Two very powerful stories structure the history of the changing roles of English women. The tale of the nineteenth-century separation of the spheres of public power and private domesticity relates principally to the experience of middle-class women. The other story, emerging from early modern scholarship, recounts the social and economic marginalization of propertied women and the degradation of working women as a consequence of capitalism. Both narratives echo each other in important ways, although strangely the capacity of women's history to repeat itself is rarely openly discussed. This paper critically reviews the two historiographies in order to open debate on the basic categories and chronologies we employ in discussing the experience, power and identity of women in past time.

Part, at least, of the historian's work consists of the formulation of general notions and the subsequent refinement of these generalities. One advance is made when a notion like romanticism is conceived, another when that notion is broken down and divided, both in terms of time and region and by the clarifications of logic, and fresh categories can be stated. This paper is concerned with proposing and-distinguishing a generalization of this type, an administrative or governmental revolution in the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century. It must be granted at once that this revolution has not the standing of its industrial and agrarian cousins. It can neither match them in ‘scale’ nor present such tangible or arresting phenomena. The very words have scarcely yet entered the historian's vocabulary, except perhaps to the accompaniment of deprecatory inverted commas. And even if the fact of its occurrence be allowed, it is clearly neither the first of its race nor indisputably the foremost. Mr Elton has staked a high claim for the corresponding Tudor change,1 and it is no doubt possible to point to really critical shifts in governmental behaviour in almost every succeeding age.

This article explores the origins of the UN's commitment to human rights and links this to the wartime decision to abandon the interwar system of an international regime for the protection of minority rights. After 1918, the League of Nations developed a comprehensive machinery for guaranteeing the national minorities of eastern Europe. But by 1940 the League's policies were widely regarded as a failure and the coalition of forces which had supported them after the First World War had disintegrated. German abuse of the system after 1933, and the Third Reich's use of ethnic German groups as fifth columns to undermine the Versailles settlement were cited by east European politicians as sufficient justification for a new approach which would combine mass expulsion, on the one hand, with a new international doctrine of individual human rights on the other. The Great Powers supported this because they thereby escaped the specific commitments which the previous arrangements had imposed on them, and which Russian control over post-war eastern Europe rendered no longer practicable. But they also supported it because the new rights regime had no binding legal force. In respect, therefore, of the degree to which the principle of absolute state sovereignty was threatened by these arrangements, the rights regime of the new UN represented a considerable weakening of international will compared with the interwar League. But acquiescing in a weaker international organization was probably the price necessary for US and Soviet participation.

The last fifteen years have witnessed an explosion of interest in the history of the Cold War. Historical attention has focused not only on the diplomatic and military aspects of the conflict, but also, increasingly, on its cultural, intellectual, and technological dimensions. One of the fruits of this widening of scope in Cold War studies is a burgeoning literature on the development of the post-Second World War American human sciences. Studies of the Cold War career of the human sciences, however, have often been inflected by moralistic, and sometimes tendentious, claims about the relationship between the state and the academy. This article seeks to explain the chief characteristics of the historiography of the human sciences in Cold War America by describing its formation in the interstices of three distinct lines of inquiry: the history of science, the cultural turn in Cold War studies, and the history of the birth of the human science professions in the United States. It argues that historians of the post-war American human sciences have absorbed some features of these literatures, whilst neglecting others that offer more nuanced perspectives on the relationship between scientific research and its patrons during the Cold War era. Moreover, it suggests that the best prospects for the future maturation of the field lie in the recovery of ‘middle-range contextualizations’ that link post-war trends in the human sciences to interwar and turn-of-the-century developments, thereby making the Cold War context less all-encompassing than it has sometimes appeared.

