In the past decade scholars such as Stanford Lehmberg. G. R. Elton, and J. G. Bellamy have increased our understanding of the use of parliamentary attainder in the reign of Henry VIII. Traditionally attainder had been used to punish fugitives in flight, a form of parliamentary outlawry, or to affirm and supplement prior convictions achieved through the common law or the law of arms in order to extend the crown's rights to forfeited estates. At common law a traitor's forfeiture was limited to lands in fee simple, and by the law of arms his lands were totally immune to forfeiture. Passage of an act of attainder, however, enabled the king to seize any or all of a traitor's land, whether held in fee simple, fee tail, or to the use of the traitor. In the crucial decade of the 1530s attainder assumed a new role, condemning and ordering the execution of offenders solely by authority of parliament, without any prior judicial proceedings and despite an absence of obstacles which might have made a trial impossible. Lehmberg emphasizes the significance of this transformation in his detailed study of attainder in the reign of Henry VIII and suggests that the ‘pivotal act’ was the attainder of Elizabeth Barton and her followers in 1534. Certainly Barton's attainder was the first of many utilized by Henry's government to enforce the Reformation, and it did so without recourse to the common law. Lehmberg is mistaken, however, in his belief that this was the first attainder of the reign to attaint an individual without prior common law proceedings, for that distinction belongs to the attainder of Richard Roose in 1531.

In 1648, Essex was the scene of a major military campaign of the Second Civil War. This essay seeks to explain why that campaign was fought. There are several reasons why such an investigation is worthwhile. Firstly, it challenges the fashionable historical idea that the Civil Wars were fundamentally a conflict between centre and localities. Secondly, it concentrates upon the Second Civil War as a serious proposition, not as a pathetic appendage of the earlier conflict to be dismissed with contempt but not consideration. Thirdly, it demands a look at Essex as a county caught up in the violence of civil war.

The resignation in May 1730 of Charles, second Viscount Townshend (1674–1738), as Secretary of State for the Northern Department, is an event that has attracted little attention. Aware of Sir Robert Walpole's determination to get rid of Townshend, scholars have tended to treat Walpole's success as inevitable. The major study of British political history in these years, that contained within Professor Plumb's valuable biography of Walpole, is disappointingly brief in its treatment of the crisis. This reflects the general tendency of the work to concentrate on domestic politics and to devote less attention to the interrelationship between them and foreign policy. As a result Plumb's treatment of Townshend's departure is less probing and comprehensive than most of his book. The failure of scholars to study the ministerial crisis of 1729–30is far from exceptional, for the years of Walpole's ascendancy have escaped the same degree of scrutiny by political historians that has marked the reigns of Anne and George III. A host of major figures lack scholarly biographies: George II; William Stanhope, who succeeded Townshend and was ennobled as Lord Harrington in 1730; the earl of Chesterfield, Townshend's principal supporter in the ministry in 1729–30; William Pulteney, the leader of the opposition Whigs; Lord Wilmington, the duke of Dorset and George Dodington, ministerial opponents of Walpole; and Queen Caroline.

References to England abound in nineteenth-century French political thought and what interested French writers about England varied enormously. English education, agriculture, religion, morals, national character, social structure: all figured in their writings. Very few failed to take note of England's rapid industrial growth and commercial power. England, in the words of Eugène Buret, was ‘le pays privilégié pour les études sociales’. Few Frenchmen, however, developed an enthusiastic admiration for English philosophy in this period. Yet there was one prevailing and predominant theme in French writings about England.

As a professional and bureaucratically organized institution of social control, the police in the United States originated less than 150 years ago. Traditionally, this development has been explained as an inevitable response to a dramatic rise in felonious crime. According to this type of account, a criminal reaction was a natural by-product of such factors as urbanization, immigration, and industrialization. Other investigators have disputed this interpretation, arguing that there is little evidence to support the occurrence of a crime wave. Rather, the municipal police in America originated as part of a larger class control apparatus designed to regulate working class social and political activities, including ‘subversive’ speeches, strikes, riots, and daily breaches of the ‘public order’. Those who argue that the ‘new police’ developed as a crime fighter typically neglect to discuss one of the oldest forms of professional policing in die nation, the private detective agency.

Mission civilisatnce was one of the bywords of French colonial expansion under the Third Republic. Unfortunately until now there have been few works devoted to its study. Indeed, the notion itself has not been taken very seriously by scholars. As long ago as 1960 when Henri Brunschwig published his seminal work on French colonialism, he stated quite categorically: ‘en Angleterre la justification humanitaire l'emporta’ while ‘en France le nationalisme de 1870 domina’ even if that nationalism ‘ne s'exprima presque jamais sans une mention de cette “politique indigène” qui devait remplir les devoirs du civilisé envers des populations plus arriérées.’ Since then academics both in France and outside have tended to concentrate (in what few works have been written on French colonialism) on the political and economic aspects of the French Empire to the detriment of its cultural components.

In May 1929 illegal Communist demonstrations in Berlin led to several days' fighting as the Prussian police sought to restore order. Over thirty civilians were killed. Communist publications hailed events as an heroic defeat, in which lessons had been learned for the ‘final struggle’ to come; the Social Democrats hailed a decisive victory over Bolshevik aggression. Liberals expressed concern at the soverity of police action; National Socialists expressed sinister satisfaction at a significant portent of the distintegration of social and political stability. Above all, the dramatic events of Blutmai (‘Bloody May’) reinforced an element of emotional tension in Weimar and Prussian politics of great importance in understanding the final collapse of 1933.

On 24 August 1931 the prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, tendered the resignation of the second Labour government. In its place he became the premier of an all-party ‘National’ cabinet. This included both the leader of the Conservative party, Stanley Baldwin, and the acting-leader of the Liberal party, Sir Herbert Samuel, together with a number of their senior colleagues. This temporary emergency administration went on to win a landslide majority in the general election of October 1931, and to govern for the ensuing decade. The crisis which created the National government has proved to be of enduring fascination, as a result of its intrinsic interest as the major political crisis of the inter-war period and its profound consequences for subsequent British history. However, historical attention has been principally focused upon the problems of the Labour government, the decisions of Ramsay MacDonald, and the contribution of King George V. As a result the role of the Conservative party – often portrayed as having been the sole benefactor from these events – has been either neglected for its supposed passivity or misunderstood in its mood and intention.