S. R. Gardiner, the doyen of English historians, wrote of the earl of Northampton's oration, delivered at a conference between the two houses of parliament in 1607, that it was ‘a speech which hardly any other man in England would have allowed himself to utter. In him was combined the superciliousness of a courtier with the haughtiness of a member of the old nobility. He treated the Commons as if they were the dust beneath his feet.’1 Furthermore, Northampton was accused by some contemporaries and most later historians of engineering the abrupt dissolution of the Addled Parliament in 1614, an abortive two-month session that was the last for seven years. For both, Northampton epitomized the authoritarian and anti-parliamentary views which came to dominate the early Stuart court.

References to Malthus are increasingly evident in narratives of agricultural trends in development discourse at the end of the twentieth century. This article addresses the long roots of Malthusian thinking in formulating public policy, that can be traced across from Malthus's own ideas and to subsequent construction of neo-Malthusianisms in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It deploys the distinction between two approaches to statistical data collection that emerge in Malthus's own time: an ‘open’ system that collects data to identify trends, and a ‘closed’ system that uses data to prove an existing model. The article uses these distinctions in order to demonstrate opposing tendencies in policy-making in both England and India, with particular reference to Indian agriculture. It shows how radical thinking about data collection as an inductive line of enquiry lost out to a deductive approach that regarded data on Indian agriculture as doomed, because of its ‘unimproved’ condition, and highlights three moments where opposing tendencies were important. The article concludes that this turn in thinking about food, land, and people continues to persist in agricultural policy-making in international development circles into the present.

This review summarises the current state of knowledge and present trends in German historiography on the Third Reich. In Germany, assessment of the Nazi past has moved first from silence, and then from an emotionally charged engagement, to the more critical analyses of today. There has been a closer examination of the involvement of particular professional groups during the Nazi era, such as historians and lawyers. The ideological background of Hitler and the Nazi elite are being examined closely. Particular interest has also been shown in the ordinary aspects of living and coping in Hitler's Germany, the daily struggle and the moral dilemmas. An enormous interest in the German opposition against Hitler continues. In unified Germany, the memory of the struggle of the German resistance is kept alive in public consciousness as a positive line of continuity.

This article studies the Hawai‘i tourism industry's efforts to market Hawai‘i as a multi-cultural paradise where positive racial experiences could be bought and sold. With jet travel arriving in Hawai‘i the same year as statehood, the tourism industry, aided by the new state government, exploited Hawai‘i's newfound prominence, luring planeloads of American tourists who thronged its beaches, hotels, and cultural spectacles. Tourism helped turn racial tolerance into a saleable, if intangible, commodity. Marketers invited mainlanders to partake in the islands’ celebrated ‘Aloha Spirit’: an elusive vision of social harmony said to be the defining feature of the Hawai‘i vacation. By attending ethnic festivals, eating exotic food, and interacting with locals, visitors might even bring some Aloha Spirit home with them. Hawai‘i's society thus became not only a site of consumption, but an object of consumption itself. What such utopian ideas obscured was that the broader construction of Hawai‘i as a multi-cultural paradise was part of state efforts both to transform Hawai‘i's economy and to promote US influence in the Pacific. While the limited historiography on multi-culturalism situates its emergence in grassroots protest, this article argues for the elite origins of the multi-cultural ideal, which served the interests of both business and US foreign policy.

Current prescriptions for welfare reform and increased reliance on the voluntary sector often base their appeal on the lessons of history, in particular the apparent successes of Victorian philanthropy in combating ‘pauperism’. This article looks at how this message has become influential in the USA and the UK among the ruling parties of right and left through the particular prism of the neo-conservative appreciation of the work of Thomas Chalmers, the early nineteenth-century Scottish churchman and authority on poverty. The attraction of Chalmers, both to the Charity Organization Society then and neo-conservatives today, lies in the practical application of his idea of the ‘godly commonwealth’ in Glasgow and Edinburgh where voluntary effort, organized through the church, replaced the statutory obligations of the poor law. While Chalmers, and his followers, declared his ‘experiments’ to be great successes, modern Scottish historians have revealed these claims to be false and his efforts failures. Only by completely ignoring the evidence presented by this historiography and continuing to rely on Chalmers's own writings and earlier hagiographies can the neo-conservative approbation of Chalmers be sustained. Such wilful neglect raises questions both about their approach to history and their proposed remedies for tackling poverty today.

The severity of many of the fines imposed in the Court of Star Chamber in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has impressed historians as much as it impressed the members of the Long Parliament. For example, it has been calculated that out of the 240 cases brought in Star Chamber in the years 1625–41 where the sentence is known, fines of over £500 were imposed in eighty–five instances. Hudson, in his famous contemporary treatise on the Court, contended that this severity had markedly increased in the reign of Charles; ‘fines’, he wrote, ‘are new of late imposed secundum qualitatem delicti and not fitted to the estate of the person; so that they are rather in terrorempopuli than for the true end for the which they were intended, when fine and ransom was appointed£10,000 or more, under both Elizabeth and the early Stuarts.

