Although one of the most influential figures of his time, Bishop Gilbert Burnet has become one of the most neglected. This article outlines Burnet's worldview, arguing that it can only be partly understood by labelling him a ‘latitudinarian’ as scholars have hitherto tended to. Alongside Burnet's conventionally latitudinarian descriptions of Christianity as a set of rational and simple beliefs that could command very wide assent, the bishop also had a strong sense of history as a providential and apocalyptic unfolding of a battle between ‘true’ and ‘false’ churches, which was characterized by a powerful European dimension and by an identification of Antichrist with religious persecution. The article concludes with suggestions about how such lines of thought might have cohered with the more traditionally ‘latitudinarian’ elements of Burnet's philosophy, and about how they might allow historians to re-think the latitudinarian movement more generally.

Local conditions and responses to European expansion were important in the ‘interactive emergence of European domination’. However, the comparative lack of sources has tended to obscure what these were. In the early eighteenth century, Morocco was responding to the growth of English power in the Mediterranean; new sources presented here show how ʿAlī b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Ḥamāmī, one of Sultan Mawlāy Ismāʿīl's most powerful ministers, tried to co-operate with the English in order to manage their influence and consolidate his own political position. This offered them a potential means to overcome the obstacles that, compared to the North African regencies, made Morocco resistant to European political and economic influence. These efforts, however, were thwarted by a combination of factors. With al-Ḥamāmī's political credibility threatened, the development of co-operation between the English and a section of the Moroccan elite was undermined, leaving the fundamental dynamics of Anglo-Moroccan relations unchanged.

The pamphlet debate concerning the perceived effects of parliamentary enclosure on property and population in eighteenth-century Britain has been largely neglected by intellectual historians. One consequence of this debate was to undermine the credibility of the classical republican economic vision of agrarian simplicity, due to its proponents' failure to come to terms with the enormous disjunction between ancient and modern economies. Although the enclosure of agricultural land had provoked hostility since at least the fifteenth century, after 1700 its opponents developed new arguments to take account of the legislature's increasingly prominent role in facilitating the process. In doing so, anti-enclosure writers drew on classical republican ideas, arguing that enclosure was contrary to the public interest because it eroded the independence of the yeomanry, valorized by numerous republican authorities as integral to the country's military strength. In their criticisms of modern policy, these writers praised the agrarian laws of the Roman republic, as well as the Tudor tillage acts. The agricultural ‘improvers’, on the other hand, denied the validity of these precedents on the grounds that the historical contingencies which had produced the Roman agrarian laws, or the Tudor tillage acts, were of limited relevance in a society based on the interdependence of agriculture, manufactures, and commerce.

This article reconsiders Thomas Carlyle's views on the crisis facing Ireland in the 1840s and British responses to it. It argues that while Carlyle saw this crisis as being related to difficulties facing contemporary ‘English’ society, he treated it as a distinctive manifestation of a malaise that afflicted all European societies. Carlyle's views on Ireland reflected the illiberal and authoritarian attitudes which underwrote his social and political thought, but they were not, as has sometimes been suggested, premised on anti-Irish prejudices derived from racial stereotypes. An examination of Carlyle's writings on Ireland demonstrate that he attributed the parlous state of that country in the 1840s to widespread failures in leadership and social morality that were not unique to the inhabitants of Ireland and were also to be found in England. Carlyle's works were not only admired by leading members of ‘Young Ireland’, but also generated ideas that framed their response to the economic, social, and political challenges facing Ireland.

During the nineteenth century the British consular service was often dismissed as an organization with purely commercial responsibilities. A succession of governments and diplomats insisted upon this notion, despite the fact that at certain times both relied very much on consular officials for information on foreign affairs. This dependence was especially evident in Italy during the decade after 1860, when British leaders had lent their moral and diplomatic support to the creation of the modern Italian state against considerable international opposition. During this period their desire not to see the achievement undone led them to maintain a close watch on Italian affairs. The contribution made in this area by the consular service, and the manner in which it was reorganized in response to Italian unification, show how such a role could take priority over its other functions. Although this state of affairs was no doubt exceptional on account of the remarkable level of British interest in the Unification of Italy, it nonetheless provides a clear demonstration of how the organization could be used under certain circumstances. The extent to which British consuls were used to monitor affairs in post-unification Italy also encourages reflection upon the widespread view that British foreign policy rejected interventionism in favour of isolation from European affairs during the 1860s.

Sex, populism, and the search for universal religious freedom were the overwhelming preoccupations of Russia's Silver Age, and no churchman did more to engage with them than Archimandrite Mikhail (Semenov). Having spearheaded the Russian Orthodox church's mission to the intelligentsia in the years before 1905, he fell from grace when Russian social Christianity was irrevocably politicized by revolution. Sacked from his chair at the St Petersburg theological academy when he declared himself a Christian socialist, he was unfrocked for converting to the Old Belief, and imprisoned for fomenting sedition. Yet even as he lurched from the established church, via the schism, to a revolutionary form of Golgothan Christianity, obsessed with suffering, Mikhail never abandoned his burning desire to build the kingdom of heaven on earth. His career, which has so far escaped detailed historical investigation, encapsulates most of the ecclesiastical tensions of his time, and reveals in particularly acute form the difficulties experienced by the Russian church when it attempted to respond to modernist intellectuals and to popular spiritual need.

In spite of a welcome and ever growing academic interest in the lives and work of twentieth-century women writers the Yorkshire novelist, Phyllis Bentley, has remained resolutely hidden from view. This article seeks to demonstrate her importance as a ‘middlebrow’ novelist, particularly in the 1930s, and to examine the ways in which her career sheds light on contemporary relationships between the ‘provincial’ and the ‘metropolitan’. Through consideration of both her private papers and her fiction, it analyses Bentley's complex relationship with both her home town of Halifax and the West Riding more widely. It argues that Bentley played a major role in creating a greater space within the national culture for the representation of provincial, especially northern, life, while also displaying a profound ambivalence toward that very life. While in many ways a passionate and articulate interpreter of the region in which she spent virtually all of her adult life, she also clearly felt constricted by her provincial location and cultural setting, especially when in contact with the London-based literary elite; her relationship with Vera Brittain was particularly highly charged in this regard.

This is a selective survey of books published over the last ten years or so and bearing on British naval history in the second half of the long eighteenth century.