It is often suggested that the earliest theorists of neo-liberalism first entered public controversy in the 1930s and 1940s to dispel the illusion that the welfare state represented a stable middle way between capitalism and socialism. This article argues that this is an anachronistic account of the origins of neo-liberalism, since the earliest exponents of neo-liberal doctrine focused on socialist central planning rather than the welfare state as their chief adversary and even sought to accommodate certain elements of the welfare state agenda within their market liberalism. In their early work, neo-liberal theorists were suspicious of nineteenth-century liberalism and capitalism; emphasized the value commitments that they shared with progressive liberals and socialists; and endorsed significant state regulation and redistribution as essential to the maintenance of a free society. Neo-liberals of the 1930s and 1940s therefore believed that the legitimation of the market, and the individual liberty best secured by the market, had to be accomplished via an expansion of state capacity and a clear admission that earlier market liberals had been wrong to advocate laissez-faire.

The issues raised by eugenics are of more than passing interest for the student of political thought. In itself a minor offshoot of turn-of-the-century socio-biological thought which never achieved ideological ‘take-off’ in terms of influence or circulation, there was certainly more in eugenics than nowadays meets the eye. The following pages propose to depart from the over-simplistic identification of eugenics, as political theory, with racism or ultra-conservatism and to offer instead two alternative modes of interpretation. On the one hand, eugenics will be portrayed as an exploratory avenue of the social-reformist tendencies of early-twentieth-century British political thought. On the other, it will serve as a case-study illustrating the complexity and overlapping which characterize most modern ideologies. While recognizing, of course, the appeal of eugenics for the ‘right’, a central question pervading the forthcoming analysis will be the attraction it had for progressives of liberal and socialist persuasions, with the ultimate aim of discovering the fundamental affinities the ‘left’ had, and may still have, with this type of thinking.

Historians will give no thanks for being told that professionalization models are fraught with pitfalls as putative interpretations of scientific development. When deployed stricto sensu, essentially to trace the evolution of the remunerated career structure, the concept of professionalization invites blinkered antiquarian administrative history. Too easily, however, the jargon can serve as a blanket pseudo-explanation of the key phenomena of modern science, and thereby it loses all precision. Thus a recent author, having noted that professionalization is a Protean term, concludes ‘perhaps we can use it to mean the emergence of a scientific community’. But this runs the risk of collapsing quite distinct concepts into each other, and thereby of begging the very questions which must be faced.

This review will survey some of the most important historical studies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century British masculinity which have appeared in the last decade. It endorses John Tosh's insistence that it is necessary to move beyond the homosocial environments and explicit ideologies of ‘manliness’ studied by those historians who, in the 1980s, first sought a gendered history of men in modern Britain. However, it also warns that a commendable desire to ensure that men's identities are located in relationship to women, children, and the home must be accompanied by a degree of scepticism towards unproblematic narratives of male domestication. Men constantly travelled back and forth across the frontier of domesticity, if only in the realm of imagination, attracted by the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood, but also enchanted by various escapist fantasies (especially the adventure story or war film) which celebrated militaristic hypermasculinity and male bonding. This commentary also insists that, in order to enrich our understanding of male domesticity, existing studies of middle-class men will have to be supplemented by further research on aristocratic and working-class masculinities, and that national, ethnic, and racial differences also need to be more fully registered.

It is a text-book commonplace that Josiah Wedgwood was amongst the pioneers of English factory organization—the discipline of workers, the division of labour, and the systematization of production—but his work in these fields has never been examined in detail. Sixty thousand Wedgwood manuscripts, organized on a geographical basis for the sake of modern area advertisement rather than for the convenience of the historian, perhaps explain this neglect. The papers have not been ignored, but they have been sifted rather than studied in detail. Certain generalizations have emerged from this hit-or-miss investigation. In the articles of three visiting North American historians, Hower, Bladen and Schofield, and in the work of Thomas (essentially concerned with the history of the whole of the Potteries), the embryonic and incomplete skeleton of Wedgwood's methods has been laid bare, but much of the flesh has been discarded in the process.