In 1964, Mr Peter Laslett drew attention to a discovery of some importance to Harrington scholars. Professor Gilbert Gilchrist, according to Laslett's report, had found ‘a manuscript version of an early part of Oceana… which may have been written well before the book appeared in 1656; indeed before the Commonwealth began’. The manuscript lay in the British Museum. Since Gilchrist's original discovery – really rediscovery, for the staff of the museum had indexed the manuscript under ‘Harrington’ – two more manuscript versions of Oceana have been unearthed, one of them in the British Museum, the other in the Bodleian. All three manuscripts are very much the same, and all seem candidates for Laslett's description as manuscript versions of Oceana written well before the publication of Harrington's printed book in 1656. Unfortunately Mr Laslett's understandable optimism is almost certainly misplaced, for the manuscripts seem much more likely to have been subsequent extracts from Oceana, taken probably in the 1690s. So much for our hopes of observing Harrington's mind working at early drafts of Oceana. But something, too, is gained. The striking differences which gave Laslett his grounds for thinking Gilchrist's manuscript to be an early version of Oceana turn out, in fact, to represent a fascinating exercise in late seventeenth-century domestication of Harrington by his interpreters. The manuscripts show how Harrington, a supporter of revolution, was made a conservative.

The reunification of Germany has given a new dimension and intensity to the debate about the historical identity of German political culture. In particular, it has revived the issue of whether the Lutheran heritage was inherently conservative, if not authoritarian, in tendency. This article re-examines the issues in relation to Lutheran political and social thought in the first half of the seventeenth century. The life and writings of the Lutheran pastor and influential popular author Johann Balthasar Schupp (1610–61) are examined in detail. What emerges is something more complex than a simple injunction to obey authority at all costs. While he implicitly rejected the idea of a right to rebel, Schupp placed his faith in the willingness of rulers to assist in a ‘reformation of society’. Rebellion would thus be unnecessary. The article argues that this hope was not unrealistic in the context of the small German territorial state in the early modern period. The traditional view of a politically conservative Lutheranism in this period must therefore be revised.

The Scot Adam Blackwood (1539–1613), often cited though seemingly no longer much read, studied in Paris under two of the leading humanist scholars of his time, their influence upon his thinking being profound. A staunch supporter and protégé of Mary, queen of Scots, he published in 1575 the first of his political tracts, the De coniunctione religionis et imperii, in which he argued for stability in religion as the necessary underpinning of political order, and against resistance to the monarch, seen as divinely authorized and the sole law-giver. Six years later he produced his Pro regibus apologia, a rebuttal of George Buchanan's De jure regni apud Scotos. Polemical in tone, this work of Blackwood's nevertheless developed further his view of the monarch as the principle of unity and cohesion necessary to the existence of any body politic. In both of these works he deployed a sophisticated array of legal and philosophical arguments whilst pursuing ultimately irenic purposes. But Mary Stewart's execution in 1587 drew from him a diatribe against Elizabeth I where such purposes succumbed to his outraged sensibilities and his combative rhetorical style.

François due de Guise, commander of the French catholic forces, was assaulted by Poltrot de Mérey (or Méré) before Orléans on 18 February 1563. He succumbed six days later, on 24 February, to the attentions of his surgeons, whose lethal ministrations are horribly retailed by the Spanish ambassador, Chantonnay. On that fatal day, Guise had gone to inspect his camp in the suburb called Portereau from which his forces were sapping and mining the stronghold of Orléans, occupied for the past year by the protestant confederates of the prince de Condé. The capture of this city, then considered imminent, would have been the fourth military episode of the first French civil war. But, instead of the expected collapse of Orléans and the continuation of war, France was rocked by the unexpected death of Guise which effectively interrupted hostilities.

A second Irish Grants Committee met for the first time in October 1926 to deal with claims for compensation from distressed southern Irish loyalists. By the time it had ceased its work, the committee had dealt with over 4,000 applications and recommended 2,237 ex-gratia grants. The surviving files constitute over 200 boxes of near-contemporary witness testimony and supplementary material making them an incomparable, if problematic, source for the study of the southern loyalist experience of the Irish Revolution – a topic of much current historiographical interest. Applicants had to prove that they had suffered loss on account of their ‘allegiance to the government of the United Kingdom’, and by applying labelled themselves as both ‘loyalist’ and ‘victim’. A study of the claim files from one district, Arva in County Cavan, offers unique perspectives on the loyalist experience of revolution in a southern Irish community, personal definitions of loyalty, and the relationship between behaviour and allegiance during war. The Arva applicants often struggled to present their financial losses as resulting directly from their ‘loyalty to the Crown’. Their statements, and the way they were treated by the committee, serve to complicate an often over-simplified understanding of civilian behaviour and popular support.