This article examines the major role that newspapers played in Colombia, as central components of its political system, between 1830 and 1930. After some introductory remarks, the first section offers a general characterization of the Colombian press during the period, underlining its volatile existence, its national significance despite limited readership levels, and its overwhelming political nature in the hands of partisan editors. The second section analyses the political role of the press, by focusing on the crucial electoral functions performed by newspapers in launching candidates and providing them with platforms, serving as party organs, and measuring the amount of public support for candidates and parties. The article also explores the extent to which the press played a wider democratic role in supporting the suffrage, in instructing voters about rights and duties, and, by doing so, in forming an enduring sense of citizenship.

Recent years have seen the growth of a new and newly self-conscious cultural historiography of the senses. This article extends and critiques this literature through a case study of the sensory work and worlds of Sir John Floyer, a physician active in Lichfield during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Floyer is best known for his work on pulse-taking, something which he described as contributing to the art of feeling. Less well known is his first book – a discussion of the tastes of the world and their therapeutic possibilities. The article explicates, contextualizes, and relates these two books and uses this analysis to suggest ways of refining and developing the wider historiography of the senses. It demonstrates how they reveal that what Floyer sensed was closely bound up with the changing ways in which he sensed, particularly when he began feeling the pulse in a ‘Chinese’ style. This, the article concludes, suggests that historians of the senses need fundamentally to reconsider the model of culture which underpins their work, focusing less on the ways in which people have interpreted or ordered sensory stimuli, and rather analysing the senses as forms of skill or dynamic ways of engaging with the world.

During the Second World War, controversy surrounded not the inevitability of psychiatric casualties but the extent to which they could be minimized by selection, training, morale, and leadership. By early 1944, when planning for the D-Day landings was advanced, the problem of the psychiatric battle casualty was considered manageable by careful preparation and clinical understanding. The campaign to liberate Europe offered the newly formed Directorate of Army Psychiatry an opportunity to demonstrate its effectiveness. Psychiatric services were deployed to Normandy to maximize the return of front-line troops to duty. Commanders, however, entertained doubts about the value of military psychiatrists. By offering a sanctioned escape route from battle, some believed that their mere presence undermined the fighting spirit of combat troops. The records of 32 General (Psychiatric) Hospital have been analysed to discover categories of troops most vulnerable to breakdown and to assess the impact of front-line treatments. Infantry soldiers, those most likely to be killed, were disproportionately represented amongst admissions. Senior non-commissioned officers were also at elevated risk of breakdown, some being war weary from earlier campaigns. Probably 36 per cent of admissions returned to combatant duty, and 53 per cent were evacuated to the UK. The scale of psychiatric casualties revealed failures in pre-deployment screening.

This article reconsiders the sugar duties controversy in early Victorian Britain. Rather than representing the defeat of abolitionism by free trade zeal, the sugar question was a contest of two varieties of anti-slavery thought which had previously co-existed: one believing that slavery's immorality was accompanied by its productive inferiority to free labour and the other asserting that slavery's profits in this world were punished outside the marketplace. West Indian decline after the end of protection led to a revision of free labour superiority, with providential externalities replacing marketplace competitiveness. The episode demonstrates how little most Britons understood the welfare of black freedmen to be connected to anti-slavery after emancipation. A fuller appreciation of the slave sugar debate furthermore recovers an important abolitionist strand in the new ‘human history’ of free trade.

It is often suggested that the earliest theorists of neo-liberalism first entered public controversy in the 1930s and 1940s to dispel the illusion that the welfare state represented a stable middle way between capitalism and socialism. This article argues that this is an anachronistic account of the origins of neo-liberalism, since the earliest exponents of neo-liberal doctrine focused on socialist central planning rather than the welfare state as their chief adversary and even sought to accommodate certain elements of the welfare state agenda within their market liberalism. In their early work, neo-liberal theorists were suspicious of nineteenth-century liberalism and capitalism; emphasized the value commitments that they shared with progressive liberals and socialists; and endorsed significant state regulation and redistribution as essential to the maintenance of a free society. Neo-liberals of the 1930s and 1940s therefore believed that the legitimation of the market, and the individual liberty best secured by the market, had to be accomplished via an expansion of state capacity and a clear admission that earlier market liberals had been wrong to advocate laissez-faire.