This article analyses the proceedings of eight International Sanitary Conferences which were convened between 1851 and 1894 to address the danger that cholera epidemics posed to Europe. These conferences are examined in the context of the intellectual and institutional changes in scientific medicine and in the light of the changing structure of internationalist endeavours that took place in the second half of the nineteenth century. The article shows that the International Sanitary Conferences were as much spaces of co-operation as they were arenas where differences and boundaries between disciplines, nations, and cultures were defined. Furthermore, it seeks to shed light on a broader tension of the period. On the one hand, the fact that the world was growing together to an unprecedented extent due to new means of transportation enabled Europeans to establish and expand profitable commercial and colonial relations. On the other hand, this development increased the vulnerability of Europe – for example to the importation of diseases. The perception that the world was becoming increasingly interconnected was thus coupled with the need for controllable boundaries. The conferences attempted to find solutions as to how borders could be secured without resorting to traditional barriers; like semipermeable membranes they should be open for some kinds of communication but closed for others.

Politeness has assumed an important place in recent interpretations of eighteenth-century Britain by historians and historically minded scholars in other fields. The use of politeness as an analytic category has relied on varying assessments of the eighteenth-century semantic associations of the term, which included attentiveness to form, sociability, improvement, worldliness, and gentility. Scholars have used politeness in one or more of these senses to characterize distinctive aspects of eighteenth-century British culture: the comportment of the body in isolation and in social interaction; the material equipment of everyday life; the changing configurations and uses of domestic and public spaces; skills and aptitudes that both constituted personal accomplishment and shaped larger cultural enterprises such as religion, learning, the arts, and science; and important aspects of associational and institutional life. Thus, eighteenth-century Britain was polite in that a wide range of quite different activities have been identified as bearing the stamp of the eighteenth-century meanings of ‘politeness’. Furthermore, what made eighteenth-century Britain a polite society was not its horizontal division between polite and non-polite persons but rather the wide access of a range of persons to activities and competencies that contemporaries considered ‘polite’.

The intention of this paper is to inquire into Burke's doctrine of traditionalism—as it may be termed—from a point of view not quite identical with that usually adopted. The aspect of Burke's thought thus isolated may or may not be the most important or the most characteristic, but it is the most familiar and that with which the student first becomes acquainted. Burke held—to summarize what may be found in a hundred text-books on the history of conservatism—that a nation's institutions were the fruit of its experience, that they had taken shape slowly as the result, and were in themselves the record, of a thousand adjustments to the needs of circumstance, each one of which, if it had been found by trial and error, to answer recurrent needs, had been preserved in the usages and established rules of the nation concerned. He also held that political knowledge was the fruit of experience and that reason in this field had nothing to operate on except experience; from which it followed that, since the knowledge of an individual or a generation of individuals was limited by the amount of experience on which it was based, there was always a case for the view that the reason of the living, though it might clearly enough discern the disadvantages, might not fully perceive the advantages of existing and ancient institutions, for these might contain the fruits of more experience than was available to living individuals as the sum of their personal or reported experience of the world. It also followed that since the wisdom embodied in institutions was based on experience and nothing but experience, it could not be completely rationalized, that is, reduced to first principles which might be clearly enunciated, shown to be the cause of the institutions' first being set up, or employed to criticize their subsequent workings. There was, in short, always more in laws and institutions than met the eye of critical reason, always a case for them undiminished by anything that could be said against them.

The story of signals intelligence begins in the days of the pharaohs. A letter records the intention of a foreigner to determine the meaning of fires raised by the Egyptians. (No one knows if he succeeded.) Several centuries later, in 207 B.C., the Romans intercepted a letter from Hasdrubal to his brother Hannibal, further south in Italy. It enabled the Romans to concentrate their forces at the Metaurus River to defeat the Carthaginians. This was the only battle in Edward S. Creasy's The fifteen decisive battles of the world: from Marathon to Waterloo that depended upon intelligence for its victory.

This essay is a critical historiographical overview of the ongoing debate about the role of the Protestant Reformation in the process of ‘the disenchantment of the world’. It considers the development of this thesis in the work of Max Weber and subsequent scholars, its links with wider claims about the origins of modernity, and the challenges to this influential paradigm that have emerged in the last twenty-five years. Setting the literature on England within its wider European context, it explores the links between Protestantism and the transformation of assumptions about the sacred and the supernatural, and places renewed emphasis on the equivocal and ambiguous legacy left by the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Attention is also paid to the ways in which the Reformation converged with other intellectual, cultural, political, and social developments which cumulatively brought about subtle, but decisive, transformations in individual and collective mentalities. It is suggested that thinking in terms of cycles of desacralization and resacralization may help to counteract the potential distortions of a narrative that emphasizes a linear path of development.

