Early sixteenth-century Germany and Switzerland witnessed, amongst their peasants, a growing dissatisfaction with economic exploitation and the increasing power of political rulers. The Protestant Reformation at the time had a profound influence on the moulding of this dissatisfaction into a right to demand the enforcement of divine justice. The Swiss reformer, Huldrych Zwingli, provided parallels for the demands of the peasants, while the German reformers, Martin Luther and Philip Melanchthon, criticized the rebellious methods of the peasantry. Against this background the young Swiss reformer, Heinrich Bullinger, responded more positively towards the claims of the peasants by opposing the views of the Lutheran reformers in his play ‘Lucretia and Brutus’. In this drama, Bullinger propounds the first steps towards the development of his federal theory of politics by advancing the idea of oath-taking as the mechanism for transforming the monarchy into a Christian republic. The idea of oath-taking was destined to become a most important device in early modern politics, used to combat tyranny and to promote the idea of republicanism.

During the East India Company's rule of India, Britons observed the pervasiveness of elephants in local modes of warfare, hunting, trade, and religious symbolism. The colonizers appropriated this knowledge about elephants: for instance, in the taking-over of Mughal trade routes or Tipu Sultan's stables. What Indians knew about the elephant also fed into a metropolitan culture of anthropomorphism, exemplified in the celebrated shooting of the elephant Chuny in 1826. Anthropomorphic approaches to the elephant held by Britons worked alongside Sanskrit texts and Mughal paintings. These hybrid understandings gave way by the mid-century to an allegedly objective and Christian science of animals, which could not be tainted by what was called pagan superstition. By using the elephant as a point of focus, this article urges the importance of popular traditions of colonial exchange in the emergence of science, and cautions against the reification of indigenous knowledge. The argument aims to show the strengths of a history of knowledge-making that is not focused on elites, the metropolis, or the periphery. A study of the uses of the elephant in colonialism also suggests the multiple and easily interchangeable meanings that animals could carry.

Burke's justification for intervention in French internal affairs in the name of the international community has formed a powerful strand of thought in both diplomacy and international relations theory. However, the strength and openness of Burke's advocacy, traced here, changed according to his target audience, the domestic, and the international political context. Crucially, when he came to justify the case openly, the arguments changed completely. Beginning with a Grotian argument drawn from Vattel and premised on states as isolated rights-holders in a pre-social ‘state of nature’, Burke always struggled to draw a justification for intervention in the case, allowed by Vattel, of irrevocable political disunion. This conflicted both with Burke's general conception of states as corporate wholes and his linked policy aspiration to restore the totality of French ancient institutions. Ultimately abandoning this, his final argument, fully set out only in the Letters on a regicide peace, is completely new. It is premised not on modern international law but on remedies to be found in Roman domestic law, invocation of which he justifies by claiming Europe to be a single juridical enclave, drawing on an eighteenth-century discourse of shared manners, law, and culture as constitutive of political identity and community.

During the 1890s evangelical Protestants took to preaching on the streets in southern Irish towns and cities. They provoked an angry response, with large Catholic crowds gathering to protest at their activities. This created a difficult situation for the authorities. Obliged, on the one hand, to protect the rights and liberties of the preachers, they also looked to nurture behaviour appropriate to the sectarian realities in Ireland. At stake was the extent to which Ireland could be treated as an undifferentiated part of the United Kingdom, with W. E. H. Lecky increasingly recognizing the need for a different legal basis in Ireland. These events formed part of the wider evolution of ‘constructive unionism’. More broadly, respectable Irish Protestant and Catholic disapproval of preachers and the ‘mob’ revealed the way in which class attitudes cut across sectarian identities, suggesting that the political dividends paid the wider unionist movement by this exposure of the apparent realities of ‘Rome rule’ were little valued in the locale. Similarly, interventions by home rule politicians reinforced the sense that conciliating British public opinion was a central concern. Here was an example of how locally orientated sectarianism helped shape national political agendas.

Questioning Edward Said's controversial perception of European Oriental studies as a facilitator of imperialism, this article analyses the views and policies promoted in late imperial Russia by academics specializing in Oriental studies, as they debated how best to integrate ethnic minorities in the country's eastern borderlands. The article argues that, themselves influenced by the pervasive impact of nationalism on European scholarship, between the 1870s and the 1917 Revolution these academics proposed policies which are best understood as aimed at nation-building (i.e. fostering a sense of community and unity among the population of a state) rather than at imperial domination of the minorities by the Russians. Identifying the origins of the academics' support for cultural and linguistic pluralism as fully compatible with pan-Russian nationalism, the article demonstrates that the Bolshevik nationalities policies of the 1920s were strongly influenced by the views of academic Orientalists and the pre-revolutionary Russian intellectual tradition to which the latter belonged.

