The place where the University of Edinburgh now stands was once the site of the church of St Mary in the Fields or, as it is usually called, Kirk o'Field. On a February night in 1567, in the small house close to the church, there occurred what is certainly the most frequently discussed event in the history of Scotland, the murder of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, consort to Mary Queen of Scots. Much discussed it has been, but since it is still not properly resolved it merits another look.

Nineteenth-century Britain, it has been argued, harboured hostility to commerce and industry at the very period of greatest industrial advance. In this the schoolroom and university have been charged with particular culpability, even though it is not clear how new was the resistance to commercial studies. The following investigates the most distinguished eighteenth-century attempt to interest the English universities in the study of commerce. The episode highlights the misunderstanding and mistrust occasioned by the promotion of the Science of Trade in the mid-eighteenth century.

In a report on the state of Poland in 1766 the papal nuncio, A. E. Visconti, observed that the new king, Stanisław August Poniatowski, possessed ‘a burning desire to reform the whole country in one day – if only he could – and the entire nation, in order to bring it up to the level of other, more advanced nations’. The interregnum after the death of Augustus III in October 1763 and Poniatowski's election in September 1764 had inaugurated the most determined campaign for reform within the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth since the Union of Lublin of 1569. By 1763–4 there was little that did not need to be reformed. The accumulation of privilege by the szlachta, the nobility, had attained such dimensions that both the monarchy and the Sejm, the parliament, were almost powerless to govern. The most obvious expression of the impotence of the state and of the refusal of the nobility to submit to the discipline of any centralized authority was, of course, the liberum veto, the use of which, real or threatened, had consigned the majority of the Sejmy of Augustus II (1697–1733) and of Augustus III (1733–63) to nullity. Yet the veto's successful, widespread application was only possible because of a rough equilibrium of political strength between Poland's various magnate factions.After Augustus Ill's death, Russian military backing enabled the so-called ‘Family’, the party led by Michael Czartoryski (1696–1775) and his brother, August (1697–1782), to break through the stalemate. At the Convocation Sejm of 7 May to 23 June 1764, the Czartoryskis pushed through a series of unprecedented reforms aimed at conferring on the monarchy and the Sejm a degree of real authority over the country at large.

This was how the Public Advertiser greeted the passage of the Quebec Act through parliament in June 1774. It was a remarkable transformation from the ecstasy evident in newspaper reports that greeted the fall of New France in 1760. As early as November 1759 the city of Nottingham singled out the North American campaign as the glorious core of British strategy. Its loyal address congratulated the king ‘particularly upon the defeat of the French army in Canada, and the taking of Quebec; an acquisition not less honourable to your majesty's forces, than destructive of the trade and commerce and power of France in North America’. What occurred in those fourteen years to produce such a stark revision of views on the conquest of New France? The answer can be found partly by surveying the English press for this period. During these years, treatment of Canadian issues in the press displayed quite distinct characteristics that revealed a whole range of attitudes and opinions on the place Canada held in the future of the North American empire. No consensus on this issue ever existed. Debate on Canada mirrored a wider discussion on the future of the polyglot empire acquired at the end of the Seven Years War in 1763. In ranged from the enthusiasm of officials at Westminster to spokesmen of a strain in English thinking that challenged the whole thrust of imperial policy to date.

‘“What,” some simple-minded man might say, “is the connection between the Gospel and commerce?”’ Speaking in Leeds in May 1860 on behalf of the Universities' Mission to Central Africa, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce was characteristically robust with his rhetorical question and no less direct in furnishing the answer. ‘There is a great connection between them. In the first place, there is little hope of promoting commerce in Africa, unless Christianity is planted in it; and, in the next place, there is very little ground for hoping that Christianity will be able to make its proper way unless we can establish a lawful commerce in the country’. Britain's part in forging the connexion was abundantly clear. It was effect of training the human race to a degree of excellence which it could never attain in non-Christian countries', giving ‘value to life’, ‘dignity to labour’ and ‘security to possession’, with the result that a Christian people would tend to be ‘a wealth-producing people, an exporting people and so a commercial people’.

