THESE addresses have been trying to explore the obvious paradox in eighteenth-century Britain's fortunes overseas: a North American empire, as I suggested last year, deeply rooted in the rich soil of a close-knit transatlantic community, was to come crashing down in the gale unleashed by the new imperial anxieties and ambitions of Britain's rulers. A British empire was, however, to be successfully planted in the unpromising terrain of alien Asian peoples. It is to the creation of this new Indian empire that I wish now to turn.

TWO hundred years ago today, on 22 January 1799, French troops forced their way into the city of Naples. In doing so, they confirmed the authority of the Neapolitan Republic which had been proclaimed, one and indivisible, the day before by a group of patriots who had taken control of the Castel Sant'Elmo, the fortress on the hill immediately above the centre of the city. Thus began the last of the revolutions which can be regarded as the offspring of the great French Revolution of 1789. There is no denying that the Neapolitan Revolution, like its predecessors in northern Italy and elsewhere, depended on French military intervention. The patriots were not in control of the city before 22 January, and needed the French to quell the popular violence and disorder which had swept the city for the previous week. And when, after three months, the French withdrew their forces, the republicans' hold on the city was too precarious to last more than a few weeks.

THERE is a popular and reasonably accurate view of pre-colonial government in Africa which believes that Africans were governed by rulers who are usually referred to as chiefs. While there were some societies in Africa where authority was exercised in a less obviously hierarchical fashion, most African polities were dominated by individual rulers whose legitimacy depended, as in so many other parts of the world, upon descent and by their near monopoly of material or spiritual means of coercion. Historians of Africa have obviously been interested in the fate of these institutions over time and have broadly concluded that by the twentieth century these monarchies were dying institutions. There are several studies of very varied cases which range from the virtual extinction of chieftaincy at the hands of colonial powers to others in which colonialism deprived traditional rulers of absolute sovereignty and did so by shielding them from the simultaneous corrosion and vitalisation of modernisation. Like most generalisations, this is caricature. But it is fair to say that modern historiography has regarded chiefs and chieftaincy as the peripheral tags of a pre-modern order; where chieftaincy survived into the second half of the twentieth century, it was because of the un-natural, instrumental preservation of these archaic forms of government and value allocation, by colonialism.

‘Well are ye called the Free People.' – Bagheera

BARTOLUS of Sassoferrato (1314–1357) is as famous to legal historians and specialists in the history of political ideas as he is unkown outside those areas of research. His obscurity is owed not to his mind but to his genre: the commentary on Justinian'sCorpus Iuris Civilis, and the occasional monograph of more systematic yet still legalistic lineaments. Of the thousands of lawyers who studied, taught and applied Roman law from its rediscovery in the late eleventh century to the end of the middle ages, there are perhaps three or four who command universal respect, some of whom we shall encounter in what follows. Only Bartolus radiates the nimbus of genius. In the realm of political ideas, he has – perversely, perhaps – best been served by Anglophone historiography, beginning with the classic study published in 1913 by C.N.S. Woolf, continuing by way of Walter Ullmann's numerous articles and most recently subjected to a full-scale analysis by Joseph Canning in his study of the ideas of Bartolus' most famous pupil, Baldus de Ubaldis (d. 1400).

THE relationship between law, the power of participants in disputes, and the structure of society and politics is always a complex one. It is also, not surprisingly therefore, controversial in writings on jurisprudence, modern law, and legal history. In this paper I argue for the importance of legal norms in the conduct of disputes in England in the period between the Norman Conquest and the early Angevin legal reforms. This importance is certainly related to the extent of Anglo-Norman royal power. However, in a wider context I shall argue against any necessary, simple, and direct link between political structure and the existence and influence of legal norms.

THAT something remarkable was happening in England in the quarter millennium separating the late sixteenth century from the early nineteenth is plain. In Elizabeth I's reign the Spanish Armada was perceived as a grave threat: the English ships were scarcely a match for the Spanish, and the weather played a major part in the deliverance of the nation. By the later eighteenth century the Royal Navy was unchallenged by the naval forces of any other single country, and during the generation of war which followed the French revolution, it proved capable of controlling the seas in the face of the combined naval forces mustered by Napoleon in an attempt to break the British oceanic stranglehold. Growing naval dominance was a symbol of a far more pervasive phenomenon. In the later sixteenth century England was not a leading European power and could exercise little influence over events at a distance from its shores. The Napoleonic wars showed that, even when faced by a coalition of countries occupying the bulk of Europe west of Russia and led by one of the greatest of military commanders, Britain possessed the depth of resources to weather a very long war, enabling her to outlast her challenger and secure a victory. The combination of a large and assertive Navy and dominant financial and commercial strength meant that, in the early decades of the nineteenth century, Britain was able to impose her will over large tracts of every continent. But her dominance did not grow out of the barrel of a gun. It derived chiefly from exceptional economic success: it grew out of the corn sack, the cotton mill, and the coal mine.

