Lucca was the smallest and least important of the three Italian republics that survived the Renaissance. Venice and Genoa still command the attention of historians. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, for all that it might seem out-of-the-way, Lucca developed an extraordinary political literature. The regular election of senators was marked by the musical performance of a text, generally drawn from Roman history, that illustrated the way citizens of a republic were to behave. The poet and composer were natives and the event was a lesson in citizenship. A close look at the content of these serenades, or operas, makes clear that the republic's motto might have been Libertas but its teaching emphasized constantia. The themes and the heroes of Lucca's political literature were those we associate with neo-Stoicism. The relationship between neo-Stoicism and citizenship in early modern Lucca is the focus of this article. These texts present us with the self-image of an early modern republic and its understanding of what it meant to be a citizen. They are an important source for anyone interested in early modern debates about citizenship and in the political ideas that are conveyed in the commonplaces of baroque visual and musical culture.

This article argues that many traditional historical narratives of individualism have been reproduced in more recent discussions of the self and selfhood, and that attempts to discover a point at which the ‘modern’ self came into existence have been hampered by such assumptions. To provide an alternative to these approaches, discussions of the self in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries will be examined. Eschewing overarching narratives, the discussion will focus on how neo-stoic sources were employed in the context of challenges to traditional forms of the humanist ethics of office-holding. Such ideas, important in writers like Montaigne, Pierre Charron, and William Cornwallis, have been associated with an idea of ‘new humanism’, but this article aims to discuss with precision how they relate to early modern ethical discussion. Here an insight can be gained into a particular philosophical development of the idea of the self. This can be more productive than some recent ‘new historicist’, or sociological, approaches to the literature of this period, which tend to the deconstruction of a particular set of sources through the use of the self as a theoretical heuristic.

Contrary to stereotypes that represent it primarily as an expression of machismo or romantic chivalry, military honour in early modern England was professional, moral, utilitarian, and a force for social stability. It was pragmatic as well as idealistic. It shared attributes of civilian honour but also comprehended rules and obligations specific to soldiers. Professional honour required that the soldier should know and observe the codes and practices of his métier. To do so satisfied his internal sense of personal integrity and brought external reputation. Honour also had a broader social value. Mutuality and utility marked its operation in the English civil war. This mutuality safeguarded practices both sides found useful, such as prisoner exchanges, for the honour of each side was engaged in observance of the relevant rules. The survival of a bipartisan soldiers' honour ameliorated relations between enemies. It helped to prevent irrevocable social divisions, to sustain social order, and to enable previously warring Englishmen to live together with tolerable equanimity.

This article explores changing responses among late Georgian Scots towards Greek history in general and classical Athens in particular. Tracing the early study of Greece through some of the more innovative Scottish Enlightenment scholars, it argues that Periclean Athens long remained a difficult and controversial topic, mainly because eighteenth-century authors found it hard to offer a fully sympathetic treatment of a historical subject strongly associated with radical political democracy. With the defeat of Napoleon, however, and as new ways were sought to celebrate Scotland's own recent imperial, economic, and intellectual achievements, Athenianism gained in credibility, assisted by the rising tide of cultural Hellenism and political Hellenophilia throughout Britain. Plans were laid for a national monument in Edinburgh, modelled on the Athenian Parthenon. Nevertheless, insufficient support was forthcoming and by 1830 the project had stalled. Not least among the causes of this debacle – popularly known as ‘Scotland's Disgrace’ – were the contradictions involved in Athenian symbolism: the abandoned monument ultimately served to represent only the failings of Scotland's tory establishment.

