confederated Maratha princes of Nagpur and Indore in the Anglo-Maratha war of 1803–5 was therefore historic. It confirmed the British as inheritors of the old Mughal supremacy and extinguished all hopes of a native hegemony in the subcontinent for 140 years. This defeat has hitherto been attributed to strategic error. The Marathas should, it has been argued, have adhered to their ancestral cavalry warfare and spread fire and devastation in the traditional Asiatic manner, instead of trying to beat the Europeans at their own game, with infantry and guns. Re-examination of the evidence leads to the conclusion that this argument is unsound. It underestimates the competence of the Marathas in their new style of combat and misplaces the blame for their failure. Traditional methods had paid off in the past; but things had changed by 1803, and had those methods been used in the second Maratha war the margin of defeat would probably have been much wider. As it was, the British victory must be described as hard won.

From 1861 to 1865, English politicians and journalists watched with passionate interest as the United States seemed to tear itself apart over the question of slavery. During these years, English public men, politicians and writers of all qualities and degrees, gave extensive airing to their views both of slavery and of American democracy. This extensive commentary on the American conflict, and the subsequent revival of interest in parliamentary reform, have made the divisions in English opinion on the war a useful testing ground of mid-Victorian social and political attitudes. Early studies, written from the perspective of the northern victory, the abolition of slavery, and the martyrdom of Lincoln, found it difficult to comprehend the extent of pro-confederate sympathy in England. On the slavery question, the mid-Victorians seemed to have lost the abolitionist enthusiasm of their evangelical forebears in the Clapham Sect. In order to fathom this failure of English judgement, historians attempted to show that the more articulate minority, the upper echelons of mid-Victorian society, sided with an aristocratic, slave-owning south, while the less articulate majority, middle-class radicals and the working class, sided with a democratic, abolitionist north.

Augustine Birrell performed the thankless task of chief secretary for Ireland for a longer period than any of his forty-nine predecessors. His nine years of office from 1907 to 1916 included some of the most critical years of Anglo-Irish history, and ended tragically when he accepted blame for the 1916 Easter rebellion, which has haunted his political reputation ever since. Birrell has been generally condemned by the English and consigned to oblivion by the Irish. This article will reassess Birrell's work as Irish secretary by relating his actual achievements and failures to the complex problems which constituted the Liberal dilemma in Ireland. Emphasis is placed on the earlier and more successful period of Birrell's administration, which has been almost entirely neglected by English historians.

The British response to the mass unemployment of the 1930s was in striking contrast to that of the other major industrialized countries. Only in Britain was a policy of accepting the apparent logic of capitalism, and waiting out the slump, successfully maintained in a reasonably stable, democratic setting. In an article on ‘The New Deal, National Socialism and the Great Depression’, John A. Garraty wrote that ‘in both Roosevelt's America and Hitler's Germany economic objectives were subordinated whenever necessary to political aims’. In neither country was there ‘any consistently held theory about either the causes of the depression or how to end it’ Britain under the National government represents almost precisely the opposite case. First, the government's policy of minimal direct intervention to relieve unemployment was directed towards achieving its central objective of ensuring that the depression would cause no fundamental changes in existing economic and social relationships. Immediate political considerations were subordinated to this overriding goal, Secondly, the government's approach, though not all of its particular actions, was based on a rational, comprehensive and widely accepted theoretical foundation.

Studies of the Anglo-German naval agreement of 1935 have so far failed to provide a complete analysis of the factors which prompted the British government's decision to sanction German naval rearmament. Diverse views on the causes of this British decision have included the interpretation that the naval agreement represented the beginning of appeasement, that it was an attempt to curry favour with Hitler's Reich at the expense of France and other continental powers, or that it was intended to become part of a general international system of naval arms limitations but because of unforeseen difficulties remained simply a bilateral agreement. The severest critics of the agreement suggest that British statesmen were the victims of Hitler's guile and of their own ignorance and credulity which blinded them to the serious consequences their conduct had for British foreign relations.

It was often difficult in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to distinguish the interests of European financiers and concession holders operating overseas from the political policies of their respective governments. Concessions from a weak regime, in regions where political disorder and economic hardship were apparent, gave the power which held them a basis for the development of political influence in the country; and a basis too for an exclusive sphere of economic enterprise or, in the event of a total disintegration of the native administration, for a sphere of political influence which might follow a general partition among the European powers. In this context, railway enterprise was especially important. Railways promoted trade, and they could bring prosperity and progress to the areas through which they passed. They allowed military mobility too; and could be thus offensive or defensive instruments to be manipulated in accordance with economic and strategic interests.