The traditional division of the Klan phenomenon into three or four separate outbreaks (Reconstruction, 1920s, post-1954, and post-1979) is a useful organizing construct for scholars, but is deceptively simple and not necessarily reflective of reality. Alabama's KKK is examined immediately following World War II. During this alleged period of dormancy there is, instead, a thriving Klan presence in perhaps the most racist of the deep South states. Postwar Alabama was especially tense as black voting registration aspirations and the growing appeal of biracial economic liberalism challenged the status quo. Klan resurgence was part of a determined white supremacist reaction. The concept of soft opposition is also coined and introduced to describe the efforts of elites to combat the Klan. While waging a vigorous opposition, elites were not so concerned with Klan depredations as abominations in and of themselves; rather, they were worried about the threat of federal intervention into southern race relations in response to violence. They opposed Klan excesses to perpetuate traditional elite, white control over southern blacks. Such opposition, while genuine, was less than effective, altruistic, or hard opposition; the kind needed to eliminate the Klan as an accepted part of southern society, which evolved only after 1979.

The French have had an ambiguous relationship with liberal democracy, doing much to pioneer it since 1789, but also harbouring substantial minorities hostile to it. This article seeks the historical roots for this relationship in a critical period for the democratization process in France between the 1830 Revolution and the consolidation of the Third Republic late in the nineteenth century. It takes the textile town of Troyes as a case study. In particular, it takes a ‘grass-roots’ approach to the problem, as opposed to the usual focus on ideologies and attitudes to democratization among the elites. The general contention is that the population of the town faced a number of obstacles as it attempted to develop a ‘democratic culture’. The analysis highlights the varying approaches to popular participation in politics taken by successive regimes between 1815 and the 1870s, the slow emergence of a civil society in the town, and the problems faced by militants as they operated under the constraints of universal manhood suffrage.

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.

This article explores the various roles that alcohol played in defining the governance of East India Company fortifications and settlements in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. It argues that, much like elsewhere in Europe, Asia, and the colonial world, alcohol was absolutely crucial to political and social life, as well as a source of great revenue and profit for both the Company and individuals who worked for it. At the same time, it was a cause of immense anxiety and concern for Company government, which understood the use (and overuse) of alcohol as a principal sign of potential disorder and disobedience. Far from a contradiction, this ambivalence towards alcohol formed a foundation for a variety of regulatory instruments, from tavern licences to taxation, that were crucial to the establishment of early Company governance and a prime reflection of the Company's very own ambivalent nature as both merchant and sovereign.

Fathers, families, and the state in France, 1914–1945. By Kristen Stromberg Childers. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. 261. ISBN 0-8014-4122-6. £23.95.

Origins of the French welfare state: the struggle for social reform in France, 1914–1947. By Paul V. Dutton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. 251. ISBN 0-521-81334-4. £49.99.

Britain, France, and the financing of the First World War. By Martin Horn. Montreal and Kingston: McGill – Queen's University Press, 2002. Pp. 249. ISBN 0-7735-2293-X. £65.00.

The gold standard illusion: France, the Bank of France and the International Gold Standard, 1914–1939. By Kenneth Mouré. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. 297. ISBN 0-19-924904-0. £40.00.

Workers' participation in post-Liberation France. By Adam Steinhouse. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2001. Pp. 245. ISBN 0-7391-0282-6. $70.00 (hb). ISBN 0-7391-0283-4. $24.95 (pbk).

In the traditional historiography of twentieth-century France the period after the Second World War is usually contrasted favourably with that after 1918. After 1945, new men with new ideas, born out of the shock of defeat in 1940 and resistance to Nazi occupation, laid the basis for an economic and social democracy. The welfare state was created, women were given full voting rights, and French security, in both economic and territorial respects, was partially guaranteed by integrating West Germany into a new supranational institutional structure in Western Europe. 1945 was to mark the beginning of the ‘30 glorious years’ of peace and prosperity enjoyed by an expanding population in France. In sharp contrast, the years after 1918 are characterized as a period dominated by France's failed attempts to restore its status as a great power. Policies based on making the German taxpayer finance France's restoration are blamed for contributing to the great depression after 1929 and the rise of Hitler. However, as more research is carried out into the social and economic reconstruction of France after both world wars, it is becoming clear that the basis of what was to become the welfare state after 1945 was laid in the aftermath of the First World War. On the other hand, new reforms adopted in 1945 which did not build on interwar policies, such as those designed to give workers a voice in decision-making at the workplace, proved to be short-lived.

