Investigating the letters, diaries, and memoirs of British officers and enlisted men from the Napoleonic Wars, this article explores the hitherto neglected subject of British soldiers’ perceptions of Napoleon. Soldiers often formed mixed and ambivalent views on Napoleon. At one level, this corresponds with a range of attitudes within Britain, highlighting the important connections between soldiers and domestic culture. Yet these views also reveal what soldiers as a distinct cohort prioritized about Napoleon, and how these perceptions evolved over time. They also reveal tensions and divisions within the army itself, and shed light on British soldiers and patriotism. And finally, they add to our understanding of soldiers’ writing practices, especially their cultural context and the differences between wartime writing and memoirs. A diverse and shifting set of cultural frameworks and lived experiences shaped soldiers’ writings on Napoleon – from the Black Legend and Napoleonic Legend, to the Enlightenment and Romanticism; and from Spain and its battlefields to Restoration Paris and post-Waterloo Britain. Tracing the evolution of British soldiers’ perceptions of Napoleon from the outbreak of the Peninsular War in 1808 to the mid-nineteenth century reveals a growing admiration of Napoleon and the increasing hold of the Napoleonic Legend.

The rise of global history has been a major development in historical studies in recent years, with the history of globalization a central part of that. But did the global matter as much to people in the past as to historians now? This article addresses that question with reference to Britain as viewed through some neglected aspects of the life of the botanist Sir Joseph Banks (1743–1820). He is usually remembered for his extensive global preoccupations. Yet his ability to be a citizen of the world, most famously on Cook's first voyage of exploration, rested on his considerable landed wealth. Indeed, as the years passed, he became more interested in improving both his own estates and the wider region, especially his beloved county of Lincolnshire in England. There, global pressures exerted some indirect influences, but local ones, especially environmental and legal, remained more important, often addressed by resort to parliamentary legislation.

Since 2001, the geo-strategic priorities of the ‘War on Terror’ have prompted renewed attention to the historically significant region of Waziristan. Ironically, given the apparent failure of British attempts to pacify the region in the century after 1849, Waziristan’s colonial history has been picked over by policy-makers, commentators, and scholars for lessons which might be applied to current projects of state-building and counter-insurgency. Unabashedly instrumentalist, these works have reproduced the reductive stereotypes of the colonial sources and helped to entrench partial understandings of the frontier which obscure the dynamic and contingent nature of imperial state-building. This article offers an alternate frame for writing the history of the colonial frontier by re-examining how British officials attempted to constitute colonial authority through their engagements with one of the region’s most powerful groups: the Mahsud Wazirs. Challenging historiographical emphases on oscillating metropolitan strategies, this article maps crucial and largely overlooked continuities in British attempts to pacify the Mahsuds, providing new insights into state-building at the edge of empire and a more nuanced account of how imperial power was engaged, resisted, and deflected by those it sought to control.

This article investigates the potential influence of the newly formed Imperial Germany on Transylvanian Saxon politics. The Saxons were German-speaking settlers with long traditions of local autonomy and political privileges within the kingdom of Hungary. From the early eighteenth century, Saxon politics had been defined by its relations to Hungary and to the Habsburg monarchy as a whole. Under the dualist system set up in the 1867 Compromise, the Hungarian government exerted control over Transylvania. The unification of Germany in 1871 introduced a new factor into Saxon politics since there was a clear territorial subject for the indistinct notions of pan-German cultural, religious (Lutheran), and historical affinities. The issue of Saxon administrative and political autonomy, eventually removed by the Hungarian government in 1876, forms a case-study of Saxon politics and the place of Germany within it. There was a spectrum of responses, not simply increased German nationalism amongst Saxons, and the article traces the careers of Georg Daniel Teutsch, Jakob Rannicher, and Guido Baussnern to highlight the diversity within the Saxon camp. From the perspective of Imperial Germany, diplomatic considerations such as regional stability outweighed any possible intervention in Hungarian domestic matters. Moreover, the German public remained largely indifferent to appeals for support.