Richard Cobden, John Bright and Joseph Chamberlain were the most famous and influential reform agitators of the Victorian era. Collectively they ensured that much British political development in the period was influenced by ideas associated first with Manchester and then with Birmingham. In this context, Blight's career was particularly important since he was the only one of the trio who had close links with the other two and with both Manchester and Birmingham. Bright's partnership with Cobden in the Anti-Corn-Law League has long been an historical cliché and has been closely studied. Yet Cobden died in 1865 and Bright outlived him for twenty-four years. During that period Bright pursued a political career which often owed little to Cobden's influence. He also became a Liberal cabinet minister on three occasions: an honour declined by Cobden. Moreover Bright developed a close association with the rising radical leader Joseph Chamberlain. Yet their relationship has received scant attention from historians.

There have been any number of biographies of Cecil Rhodes but they are all concerned with his imperialist dreams and dieir realization, paying litde attention to his business career and financial connexions in London. This is surprising in view of J. A. Hobson's identification of finance as ‘the motor-power of Imperialism’ and his reference to the prime role of Rothschilds (Rhodes' financiers) and other Jewish firms. The name of Rothschild is of course mentioned in the biographies, but the merchant bank's contribution is nowhere probed and the student of business history or imperialism is left to draw his own inferences from its characteristically low profile. Perhaps Rothschilds only receive passing mention because their contribution was very modest, an initial priming for a client that needed litde external financial support? Or, following Hobson, conceivably the bankers were the real powers behind Rhodes, ‘the prime determinants of imperial policy’? Recent revelations of some of Rhodes' business deals have not improved his reputation, and it is important to know if his financial backers were in any way responsible for the unsavoury aspects of his business record.

For historians of the Edwardian Conservative party one problem in particular continues to present severe difficulties. This problem in the history of the Conservative party was first outlined by Lord Blake in his study of the party from Peel to Churchill, namely how to explain the feet that Conservative politics came to be so dominated by the issue of Tariff Reform in the decade preceding the Great War. Indeed, to Lord Blake it seemed scarcely credible that the Conservatives should have even considered, let alone shackled themselves to, a policy which was apparently so disastrous both for the party's unity and its electoral prospects. Such incredulity is, in many ways, hardly surprising for, as all the studies of Tariff Reform have agreed, there were enormous difficulties involved in the adoption of this policy – and two problems in particular were clearly almost insurmountable. Firstly, the core of the Tariff Reform policy, that is to say the securing of the imperial markets for British producers through a system of preferential tariff agreements with the colonies, was severely handicapped by the fact that the self-governing colonies, the only worthwhile markets, were very lukewarm about the whole idea. This difficulty stemmed from the fact that the colonies had begun to develop their own fledgling industries and were thus none too keen to have them swamped by a flood of imported British manufactures. Secondly, the only agreement in which the colonies were interested entailed the Conservatives advocating duties on imported foreign grain and agricultural goods. This, of course, led to the Conservatives being labelled the party of ‘dear food’ and there seems little room for doubt that these ‘food taxes’ did the Conservatives a great deal of electoral damage, especially amongst the working-class electorate.

The outbreak of the First World War in Europe and the subsequent Ottoman–German alliance presented Great Britain with some severe dilemmas as to her interests in the Middle East as well. Striving to consolidate their position in the Middle East should a war against the Ottomans become inevitable, the British began to search for local allies. In the Arabian Peninsula, three rulers emerged as potential allies: the Sharif Husayn, the guardian of the Holy Places in the Hijāz on behalf of the Ottoman sultan; the Idrisi Sayyid of 'Asīr, the area south of the Hijāz and north of Yemen; and 'Abd al-'Azīz Ibn Saud, the Amir of Najd, who became a Persian Gulf coastal ruler in May to 1913 by virtue of his occupation of Hasa the coastal strip stretching from Kuwayt to the base of the Qatar peninsula.