In September 1579, at the height of an intense political debate over her prospective marriage to the duke of Anjou, Elizabeth I visited New Hall, the country seat of the match's greatest supporter within England, Thomas Radcliffe, third earl of Sussex. Her entertainment on that occasion, hitherto completely unknown, was described in a letter, printed here, from one Norfolk gentleman, Sir Edward Clere, to another, Bassingbourne Gawdy. The letter describes the dramatic performances and other entertainments provided for the queen, which included coded but unmistakeable encouragements for her to proceed with the marriage. This article discusses the ways in which this was done and their consequences for our knowledge of the Anjou marriage debate as a political episode, suggesting that Sussex sought to use the entertainment to boost the participation of more conservative members of the nobility in government. It also explores how this evidence affects our picture of Elizabethan courtly entertainments, and particularly their non-dramatic elements. Finally, it discusses Clere's letter itself as an insight into the nature of gentry news culture, particularly with regard to matters of high politics.

Street vending was a common feature in many towns in early modern Europe. However, peddlers and hawkers often operated outside the official framework, lacking permission from governments and guilds. The impact of their informal status has hitherto not featured very extensively in historical studies. This article assesses the impact of policing of street vendors by looking at familiar source materials in a new way. Rather than solely focusing on those people who were ultimately punished, this article investigates the full process of policing and prosecution of street traders in eighteenth-century Dutch towns. It exposes that apart from those receiving a formal punishment, many more traders could suffer from policing activities, and that particular groups of street vendors were more vulnerable than others due to the specific dynamics of local power relations. As such, this article provides new insights into policing and social control, while also offering wider lessons for our understanding of the relationship between the formal and informal economy in pre-industrial Europe.

The use by British crowds of victorious admirals to articulate patriotic and libertarian ideas during the wars of the long eighteenth century is well known. But conflict also posed awkward questions about masculinity and issues surrounding it. Was military prowess compatible with politeness, with religiosity? During the 1790s, the fight to the death with revolutionary France made such questions hard to ignore, being compounded by the fact that Britain's most celebrated leader – Nelson – was not a paragon of virtue. This article shows how evangelicals sought to resolve these tensions by advancing a different set of ideals founded on piety and professionalism: by finding heroes of their own. This has crucial consequences for our understanding of how they and the ideas they championed became so prominent in late Hanoverian public life. In contradistinction to recent work suggesting that they exploited causes that were already popular – moral reform, antislavery – this article shows how they advanced a powerful providential narrative in which Christian heroes and godly policy were what made Britain great, a narrative whose veracity was ‘proven’ by wartime successes, especially in the navy, and which would remain highly influential well into the nineteenth century.

This article considers British society's response to the suspension of cash payments in February 1797. Although this event marked the beginning of the so-called Bank Restriction Period, during which the Bank of England's notes were inconvertible, there have been no detailed studies on the social and political situation surrounding the suspension. This article provides an in-depth examination of the events leading up to and immediately following the suspension. It questions existing accounts of the suspension as a smooth transition into the nationwide use of paper money and describes the complex process that came into play to avert a nationwide financial collapse. The decision to suspend the Bank's cash payments stemmed from deep-rooted financial instability, exacerbated by recurrent invasion scares that heightened after the French attempt on Bantry Bay, Ireland, in December 1796. Under such circumstances, national support for drastic financial measures could not be taken for granted. The article demonstrates that the declaration movement, which was a form of consolidated and visualized trust in the financial system, played a crucial role in the 1797 suspension crisis.

Beyond the repression of the national waves of food rioting during the subsistence crises of the 1790s, workers in the English countryside lost the will and ability to mobilize. Or so the historical orthodoxy goes. Such a conceptualization necessarily positions the ‘Bread or Blood’ riots of 1816, the Swing rising of 1830, and, in particular, the agrarian trade unionism practised at Tolpuddle in 1834 as exceptional events. This article offers a departure by placing Tolpuddle into its wider regional context. The unionists at Tolpuddle, it is shown, were not making it up as they went along but instead acted in ways consistent with shared understandings and experiences of collective action and unionism practised throughout the English west. In so doing, it pays particular attention to the forms of collective action – and judicial responses – that extended between different locales and communities and which joined farmworkers, artisans, and industrial workers together. So conceived, Tolpuddle was not an exception. Rather, it can be more usefully understood as a manifestation of deeply entrenched cultures, an episode that assumes its historical potency because of its subsequent politicized representations.