In the autumn of 1913, Japanese radical journalist Ishikawa Sanshirō (1876–1956) fled Japan for Europe on a self-imposed exile that would last more than seven years. While there, he mingled with English social philosopher Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) and his circle of friends, and resided for several years with the family of French anarchist Paul Reclus (1858–1941), nephew and professional heir of famed nineteenth-century geographer Elisée Reclus (1830–1905). Ishikawa’s travels contributed to the development of an intricate web of non-state, non-institutional links, fuelling an exchange of knowledge that spanned four decades. His personal trajectory highlights the significance of individual-based activism to the early twentieth-century global spread of anarchism. The experience of exile is also a valuable opportunity to explore how chance encounters, emotional ties, and subjective politics shape ideas of social change in tension with ideological consistency.

This article examines the contributions of the Miskitu people of colonial Nicaragua and Honduras to Britain's largest military intervention in interior Central America – the invasion of Spanish Nicaragua in 1780. Lacking the local skills and knowledge essential to offensive operations in the region, the expedition relied on an existing alliance with the Miskitu. Charting the evolution of this alliance, this article reveals not only the importance of indigenous manpower to colonial endeavours but also how intercultural campaigns generated powerful assumptions about martial skills and racial categorizations. These assumptions were highly vulnerable to misunderstandings that, in turn, had a profound effect on supposedly rigid European concepts of national policy, military planning, and strategic interests. The failure of British officials to appreciate the needs of their allies ended hopes of defeating the Spanish empire. But the failure also shaped understandings of the Miskitu and broader British interests in Central America. The raising of military labour was much more than the process of hiring soldiers. It was a broader process of negotiation, understanding, and misunderstanding that helped define the expansion of European empires in the new world.

The years of fascist rule in Italy saw an unprecedented mass political mobilization of women, a mobilization that has, to date, been little studied by historians. This article focuses on the role of the ispettrici nazionali – the highest rank that women ever reached in the fascist party hierarchy. It attempts to piece together a ‘group portrait’ of these hitherto unstudied female hierarchs, who were appointed from 1937 onwards to form a group leadership for the fasci femminili – the women's section of the party and the only way that women could join it. The article investigates who these women were, how they managed to rise to this prominent position, their ideas and motivations, and their role in organizing and mobilizing millions of female party members for political campaigns and for the war effort.

Scholars inquiring into Saudi–Egyptian or Hijazi–Egyptian relations, or the history of modern Saudi state formation, have been tempted to concentrate on the June 1926 attack by the tribal Ikhwan on the Egyptian Maḥmal, or pilgrimage caravan, as the key to understanding these relations. But such a courte durée, sometimes known as the événementielle approach, leaves out much rich depth. In fact, when placed within the wider time frame of the longue durée of relations between Egypt and the Hijaz, which is Arabia's western littoral region and home to Islam's holiest places, its historical significance becomes more about ending Egyptian claims of primacy in the Hijaz than achieving internal Saudi state consolidation. It is the longue durée that should command attention, for the only way that Ibn Saud could refashion to his own favour the historical connections that defined Islamic legitimacy in a political form was to cut the Gordian knot between Egypt and the Hijaz. He had to break up the Red Sea littoral system, and tie the holy places instead to the Saudi heartland of Najd. At the Red Sea's expense, the Arabian Peninsula, dominated by Saudi Arabia, became the new geo-political feature of the region.

This article assesses ‘Rotten Protestants’, or Protestant home rulers in Ulster, by means of an analysis of the Ulster Liberal Association, from its founding in 1906 until its virtual disappearance by 1918. It argues that Ulster Liberalism has been neglected or dismissed in Irish historiography, and that this predominantly Protestant, pro-home rule organization, with its origins in nineteenth-century radicalism, complicates our understanding of the era. It has previously been argued that this tradition did not really exist: this article uses prosopography to demonstrate the existence of a significant group of Protestant Liberal activists in Ulster, as well as to uncover their social, denominational, and geographic profile. Ulster Liberals endured attacks and boycotting; this article highlights the impact of this inter-communal violence on this group. Although Ulster Liberalism had a substantial grassroots organization, it went into sharp decline after 1912. This article describes how the third home rule crisis, the outbreak of the Great War, and the Easter Rising of 1916 prompted a hardening of attitudes which proved detrimental to the survival of a politically dissenting tradition within Ulster Protestantism.