Nineteenth-century Britain, it has been argued, harboured hostility to commerce and industry at the very period of greatest industrial advance. In this the schoolroom and university have been charged with particular culpability, even though it is not clear how new was the resistance to commercial studies. The following investigates the most distinguished eighteenth-century attempt to interest the English universities in the study of commerce. The episode highlights the misunderstanding and mistrust occasioned by the promotion of the Science of Trade in the mid-eighteenth century.

The recently released Special Operations Executive (SOE) personal file of Major Hugh Bertie Campbell Pollard (HS 9/1200/5) sheds new light on the man who helped fly General Franco from the Canary Islands to Morocco, leading ultimately to the overthrow of the democratically elected republican government and thirty-six years of brutal dictatorship. Contrary to the previous portrayal of Pollard, a genial, rough-and-ready gung-ho ‘adventurer’ who flew the future Caudillo to Morocco on a whim, the files reveal Pollard to have been an experienced British intelligence officer, talented linguist, and firearms expert with considerable firsthand experience of wars and revolutions in Mexico, Morocco, and Ireland, where he had served as a police adviser in Dublin Castle during the ‘stormy days’ of the Black and Tans in the early 1920s. Pollard, who listed his hobbies in Who's Who as ‘hunting and shooting’, was the sporting editor of Country Life and a member of Lord Leconfield's hunt. He was also a renowned and passionate firearms expert having written numerous books on the subject including the section on ‘small arms’ for the official war office textbook. His friend Douglas Jerrold, who himself later served in British intelligence, recalled that Pollard ‘looked and behaved, like a German Crown Prince and had a habit of letting off revolvers in any office he happened to visit’. Once Jerrold plucked up the courage to ask Pollard if he had ever killed anybody.

The thirteenth edition of Robert Art and Robert Jervis’s International politics: enduring concepts and contemporary issues (2017), a textbook used in the core International Relations class for MA students in the Georgetown Masters in Foreign Service and many other such courses, asserts the following: ‘By the fourteenth century, these Sinicized states [China, Japan, and Korea] had evolved a set of international rules and institutions known as the “tribute system”, with China clearly the hegemon and operating under the presumption of inequality, which resulted in a clear hierarchy and lasting peace.’ This appears in a short article by David Kang, summarizing arguments from his books.1 It appears in a section titled ‘The mitigation of anarchy’, sandwiched between short pieces by Stephen M. Walt (‘Balancing and bandwagoning’), Hans Morgenthau (‘Diplomacy’), Stanley Hoffman (‘International law’), and Robert Keohane (‘International institutions’). This positioning suggests that while international relations in the West involves balancing, bandwagoning, law, and institutions, East Asia runs on the ‘tribute system’.

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.

The French expedition to Mexico from 1862 to 1867 rarely features in accounts of the origins of the Franco-Prussian War or of the liberalization of the French Second Empire in its final years. By contrast, this article uses a range of archival and published sources to argue that the failure of the Mexican expedition was an important factor in the crisis that convulsed French politics in the late 1860s. The legitimacy of the fiscal-military system was undermined, partly because of the burdens that the expedition imposed on the French people. There resulted difficulties over finance and the army, which hindered the Second Empire's ability to confront the Prussian threat and accelerated the emergence of the ‘Liberal Empire’ with the constitutional reforms of 1867–70. Liberalization, though, could not rescue the imperial regime, and the legitimacy crisis of the Second Empire was only resolved by a transition to a parliamentary democracy under the Third Republic.