This essay surveys recent scholarly work on the political theory of empire and international relations in Britain during the long nineteenth century. It traces the dominant themes and arguments to be found, points to some interpretative and methodological weaknesses, and highlights a number of topics that remain to be explored in detail. I focus on the following: the relationship between liberalism and empire and, in particular, the role played by the idea of civilization in circumscribing liberal claims to universality; the nature and evolution of international law, and the key role that jurisprudential thought played in shaping conceptions of civilization and setting the bounds of legitimacy for imperialism; the vexed relationship between the history of imperial thought and cultural/political history; and the important, though frequently marginalized, role of the colonial empire in the Victorian imperial imagination. Finally, I suggest that areas that remain to be explored in depth include non-liberal visions of international affairs; the role of theology in shaping conceptions of global order; and the balance between the United States, Europe, and the various (and very different) elements of the empire.

In theory the eighteenth-century criminal law was a rigid, fixed and bloody penal code laying down the penalty of death for a broad range of property crimes. In practice it was a flexible and highly selective system. The legal process had no effective police force to provide an organizational core and it was therefore a private and negotiable process involving personal confrontation rather than bureaucratic procedure. All the major published studies of the administration of the criminal law in this period have stressed its highly discretionary nature. They have also shown that the law was important as ideology. The widely held notions that every freeborn Englishman was protected by the rule of law and that all were equal before the law both constrained authority and legitimized and strengthened it.

Historians concerned to demonstrate women's increasing relegation to a private, domestic sphere in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have emphasized the extent to which married women's opportunities were restricted by the common law practice of coverture, which deprived wives of the ability to enter into economic contracts in their own right. Yet social and cultural historians have argued that women played an essential role as purchasers in promoting the consumer revolution of these decades. This article explores the devices used by married women consumers to evade the strictures of coverture. Focusing on three overlapping practices – wives' willingness and ability to pledge their husbands' credit to purchase a wide range of ‘necessary’ goods, their use of this tactic to secure a degree of independence from unsuccessful marriages, and their active participation in the deliberations of a variety of small claims courts – it argues that the purchase of coverture in the sphere of consumption was partial and contested, rather than monolithic.

Of the three major innovations in law enforcement in nineteenth-century England, the penitentiaries, the new police and the stipendiary magistracy, the stipendiary magistracy came first. Three years before Patrick Colquhoun published his influential Treatise on the police of the metropolis, urging the foundation of a centralized preventative police force, the Middlesex Justices Act of 1792 established a system of paid magistrates for metropolitan London. The stipendiary magistracy sitting in police offices was further reformed in the 1820s and 1830s, the same decades which saw the organization of the metropolitan police. By 1838 the police courts had taken their final shape, remaining largely unaltered into the twentieth century. Side by side with the new police, stipendiary magistrates were the primary instruments of public order in Victorian London.

Whilst it would be wrong to claim that voluntary societies in Britain were new in the period 1780 to 1850, the growth of large industrial and urban populations was accompanied by an increase in the foundation and prosperity of such societies. These societies were diverse in their purpose, form, size and membership. Edward Baines, junior, one of the self-appointed tribunes of the industrial middle class, in 1843 described recent developments as follows:

In February 1842 a wealthy lay congregationalist named Thomas Thompson wrote to the secretaries of the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society urging them to do more to interest the young and the working classes in the cause of foreign missions. Missionary advocates were needed, insisted Thompson, who could shew to our manufacturing population that Christianity Civilization & Commerce are only synonimous terms - that the extension of the former will do more for a World recovery - the bonding of distant nations with a Love of amity & good will & do more for the employment of hundreds of thousands, than all the Anti Corn leaguers can ever accomplish, even were they to realise all their members so fully anticipate, & we shall thus obtain the auxiliary aid of a class of countrymen, whom we have hitherto left to the worst foes of our species.