In Nigeria, Britain asserted its post-colonial security role during and immediately after the transfer of power, and remained responsible for assisting the Nigerian armed forces. While the Americans recognized Nigeria's potential as an important partner in the Cold War, they preferred to focus on development aid. Washington was thus supposed to complement British assistance, while leaving the responsibility for the security sector to London. But with the escalation of the Cold War in Africa, the Nigerians’ efforts to reduce their dependency on the United Kingdom, and Nigeria's growing significance for the United States in African affairs, this Anglo-American burden-sharing was increasingly questioned in Washington. The United States thus eventually decided to militarize its aid policy towards Nigeria. In analysing the militarization of US aid policy towards Nigeria, this article will, first, assess the Anglo-American relationship in the early 1960s; secondly, position Nigeria in American Cold War policy towards Sub-Saharan Africa; thirdly, question the role of military assistance in Washington's policy towards Nigeria and Africa; and fourthly, discover the regional and local factors that influenced policy-makers in Washington and London.

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.

Czechoslovakia between Stalin and Hitler: the diplomacy of Edvard Beneš in the 1930s. By I. Lukes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. xii+318. ISBN 0-1951-0267-3. £22.50.

Carpatho–Ukraine in the twentieth century: a political and legal history. By V. Shandor. Cambridge, MA: distributed by Harvard University Press for the Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard University, 1998. Pp. xvii+321. ISBN 0-9164A-5886-5. £21.95.

Czechoslovak national interests, Part I: A historical survey of Czechoslovak national interests, Part II: Reflections on the demise of Czechoslovak communism. By Oskar Krejčí. Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, distributed by Columbia University Press, New York, 1996. Pp. 193, 167. ISBN 0-8803-3343-X. £31.00

It is really deplorable that until quite recently there still existed in Western academic circles a number of serious misunderstandings about Chinese historiography, particularly the Chinese theory and practice of historical method and critical techniques. Many well-known academic figures still do not know, or refuse to face the fact, that the Chinese tradition of pursuing an objective knowledge of history can be dated back as far as the first century and that the quality of critical scholarship had reached a level equal, either in terms of textual criticism or higher criticism, to any found in the West up to the beginning of the nineteenth. To cite a few examples of Western ignorance. An American sinologist specializing in Chinese traditional historiography firmly asserts that ‘the Chinese are not a whit behind Western scholarship in the exacting domain of textual or preparatory criticism’, but ‘in the field of historical criticism... Chinese historians of the old school did not evolve those principles which are now regarded in East and West alike as an indispensable part of scientific historical method’, although ‘since the seventh century, a few bold, independent spirits have evolved the elements of historical criticism’.1 Another sinologist holds nearly the same position by stating that ‘what was missing’ in traditional Chinese historiography until the sixteenth century was a ‘systematic method’ of criticism, while recognizing that ‘there was an almost continuous line of doubters’ from the early eighth century onwards, and that under the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) attempts were ‘made to bring all the doubts together into one publication’and so to lay‘ the basis for organized study’, an active role being played by ‘ancillary studies of all’ including philology in the development of the Chinese textual criticism of history.2 The most bigoted and dogmatic verdict passed on Chinese historiography which I have ever read in the Western literature is Professor J. H. Plumb's assertion that Chinese historians ‘never attempted, let alone succeeded, in treating history as objective understanding’, and that ‘Chinese scholars were using historical materials for the same purposes in the early twentieth century as in the T'ang and Han dynasties’. Professor Plumb's bias is further reflected in the affirmation, which was added after his reading of Professor E. G. Pulleyblank's remarkable essay Chinese historical criticism: Liu Chih-chi and Ssu-ma Kuang,3 that ‘I would maintain that the Chinese were concerned solely with creating an educative past - subtle, highly detailed, accurate in commission, but not history’4.

The rebellion against Charles I's authority that began in Edinburgh in 1637 involved the Scots in successive invasions of England and armed intervention in Ireland. Historians have almost universally taken a negative view of Scottish involvement in these wars, because it has been assumed that the Scottish political leadership sacrificed all other considerations in order to pursue an unrealistic religious crusade. This article suggests that aspects of the Anglo-Scottish relationship need to be reappraised. Using estimates of English payments to the Scots during the 1640s, it will be argued that the Scottish leadership made pragmatic political decisions based on a practical appreciation of the country's military and fiscal capacity. Substantial payouts from the English parliament enabled the Scottish parliamentary regime to engage in military and diplomatic activities that the country could not otherwise have afforded. The 1643 treaty that brought the Scots into the English Civil War on the side of parliament contrasts favourably with the 1647 Engagement in support of the king. It will be shown that, although the English parliament did not honour all of its obligations to the Scots, it does not automatically follow that the alliance was a failure in financial terms.

