This volume of Transactions is notable not only – of course – for what it contains, but also for what it does not contain. Readers will find the usual varied fare of papers read at the Society's meetings – the cream of recent scholarship – as well as three of the papers read at the colloquium on ‘Croatia and Europe’ held at the University of Leicester on 27 March 2013 to mark Croatia's entry into the European Union – an unusual and timely reminder of an important geopolitical story not often included in standard accounts of European history. As for the missing contents – with this volume, Transactions will no longer include the Society's annual report and accounts. This change will decouple the publication of report and accounts necessary for the AGM from the publication of Transactions and will enable us to include more academic content in the latter. The annual report and accounts will be made more widely available by publication before the AGM in November on the Society's new website (www.royalhistsoc.org). I encourage all Fellows and Members to take a look, not only for the full annual report, but also for the wide range of new resources now available on the website: an archive of policy documents (the Society's but also other scholarly and public bodies), on subjects ranging from the school curriculum to freedom of information; podcasts of all of the Society's recent public lectures; information on upcoming events of interest to historians; application forms for proposing new Fellows and Members and applying for the Society's early career research grants and fellowships; a guide for early career historians; and much more relevant not only to the Society's activities but to the rich world of historical research beyond.

This paper assays the public discourse on secondary education across the twentieth century – what did voters think they wanted from education and how did politicians seek to cater to those desires? The assumption both in historiography and in popular memory is that educational thinking in the post-war decades was dominated by the ideal of ‘meritocracy’ – that is, selection for secondary and higher education on the basis of academic ‘merit’. This paper argues instead that support for ‘meritocracy’ in this period was fragile. After 1945, secondary education came to be seen as a universal benefit, a function of the welfare state analogous to health. Most parents of all classes wanted the ‘best schools’ for their children, and the best schools were widely thought to be the grammar schools; thus support for grammar schools did not imply support for meritocracy, but rather for high-quality universal secondary education. This explains wide popular support for comprehensivisation, so long as it was portrayed as providing ‘grammar schools for all’. Since the 1970s, public discourse on education has focused on curricular control, ‘standards’ and accountability, but still within a context of high-quality universal secondary education, and not the ‘death of the comprehensive’.

This article takes two major moments of social change in central medieval Europe, the ‘feudal revolution’ in France and the origins of Italian city communes, in order to see what they have in common. They are superficially very different, one rural one urban, and also one whose analysts focus on the breakdown of political power and the other on its construction or reconstruction; but there are close parallels between the changes which took place in France around 1000 or 1050 and those which took place in Italy around 1100. The contrast in dates does not matter; what matters is that in each case larger-scale political breakdown (whether at the level of the kingdom or the county) was matched by local recomposition, the intensification or crystallisation of local power structures which had been much more ad hoc before, and which would be the basic template for local power henceforth. In Italy, the main focus of the article, the different experiences of Pisa and Genoa are compared, and the development of urban assemblies first, consular collectives second, communal institutions third, are all analysed from this perspective, as guides to how the city communes of the peninsula developed, however haltingly and insecurely. The article finishes with a brief comment on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.

Studies of preaching in England during the 1640s and 1650 have focused on the high-profile sermons, preached before the parliament on fast days and other special days of thanksgiving, relying in particular on analysis of preachers’ texts as published in print. This paper explores ways of placing the fast sermons in broader contexts, drawing on the lively scholarship on early modern sermons that presents them as events as well as texts, dynamic encounters between preachers and hearers. This paper thus explores the responses of conscientious hearers to sermons in London in the 1640s and 1650s, through a variety of notes kept by pious Puritans, broadly sympathetic to the parliament's cause, including the artisan Nehemiah Wallington, John and Katherine Gell from the provincial gentry and John Harper, a city fishmonger. For these hearers, sermon note-taking had enduring purposes, for reflection, meditation and discussion, sometimes across generations; recording the immediate political context or the polemical arguments of the fast sermons was not necessarily their priority. Hearers’ notebooks place the fast sermons within a broader context of attendance at more ‘routine’ pastoral and didactic preaching in London parishes, revealing also that a preacher like Stephen Marshall, best known for his dynamic sermons before the parliament, spent most of his time on less controversial series of sermons on central issues of Protestant faith. Note-taking practices suggest that too sharp a contrast between polemical and routine preaching would be misleading; the fast sermons could be apprehended in a variety of ways by conscientious Puritan hearers, while sermons with a more pastoral focus nonetheless exhibited clear signs of the tensions and dilemmas provoked by the religious conflicts of the period.

