This article attempts to establish a connection between the practical legitimation of war and the theories of international law, examining Sweden's efforts to justify her intervention in the Thirty Years War in 1630. Swedish argumentative strategy is analysed in the light of two major traditions of thinking about war: theological and humanist ‘just war’ traditions. The article argues that Swedish leaders did not appeal to the more belligerent humanist arguments which would have enabled them to describe their campaign as a just war either on the grounds of pre-emptive defence or humanitarian intervention. Instead, they tried to interpret it as being within the limits set by the more restrictive theological tradition. This strategy eventually forced them to relinquish attempts to present their intervention as a genuine war and to develop an argument of ‘police-action’, even though it resulted in a loss of credibility. The case study suggests that in the early seventeenth century the prevailing normative language of just war was that of the theologians.

Over the course of the ‘long’ eighteenth century the nature and significance of duels fought in the London area changed dramatically. Pistols replaced swords, seconds took on a new role as mediators, and new conventions reduced the violence. Consequently, injuries and fatalities decreased significantly. The purpose of fighting duels also shifted from the defeat of one's antagonist to a demonstration of courage. Although duels continued to occur, growing opposition meant that the audience of people who supported duelling became increasingly limited and duels took place in places far from public view. At the same time, both the press and the courts provided alternative strategies for defending reputations. These changes cannot be attributed to technological developments, official attempts to prevent duelling, or the embourgeoisement of the duel. Rather, they resulted from a series of interlinked cultural changes, including an increasing intolerance of violence, new internalized understandings of elite honour, and the adoption of ‘polite’ and sentimental norms governing masculine conduct. These eighteenth-century changes shed new light on the reasons for the final end of duelling in England in 1852.

This article re-examines the evidence that has been used to claim that, in the aftermath of the collapse of the British secret service's counter-revolutionary plans in France in September 1797, foreign secretary Lord Grenville supported a French royalist plot to assassinate the Directory. It concludes that, although his agent James Talbot was actively involved and probably thought he had official permission to proceed, Grenville remained ignorant of the plot until December 1798. He subsequently ordered Talbot to withdraw from the conspiracy. Emphasis is placed on communications difficulties associated with undercover secret service activities in this era and on bureaucratic failures within the foreign office, together with evidence to suggest that Talbot was temperamentally unsuited to the role of intelligence officer.

The Victoria League, founded in 1901 as a result of the South African War, was the only predominantly female imperial propaganda society in Britain during the Edwardian period. To accommodate women's activism within the ‘man's world’ of empire politics the League restricted its work to areas within woman's ‘separate sphere’ while transforming them into innovative methods of imperial propaganda. Through philanthropy to war victims, hospitality to colonial visitors, empire education, and the promotion of social reform as an imperial issue, the League aimed to encourage imperial sentiment at home and promote colonial loyalty to the ‘mother country’. The League's relationship with its colonial ‘sister societies’, the Guild of Loyal Women of South Africa and the Canadian Imperial Order, Daughters of the Empire, demonstrates both the primacy of the self-governing dominions in its vision of empire, and the importance of women's imperial networks. The Victoria League illustrates both significant involvement by elite women in imperial politics and the practical and ideological constraints placed on women's imperial activism.

In the period between 1935 and 1939, the international communist movement urged communist parties to strike a more nationalistic note in their propaganda. In Scotland this was met by what may seem as a surprising reluctance to move away from strict communist adherence to internationalism, and towards a more nationalistic approach to Scottish politics. This article aims at understanding how the interplay between the international and national political contexts resulted in this reluctance. It considers, in particular, the extent to which the national identity of Scottish communists influenced their approach to the national question. It places the ideas of Scottish communists in the context of Marxist-Leninist doctrine, and considers how these were adapted into the national political context. As a further aid in determining which factors were at work when Scottish communists tackled the national question, the attitude of Scottish communists is compared with that of their fellow communists in Iceland. By broadening the perspective in this way, it is argued, we can make sense of the paradox that it was indeed international communism that eventually turned Scottish communists into nationalists.

This review traces historians' use of the concept of popular culture, since its entry into the discipline in the 1970s. ‘Popular culture’ was initially loosely understood as the values, pleasures, and pastimes of the poor, and research in the field was heavily influenced by both Marxism and cultural anthropology. By the 1990s, earlier conceptions of popular culture appeared crudely reductionist, and heterogeneity, diversity, and ‘appropriation’ were firmly established as key terms and concerns for the historian of popular culture. But in the search for social and cultural complexity, the role of politics and the simple force of power and social inequality have been neglected. I argue here that wealth and power have long been key determinants shaping the character of popular cultural practice, and that their operation needs to be incorporated into our analyses. In this way, the study of popular culture offers the promise of research that is both of intrinsic interest and of broader historical significance.

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.