This article explores the last instance of mass public oath-taking in England, the tendering of the oaths of allegiance, supremacy, and abjuration in the aftermath of the Jacobite Atterbury Plot of 1722. The records of this exercise, surviving in local record offices, have been little examined by historians. The returns are, however, unusual not only in the level of detail they occasionally provide concerning subscribers (place of abode, occupation, and social status) but also in the consistently high numbers of women who can be found taking the oaths. Prior to 1723, the appearance of female subscribers on oath returns was exceptional and usually assumed to be accidental. As this article seeks to demonstrate, the targeting of women in 1723 was intentional and represented a recognition of women's economic and political influence in early Hanoverian England. Even so, the presence of women on these oath returns represented a breach in the normal exclusion of women from formal political participation. The article suggests that other means of presenting public loyalty, namely the loyal address, were subsequently preferred which both seemed more the product of popular enthusiasm rather than state direction and which could informally represent women without conferring a public political identity.

Robert John Wilmot Horton became associated with colonial affairs in an official capacity at a time when the Colonial Office was in the throes of a reorganization. He did not bring any previous experience to his new office, and his ability was not highly rated - ‘He had always appeared to me a particularly silly fellow’, Lord Melbourne, the prime minister, was to remark later - but his tenure as the Under-Secretary of State for War and Colonies was not devoid of success. The role he played in the reorganization of the Colonial Office, for instance, was noteworthy. He proved to be an able lieutenant to Earl Badiurst, the Secretary of State. Yet Horton attained only a limited success in his political life. By the year 1828 he was out of office, and by 1830 was out of parliament. Having reached an impasse in his political life, Horton was led to seek a colonial appointment, a decision which was also partly strengthened by his pecuniary embarrassments. He staked a claim to the Governorship of Canada, and later to the Governorship of Madras, but what he was to receive was a less coveted position, the Governorship of Ceylon.

This article continues an examination of the British government's counter-revolutionary organization begun in ‘The Alien Office 1792-1806’, The Historical Journal, XXXIII (1990), which outlined the department's functions and secret service policy. The Swiss and Swabian agencies were one aspect of British foreign secret service; they linked the French princes' secret agents to the British government under the central European control of William Wickham, ambassador in Berne 1794–7, and military and diplomatic subsidiaries. Anti-republican secret committees were set up covering all France, Switzerland, northern Italy and southern Germany, which included members from every grade of society. French republican generals, even Ministers were swayed, allowing infiltration of the French secret police. British control was however limited to the finesse of finance – bribery was implicit. By never offering enough to the leaders and too much to assistants, initial constitutional intentions slid into subversion and assassination. The first complete andfully documented description is included of how, why, and by whom, the French deputies were assassinated at Rastadt.

For historians of empire, scandals provide a useful starting point for investigating how the operations of imperial power were contested and reworked in moments of crisis. Yet, existing scholarship on imperial scandal consists mostly of case-studies that do not always reflect on the larger trend of which they are a part. This review draws on six accounts of imperial scandals to produce a general picture of the characteristics and functions of scandals in the historiography of the nineteenth-century British empire. What this comparison suggests is that imperial scandals possessed distinctive stakes and seem, as a result, to have represented periodic ruptures in longer-term patterns of local silence and complicity. Scandals, if used cautiously, can therefore provide evidence to support ongoing discussions about the logic of colonial concealment. At the same time, scandals also remind us that publicity is not a simple cure-all. By including a wider range of actors and non-governmental sources, future studies of scandal might elucidate the political limits of transparency, as well as exploring how imperial subjects negotiated gendered and racialized access to public and political platforms.

The countries of south-eastern Europe at the beginning of the last war were caught, as they themselves put it with as much self-deprecation as fear, between the Axis hammer and the Russian anvil. There was almost a touch of defiance in their description, as if the extraordinarily high odds against their survival confirmed in their eyes their claim to national independence and to world attention. In fact over the 20 years of their existence they had made a virtue of the politics of Kleinstaaterei, of the fact that their destiny was determined not by themselves but by the Great Powers surrounding them. The Balkan states were creatures of Great Power politics and, with an unerring appreciation of their dependence on powerful neighbours, they looked to London or Paris or Rome or Berlin or Moscow for sustenance and direction. And yet—and this is the crucial paradox—they continued to harbour, side by side with their acknowledged dependence on the Great Powers, a deeply felt longing for collective independence and for political self-sufficiency. This paper is concerned with the desperate attempts of the Balkan countries in the autumn of 1939 to harmonize these conflicting requirements by promoting collective independence in the form of a bloc of neutrals under the leadership of a Great Power.