This article takes the example of the Tana-Beles project – a scheme sponsored by Italy to respond to the 1980s famine in Ethiopia – to demonstrate that postimperial international relief policies and practices were woven into the very fabric of the colonial past. Postcolonial humanitarianism emerges as the transformation of colonial practices and relationships into new policies, which did not depend on the interests only of former metropoles, but also of the new independent states and on the agenda of international organizations. Furthermore, this article contends that private companies had a prominent role in shaping postcolonial humanitarianism because they could benefit from both the favourable policies of donor countries and the relationships they established in the long run with the authorities of recipient countries. Finally, the history of the Tana-Beles project enables us to re-read the international response to the Ethiopian famine within a larger timeframe. On the one hand, this appears to be rooted in the previous colonial period, on the other it embraces the years thereafter when the schemes, relationships, and strategies set in motion during the famine were developed further.

In Bolton's pubs at the end of the 1930s, the research organization Mass Observation pursued answers to big abstract questions about time by studying small concrete actions. Drawing on field notes, draft manuscripts, and published works, this article sets out the different understandings and experiences of time documented by the team of investigators. Outside the ‘time-clock factory-whistle dimension of living’ and inside ‘pub-time’, individuals bought drinks for their companions, drank at the same pace, and engaged with everyone around them on an equal footing. Mass Observation presented such behaviours as proof that the pub fostered a socially harmonious, egalitarian community from a pre-industrial age. However, this article shows that the pub study's archive contains material that goes against the published findings. Observers turned in reports about authoritarian conduct, hierarchical power structures, and the intrusion of contemporary politics. Blurring the research subject and object, it was sometimes the investigators themselves who broke the spell of the pub. These moments of tension, confusion, and contradiction offer insights into the observers’ own perspectives on modern temporalities and subjective experiences of time. All the people in the pubs were caught up in a state of flux.

This article uses recently released documents from the Soviet diplomatic archives to examine the Merekalov–Weizsäcker meeting of April 1939. It argues that these documents show that western historians have been mistaken in assuming that this meeting was the occasion for Soviet signals of a desire for détente with Nazi Germany. The significance attached to the meeting in this respect is part of the cold war myth that the USSR's negotiations for a triple alliance with Great Britain and France in the spring and summer of 1939 were paralleled by secret Soviet–German discussions which eventually lead to the Nazi–Soviet pact of August 1939. The article seeks to demolish those elements of the myth that concern the Merekalov–Weizsäcker encounter and to present an alternative interpretation of the provenance and meaning of the so-called political overture by the Soviet ambassador at the meeting.

This article examines the life of Lady Elizabeth Anson (1725–60), daughter of Philip Yorke, 1st earl of Hardwicke, and the wife of Admiral George Lord Anson, first lord of the admiralty. Using a sample of her letters, this article argues that Lady Anson engaged with letter-writing as an inherently political activity. Previous studies of Lady Anson’s correspondence have emphasized her role in the Yorkes’ political network, but this article foregrounds her marriage to Lord Anson and her life at the admiralty. In a marriage shaped by the strains of naval service, Lady Anson used her talents as a letter-writer to establish a role for herself as her husband’s political partner. Building on the work of Elaine Chalus, Judith Lewis, and Sarah Richardson, this article explores the ways in which Lady Anson used letters to disseminate intelligence and negotiate patronage. It examines her friendship with the powerful admiralty secretary, John Cleveland, and considers the ways in which her physical proximity to the admiralty office gave her privileged access to the inner workings of the Royal Navy. Consequently, her writing provides important insights into the ways in which elite women could use letters to establish their own political authority.

From its origins in the Chesapeake and the Caribbean to its transformation into smoke in a Jacobean chamber, tobacco entered drastically new contexts of use as it travelled from Indigenous America to the social spaces of early seventeenth-century London. This article draws on comparative anthropology and archaeology to explore how early colonization, particularly in Jamestown, influenced the development of smoking among the English political elite. This offers a case study into the ways in which Indigenous commodities and knowledge were integrated into English ritual practices of their own; it also reveals the deliberate choices made by the English to set themselves apart from those they sought to colonize. Placing the material practices and wit poetry of gentlemen within the geopolitics of colonialism raises attention to the acts of erasure or dispossession that accompanied the incorporation of tobacco into urban sociability. Here, the practices of Indigenous peoples were modified and altered, and the pleasures of plantation were expressed as an intoxication as potent as the plant itself.