This article examines Spanish and Portuguese liberal political thought in the period after the independence of Latin America (c. 1825–50). It argues that while Iberian liberalism undoubtedly reflected broader European and transatlantic debates and intellectual trends, it was distinguished by its robust engagement with literary romanticism. The article proceeds to describe and make a case for ‘romantic liberalism’ through the examination of texts by six politically engaged writers: Spanish statesman, poet and dramatist Francisco Martínez de la Rosa (1787–1862); Portuguese statesman, poet, novelist, and dramatist João Baptista da Silva Leitão de Almeida Garrett (1799–1854); Spanish poet and statesman Ángel de Saavedra (1791–1865), Duque de Rivas; Spanish parliamentarian and literary critic Antonio Alcalá Galiano; Spanish poet, journalist, and parliamentarian José de Espronceda (1808–42); and Portuguese historian, novelist, and journalist Alexandre Herculano (1810–77).

From the 1820s to the 1850s, the British Indian state undertook its final major phase of expansion to assume the approximate geographical extent it retained until its demise in 1947. It confronted at its north-eastern and north-western outskirts seemingly intractable mountains, deserts, and jungles inhabited by apparently stateless ‘tribal’ peoples. In its various attempts to comprehend and deal with these human and material complexities, the colonial state undertook projects of spatial engagement that were often confused and ineffective. Efforts to produce borders and frontier areas to mark the limits of administered British India were rarely authoritative and were reworked by colonial officials and local inhabitants alike. Bringing together diverse examples of bordering and territory-making from peripheral regions of South Asia that are usually treated separately lays bare the limits of the colonial state's power and its ambivalent attitude towards spatial forms and technologies that are conventionally taken to be key foundations of modern states. These cases also intervene in the burgeoning political geography literature on boundary-making, suggesting that borders and the territories they delimit are not stable objects but complex and fragmented entities, performed and contested by dispersed agencies and therefore prone to endless fluctuation.

In 1883 and early 1884 the controversial commemoration of the four-hundredth birthday of Martin Luther, celebrated in Germany and worldwide, captured much British public attention. The examination of this celebration offered here will improve current understanding of late Victorian religious controversies and indicate their continuing centrality to a range of cultural and historical debates in the period. The commemoration invigorated historic antagonisms in the British religious landscape, yet it also did far more than this. The commemoration provided a platform for those who wanted to foster Protestant unity in the face of what was widely perceived to be a revived threat from ‘popery’ and religious indifference at home and abroad. Whereas some religious and not-very-religious commentators, often belonging to a younger generation, wanted closely to associate Luther's world-historical role with liberalizing intellectual and social progress, others – sceptics, Catholics, high Anglicans, older Protestants – resisted this. Arguments about Luther's life and teaching often became more broadly Victorian discussions of the family, Anglo-German affinities or antagonisms, and the nature of modernity. By relating themes in the study of modern religious history to current concerns in the history of historical writing, this article will point to wider lacunae in scholarly approaches to nineteenth-century culture.

This article explores early twentieth-century British political and humanitarian engagement with the Balkans. It focuses on the Balkan Committee, a liberal pressure group that served as the main hub for British interest in the region in the decade before the First World War. Whilst drawing attention to the specific challenges presented by the Balkans to the British liberal mind, it is argued that the Balkan Committee was part of a wider movement of humanitarianism and political activism that encompassed both continental and colonial questions. The issues around which the committee campaigned are related to humanitarian protests against the use of forced labour in Africa, in particular the Congo Reform Association, as well as to the Persia Committee, formed in protest against the 1907 Anglo-Russian agreement. This approach highlights how ‘Europe’ and empire were interconnected agendas within an overarching liberal-internationalist worldview and reformist conscience, despite the different cultural lenses through which humanitarian questions in different parts of the globe were viewed. It is suggested that research into British interaction with the Balkans offers a fruitful means by which to integrate historical analysis of the continental and imperial aspects of Britain's external relations in the ‘age of empire’.