This article explores some of the tensions and interaction between two rival conceptions of the relationship between citizenship and patriotism in twentieth-century England. The first was widespread among the intellectual elite and greatly qualified the role of patriotism in sustaining a higher ideal of citizenship. The second was generally the preserve of popular writers and activists who conceived citizenship in terms of patriotic attachment to the English and English-British nation. However, the article maintains that the Edwardian intellectual elite often assumed an homogeneous national culture as the basis of successful citizenship, both local and international. In this regard, despite subjection to increasing strain, continuity as much as change is apparent in conceptions of citizenship up to and including the interventions of Enoch Powell in the debate over mass immigration. Subsequent attempts to ground citizenship in difference rather than sameness have greatly intensified the tension with a more persistent culture of patriotism.

It is clear that a strand of anti-Stalinism had firmly entered the political discourse of British Labour and the Left by the late 1940s. This was largely a response to mounting Cold War tension and is rightly seen to contrast with their earlier broad support for the Soviet experiment. This article adds to this picture by arguing that anti-Stalinism was first adumbrated in the late 1930s in reaction to the Stalinist purges. Whereas previous accounts have given the impression that the Labour party and the wider Left were largely uninterested in the purges, this article shows instead that they provoked sharp criticisms of Stalin from across the range of Labour and Left opinion. Moreover, it also demonstrates that while certain figures and groupings did choose not to discuss the purges publicly, this was not necessarily because of a lack of interest or knowledge. For the Left the domestic political necessities of supporting the united front meant that, at least temporarily, their real views had to be concealed. More generally, the international pressure of endorsing the Soviet Union as an ally against international fascism inhibited an even more forthright condemnation of Stalin.

For most of the Second World War, German and Italian agents were actively engaged in a variety of intelligence gathering exercises in southern Africa. The hub of this activity was Lourenço Marques, the colonial capital of Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique). One of the key tasks of Axis agents was to make links with Nazi sympathizers and the radical right in South Africa, promote dissent, and destabilize the imperial war effort in the dominion. Using British, American, and South African archival sources, this article outlines German espionage activities and British counter-intelligence operations orchestrated by MI5, MI6, and the Special Operations Executive between 1939 and 1944. The article, which is part of a larger study, examines three broad themes. First, it explores Pretoria's creation of a humble military intelligence apparatus in wartime South Africa. Secondly, it examines the establishment of several British liaison and intelligence-gathering agencies that operated in southern Africa for most of the war. Finally, it assesses the working relationship between the South African and British agencies, the tensions that arose, and the competing interests that emerged between the two allies as they sought to contain the Axis-inspired threat from within.

The ‘religious right’ came to prominence in the US during the late 1970s by campaigning on ‘social issues’ and encouraging many fundamentalist and evangelical Christians to get involved in politics. However, the fact that it clashed with ‘born again’ President Jimmy Carter over tax breaks for religious schools believed to be discriminatory, together with its illiberal stances on many issues, meant that it was characterized as an extremist movement. I argue that this assessment is oversimplified. First, many Christian schools were not racially discriminatory, and their defenders resented being labelled as racists. Secondly, few historians have recognized that the Christians involved in the religious right were among the most secularized of their kind. The religious right was often mistakenly categorized alongside earlier American Christian political movements that had displayed extremist and anti-democratic tendencies. The Carter administration's records and oft-ignored religious right ephemeral literature partly substantiate the movement's contention that it was defensive rather than theocratic in nature. One of my conclusions is that more attention must be paid to the subtle nuances of the political and theological views of religious right leaders, because the confusion surrounding the religious right is partly a function of its leaders harbouring internally inconsistent views.

In the past decade, ‘internationalizing’ or ‘globalizing’ American history has become the mantra of the historical profession. This essay reviews this new body of literature that situates American history within a global framework, searches for connections between the United States and the rest of the world, and explores how American practices and culture have been exported. The ‘globalizing’ project, it shall be argued, has helped historians move beyond the limiting concept of American exceptionalism, whilst providing new explanations for the distinct and, at times, unique, history of the United States. It has also shed new light on the history of American foreign relations. Though historians need to balance the international with the national and better apply transnational methods to the study of the nineteenth century, the global perspective has already added a new texture to our understanding of American history.