This article examines British attitudes towards the career of Sir James Brooke, the English rajah of Sarawak, between 1846 and 1851. It argues that Brooke's early reception as a hero, and the succeeding debates over the principles of his enterprise, were important for three reasons. First, they suggest that the domestic negotiation of imperial issues was influenced much more profoundly by contextual anxieties about the nature of British politics and character, than by considered engagement with conditions overseas and the character of dependent peoples. Secondly, they demonstrate the continued significance of Britain's ‘civilizing mission’, variously defined, as part of a politics of national identity in this period. Finally, the rejection of the radical challenge to Brooke's suppression of ‘piracy’ in the Eastern seas underscores the increasing dominance at this time of a more pragmatic, self-interested conception of how native peoples should be handled.

Although higher murder rates have traditionally been associated with large cities, this view has recently been challenged by several historians who have argued that ‘homicide rates were negatively correlated with urbanisation and industrialisation’, and this is rapidly becoming the new consensus. By exploring the geography of homicide rates for one area undergoing rapid urbanization and industrialization – England and Wales, 1780–1850 – this article challenges this new view and re-assesses the relationship between recorded homicide rates and both modernization and urbanization. After discussing the methodological problems involved in using homicide statistics, it focuses mainly on the first fifteen years for which detailed county-based data is available – 1834–48 – as well as looking at the more limited late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century evidence. This data raises fundamental questions about the links historians have recently made between urbanization and low homicide rates, since the remote rural parts of England and Wales generally had very low recorded murder rates while industrializing and rapidly urbanizing areas such as Lancashire had very high ones. Potential explanations for these systematic and large variations between urban and rural areas – including the impact of age structures and migration patterns – are then explored.

This article examines the prelude to, and machinations surrounding, the arrest, trial, and expulsion from America of Charles Rowcroft, the British consul in Cincinnati. Rowcroft's difficulties were a direct consequence of the conniving of Irish-American nationalists in the region during the Crimean War. The article places these events in Cincinnati against a backdrop of intense Anglo-American diplomatic distrust. It also highlights the exaggerated Hibernophobic response of some British officials in the United States. A study of Irish-American nationalism during the 1850s, bridging the historical and historiographical gap between the 1848 Young Ireland rebellion and the beginnings of Fenianism, has long been wanting. This article is a first, important step toward filling that void, elucidating the hitherto hidden extent of Irish-American agitation during the Crimean War.

The historian, Hannah Lawrance (1795–1875), played an important role in nineteenth-century public debate about women's education. Like Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft, she argued that virtue had no sex and she promoted the broad education of women in order to increase their opportunities for employment. But unlike her bluestocking predecessors, she derived her argument from a scholarly reappraisal of women's history. Whereas the Strickland sisters' Tory Romantic histories celebrated the Tudor and Stuart eras in particular, Lawrance's ‘olden time’ celebrated the medieval period. This is when she located England's civilizational progress, driven by the education of queens and the wider state of women's education, allowing her to evade the potential conflict of a feminine creature in a manly role. Using the condition of women to measure the peaks and troughs of civilization was a familiar approach to historical writing, but Lawrance's radical argument was that women were often responsible for England's progress, rather than passive bystanders. Her emphasis on women's contribution to public life complemented the Whig-nationalist narrative and secured her a high reputation across a range of political periodicals. Above all, it appealed to other liberal reformers such as Thomas Hood, Charles Wentworth Dilke, and Robert Vaughan, who shared Lawrance's commitment to social reform and helped to secure a wide audience for her historical perspective.

