While there seems no end to the polemics of nationalism, a critical analysis is far to seek; for which reason an account of the beginnings of the theory of nationality in the eighteenth century may be of value to the political theorist as well as of interest to the historian. We may say of its beginnings, because although nationality as a fact is in England and some other countries of Western Europe a heritage of the Middle Ages, as a theory it is much more recent in origin. In Shaw's Saint Joan, Pierre Cauchon, discussing with Warwick the popular uprising in France under the Maid, says, “If I were to give it a name I should call it—nationalism.” Mr Shaw's Bishop is nearly four centuries in advance of his age. It was not till the nineteenth century that men in general began “to call it nationalism,” and under the guidance of such as Wordsworth and Mazzini to understand in some degree what they implied when they did so. The Revolutionary upheaval and the Napoleonic dominion were necessary to rouse the nations to self-consciousness. But these events, though they may partially account for the fact, do not altogether elucidate the theory of nationality. For its veritable beginnings we must look earlier. It is a significant fact in considering the causation of the nationalistic movement that the first and possibly still the wisest of the theorists of nationality had developed his ideas long before the Revolution.

The strides made by the Russians into Central Asia between 1864 and 1869 were greater than any they took thereafter in that area. In 1865 they captured Tashkend. In 1866 they occupied Khojend and broke the power of the Khanate of Khokand. In 1867 they invaded the Khanate of Bokhara, and established fortified posts far to the south of the Jaxartes River; they also established the new Province of Turkestan, erecting it into a separate Viceroyalty with its capital at Tashkend. In 1868 they captured the city of Samarkand, capital of Bokhara, and made it clear that the Amir of Bokhara lived henceforth as a subservient client.

In 1807 William Smyth, tutor of Peterhouse, was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge through the good offices of Lord Henry Petty, later third Marquis of Lansdowne and then still liberal M.P. for the University. Two years later, not long after Smyth had delivered his first course of lectures, there appeared the caricature of him reproduced as a frontispiece to this paper and bearing the same title. It represents him in profile lecturing to a drowsy and yawning audience of undergraduates and elderly bewigged Fellows.

Rebuilding plans submitted after the Great Fire of London in 1666 have been widely treated by historians of the Great Fire and in wide-scope histories of London and modern city planning. However, few attempts have been made to assign an overarching logic to all of them, while paying attention to their texts as well as to their maps. The following article highlights certain common features in these abortive efforts to plan London, assigns a common logic to all of them, and traces the origins of this logic. Such an analysis illuminates the economic principles in plans that are usually examined for their architectural features, and places them in a different historical context. Rather than seeing them as manifestations of contemporary architectural trends, or as a continuation of ongoing attempts to regulate London's cityscape, the plans are presented here as a response to emerging ideas in mid-seventeenth-century England about the nature of value and the economic function of cities within the world of commerce. Such a view reveals the complex interplay between London's early modern growth and the emergence of new forms of knowledge in seventeenth-century England and reasserts the importance of these plans as forerunners of present-day city planning.

Philip Nye was one of the most important of the early Independents. His youthful allegiance to the cause, and his exile from 1633 to 1640 in Holland, gave him a breadth of outlook and an experience of congregational churches which effected a greater balance of his natural abilities. He has been coupled with John Goodwin as one of the most original minds among later Puritans. Returning from Holland, he soon had occasion to display his talents. As a representative to the Westminster Assembly he became one of the group of dissenting ministers which challenged the validity of the Presbyterian system of church government. The five “Holland Ministers” resisted the alien centralising policy of the Scottish Presbyterians. During the Protectorate, Nye became more prominent in ecclesiastical politics, but the Restoration forced him into the background. He died in 1672, serving an Independent church in London as its “doctor”.

In ‘The Sentiments of a Church of England Man’, written in 1708, Swift offered to the whig party (then entering into power thanks to the exigencies of the Spanish Succession war) a piece of advice which they would have been well advised to regard despite the suspected allegiance of the writer.

The article is dedicated to one of the least known early works of Peter Mohyla, Orthodox Metropolitan of Kiev (1633–46). Known as a great church and educational reformer and ‘Westernizer’, he made a major contribution to the cultural development in Ruthenia, then a part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Muscovy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The work has survived in a single manuscript copy which could have been made from a printed edition that was suppressed or destroyed soon after its publication. The author has established, for the first time, that the work in question is not an original piece, but a rendition of the fifteenth-century Catholic devotional treatise The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis into contemporary literary Ukrainian. First-hand evidence is presented to support this claim. Mohyla brought many significant changes to the original text using it as a vehicle to convey his own views formed under the influence of the Catholic Reformation, Jesuit education, and Latin books. Conclusions are drawn about the way he applied Western sources to rid the Orthodox Church from obscurity and self-imposed isolation from the European Christian civilization.

The causes and consequences of the quarrels between Louis XV and the parlements in the third quarter of the eighteenth century continue to provoke a lively debate amongst historians. In France, the traditional thesis of a reforming monarchy confronted by the selfish obstructionism of the judiciary has many adherents. However, few Anglo-American scholars favour such an interpretation and some have gone as far as to reject the existence of a crisis altogether. Research is also concentrated upon the consequences of these disputes, and their importance to the development not only of parlementaire constitutionalism, but even of a new political culture. In order to contest these conflicting interpretations, this article takes afresh look at the Besançon affair of 1757–1761. In one of the most heated political battles of the reign, thirty judges were exiled from the parlements of Besançon, provoking a lively response from the other parlements, headed by that of Paris. By examining the origins of the dispute in Franche-Comté, and the subsequent reaction of both the government and the Parisian magistrates, this article offers a new picture of the causes of crisis and of how judicial politics actually worked.

