Recent scholarship on the ideological origins of the British Empire has emphasized the importance of John Dee's imperial writings in justifying the Elizabethan exploitation of English Atlantic discoveries. Yet a closer reading of these writings in the context of European politics, Elizabethan Court intrigues, and Dee's occult natural philosophy and magical imperialism reveals their covert purpose of recovering a lost British Empire in Europe. Dee wrote initially to address both the chronic and acute problems facing the regime in 1576, but rather than being an autonomous authority whose ideas commanded attention because of their intrinsic power, he was subordinate to the Court patronage system. Consequently his writings only gained attention when revised to align with the policies of powerful courtiers such as the earl of Leicester, and even then influential Catholic courtiers could exploit contingent political circumstances to counter his influence. Dee's writings remained problematic not only because restoring the British Empire in Europe would entail confronting Spain, but also because in their hidden centre they proposed the creation of an apocalyptic empire by magical means, particularly the philosopher's stone. In the end the contingent events that made Dee's writings briefly influential ensured their ultimate irrelevance to Elizabethan policy-making.

This article analyses John Dryden's personal and textual relations with the Butlers of Ormond as they are played out over four decades in a series of texts – Absalom and Achitophel (1681), the dedication of his Life of Plutarch (1683), the engraved plates of the Aeneid (1697), and the verse which opens Fables (1700). This detailed case study uncovers the nature and complexities of literary patronage during years of rebellion, war and intense political uncertainty. It addresses issues central to restoration politics and society – lineage, legitimacy, loyalty, honour, and reputation – and suggests how these issues might be explored more fully by both historians and literary scholars.

This article contributes to current historical knowledge on the relationship between Crown and local municipal power in Old Regime France. In particular, it examines the political language of bien public mobilized by Marseillais elites and royal administrators between 1660 and 1700 in the context of French commercial expansion. Traditionally, ‘public good’ could be understood in two distinct ways. Derived from royal absolutist doctrine, public good was what the king willed to preserve the state, a collection of diverse, corporate bodies held together by royal justice and reason. Derived from civic humanistic, municipal traditions, public good was the united will of the civic community. Investigating three moments where these two definitions of public good converged and collided – during Marseille's urban expansion (1666), in the local justification of modern commerce, and in the deliberations at the Council of Commerce (1700) – this article points to several mutations in the language of public good at the end of the seventeenth century. Pointing to the convergence of civic humanistic and absolutist traditions, this article demonstrates that centralization under Louis XIV, rather than obscuring local traditions, allowed for the intensification of civic humanistic, republican sensibilities.

This article argues that during the closing decades of the nineteenth century a significant group of British imperial thinkers broke with the long-standing conventions of political thought by deliberately eschewing the inspiration and intellectual authority provided by the examples of the ancient empires. While the early Victorian colonial reformers had looked to the template of Greece, and while many later Victorians compared the empire in India with the Roman empire, numerous proponents of Greater Britain (focusing on the settler colonies, and associated in particular with the movement for imperial federation) looked instead to the United States. I argue that the reason for this innovation, risky in a culture obsessed with the moral and prudential value of precedent and tradition, lies in contemporary understandings of history. Both Rome and Greece, despite their differences, were thought to demonstrate that empires were ultimately self-dissolving; as such, empires modelled on their templates were doomed to eventual failure, whether through internal decay or the peaceful independence of the colonies. Since the advocates of Greater Britain were determined to construct an enduring political community, a global Anglo-Saxon polity, they needed to escape the fate of previous empires. They tried instead to insert Greater Britain into a progressive narrative, one that did not doom them to repeat the failures of the past.

This article studies the political significance of the schism that occurred at Liverpool's single professional football club in 1892 and which led to the incorporation of two clubs, Everton FC and Liverpool FC. Significantly, the management and direction of professional football had become bound up with community politics and identity at a time of important change in municipal politics when the tories' ascendancy faced a Liberal challenge partly predicated on the success of a virulent moral crusade over the influence of alcohol, social decay, and corruption in local government. At its simplest, the dispute at the club concerned allegations of commercial exploitation by the largest financial stakeholder. More fundamentally, rival factions were championing competing models for the role they believed a successful football club should be performing within the community which, in turn, embraced attempts by the political parties to engage male, working-class voters. Interestingly, the schism was within Protestant ranks for, despite the prominence often assigned to the role of sectarianism in Liverpool politics, differences between Catholics and Protestants played very little part in the dispute. This case study highlights the complexity of Liverpool political activities and alliances and reveals the importance of a multi-layered interplay of local and national issues.