This article attempts to shed new light on the character of late Victorian Liberalism by investigating its political priorities in British India. It takes as its particular focus the debates which raged between 1881 and 1883 over the Government of India Resolution on Local Self-Government. Along with the Ilbert Bill, the Resolution comprised the centrepiece of the marquis of Ripon's self-consciously Liberal programme for dismantling Lytton's Raj. When analysed in conjunction with contemporaneous Liberal discourse on English local government reform, the debates surrounding the Resolution help to clarify many of the central principles of late Victorian Liberalism. In particular, these debates emphasize the profound importance of local government reform to what one might call the Liberal project. Beyond its utility in effecting retrenchment, efficiency, and ‘sound finance’, local government reform was valued by Liberals as the best and safest means of effecting ‘political education’ among populations, in both Britain and India, with increasingly strong claims to inclusion within the body politic.

This article explores Free French responses to Allied planning for post-war international relief in Europe. A number of French experts in exile, often veterans of the League of Nations, advocated international co-operation with the nascent United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). For such figures, participating in the UNRRA could bring critical knowledge, political legitimacy, experience, and funds. They also hoped that this participation could bolster French prestige in the wake of the recent experience of defeat and foreign occupation. Their efforts had little impact on the early development of international relief, yet the contacts and exchanges between French and Allied planners resulted in a political imperative that gave a new impetus to the post-war restructuring of French relief abroad. Studying the complex inter-relationship between French foreign policy and humanitarian efforts during the Second World War can offer historians a framework through which to reconsider French attempts to reassert their power globally. Crucially, this article argues that the UNRRA was used by a number of French expert planners as a platform from which to pursue broader political aims, notably the reassertion of republican legitimacy and the re-establishment of national sovereignty.

For the past two decades, Canadian international historians have largely missed the Cold War, or at least a significant portion of it. Certainly, there has been no shortage of studies of Canadian foreign policy featuring the bipolar struggle, and yet historians have largely confined their attention to Canada's admittedly crucial relationship with the United States, while Canadian–Soviet relations have been ignored. Indeed, in the historiography of Canada's Cold War international relations, the communist powers are largely missing. Hoping to challenge this limited focus, we frame our article around two Canada–US air defence exercises held in 1959 and 1960. While historians have viewed these exercises within the context of Canada's relationship with the United States, we highlight the wider Cold War framework in which Canadian policy was formed. After all, these exercises occurred during the mini-détente of the late 1950s and the collapse of the Paris summit in May 1960. As we demonstrate, the failure to take full account of the Cold War is a shortcoming of much of the writing on Canadian international relations, and so we offer an example of the need to take seriously Canada's foreign policy toward the communist bloc.

The author and politician Morgan Philips Price (1885–1976) is best remembered today as a sympathetic eye-witness to the Russian Revolution and commentator on events in Soviet Russia throughout his long life. Less well known are his activities in Germany, to which he travelled in 1918 to observe the course of the November Revolution and better communicate his favourable view of Bolshevik Russia to Western Europe, and where he remained until 1924. In the summer of 1919, Price was arrested and held without trial in Berlin's Moabit prison, an incident which he later insisted was instigated by the British authorities. This article examines the extensive files on Price kept by the British security services in order to verify this interpretation of his arrest. In so doing, it will argue that a consideration of the case not only sheds light on an interesting aspect of Price's biography but also reveals much about the prevailing mind-set amongst some leading British military officers, security personnel, and politicians, and the methods by which they sought to neutralize perceived ‘revolutionary’ threats in the months after the First World War.

It is widely recognized that ‘the individual’ was prioritized by the Thatcher governments. However, there has been little analysis by historians of exactly how the Thatcher government conceptualized ‘the individual’. In this article, we attempt to remedy this deficiency by undertaking a case-study of a key Thatcherite social policy reform: the introduction of ‘personal pensions’. This approach allows us to understand the position of ‘the individual’ on the functional level of Thatcherite policy-making. In doing so, we argue that there was no coherent or fixed Thatcherite concept of the individual. Instead, we identify three fundamental tensions: (i) should individuals be capitalists or consumers; (ii) were they rational or irrational; and (iii) should they be risk-taking entrepreneurs or prudent savers? This reflected, in part, conflicts within the diverse tapestry of post-war neoliberal thought. We demonstrate in this article that these tensions undermined the Thatcher governments’ original attempt to create a society of entrepreneurial investor-capitalists, which in turn cemented their preference for simply maximizing individual freedom of choice within a competitive – yet tightly regulated – market environment.