WERE tendencies in the direction of regional difference in the later Russian Empire outweighing tendencies in the direction of homogeneity? In view of the fact that the empire fell apart in 1917, it looks as if the emphasis ought to be on difference. A good case, however, can also be made for homogeneity. I shall therefore be proposing that the regions of the Russian Empire occupied a more or less constant position on an imaginary `divergence–coalescence spectrum'. Admittedly, the contest between divergence and coalescence ceased to be equal during the First World War and the empire collapsed. This imbalance, however, turned out to be temporary. The empire re-emerged under a new name at the end of 1922 and for sixty-nine years thereafter occupied more or less the same place on the divergence–coalescence spectrum that it had occupied before it collapsed. So I shall be arguing that, except under extreme duress, the empire was stable. It is this stability I wish to draw to your attention. One's natural inclination is to think of the later Russian Empire as a hotbed of change. I have argued in a recent article that the inclination should be resisted in analyses of work-patterns. I shall argue today that it should also be resisted in the field of regional diversity. To make the case, I shall divide what I have to say into three parts, the first on divergence, the second on coalescence and the third on the First World War.

FOR anyone so improbable as a historian of France to presume to address aconference about a landmark in British and Irish history requires someexplanation. It lies in a bizarre twist of professional history which left me,for the best part of twenty years, teaching late eighteenth-century Ireland asa special subject. My research interest, however, has always lain in the ancien régimein France.

‘BRITISH history’, or ‘the new British history’ – a field which the present writer is over-generously credited with inventing some twenty-five years ago – seems to have reached a point of takeoff. At least two symposia have appeared in which the method and practice of this approach are intensively considered, and there are monographs as well as multi-author volumes – though the latter still preponderate – in which it is developed and applied to a variety of questions and periods. Its methodology remains controversial, and it may be in its nature that this should continue to be the case; for, in positing that ‘the British isles’ or ‘the Atlantic archipelago’ are and have been inhabited by several peoples with several histories, it proposes to study these histories both as they have been shaped by interacting with one another, and as they appear when contextualised by one another. There must be tensions between such a history of interaction and the several ‘national’ histories that have come to claim autonomy, and it is probable that these tensions must be re-stated each time a ‘British history’ is to be presented – as is the case in the present paper.

STUDENTS of the Union and the Irish and British contexts in which it was shaped owe G.C. Bolton and his study of the subject,The Passing of the Irish Act of Union, a considerable debt. By 1966, the year of its publication, J.C. Beckett, E.M. Johnston and R.B. McDowell had laid the foundations for a re-evaluation of Irish politics and British–Irish relations in the later eighteenth century, but for many aspects of those subjects, including the Union, Lecky's near-eighty-year-old history still remained the principal source. Bolton's was therefore a pioneering book and not only in the sense that it was the first to be based on an exhaustive study of the available evidence: it also broke new ground in its attempt to measure Irish elite and popular opinion on the issue and in the techniques that were used to do so. For these and other reasons, Bolton's study has had a strong influence on more than a generation of undergraduates at Queen's, some of whom have become major historians of the period; his study is, and will remain, an essential guide to the subject.

THE Union has been little studied; its undoing on the other hand has been much debated. One reason for the contrast is of course that the Union was later seen by many as uncongenial; another was that the methods of securing it seemed on a universal telling clear cut: it was, or so it was said, achieved by corruption and was intensely unpopular. In Lecky's view, for instance, `The measure was an English one, carried without a dissolution and by gross corruption, in opposition to the majority of the free constituencies and to the great preponderance of the unbribed intellect of Ireland.'

IN late-1800, after the passing of the Union, Lord Cornwallis wrote a carefully argued paper on Catholic emancipation in which he posed the chilling question:

What then have we done? We have united ourselves to a people whom we ought in policy to have destroyed.

That Cornwallis, one of the leading proponents of both the Union and Catholic emancipation, should have put the question in such stark terms is revealing. For him, Union without emancipation was worthless; the government would not secure the loyalty of the country, and there would never be a genuine uniting of the peoples on the two islands. The lord-lieutenant's analysis summed up the challenge facing the government towards the end of 1800: how to reconcile the claims of the Catholics with the fears of the Protestants before the beginning of the united kingdom on 1 January. This was a critical issue, because over the previous two years the government had tried to make the Union appear all things to all men, and all creeds. For some, the Union was supported because it seemed to be the best mechanism for securing Catholic emancipation; for others it was welcomed as a way of closing the door on the Catholics for ever. The political crisis of 1801 was a direct result of this confusion and culminated in both the collapse of the ministry and the end of Cornwallis's hopes of making the Union complete.