This article argues that those termed ‘liberals’ in the United States had the opportunity in the late 1940s to use overseas case studies to reshape the ramshackle political agenda of the New Deal along more specifically social democratic lines, but that they found it impossible to match interest in the wider world with a concrete programme to overcome tension between left-wing politics and the emerging anti-totalitarianism of the Cold War. The American right, by contrast, conducted a highly organized publicity drive to provide new meaning for their anti-statist ideology in a post-New Deal, post-isolationist United States by using perceived failures of welfare states overseas as domestic propaganda. The examples of Labour Britain after 1945 and Labour New Zealand both provided important case studies for American liberals and conservatives, but in the Cold War it was the American right who would benefit most from an ideologically driven repackaging of overseas social policy for an American audience.

About the circumstances surrounding Hobbes's dismissal from Charles's court and his subsequent departure from Paris at the end of 1651 we know little. While recent scholarship has clarified the broad outline of events, fresh evidence allows us to add some detail, showing that Leviathan was attacked in a sermon delivered by Richard Steward in the Anglican chapel of Sir Richard Browne, thus confirming Hobbes's claim for the involvement of the Anglican establishment in engineering his dismissal from court and giving us a slightly clearer sense of the source and character of the move against him.

Sir Horace Wilson was Neville Chamberlain's confidential adviser while the latter was prime minister. The article addresses three questions. First, what was Wilson's role in Whitehall in connection with rearmament and foreign policy? Second, did he diminish the influence of the Foreign Office? Third, what contribution does his defence of appeasement make to understanding of a subject that continues to divide historians? The article concludes that Wilson played an important role in enabling Chamberlain to pursue his foreign policy goals. However, when there was outright disagreement between Wilson and the Foreign Office, it was the Foreign Office view that prevailed. Finally, the evidence of Wilson's words and actions, both in 1937–9 and later, broadly supports R. A. C. Parker's post-revisionist interpretation of appeasement, particularly as regards Munich, but Wilson was a good deal firmer in 1939 about Britain's will to fight, if necessary, than his critics then or later allowed.

The puritan pastor and writer, Richard Baxter, and a member of a prominent Derbyshire family, Katherine Gell, exchanged a series of letters between 1655 and 1658. This article highlights the existence of three further items of correspondence in this exchange, located in the Derbyshire Record Office, hitherto believed not to be extant. The additional three letters are all penned by Baxter and include his replies to her first two epistles (dated 28 July 1655 and 4 September 1655) as well as a reply to a non-extant Gell letter (dated 31 July 1658). The correspondence provides valuable insights into Baxter's pastoral methods and the nature of puritan piety. The first two items draw attention to the importance of the dimension of duty within Baxter's pastoral agenda; while expressed in a context of warmth and encouragement, he believes that Gell will find a measure of resolution to her spiritual struggles by careful attention to the obligations of Christian living. The third letter, written some years later, after Baxter has discovered that Gell suffers from melancholia, is couched in a gentler tone and reveals a more reciprocal dimension to their relationship.

This article examines changes to Dublin's built environment in the 1960s through a study of the north inner city. It first discusses Dublin Corporation policy in the area and then studies three efforts to resist these changes, by the Irish Georgian Society, Uinseann MacEoin, and the Dublin Housing Action Committee. It argues that, due to the deficit of urban regulation emanating from central government, these groups could use preservation as a way to articulate a variety of discontents. The three campaigns all had very different conceptions of what was worth preserving in the urban environment, resisted Corporation policy in very different ways, and ultimately came into conflict. This urban activism raised issues about the nature of the city in the Irish cultural imagination, the effects of urban modernization, and the role of voluntary bodies in shaping the urban environment. Through addressing these themes this article makes a fundamental contribution to the historiography of the 1960s in Ireland by assessing the complexities of Irish modernity and the continued impact of a multiplicity of pasts on Irish politics and culture.

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.