21 November 1920 began with the killing of fourteen men in their flats, boarding houses, and hotel rooms in Dublin. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) alleged that they were British spies. That afternoon British forces retaliated by firing on a crowd of supporters at a Gaelic football match in Croke Park, killing twelve and injuring sixty. The day quickly became known as Bloody Sunday. Much has been made of the afternoon's events. The shootings in Croke Park have acquired legendary status. Concern with the morning's killing has been largely limited to whether or not the dead men were the spies the IRA said they were. There has been little or no consideration of the men who did the killing. This article is based on largely unused interviews and statements made by the IRA men involved in this and many of the other days that came to constitute the guerrilla war fought against the British forces in Ireland from January 1919 until July 1921. This morning's killings are a chilling example of much of what passed for combat during this struggle. Bloody Sunday morning is used here as a means to explore how generally young and untrained IRA men killed and how this type of killing affected their lives.

Even though the argument runs counter to much of the detailed scholarship on the subject, Britain's decision in 1921 to terminate its alliance with Japan is sometimes held in general historical surveys to be a major blunder that helped to pave the way to the Pacific War. The lingering sympathy for the combination with Japan is largely due to an historical myth which has presented the alliance as a particularly close partnership. The roots of the myth lie in the inter-war period when, in order to attack the trend towards internationalism, the political right in Britain manipulated memory of the alliance so that it became an exemplar of ‘old diplomacy’. It was then reinforced after 1945 by post-war memoirs and the ‘declinist’ literature of the 1960s and 1970s. By analysing the origins of this benevolent interpretation of the alliance, this article reveals how quickly and pervasively political discourse can turn history into myth and how the development of myths tells us much about the time in which they were created.

This article examines the impact of England's first women justices of the peace (JPs) on the work of lay magistrates in the period 1920–50. It argues that the early women JPs (many of whom had been active in the women's suffrage campaign), and the organizations that they belonged to, helped to transform the institution of the lay magistracy by adopting a more ‘professional’ approach, evidenced in their willingness to educate and train themselves for their new role. In consequence, this article challenges conventional definitions of ‘professionalism’, arguing that, where the work of JPs was concerned, the boundary between ‘voluntary’ and ‘professional’ activities was less clear than might be supposed. Furthermore, the willingness of many women magistrates in particular (later followed by some of their male colleagues) to undergo training helped to ensure the survival of the lay element in the criminal justice system to the present day.

The year 1968 witnessed a global revolt against imperialism, capitalism, and bureaucracy. It was not – as has long been claimed – the start of a cultural revolution that produced greater personal freedom, but the end of the post-war attempt to define a new left. This reinterpretation of '68 as a global revolt rather than the the baby-boom generation's coming-of-age party is based upon recent research at the local level. An examination of Ireland's radical left during the ‘long '68’ is an important contribution to this work, as it was significant as well as small. Contact at congresses and through the media with other leftists enabled Northern Ireland's ‘sixty-eighters’ to conceive of themselves as part of an imagined community of global revolt. They shared similar goals and tactics. Like their comrades on the continent and across the Atlantic, the region's sixty-eighters tried to attract attention and support by provoking the authorities into an overreaction. In a country dominated by the sectarian divide, however, clashes between Catholic protesters and Protestant police officers were always more likely to lead to communal conflict than class struggle. The Troubles is perhaps the most tragic outcome of the interaction of global and local politics that occurred during '68.

Dr Anne McLaren has disputed the interpretation of the Vindiciae, contra tyrannos (1579) as a work in which Roman and canon law were fundamental. She correctly identifies Quentin Skinner and me with this interpretation. She bases her case on two sorts of evidence: the alleged paucity of Roman law citations, as compared with scriptural ones, in the margins of the original text; and our alleged failure to appreciate the ‘context’ of the Vindiciae, which, she suggests, means how it was translated and used in England, primarily in the seventeenth century. This response argues that she has seriously underestimated the number of legal citations, ignored the use of legal material which is not cited in the margins, and failed to appreciate that Scripture is interpreted in accordance with the categories and principles of Roman and canon law. It further argues that sixteenth-century France, not seventeenth-century England, is the proper ‘context’ in which to understand the book; and that substituting her assessment of English interpretations for what the original says is illegitimate.

Samuel Pepys's affair with his wife's companion Deborah Willet is one of the most celebrated episodes in his journal of the 1660s. When Pepys ended his journal in May 1669, he also believed that he had ended contact with Deb. Unable to trace her in the historical record, scholars have been forced to accept this conclusion. However, new evidence shows that Deb Willet did not disappear from Pepys's life. Rather, she married soon after the end of the diary and her husband, the clergyman Jeremiah Wells, quickly became a client of Pepys. This article explores the evidence on the connections between the three in the 1670s, offering a case study of one individual's role in Pepys's patronage network, and reflecting back upon events in the journal.

