What lay behind the anxiety of so many Frenchmen of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to defend the ‘liberties of the Gallican church’? In a stimulating essay published in 1971, Professor W. J. Bouwsma argued that Gallican ideas transcended any purely national setting, and that they should be studied (to borrow Febvre's distinction) from the standpoint of religious rather than of ecclesiastical history. Beyond the narrowly institutional concerns of traditional French approaches to the subject, Professor Bouwsma glimpsed among the upholders of Gallican liberties a certain cast of mind: a disposition towards religious renewal, an acceptance of the diversity of local church arrangements, and a corresponding distaste for the dogmatic certainties and standardizing ambitions of Tridentine Catholicism. So Professor Bouwsma argued.

Most historians have agreed that only the death of Empress Elizabeth (5 January 1762) and the accession of her nephew, the prussophile Peter III, saved Prussia from destruction in that epic conflict known as the Seven Years’ War. Just when Frederick II's military fortunes were at their lowest point — by early 1762, numerous parts of Prussia had already or were about to come under enemy control — and total defeat appeared unavoidable, chance intervened in the person of the new czar, who, victor though he was, withdrew his forces from the front, offered an armistice and agreed to relinquish without compensation the gains (East Prussia and Pomerania) which Russia had made during the war. At a stroke, the great anti-Prussian confederacy dating from 1757 had collapsed.

It is nearly twenty years since the seminal discussions of the English crowd by Hobsbawm, Rose, Rudé and Thompson, and almost forty years since Wear mouth's extraordinary catalogue of eighteenth-century disturbances.1 These studies established that if we examined the composition, organization, objectives and beliefs of eighteenth-century crowds, then we would find them to have been informed, disciplined, and in possession of broad notions of the necessity and legitimacy of their actions. Crowds were not ‘rabble’, or criminal, or ‘society's dregs’. Such conclusions were based upon the examination of the crowd in its most visible and vocal form: the riot.

The history of ‘sociology’ as it has been written in the last generation is largely a history of fictions. It is characterized by the various mythologies that Skinner isolated in 1969 in his attempt ‘to uncover the extent to which the current historical study of ethical, political, religious and other such ideas is contaminated by the unconscious application of paradigms whose familiarity to the historian disguises an essential inapplicability to the past’. In a now familiar argument - that to Construct a truly ‘historical’ history of ideas we must concentrate on the actual intentions of historical agents, setting those intentions within their wider social, and, above all, linguistic context – Skinner anatomized the varieties of intellectual disfiguration to such an enterprise: the ‘mythology of doctrines’ where ‘the historian is set by the expectation that each classic writer (in the history, say, of ethical or political ideas) will be found to enunciate some doctrine on each of the topics regarded as constitutive of his subject’; the ‘mythology of coherence’, which substitutes a spurious unity and homogeneity for the fragments of an agent’s thought; the ‘mythology’ of prolepsis’ by which the actions of an historical agent are invested with retrospective significance unacknowledged in the actual intentions of the agent at the time; and the ‘mythology of parochialism’ where ‘the historian may conceptualize an argument in such a way that its alien elements are dissolved into an apparent but misleading familiarity’.

The reasons for the decline of the Liberal party in Britain, and its replacement by the Labour party as the representative of the left, continue to be the subject of debate among historians of twentieth-century British politics. An important point at issue has been whether or not the Liberal decline had irreversibly set in prior to World War I; or if the war itself with the strains it placed on liberal ideology and the relationship among the party's most prominent leaders, and with the stimulus it provided for a more militant working class, was the catalyst for decline. There can be no question that the Liberal party was critically dependent upon the support of working-class voters for its viability as an alternative party of government.1 Thus, a major issue of contention among historians of Liberal politics has been the party's success or failure before August 1914 in retaining the allegiance of this crucial electoral base.

Improved Franco-German relations are rarely associated with the years preceding the Great War or with the policies of Raymond Poincaré. Yet from 1907 to 1914 a persistent attempt was made to bring about détente between Paris and Berlin, which eventually led to the French president adopting a conciliatory attitude towards Germany, occasionally at the expense of relations with Russia. The instigator of this policy was the French ambassador in Berlin, Jules Cambon. He believed that Franco-German détente could best serve the two axioms of French diplomacy since 1870: continental security and overseas expansion. Cambon considered the growth of German power in Europe and abroad to be both natural and inevitable and that France must come to terms with it.1 His policy involved ending the intransigence which he saw as having characterized French diplomacy, often with disastrous results, since 1870. He confessed in May 1908 that his ideas were fairly summarized in Clemenceau's remark to him: ‘On dit que vous avez dit que vous ne voulez aller ni à Ems ni à Faschoda.’2 These two incidents, the ‘Ems telegram’ and the Fashoda crisis, symbolized for him the recklessness and inflexibility of France's past diplomacy.