This paper starts from the proposition that historians of identity in the early modern period have paid insufficient attention to the significance of occupations and work. It demonstrates one possible approach to this topic by exploring the social identity of a particular occupational group – tradesmen – through a study of a particular source – printed broadside ballads. A number of important conclusions result: it argues that historians have overstated the dominance of craft-specific consciousness in the formation of early modern work-based identity (a term that is offered as a more helpful alternative to that of occupational identity), and suggests that broad-based identifiers such as ‘tradesman’ had a real purchase in contemporary discourse. It also considers the extent to which broader changes in the seventeenth-century economy – especially growing commercialisation and the increasing complexity of credit relations – affected the identity of the tradesman. Although the tension between the hard-working tradesman and the prodigal gentleman in ballad portraits suggests a growing social confidence on the part of the former, the marketplace is depicted to be as much a threat as an opportunity for tradesmen given the fragility of credit relationships. Moreover, the paper examines the gender dimensions of this occupational identity, arguing that a ‘female voice’ was central to ballad discussions of masculine ideals, and that the tradesman's patriarchal authority was generally portrayed as insecure. At its heart, the paper is an exploration of the intersection of class, gender and occupational identities in a period of economic change.

Andrés Bello (1781–1865) is generally reckoned to be the foremost intellectual amongst opponents of the Spanish empire in the Americas after the Napoleonic Wars. This paper provides a synoptic account of Bello's development as a scholar, politician and statesman from his early career as a servant of the crown in colonial Caracas, through his nineteen-year exile in London, to his prominent role in the institutional design and management of the young Chilean republic. The paper traces the historiographical treatment of Bello and the application of his cosmopolitan learning to the tasks of nineteenth-century state-building. It is suggested that his trajectory reflected a successful adaptation of liberal precepts to a conservative local social setting within a world order dominated by British promotion of free trade.

It is time to reexamine craft and small-scale manufacture within our histories of industrialisation, both West and East, and to reflect on the long survival and adaptation of artisanal production even within our globalised world of production and consumption. Historians since the 1950s have addressed craft, skill and labour-intensive production in historical frameworks such as ‘the rise of the factory system’, ‘proto-industrialisation’ and ‘flexible specialisation’. More recently, they have devised other concepts which include labour and skill-intensive production such as ‘industrious revolution’, ‘the great divergence’, ‘knowledge economies’, ‘East Asian development paths’ and ‘cycles of production’. This paper surveys this historiography of craft and skill in models of industrialisation. It then reflects on small-scale industrial structures in current globalisation, emphasising the continued significance of craft and skill over a long history of global transitions. It gives close examination to one region, Gujarat, and its recent industrial and global history. The paper compares industrial production for East India Company trade in the eighteenth century to the recent engagement of the artisans of the Kachchh district of Gujarat in global markets. It draws on the oral histories of seventy-five artisan families to discuss the past and future of craft and skill in the industry of the global economy.

Croatia's entry to the EU in July 2013 signalled an association with Europe which was anticipated in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in the regular use of antemurale (bulwark) rhetoric. This rhetoric was one of the salient characteristics of the period's crusading discourse, as the task of mobilising Christian assistance for regions confronting the Ottoman advance, and in so doing defending the faith as a whole, created a two-way traffic of information and arguments between the embattled frontline states and centres of power in the European interior. This paper investigates the distinctively Croatian features of antemurale language. The exposition of Croatia's role as an antemurale reveals the extent of the country's embrace of humanist ideals and techniques, enabling prominent lobbyists like Tomaso Negri to convey Croatia's plight with finesse in orations delivered at Rome, Venice and elsewhere. The written output of the humanists also shows that Croatia's dismemberment occurred at a time when national identity was forming, and the emphasis placed on the country's relationship with fellow-Catholics reinforced the tendency to look westwards. In addition, Croatia provides a telling example of the tension between centre and periphery in the person of Andrija Jamometić. When he dramatically called for the deposition of Sixtus IV in 1482, Jamometić included neglect of the crusade against the Turks amongst the accusations directed against the pope.

This article addresses the experiences of Croats and Croatia in the aftermath of the First World War, showing how the interwar Kingdom of Yugoslavia privileged the wartime sacrifice of Serbia and the Serbian army and how Croats were often depicted as the remnants of a defeated state, Austria-Hungary, and therefore less entitled to citizenship in the South Slav kingdom. It focuses on three large veteran associations: the Association of Reserve Officers and Warriors, the Union of Volunteers, and the Association of War Invalids.

This paper deals with a transnational network of scholars and their demographic concepts of ethnic homogenisation of Europe. Focusing on the ethnographer Karl Christian von Loesch and the sociologist Max Hildebert Boehm, it sheds light on German supremacist scholarship and its international entanglements in the interwar years. Loesch and Boehm headed the Institute for Borderland and Foreign Studies in Berlin, where they developed concepts of a new European demographic order based on ethnic segregation, border shifts, assimilation and population transfers. They closely cooperated with non-German nationalists. Indeed, Loesch and Boehm had a big impact on non-Germans scholars, who studied at their institute and who would later try to apply similar concepts of ethnic homogenisation to their countries. By discussing the work of three of their students, Franz Ronneberger, Mladen Lorković and Fritz Valjavec, the paper presents a case of transnational cooperation between German and south-eastern European scholars. Using Croatia as an example, the paper demonstrates how these scholars worked towards nation-states freed of ethnic minorities. The Second World War would bring them into a position to try to implement their projects. Yet, the brutal dynamics of the war quickly altered the reality scholars had planned to design. The grand demographic schemes paved the way for ethnic cleansing, but had not much to do with the way they were carried out.