This is a review of recent English- and German-language publications on suicide, both as an act and a subject of discourse, in the early and late modern periods. It argues that, while publications on the theme have increased considerably in the past two decades, the problematic character of the evidence for suicide has led to a focus on attitudes to suicide at the expense of empirical investigations. The latter have largely confirmed the link between social isolation and suicide, posited by Durkheim, but have revealed differences in patterns across social groups. The growth of lenient attitudes to suicide has proven to be more protracted and contested than originally believed. The ambivalent role of clergy, the persistence of religious sanctions against suicide, and continued efforts by the state to curb suicide all suggest that the term ‘hybridization’ better characterizes the changes over this period than the older term ‘secularization’. Finally, this review recommends that historians undertake further empirical investigations of suicide, where possible, and that they broaden suicide research to include suicidal behaviours and alternative responses to despair in order to identify the specific allure of suicide.

United States's historians are almost alone in the scholarly world in using the term ‘Indian’ to describe the original inhabitants of the landmass that came to be called the Americas. The term is an artefact of Christopher Columbus's imagination, and it conditions American historiography in ways that reflect the particular logic of the first contact that Columbus initiated. This review draws upon several recent books in native history, as well as a few older ones, to explicate how Columbian logic has informed the evolution of such scholarship and to suggest new ways of thinking about contact, colonization, and acculturation in the Americas. The concept of ‘creolization’, developed by francophone and anglophone scholars in the Caribbean, it is argued, offers a particularly interesting and constructive way to imagine a different history of America's first and second peoples.

The last medieval queens: English queenship, 1445–1503. By J. L. Laynesmith. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. xxviii+294. ISBN 0-19-924 737-4. £35.00.

The marrying of Anne of Cleves: royal protocol in Tudor England. By Retha M. Warnicke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+343. ISBN 0-521-77037-8. £19.95.

Mary of Guise in Scotland, 1548–1560: a political career. By Pamela E. Ritchie. East Lothian: Tuckwell Press, 2002. Pp. xii+306. ISBN 1-86232-184-1. £20.00.

My heart is my own: the life of Mary Queen of Scots. By John Guy. London: Fourth Estate, 2004. Pp. xii+574. ISBN 1-84115-752-X. £20.00.

Queenship in Britain, 1660–1837. Edited by Clarissa Campbell Orr. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Pp. xii+300. ISBN 0-7190-5769-8. £49.99.

Therefore if any man be in christ, let him be a new creature.Old things are passed away: behold, all things are become new.2 Cor. 5:17, Geneva Bible

The Reformation's claim to be, in Patrick Collinson's words, the ‘greatest geological fault line in European civilisation’ rests not on the fact that it proposed a new set of answers to old questions, but rather that it proposed old answers in a new world – the one that came into being with the advent of printing. This confluence transformed the ways in which the yearning for purification and renewal endemic to the religious impulse was enacted and institutionalized during the early modern period. Most radically, the Reformation challenged the socio-political hierarchies of degree, descent, and gender that had ordered medieval society. These hierarchies were most powerfully symbolized by the person of the king. In important ways they were perceived to be embodied in and dependent on him and, through him, on the women who came to be queens. To understand early modern queenship, we must bear this cultural context in mind. Too often, however, historians fail to do so, writing instead of kings and queens in terms more suited to modern political biography. This limits our ability to comprehend not only the phenomenon of kingship, but also – for as long as personal monarchy remained the dominant form of European government – political culture more generally. This review article provides an opportunity to address this historiographical deficiency. I therefore want to begin by sketching out the contours of early modern queenship, before turning my attention to the books under review.

Subjects of the sultan: culture and daily life in the Ottoman empire. By Suraiya Faroqhi. London: I. B. Tauris, 2000. Pp. x+358. ISBN 1-86064-289-6. £35.00.

The Ottoman empire and early modern Europe. By Daniel Goffman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xvi+273. ISBN 0-5214-59087. £15.99.

A shared world: Christians and Muslims in the early modern Mediterranean. By Molly Greene. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+228. ISBN 0-619-00898-1. $29.50.

Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab world: the roots of sectarianism. By Bruce Masters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pp. xiv+222. ISBN 0-521-803330. £48.00.

Consumption studies and the history of the Ottoman empire, 1560–1922: an introduction. Edited by Donald Quataert. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2000. Pp. vii+358. ISBN 0-7914-4431-7. $25.50.

The Ottoman empire, 1700–1922. Second edition. By Donald Quataert. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xxii+212. ISBN 0-521-839106. £40.00.

Since Edward Said first launched his devastating critique of western scholarship on the Islamic world, it has been almost impossible to think of Orientalism as anything other than a euphemism for the systematic distortion of an exotic Other. That imaginings of a fanciful ‘Orient’ are now recognized as providing acute expositions of western pathologies, of references to deep-seated desires and anxieties so disturbing that they only reveal themselves in alterities, goes some way towards explaining the sheer bulk of interdisciplinary publications that have been directly inspired by Said's Orientalism.1 As reflexive phenomena, however, such publications have even less to say about the real ‘Orient’. Rather, the historical reconstruction of Orientalism's ostensible subject has been left to a separate and less conspicuous stream of scholarship that is characterized by painstaking archival research.