The study of the Edwardian Conservative party is rapidly becoming as much of a minefield as that of the Edwardian Liberal party. Both parties were in serious difficulties in the years immediately preceding the First World War. But whilst the condition of the Liberal party is at least openly acknowledged as a disputed area, its perils clearly marked, the condition of the Conservative party is treacherous ground, the hazards uncharted. From one point of view, ‘it would be easy to give an account of Edwardian politics in which the emphasis fell on “the crisis of Conservatism” and on the parlous state of the Conservative party on the eve of the War… The fundamental weakness of the Conservative party lay in its inability to win elections.’ Alternatively, ‘Both at the local-government level and in national by elections in 1912 and 1913, what was at work was not so much “The Strange Death of Liberal England” as “The Strange Revival of Tory England”. The most likely outcome, moreover, was not apocalyptic, merely a Conservative triumph in the general election scheduled for 1915.’ By a curious coincidence, or perhaps editorial perversity, these two views are juxtaposed on consecutive pages of the same collection of essays.

In the years between the end of the First World War and the end of the Second, the estimate outside Britain of the status of intellectuals in the British Labour movement grew to prodigal dimensions.

Despite the stature of J. S. Mill as a political philosopher and the growth of interest in Irish history, the literature on Mill's writings on Ireland is sparse. Aside from passing comments in some of the major works on Mill, the issue has been addressed by only three recent scholars who, for the most part, have not dealt directly with the relationship between Mill's political theory and his published materials on Ireland. R. D. C. Black has concentrated on economic considerations, arguing that Mill broke ranks with most of the English economists of his time because he believed that Irish conditions were different from those of England and hence that radical land reforms were necessary for economic development in Ireland. E. D. Steele has challenged this position, claiming that Mill was not so radical about Irish matters in his early years, that Mill hedged significantly on governmental interference with landed property until the rise of Fenianism in the 1860s, and that, even then, Mill's reforming zeal was guided by his concerns for saving the Union and upholding the empire. R. N. Lebow has argued that Mill's writings reflect the tensions in his own thought and in Victorian England concerning individual rights and social concerns, suggesting that Mill resolved the problem only late in his life, by deciding that the interests of society (in this case, the issue of land reform for the benefit of Irish tenants) overrode the individual property rights of the Irish landlords.

In the spring and summer of 1942 the German military forces in north Africa and southern Russia made significant advances. In June the German army reached EI Alamein, only seventy miles west of Alexandria, while in August the German army reached the outskirts of Stalingrad. As a result of these German advances, Britain, which was the allied country with primary responsibility for defending the Middle East against the Axis powers, became concerned about the possibility that the German air force might attempt to bomb the oilfields and oil refineries in the Middle East in order to deny the oil in that area to the allied governments. Britain was also alarmed about the possibility that, instead of bombing the oil installations, the Germans might attempt to capture them intact in order to utilize the oil for their war machine. In 1942 total Middle Eastern oil production constituted only about six per cent of total world oil production. However, all Middle Eastern oil was refined locally - about two-thirds at Abadan in Iran - and played a vital role in the conduct of British military operations in the Middle East and southeast Asia.1 In 1942 Britain had troops stationed in Iran, Iraq, Egypt, and Bahrain, the four main Middle Eastern oil-producing nations, and thus was well placed to defend and, if necessary, to destroy the oil facilities in those countries. However, at this time Sa'udi Arabia, the remaining Middle Eastern oil producing nation, was a neutral power with no British or American troops stationed on its territory. As a result of Sa'udi neutrality it was difficult for Britain to defend the Sa'udi oilfields against German air attack. It was also difficult for Britain to make the necessary preparations to destroy the Sa'udi oilfields in the event that the German army advanced into the Arabian peninsula. The purpose of this communication will be to discuss the manner in which the British government attempted to deal with these problems. It will also discuss the reaction of the United States government and the American-owned oil company in Sa'udi Arabia to this situation.

‘For the moment, anyway, political philosophy is dead.’ Peter Laslett's remark of 1956 is well known. His lament was echoed in 1962 in Bernard Crick's extended plea In defence of politics. They surveyed a wasteland laid bare by a sociology which announced the exhaustion of political ideals, and a philosophy, logical positivism, which declared that nothing significant could be said about ethics or politics. According to Laslett, one of the original culprits of the former kind was Karl Mannheim, because he had taught that all thinking and all knowing were sociologically determined.