Twenty years after its initial publication, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's Pulitzer Prize winning monograph A midwife's tale: the life of Martha Ballard based on her diary, 1785–1812 (1990) still serves as a major benchmark in women's labour/economic history mainly because it provides scholars with a window into the life of a turn-of-the-nineteenth-century lay American rural healer not through the comments of an outsider, but through the words of the healer herself. While, on the surface, Ballard's encoded, repetitive, and quotidian diary may seem trivial and irrelevant to historians, as Ulrich notes, ‘it is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard's book lies … For her, living was to be measured in doing’ (p. 9). By piecing together ‘ordinary’ primary source material to form a meaningful, extraordinary socio-cultural narrative, Ulrich elucidates how American midwives, such as Martha Ballard, functioned within the interstices of the private and public spheres. A midwife's tale is thus not only methodologically significant, but also theoretically important: by illustrating the economic contributions that midwives made to their households and local communities, and positioning the organizational skill of multitasking as a source of female empowerment, it revises our understanding of prescribed gender roles during the early American Republic (1783–1848). Even though A midwife's tale is clearly limited in terms of time (turn-of-the-nineteenth century) and place (rural Maine), it deserves the renewed attention of historians – especially those interested in gender relations and wage-earning, the economic value of domestic labour, and women's work before industrialization.

Scholarly works dealing with the Long Parliament's military finances have often necessarily relied on sampled data and exemplary evidence. This communication demonstrates that full, systematic analyses of the relevant materials in the Commonwealth Exchequer Papers have the potential to alter our understanding of these finances when certain questions are asked. Lacking a detailed calendar, this vast collection of documents is extraordinarily complex and opaque, and because of this it is very hard to deal with holistically. Nevertheless, this communication demonstrates that achieving a broad yet precise view of this vital quantitative material is sometimes possible. It will be suggested here that the army of the earl of Essex enjoyed full payment from the moment of its creation in August 1642 until the end of that October. This will be demonstrated by comparing the total payments received by the foot soldiers to a newly calculated model of their monetary needs during the period in question. Ultimately, there are many possible reasons for the army's failure to secure a decisive victory at Edgehill, but a financial crisis at the political centre was not one of them.

This article recovers the rationale behind the project to found a ‘new’ British history undertaken by J. G. A. Pocock in the early 1970s, and contrasts this with the approach adopted in the subsequent historiography. The article argues that British history as conceived by Pocock was intended to transcend the parochialism of national history whilst also rehabilitating the writing of imperial history without succumbing to the temptations of metropolitan whiggism. Pocock's perspective was constructed against the backdrop of a British withdrawal from empire and led him to a neo-Seeleyan interest in the dynamics of imperial expansion and retrenchment. While this process is best understood through the comparative study of empires, any such undertaking raises complex questions about the ultimate subject of historical inquiry and the nature of historical explanation. In addressing these questions, this article distinguishes the ambition to write the history of a polity from the aim of writing histories of ‘party’ as originally formulated by the historians of the Scottish enlightenment whose work has been among Pocock's abiding subjects of investigation.

This historiographical review assesses recent studies of the development of the modern British empire. It appraises works that explore the transformation of the empire, its changing cultural pattern, and the forces that radically reshaped the empire during the twentieth century. I argue that within the clear shift towards cultural interpretations of the imperial past, three main areas of analytical concern have taken shape: the importance of information and knowledge in empire building, the centrality of cultural difference within imperial social formations, and the place of imperial networks and patterns of cross-cultural exchange in the operation of the empire. The review suggests that the relationships between the economic and cultural domains of empire require close examination and that historians of empire must remain attentive to the weight and significance of pre-colonial structures and mentalities in moulding the shape of colonial political and cultural terrains.

This historiographical review discusses recent literature on cities in modern Central Europe – mainly on Berlin and Vienna – which reflects the great variety of approaches to urban history and underlines the importance of urban history for the study of modernity. The history of urbanization was a central event in the history of modernity. Especially in the Central European capitals of Berlin and Vienna, where modernization and urban growth started later and then advanced more quickly than in West European cities, all aspects of social, political, economic, and cultural modernity and its consequences can be observed in detail.