This article looks at one of the less frequently examined contests in the parliamentary borough of Westminster – the election of 1796, in which Charles James Fox, Admiral Allan Gardner, and John Horne Tooke vied for the borough's two seats. This election offers an opportunity to investigate the patriotic discourses, representational strategies, and styles of political leadership available to loyalism and popular radicalism in the early years of the war with Revolutionary France. The period of the election spanned the second anniversary of Admiral Richard Howe's victory of 1 June 1794, creating significant opportunities for links to be made between Gardner's naval position and the necessity of electing a loyalist candidate. The article investigates electoral politics with an eye towards reconstructing some important features of Westminster political culture in the 1790s. While Gardner's electoral posture is revealed to depend on a series of stereotypes operating around the image of the ‘political’ admiral, Tooke's is shown to have been heavily informed by his philological studies. Given the long history of admirals serving as MPs for Westminster and the persistent presence of naval officers as members of parliament between 1790 and 1820, the article concludes by suggesting that political admiralship played a role in the development of nineteenth-century styles of political candidacy and leadership.

The career of the third Viscount Palmerston as foreign secretary and prime minister has been thoroughly studied, but few are aware that he was one of the first Irish landlords to finance the emigration of starving tenants during the great Irish famine. Although the first boatloads of emigrants were well outfitted, by the end of 1847 Palmerston stood accused of cruelly mistreating his departing tenants. One Canadian official compared conditions on the vessels he chartered to those of the slave trade. Given the tremendous detail with which historians have scrutinized Palmerston's long career, it is surprising that no thorough account of either the management of his Irish estate or of his emigration scheme has ever been written. An examination of the programme under which 2,000 residents of Palmerston's Sligo estate fled to America in 1847 adds significantly to our understanding of the career of one of Britain's most important nineteenth-century statesmen, the complicated motives driving landlords to ‘shovel out’ their impoverished tenants, and an often-forgotten means by which thousands of the most destitute famine-era immigrants made their way to America.

Historians have praised Joseph Chamberlain's workmen's compensation act of 1897, the foundation of Britain's modern insurance-based compensation scheme for on-the-job injuries, as a forward-looking social programme of great benefit to workers. By contrast, the Liberals' support of the option of potential unlimited employer liability for worker injuries has been viewed as unimaginative and a failure of political leadership at a crucial juncture in the history of the Liberal party's relationship with labour. This article re-examines the employers' liability/workmen's compensation debate of the 1890s, arguing that historians' criticism of the Liberals' position stems from a misunderstanding that the crux of the debate was over the method of fair compensation. To the contrary, as this article demonstrates, the real issue was workplace safety. Far from being caught napping, Liberals strenuously argued the workers' long-held position that workplace safety, that is, the prevention of accidents, was much more important than compensation after the accident occurred and that Chamberlain's compensation scheme would do nothing to improve safety. Significantly, this article reveals that the Liberals were correct in that, while employers immediately gained protection from unlimited liability at minimal cost, worker safety, in fact, did not improve and may have even declined during the first decade of the act's operation.

It is widely assumed that after 1918 the British general staff ignored the experience it had gained from fighting a first-class European enemy and that it was not until the establishment of the Kirke committee in 1932 that it began to garner the lessons of the Great War and incorporate them into its doctrine. This article demonstrates that in fact British military doctrine underwent a continuous process of development in the 1920s. Far from turning its back on new military technologies, the general staff rejected the manpower-intensive doctrine that had sustained the army in 1914 in favour of one that placed modernity and machinery at the very core of its thinking. Between 1919 and 1931 the general staff did assimilate the lessons of the First World War into the army's written doctrine. But what it failed to do was to impose a common understanding of the meaning of that doctrine throughout the army.

For much of the interwar period there was discussion in Whitehall of the policy to control prices and profits in any future major war. Opinion was divided between those who believed that the control of prices and profits would be necessary in return for controlling labour in the light of the experience of the First World War, and those who focused on the financial aspects of the issue, in which the control of prices and profits was seen to play little positive role. This second strand of thinking, rooted in the treasury, predominated, particularly once rearmament began: the co-operation of business and labour, it was argued, was best achieved by maintaining the status quo. As a result, once war did break out, legislation had to be enacted very rapidly to meet popular demands. More generally, this study throws light on the nature of interwar government in Britain and its attitude towards intervention.