It is generally assumed that the kingless Commonwealth established in 1649 was the unforeseen consequence of the regicide: an expedient taken hesitantly and nothing more than a stop-gap. ‘Republicanism’ was a minority position even among those who remained at Westminster during the dramatic events of 1648–9: the majority remained committed to monarchical forms of government. By reappraising the surviving evidence, this article proposes a radically different account of the genesis of the Commonwealth regime. Not only were preparations already underway in the weeks before Charles I's death that helped to pave the way for government without a king, but also the decision to abolish kingship after the regicide was itself taken relatively quickly, with no discernible signs of hesitation. Even if few who defended or served the Commonwealth were republican, this need not mean that the majority were attached to monarchy. Rather, many of those who supported the regime, drawing upon the experiences and ideas of 1640s parliamentarianism, claimed that the form of government was only ever of secondary importance in comparison to its substance. They did not think kingship was inherently unlawful, but they did not believe it was absolutely necessary either.

Recent work on the Enlightenment continues to bear out the importance of context in shaping both what is written and how it is read. In the case of the French Revolution, largely thanks to the work of Robert Darnton, studies have come to focus on how, if at all, different layers and styles of dissidence helped to bring down the French monarchy. But not all writing has, or need be suspected of, such an obvious or immediate outcome. This period, for instance, sees the birth of ‘philosophical’ history, as John Pocock and others have made us aware. Here again, contexts and individual experience shape what is studied and written, but it is clear that the project common to the best-selling work of, for instance, Gibbon, Hume and Robertson was to explain how civil society emerged and thrived. This inquiry, and what it says about the separate states and common principles of Europe then and now, is unfinished business; so, too, is determining what historical knowing is, and cannot be. What the eighteenth century undeniably saw, even from the slightly educated, was a growing appetite for understanding and for improvement: these have proved necessary, if not sufficient, conditions for modernity.

Histories of the Jews are a fundamental and polemical aspect of Christian and especially Protestant historiography in the nineteenth century. This article considers, in their context, the five most popular and influential multi-volume histories published in Britain, namely those of Henry Hart Milman, Heinrich Ewald, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Ernest Renan (the one significant – lapsed – Catholic historian in the tradition), and Emil Schürer. It shows how each of these major historians constructs an opposition between Alexandrian Judaism and Palestinian Judaism, a hierarchical opposition which denigrated Alexandrian Judaism as a betrayal or corruption of true religion because it depended on an assimilation of Jewishness and Greekness. The opposition of Greek and Jew was fundamental to nineteenth-century thought for a high intellectual tradition (most famously embodied in Matthew Arnold's categories of Hebraism and Hellenism). The Alexandrian Jews become for these historians an icon of a dangerous hybridity – despite the fact that the Septuagint, the Alexandrian Greek Bible, was the Bible of early Christianity. The article considers the different strategies adopted by these historians in response to this constructed opposition of Jerusalem and Alexandria, and its continuing implications for the historiography of the Hellenistic world.

Archives of the scientific revolution: the formation and exchange of ideas in seventeenth-century Europe. Edited by Michael Hunter. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998. Pp. xii + 216. ISBN 0–8511–553–7. £45.00.

The peasantries of Europe from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Edited by Tom Scott. London: Longman, 1998. Pp. xi + 416. ISBN 0–582–10131-X. £19.99.

Civil society and fanaticism: conjoined histories. By Dominique Colas. Translated by Amy Jacobs. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Pp. xxx + 480. ISBN 0–8047–2736–8. £14.95.

The quest for compromise: peacemakers in Counter-Reformation Vienna. By Howard Louthan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xvi + 185. ISBN 0–531–58082-X. £35.00.

Each of the four volumes at hand examines a different yet vital aspect of European society between the late middle ages and the beginnings of industrialization. The field is far too diverse and the approaches too complex to expect a commonality among these works, excepting a shared temporal and geographic concentration. Still, the themes and subjects reveal some of the issues that have captured recent attention and show how scholars propose to go about exploring them. They suggest the interests of historians of early modern Europe, their distinctive perspectives, and varying methodologies. The collective reach extends from deciphering the papers and manuscripts left by participants in the scientific revolution to an exploration of the immense yet largely reticent peasant world, an attempt to establish the origins and trace the development of today's ongoing discussion over civil society and fanaticism, and finally a study of four peacemakers who urged religious moderation at the imperial court of Counter-Reformation Vienna. Put slightly differently, these studies raise fundamental questions about the sources upon which scholars depend, the nature and utility of historical models, and the relationship between contemporary concerns and our collective past, whether they be issues of civil society or irenic accommodation.

This article examines the exodus down the Rhine in 1816 and 1817 of tens of thousands of German migrants, who attempted to reach the United States after the Napoleonic Wars. It establishes the episode as an important link between the mass-migration periods of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which saw more Germans land in North America than any other European group. The article focuses on the active commercial, logistical, social, and religious networks, produced in the eighteenth century, which made the exodus possible, and how it in turn changed future migration patterns. This integrates the exodus into an evolving German Atlantic movement, where previous historiography has treated it as an isolated episode, produced by extraordinary post-war conditions.