The Indian Rebellion leader Nana Sahib became Victorian Britain's most hated foreign enemy for his part in the 1857 Cawnpore massacres, in which British men, women, and children were killed after having been promised safe passage away from their besieged garrison. Facts were mixed with lurid fiction in reports which drew on villainous oriental stereotypes to depict Nana. The public appetite for vengeance was thwarted, however, by his escape to Nepal and subsequent reports of his death. These reports were widely disbelieved, and fears persisted for decades that Nana was plotting a new rebellion in the mountains. He came to be seen as both a literal and symbolic threat; the arrest of suspects across the years periodically revived the memories and the atavistic fury of the Mutiny, while his example as the Victorians' archetypal barbaric native ruler shaped broader colonial attitudes. At the same time, he influenced metropolitan perceptions of empire through the popular Mutiny fictions in which he was a larger-than-life villain. Tracing Nana's changing presence in the British collective memory over generations illustrates the tensions between metropolitan and colonial ideas of empire, and suggests the degree to which an iconic enemy figure could shape perceptions of other races.

In August 1914, as war broke out, socialist parties across Europe offered support to their own governments. The Socialist International was shattered. This rush to defencism has traditionally been seen as a volte face in which the International's frequent protestations in favour of peace and international working-class solidarity were suddenly abandoned. The collapse has been variously ascribed to socialist helplessness, betrayal, or ideological incoherence. This article examines the International's attitudes to war and peace as developed and espoused in the decades before 1914, and finds that the decisions of the constituent socialist parties in 1914 were understandable within this context. Socialists were not abandoning past ideals, but attempting to put them into practice. The circumstances of modern war, however, made traditional distinctions – between aggressor and defensive belligerents, and between ‘progressive’ and ‘reactionary’ nations – difficult to maintain. For some socialists, this meant that socialists of every country had a certain justification in rallying to their nation's defence. For Lenin and the Bolsheviks, however, if no capitalist country could be considered innocent, then all must be guilty.

The importance of the honours system as an institution in British politics and public life has frequently been underestimated. At the end of the First World War, the British government prioritized voluntary service to the state as an area which the honours system should reward more than others through the newly created Order of the British Empire. However, after the war the Order changed to focus more on civil servants, soldiers, and the broad category of ‘local service’. The latter could include volunteers, but more often did not. Various attempts to democratize honours through reforms from the 1960s focused on rewarding a wider range of service. The most successful of these was John Major's honours reform programme in 1993, which returned volunteer service to the forefront of the public image of honours. While these reforms were not as egalitarian as they seemed, they were successful because they integrated an ideology of crown honours with the other functions of the modern monarchy and opened up the honours system to a wider potential set of recipients. At the same time, they maintained a hierarchical structure that meant that elites who had traditionally enjoyed the exclusivity of high honours continued to do so.

Recent years have seen an increase in the number of historical studies dealing with the state and its involvement in the process of economic growth, both prior to and during the transition known as industrialization. This is striking inasmuch as for a long time the state as an actor had been absent from the master narratives in history. It is still lacking in most studies on the Great Divergence, i.e. the story explaining the long-run differential growth trajectories between Europe and Asia, c. ad 1500–2000. It has been, likewise, missing in the more ‘Euro-centrist’ accounts on the perceived ‘European miracle’ – models that were to an extent influenced by neoclassical theory about market performance and economic development, which quite naturally saw little room for the pro-active state in the explanation of economic success, and against which much of the Great Divergence narrative was developed as an alternative model. As an actor, the state has also been missing from most of the accounts on Europe's first transition to industrialization. And it has had, until very recently, very little place in modern economic theory explaining long-run growth and economic change. Even the wider public opinion – just think of journalist T. Friedman's early 2000s best-seller The world is flat – had, by the late twentieth century, increasingly subscribed to the idea that free markets, unfettered globalization, and the ‘invisible hand’ were the best means to achieve economic health.