Since the breakdown of the Soviet Union and Swedish socialism the Baltic region has attracted more attention, although not perhaps as much as it might deserve, than since the 1930s. English-speaking readers have been presented with a magisterial survey of the northern world over a five hundred years' period. However, many of the old stereotypes of war, pestilence, and the rise of Sweden under Gustav Adolphus, the lion of the north, and of Russia under the delusively attractive despots, Peter I and Catherine II (both of whom were essentially Baltic animals), remain unchallenged. Over the past decade much new work has appeared in northern Europe to open a more intriguing and understandable vista – of Baroque vibrancy in art, literature, and architecture; remarkably resilient small towns and efficient manor economies; and powerful interacting religious and political mythologies that combine in a vision of ‘Gotho-Sarmatian’ unity.

Angélique Arnauld. By Fabian Gastellier. Paris: Fayard, 1998. Pp. 505. ISBN 2-213-60043-0. FF 170.

The world of André Le Nôtre. By Thierry Mariage, translated by Graham Larkin. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Pp. xv+144. ISBN 0-8122-3468-5. £26.00.

Charles XI and Swedish absolutism. By Anthony F. Upton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xxiv+281. ISBN 0-521-57390-4. £35.00.

Discourse on history, law, and governance in the public career of John Selden, 1610–1635. By Paul Christianson. London: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Pp. xiii+451. ISBN 0 8020 0838 0. £48.00.

Sovereignty and the sword: Harrington, Hobbes, and mixed government in the English Civil Wars. By Arihiro Fukuda. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp. ix+175. ISBN 0 19 8206836. £35.00.

The intellectual origins of the English Revolution revisited. By Christopher Hill. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997. Pp. xi+422. ISBN 0 19 820668 2. £25.00.

Constant minds: political virtue and the Lipsian paradigm in England, 1584–1650. By Adriana McCrea. London: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Pp. xiii+342. ISBN 0 8020 0666 3. £49.00.

Sir Henry Vane, theologian: a study in seventeenth-century religious and political discourse. By David Parnham. London: Associated University Presses, 1997. Pp. 370. ISBN 0 8386 3681 0. £39.50.

King James VI and I and the reunion of Christendom. By W. B. Patterson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xv+409. ISBN 0 521 41805 4. £40.00 (pb, £15.95).

Jacobean gentleman: Sir Edwin Sandys, 1561–1629. By Theodore K. Rabb. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. xii+412. ISBN 0 691 02694 7. £37.50.

Francis Bacon. By Perez Zagorin. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pp. xvi+286. ISBN 0 691 05928 4. £35.00 (pb, £10.50).

Republik ohne Chance? Akzeptanz und Legitimation der Weimarer Republik in der deutschen Tagespresse zwischen 1918 und 1923. By Burkhard Asmuss. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1994. Pp. 619. ISBN 3-110-14197-3. DM280.00.

Heinrich Brüning and the dissolution of the Weimar Republic. By William L. Patch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. 358. ISBN 0-521-62422-3. £42.50.

National identity and Weimar Germany: Upper Silesia and the eastern border, 1918–1922. By T. Hunt Tooley. Lincoln, Nebraska, and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Pp. 320. ISBN 0-803-24429-0. £53.00.

Reichswehr und Rote Armee, 1920–1933: Wege und Stationen einer ungewönlichen Zusammenarbeit. By Manfred Zeidler. Munich: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1993. Pp. 375. ISBN 3-486-55966-4. DM78.00.

The world and the West: European challenge and the overseas response in the age of empire. By Philip D. Curtin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xiv+294. ISBN 0-521-77135-8. £19.95.

The global world of Indian merchants. 1750–1947: traders of Sind from Bukhara to Panama. By Claude Markovits. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xv+327. ISBN 0-521-62285-9. £40.00.

New frontiers: imperialism's new communities in East Asia 1842–1953. Edited by Robert Bickers and Christian Henrito. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Pp. xii+290. ISBN 0-7190-5604-7. £45.00.

Colonial writing and the New World, 1583–1671: allegories of desire. By Thomas Scanlan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. x+242. ISBN 0-521-64305-8. £37.50.