This is a review of recent English-language scholarship on the development of Russian identity since the collapse of the USSR in 1991. The first part examines literature on the economic and political changes in the Russian Federation, revealing how scholars became more sceptical about the possibility of Russia building a Western-type liberal democracy. The second part investigates approaches to the study of Russian national identity. The experience of empire, in both the tsarist and Soviet periods, gave Russians a weak sense of nationhood; ethnic Russians identified with the multi-national Soviet Union. Seeking legitimacy for the new state, President El'tsin sought to create a civic identity focused on the multi-national Russian Federation. The Communist and nationalist opposition continued to promote an imperial identity, focused on restoring the USSR or creating some other formation including the Russian-speaking population in the former Soviet republics. The final section discusses accounts of the two Chechen wars, which scholars see as continuing Russia's imperial policy and harming relations with Russia's Muslim population. President Putin's co-operation with the West against ‘terrorism’ has not led the West to accept Russia as one of its own, due to increasing domestic repression and authoritarianism.

The common law tradition: lawyers, books and the law. By J. H. Baker. London: Hambledon, 2000. Pp. xxxiv+404. ISBN 1-85285-181-3. £40.00.

Lawyers, litigation and English society since 1450. By Christopher W. Brooks. London: Hambledon, 1998. Pp. x+274. ISBN 1-85285-156-2. £40.00.

Professors of the law: barristers and English legal culture in the eighteenth century. By David Lemmings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+399. ISBN 0-19-820721-2. £50.00.

Industrializing English law: entrepreneurship and business organization, 1720–1844. By Ron Harris. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xvi+331. ISBN 0-521-66275-3. £37.50.

Between law and custom: ‘high’ and ‘low’ legal cultures in the lands of the British Diaspora – the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, 1600–1900. By Peter Karsten. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi+560. ISBN 0-521-79283-5. £70.00.

The past few decades have witnessed a welcome expansion in historians' understanding of English legal cultures, a development that has extended the reach of legal history far beyond the boundaries circumscribed by the Inns of Court, the central tribunals of Westminster, and the periodic provincial circuits of their judges, barristers, and attorneys. The publication of J. G. A. Pocock's classic study, The ancient constitution and the feudal law, in 1957 laid essential foundations for this expansion by underlining the centrality of legal culture to wider political and intellectual developments in the early modern period. Recent years have seen social historians elaborate further upon the purchase exercised by legal norms outside the courtroom. Criminal law was initially at the vanguard of this historiographical trend, and developments in this field continue to revise and enrich our understanding of the law's pervasive reach in British culture. But civil litigation – most notably disputes over contracts and debts – now occupies an increasingly prominent position within the social history of the law. Law's empire, denoting the area of dominion marked out by the myriad legal cultures that emanated both from parliamentary statutes and English courts, is now a far more capacious field of study than an earlier generation of legal scholars could imagine. Without superseding the need for continued attention to established lines of legal history, the mapping of this imperial terrain has underscored the imperative for new approaches to legal culture that emphasize plurality and dislocation rather than the presumed coherence of the common law.

The myth of Mr Butskell: the politics of British economic policy, 1950–1955. By Scott Kelly. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002. Pp. viii+248. ISBN 0-7546-0604-X. £42.50.

The Labour party and taxation: party identity and political purpose in twentieth-century Britain. By Richard Whiting. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xii+294. ISBN 0-521-57160-X. £45.00.

British social policy since 1945. Second edition. By Howard Glennerster. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, 2000. Pp. xii+260. ISBN 0-631-22022-4. £15.99.

Governance, industry and labour markets in Britain and France: the modernising state in the mid-twentieth century. Edited by Noel Whiteside and Robert Salais. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Pp. xi+295. ISBN 0-415-15733-1. £45.00.

The final result of political action often, no, even regularly, stands in completely inadequate and often even paradoxical relation to its original meaning. Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation (1918–19)

Hugh Gaitskell (Labour chancellor of the exchequer, 1950–1) remarked in 1957 that ‘professional politicians, when they have been in the job for any length of time, are not well fitted for really deep thinking, partly because they have no time for it and partly because the very practice of their art involves them in continual simplification’. This candid observation has important implications for the study of how past politicians formulated policy. The books under review all deal with differing aspects of British (and also, in one case, French) economic and social policy in the twentieth century. They all show, to varying degrees, that parties, governments, and other political actors have proffered apparently simplistic and muddled solutions to important problems. But was this because of intellectual deficiency on their part, or was it an inevitable consequence of the exercise of what Rab Butler, Gaitskell's Conservative successor, famously called ‘the art of the possible’?