This article explores the lengthy and convoluted history of a Jacobean project to set the idle poor to work making ‘new draperies’. Although the projector, Walter Morrell, convinced the Cecils, King James, and the privy council of the social and fiscal benefits of his scheme, he failed to persuade the Hertfordshire gentry. This case study in the formulation of crown economic policy, and in ‘Stuart paternalism’, draws upon Morrell's own detailed, unpublished treatise, as well as conventional political sources, and shows how the combination of ‘commonwealth’ rhetoric and progressive economic thinking could sway crown policy-making. It also demonstrates once again the limits of conciliar authority in early Stuart England. In the face of sustained provincial non-compliance, the privy council had neither the machinery nor the stomach to force the Hertfordshire elite to implement government policy and give meaningful support to a government-backed projector. And despite their inability to deal with growing rural unemployment, the Hertfordshire magistrates were unwilling to experiment with rural industry as a solution.

While recent work has shown that interwar Asian civic associational culture was becoming more plural than previously understood, scholars focus mostly on transnational networks and neglect local associations co-existing in the colonial urban space. We also know little about how internationalist and liberal ideals interacted with notions of racial and national exclusion prevalent in the wider society. To overcome this, this article examines local organizations alongside transnational networks in interwar Hong Kong to understand fully how global trends in the interwar period affected colonial civic culture. Drawing on Freemasonry, Rotary, the League of Fellowship, and the Kowloon Residents’ Association, I discuss the aspirations of multi-racial urbanites in interwar Hong Kong and their limits. I argue that, while internationalism and colonial hierarchies allowed solidarity to be forged amongst multi-racial urbanites and encouraged their civic engagements, racism embedded in the society, rising nationalism, and constitutional constraints put limitations on their aspirations.

Any account of religious controversy in nineteenth-century Britain must mention Essays and Reviews, the collection of essays published in i860 by a group of distinguished and liberal Anglicans.1 The volume was a deliberate challenge to the great body of Anglican opinion in the name of reason, science, and Biblical Criticism. The challenge was taken up eagerly, and the essayists suffered a mild persecution. Frederick Temple's position as Headmaster at Rugby was threatened, Benjamin Jowett, Professor of Greek at Oxford, had the increase in his professorial stipend withheld. Rowland Williams and H. B. Wilson were tried for heresy.

In early modern England, spectral figures were regular visitors to the world of the living and a vibrant variety of beliefs and expectations clustered around these questionable shapes. Yet whilst historians have established the importance of ghosts as cultural resources that were used to articulate a range of contemporary concerns about worldly life, we know less about the social and personal dynamics that underpinned the telling, recording, and circulation of ghost stories at the time. This article therefore focuses on a unique set of manuscript sources relating to apparitions in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century England to uncover a different vantage point. Drawing on the life-writing and correspondence of the antiquarian who collected the narratives, it lays bare concerns about familial relations and gender that ghost stories were bound up with. Tracing the way that belief in ghosts functioned at an individual level also allows the recovery of the personal religious sensibilities and spiritual imperatives that sustained and nourished continuing belief in ghosts. This subjective angle demonstrates that ghost stories were closely intertwined with processes of grieving and remembering the dead, and they continued to be associated with theological understandings of the afterlife and the fate of the soul.

Of all the professions none has proved more resistant to the inclusion of women than the Christian ministry; no branch of the church stemming from the Reformation has been firmer in asserting the ‘disability of sex’ for ordained ministers than has the Church of England. The contemporary struggle to open the priesthood to women is the latest phase in a long movement of church feminism which permeated the Church of England from the very last years of Victoria's reign, a movement which, by 1930, had succeeded in considerably increasing women's influence and even ministry in the English Establishment although it had failed in its more radical aims. As they battled for the right to vote for (and sit on) elective church councils, as they sought equality of ministry with male laity, as they searched for vocationally fulfilling modes of pastoral care and evangelism which respected the ban against ordination, and as they assaulted that ban itself, able and ambitious church feminists have been continually frustrated by sexist prejudice, clerical exclusiveness, and entrenched religious tradition.