The recent bicentennial commemorations of the Napoleonic empire have witnessed a proliferation of new studies. Scholars now possess much more sophisticated conceptual tools than in past decades with which to gauge the problems faced by French imperial administrators throughout Europe. Well-trodden concepts, like centre/periphery or collaboration/resistance, have been reinvigorated by more sophisticated understandings of how rulers and ruled interacted in the early nineteenth century. This article argues that, while much progress has been made in understanding problems of ‘resistance’, there is more to be said about the other side of the same coin, namely: ‘collaboration’. Using the micro/local history of a scandal in Napoleonic Bologna, this article wishes to reaffirm that collaboration was an active agent that shaped, and often shook, the French imperial project. The biggest problem remained that, despite ‘good intentions’, collaborators sometimes simply did not collaborate with each other. After all, imperial clients were determined to benefit from the experience of empire. The centre was often submerged by local petty squabbles. This article will use a specific micro-history in Bologna to highlight the extent to which Napoleonic empire builders had to thread a fine line between the impracticalities of direct control and the dangers of ‘going native’.

Gladstone has not been well served by the historiographical tradition dominant for much of this century. It has disseminated an image of him that emphasizes little more than an undefined ‘reformism’ and a moralizing populism; this is as unhelpful and distorted as is the interpretation, emanating from the same source, of much of the rest of nineteenth-century politics. It is no longer enough to judge public figures of this period by the degree of their commitment to nebulous platitudes like ‘social reform’ or ‘progress’: historians have recently exposed the flimsy foundations that sustain the reputations of even those most frequently celebrated in these spheres. It is misleading to concentrate attention on the development of institutional reform, centralized government, trade union legislation, or welfare statutes for the poor; franchise extension apart, advances here were often provoked solely by bureaucratic agency or by the concern of philanthropic backbenchers, and contributed only occasionally to the major disputes of Victorian political society. If we are to shed light on the domestic issues of vital importance to contemporary politicians, we need a far more coherent account than is now available of financial, taxation and land policy on the one hand, and, on the other, of the main subject of this article, the role of religion in politics.

The Government which Lord Russell formed on Palmerston's death in October 1865 met Parliament first on 6 February 1866. On 12 March it introduced a Reform Bill, the chief objects of which were to lower the Borough Franchise of 1832 from £10 rental to £7 and the County Franchise from £50 to £14, and to give votes to £50 Savings Bank depositors, £10 lodgers and certain others (enfranchising altogether about 400,000 new voters). On 7 May it introduced a Seats Bill which provided for grouping of boroughs with populations smaller than 8000 and removal of second seats from small towns with two members; and which proposed to distribute the 49 seats thus freed so that Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Salford and London would have 10 new seats between them, Scotland 7, London University and a number of new boroughs 1 each and the English counties 26 in all. These measures were recommended by Gladstone, as Leader of the House of Commons, in the hope, which the Queen shared, that they would put an end to the reform question for a generation. Their authors, Russell and Gladstone, intended them to wind up the line of abortive measures which had been presented to Parliament in the previous seventeen years: they expected, innocently as it turned out, that a degree of enfranchisement which the Cabinet had accepted, however reluctantly, which had been tailored in order to pass through Parliament and ‘which we had so much cut down…from the standard of the Palmerston measure of 1860 would be accepted by the Liberal majority in the House of Commons.

In 1852 a new British Colony, the Colony of the Bay Islands, was set up by Letters Patent. In 1859 Great Britain signed a Treaty, subsequently ratified in 1860 and put into effect in 1861, recognizing the Bay Islands as part of the Republic of Honduras. These facts are well known in the diplomatic history of the Central American question, and in the history of Anglo-American relations. The diplomatic historians have not, however, been able to find any convincing diplomatic explanation for the creation of the Bay Islands Colony in 1852; and, while they have fully explained the diplomatic reason for the cession of the islands in 1859, they do not seem to have considered it necessary to inquire how such a rare event in the history of the British Empire as the peaceful cession of a regularly constituted British colony to a foreign nation was brought about. This article seeks to explain the history of the Bay Islands Colony by showing that the colonization was effected by the Colonial Office without the Foreign Office being informed, and that the cession was effected by the Foreign Office without the Colonial Office being informed.