Not the least of the duties with which Thomas Cromwell was burdened during the period of his ascendancy was the supervision of the lordship of Ireland. There the changes effected in the function and powers of the Dublin administration in the 1530s proved to be quite as important for the development of early-modern Ireland as those occurring in England during the same decade were for that realm. These changes centred on the legislation of the Irish Reformation Parliament of 1536–7 and on the termination of a policy of aristocratic delegation whereby Anglo-Irish magnates, primarily the earl of Kildare, had ruled the lordship on behalf of the king. By the later 1530s the lordship was governed through an English deputy working with a reconstituted Irish council, backed by a small English garrison, and controlled more firmly from London. For all this, recent research has established the overall responsibility of Cromwell.

The contemporary international system is at once the continuation and the negation ofthe old European states-system. It is the continuation in the sense that the world is nowpeopled with the same kind of political bodies that were formerly concentrated within thearea of Europe alone, namely sovereign states. The overseas empires of Britain, France, Spain, and others, represented both the subordination of the rest of the world to Europe, and the media through which the state as a political structure was exported from Europe. The dissolution of these empires, foreshadowed by the independence of the United States and the emancipation of Spain's Latin American colonies, and accomplished definitively in the half-century following the Great War, signified the extension of inter-state relationships to the world in general, while it marked the end of the domination of the European states in particular.

Historians have in recent years used several approaches to explain the first Reform Act. Michael Brock's elegant account sets the whole Reform crisis in its political context. D. C. Moore has attempted a ‘sociological’ explanation of ministers’ intentions, while John Milton-Smith has offered a more traditional analysis of their private papers. This emphasis on the men who framed and steered the measure through parliament perhaps obscures the role of the ordinary members in whose hands its fate rested. Like the ministers, the backbenchers also suffered intense periods of indecision, soul-searching and calculation based on a confused mixture of pragmatism and principle. This is especially true of the moderates, the men of the parliamentary centre, who provided the vital votes for the government's hair-breadth majority on the second reading in February 1831, but who deserted them to support General Gascoyne's motion a few days later. Only fifteen M.P.s voted both for the Bill and for Gascoyne's motion, thus locating themselves - at least temporarily - at the very centre of the political spectrum.

Political economy suffered a sharp decline in prestige and influence in Britain after 1870. The methods, doctrines and policies of the classical school were called into question by a younger generation of economists, eager to respond positively to the sudden appearance of the ‘ social problem’ in politics. The most dramatic break with the old school took place in the sphere of policy, where the link between laissez-faire and political economy was severed. Economists such as Jevons, Cairnes, Sidgwick, Toynbee and Marshall led the assault on the orthodox school.1 Unfortunately, the very success of their attack has conditioned historians to assume that they spoke for all their generation. Such was not the case. Below the level of the leading academic economists and liberal social reformers a strong current of opinion ran in the opposite direction; it feared the growth of socialism and looked to a re-juvenated ‘science’ of political economy as the only counterpoise to it.

In 1915 and again in 1917 the British government almost decided to buy out the whole of the licensed liquor trade in the United Kingdom. An examination of the circumstances in which this ambitious proposal was contemplated poses serious questions of interpretation for the historian of the first World War. The episode figures in the historiography of temperance as a missed opportunity to use the power of government to solve a longstanding social problem; this, however, was a minor part of the story. In 1915 state purchase was to have helped to reduce industrial absenteeism, and thus to increase munitions production. In 1917 it was to have conserved foodstuffs and saved shipping during the submarine crisis. It can thus be seen as yet another manifestation of ‘war socialism’: but it has two distinctive characteristics. First, the government had little understanding of the economic and social phenomena which it sought to control by assuming ownership of the liquor trade, though much political effort was put into the manoeuvre. Second, the private interests concerned were quite eager, partly because of pre-war conditions, to be expropriated for their own good as much as for the nation's benefit. It is an unexceptionable part of conventional wisdom that the first World War, like the second, was a major catalyst of change, and especially of state intervention in society. The history of state purchase shows how tenuous and haphazard the causal connexion between war and social change could be. The demands of war were (almost) translated into major state intervention, but the process was mediated by the political mythology of drink, by the operation in the political system of a powerful business pressure group, and by the shifting priorities of governments which subordinated all policy to the need to guide a war economy to victory.

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.

In the 1930s the British peace movement expanded rapidly from a preserve of small elitist peace societies into a mass phenomenon. More specifically, it was in the period from the Manchurian crisis to the Italo-Ethiopian war that what has been loosely called ‘pacifism’ gained political weight. Whilst its effect on the making of foreign policy has been the subject of much historical inquiry, the manifestations of the peace debate, including the famous Peace Ballot, can best be explained in the domestic context of party and pressure-group politics. The divisive nature of war rejection as an issue then becomes clearly apparent. Indeed the argument that the peace movement was a point of consensus can only be valid at a superficial level. One can agree with Marwick that a ‘middle opinion’ preferring peace to war developed in the thirties.1 But in public discussion about collective security pacifists caused schisms which hindered the clarification of party and pressure-group policies.

The inter-war years are a nomansland in the history of British decolonization. Conventional as it is to see the first World War as a great watershed in British imperial history, separating the era of strength and success from the age of decline and dissolution, it remains difficult to show conclusively that the disintegration of the imperial system had become inevitable before the second World War. Yet historians have felt instinctively that after 1918 much of the crude self-confidence had drained out of British imperialism. The age when Curzon could proclaim heroically that ‘efficiency of administration is in my view a synonym for the contentment of the governed’; when Cromer could lecture the khedive of Egypt like a schoolboy; or when Milner could set out to demolish everything that preserved a separate identity to the Afrikaners, appears in striking contrast to the post-war era when statesmen spoke the language of trusts and mandates, genuflected before the image of self-determination and claimed that self-government was the ultimate purpose of colonial rule. But for all the piety of its new principles, post-war imperial policy seemed strangely reluctant to liberate Britain's dependencies or hold out firm promises of independence; and the imperial government periodically repressed its recalcitrant subjects with a vigour and efficiency that would have impressed Lord Kitchener.