In 1837 leading reformers in a number of England's rapidly growing but still archaically governed industrial cities began to agitate for the incorporation of their boroughs in accordance with the provisions of the Municipal Corporations Act passed two years before. Up until then little interest had been shown in the subject in the provinces, an attitude which is rather easier to understand than the sudden belated burst of enthusiasm. For, even after it had become clear in 1835 that the great reform bill had made some sort of municipal reform inevitable, Tory opponents of the measure had not given way without a struggle. By strictly limiting the powers of the reformed borough councils, by creating a property qualification for councillors, and by requiring the inhabitants of unincorporated cities to petition the Privy Council for a charter rather than, say, providing for automatic incorporation of parliamentary boroughs, they hoped to emasculate what they dared not destroy. In this they were remarkably successful. The borough councils remained hobbled for years because the powers of the variety of trusts which existed in most cities to take care of such things as paving, water supply, cleaning and general improvements were not handed over to the municipal authorities. And largely because of this even many reformers in the proud industrial cities of the north and midlands were often less than enthusiastic about getting a charter for their city. The prospect of replacing narrowly selected Court Leets and Boroughreeves with semi-democratically elected borough councils and mayors was appealing, but it had to be balanced against the fact that these councils would not supersede but merely take their place alongside already existing boards and commissions, with the result that the cost of local government was likely to go up. Looked at in this way there did not seem to be much in it, or at least not enough to make incorporation worth the fighting that would probably be necessary to secure it.

To most Frenchmen of the revolutionary generation the south conjured up a stereotype image of militant royalism in which bizarrely accoutred peasants followed ci-devant seigneurs and priests into battle and murder gangs toiled under a burning sun. The principal weakness of such a view lies not in the factual detail nor even in the presumption that the entire population was insurgent, but in its essentially linear perspective. As a recent historian has observed, the south can be characterized not only by its fervent royalist commitment but also by its predilection for the politics of extremes. The complicating and exacerbating factor in this southern counter-revolutionary equation was the presence of a parallel and equally uncompromising loyalty to the Republic. Of course, both stances were rationalizations whose ideological content needs careful weighing, but their interaction in small and often volatile communities provided counter-revolution with a dynamic which perpetuated confrontation and drove each side to extremes of savagery and fanaticism.

The Irish Party, the organization which represented the constitutional nationalist demand for home rule for almost fifty years in Westminster, was the most notable victim of the revolution in Ireland, c. 1916–23. Most of the last generation of Westminster-centred home rule MPs played little part in public life following the party's electoral destruction in 1918. This article probes the political thought and actions of one of the most prominent constitutional nationalists who did seek to alter Ireland's direction during the critical years of the war of independence. Stephen Gwynn was a guiding figure behind a number of initiatives to ‘save’ Ireland from the excesses of revolution. Gwynn established the Irish Centre Party in 1919, which later merged with the Irish Dominion League. From the end of 1919, Gwynn became a leading advocate of the Government of Ireland Bill, the legislation that partitioned the island. Revolutionary idealism – and, more concretely, violence – did much to render his reconciliatory efforts impotent. Gwynn's experiences between 1919 and 1921 also, however, reveal the paralysing divisions within constitutional nationalism, which did much to demoralize moderate sentiment further.

One of the recurrent challenges to the historian of the French Revolution is that of interpreting the transition from the liberalism of its early years to the centralized dictatorship of the Terror. Why did the constitution of 1791, that remarkable legislative achievement which stood for so long as a model to nineteenth-century liberal reformers, collapse within a year of its enactment? How did the individual and political liberties guaranteed by that constitution become submerged so rapidly under the flood of repressive legislation during the Year II? What made the impressive façade of the annus mirabilis of 1790 crumble into political dissension from the summer of 1791 onwards, revealing the stark realities of religious conflict, war, insurrection and civil strife? Whether one regards this transition as the unfortunate consequence of a succession of political accidents or as the inevitable result of deeply rooted social conflict, the role of Jacobinism in the process is fundamental, for it provided both the personnel and the ideology that was to dominate political life throughout the Terror. As Michelet was one of the first to point out, Jacobinism underwent several transformations during the five years of its existence as a formal political movement, moving decisively to the left after the secession of the Feuillants in July 1791 and again with the expulsion of the leading Girondins in the following autumn, until it reached its final and most characteristic stage only at the height of the Terror, during Year II.