Generic fascism scholarship, which has turned strongly towards cultural political history in recent years, has focused heavily on themes of rebirth in fascist culture, but rebirth's counterpart of decline remains under-researched. After emphasizing the existence of several distinct and even mutually exclusive ideological strands in the NSB, this article shows how ideological difference was marked by narratives of decline. But they were equally used to generate a coherent political message about the contemporary state of the Netherlands. Central to their functionality as a unifying tool was party newspaper Volk en Vaderland, which served to promote a patriotic, news-focused, and peculiarly Dutch narrative of decline that overarched ideological difference. Yet more than just tying ends together, one narrative in particular served as a crucial ideological constant in the Movement, namely the Leider Anton Mussert's narrative of decline since the early modern Golden Age of the Dutch Republic, which tied traditional liberal patriotic themes into fascist discourse. Where other historians have emphasized Mussert's lack of moral and ideological leadership, the article impresses how narratives of decline functioned as moral support, and rallied NSB loyalists throughout the German occupation of the Netherlands, until Mussert's own death.

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.

The article addresses the question of Mussolini's role in the fall of fascism. After Alamein and Stalingrad, in order to save the regime, Mussolini's main concern became how to reach a compromise peace agreement with Soviet Russia. As Hitler remained obdurate, however, the sole option left to the duce was to send stern warnings to Berlin about the precariousness of his domestic position. Mussolini's growing apathy and unusual passivity facing domestic opposition, as well as his demeanour during the Grand Council of Fascism, between 24 and 25 July 1943, which eventually spelled his fate, have often been interpreted as the result of his declining health or of his overconfidence. On the contrary, in his desperate struggle to sway Hitler, Mussolini needed to provide him with a last and unquestionable proof of how awful the situation had become for the regime in Italy and for himself. In Mussolini's twisted calculations, by deliberately provoking the opposition against him, the vote in the Grand Council would have provided that evidence. It proved to be his last political gamble.

This article tells the history of the midlife crisis, for the first time. Today, the idea of midlife crisis conjures up images of male indulgence and irresponsibility, but it was first successfully promoted as a feminist concept that applied to men and women equally and described the dissolution of gender roles at the onset of middle age. Although the term was coined by the psychologist Elliott Jaques in the 1950s, it only came into general use two decades later with journalist Gail Sheehy's bestselling Passages (1976), as a concept that relied on older understandings of middle age as a welcome ‘release’ from motherhood and domesticity. The feminist origins of the midlife crisis suggest, first, that journalistic publishing can be more significant for the history of an idea than specialists’ theories, even if those precede it. Secondly and more importantly, it sheds new light on Susan Sontag's classic analysis of the ‘double standard of aging’ by making visible how women used the notion of midlife change to undermine gender hierarchies.

During the summer of 1967, the United States experienced a series of race riots across the nation's cities as largely black neighbourhoods rebelled against the conditions in which they were living. The crisis reached its apogee in July when the worst riots since the American Civil War struck Detroit. In this atmosphere, legislators were faced with a stark choice of punishing rioters with stricter crime measures or alleviating living conditions with substantial federal spending. Despite being a minority in Congress, elected Republicans found themselves holding the balance of power in choosing whether the federal government would enforce law and order or pursue social justice for ghetto residents. While those Republicans who pursued ‘order’ have been given prominence in historiographical narratives, such politicians only represent one side of the Republican response. Indeed, moderate and progressive Republicans rallied to save Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty and a host of urban spending initiatives that had appeared politically doomed. These actions reveal that scholars have overestimated Republican conservatism during the 1960s. Nonetheless, the rioting left a long-term legacy that enabled ‘order’ eventually to triumph over ‘justice’ in the following five decades.

Reconstructing Britain's cities to accommodate the ‘motor revolution’ was an integral part of urban renewal in the post-war decades. This article shows how opposition to urban motorways had a pivotal role in the retreat from urban modernism in the 1970s. It takes as its case-study Birmingham, Britain's premier motor city, headquarters of the motor industry, and with heavy investment in roads, including the Inner Ring, Britain's first urban motorway completed in 1971. The article traces the collapse of the motor city ideal in Birmingham sparked by controversy over car pollution at Spaghetti Junction, the growth of roads protest, and the implication of the Inner Ring in municipal corruption. In so doing, it identifies the intersection of environmental, political, and economic factors that lay behind the volte-face in urban policy and compares Birmingham with other cities which witnessed similar revolts. It argues that the 1970s in Britain saw the end of a specific engineering vision of the post-war city, centred on the car and the ‘citizen-driver’.