THE most striking features of the popular political response in Ireland to the attempts between mid-1798 and mid-1800 to bring about the legislative union of Britain and Ireland are its comparative uneventfulness and traditional character. On first encounter, this observation may appear provocative since it is still commonly perceived, the work of G.C. Bolton notwithstanding, that the Act of Union was imposed upon a reluctant parliament and an antipathetic people. Moreover, it does not sit easily with what we know of popular anti-unionism in eighteenth-century Ireland, the most celebrated manifestation of which was the anti-union riot of 3 December 1759 when the Dublin mob invaded both houses of parliament and assaulted a number of leading officeholders arising out of a rumour that a legislative union was intended. Arising out of such manifestations of popular attachment to a domestic Irish parliament, and the high level of political, social and criminal violence during the 1790s, it is hardly surprising that leading figures in the Irish administration anticipated that serious public disorder would be a feature of the opposition to a union in 1798–1800. In point of fact, the decisive defeat of the 1798 rebellion and the strenuous efforts of United Irish leaders to minimise the extent of their revolutionary involvement thereafter ensured that there was no overt popular resistance from a quarter which, during the 1790s, treated every reference to a union with disdain.

THERE was always an important, though varying, distinction between the Irish peerage and the Irish House of Lords. The former dated from the late twelfth century, and the latter, or at least something discernible as its forerunner, from the late thirteenth. From then until the early seventeenth century, because men who were neither temporal nor spiritual peers attended the House of Lords (though in decreasingly significant numbers) by virtue of a writ of summons only, the House of Lords was a larger body than the Irish peerage. Thereafter, due to the number of non-Irishmen and/or non-residents who were created Irish peers, the House of Lords became the smaller body, because such people seldom or never attended.

WHEN writing his monumental history of the British army, Sir John Fortescue devoted just two paragraphs to the military implications of the Union. He noted that Union greatly simplified British military affairs in general and that this was an excellent thing for historians, driven to distraction by the confusing archival situation produced by the pre-Union military relationship of the two countries. The Irish military historian, Sir Henry McAnally, was equally succinct, merely remarking that `military matters had not bulked largely in the Union debates'. In ways they were both right. Although none of the eight articles of the Union refer to the army, it was understood that the assimilation principle, which regulated other branches of the public service and the church, would apply to the army. Yet, beneath and perhaps because of the delusive brevity of these bare facts, lies a seriously under-researched subject with wider ramifications, both in the short and longer term. Before these issues can be developed, it is first necessary to set the context by describing the pre-Union military background Ireland and then outlining the formal changes wrought by the Union.

BEFORE the smoke of the Irish rebellion of 1798 had cleared, the British prime minister William Pitt was convinced of the necessity of a legislative union between Britain and Ireland. He broached the subject seriously with his cabinet colleague, Lord Grenville, on 2 June and by 4 June the joint post master general, Lord Auckland, an expert on Irish commercial affairs, was brought into Pitt's confidence. Pitt told Auckland that he and Grenville had been able to: ‘see daylight in almost everything but what relates to trade and revenue.' The subject of this paper is to discover how matters of trade and revenue were arranged in the Act of Union and to discuss some of the political difficulties which arose from implementing these arrangements. As the evolution of ministers' thinking is documented, the authorship of some points can be precisely identified and the thinking and tacit economic forecasting brought to light. This paper will suggest that the arrangements were intended to be generous to Ireland and contrasts with an Irish nationalist interpretation of the subject articulated in the early decades of the twentieth century. Then the difficulties that politicians experienced in executing policies within the framework laid down by these articles are considered. The whole vice-regal system of government was by no means guaranteed in the immediate post-Union period as it worked against the chancellor of the Irish exchequer in his attempts to manage Irish public finance.

ROY Foster remarks in Paddy and Mr Punchthat a nodding acquaintance with Irish history, which one of his English commentators claimed to have, is ‘the most dangerous type of acquaintance.’ My own growing alarm at attempting to reinvent the wheel for the purpose of this conference has been allayed only slightly by reading a remark of John Stuart Mill: ‘Those Englishmen who know something about India, are even now those who understand Ireland best.

THE political, administrative and social consequences of the union of Great Britain and Ireland, and even more the eventual unravelling of the structures it created, have for the greater part of the past century provided Irish historians with a major theme. By contrast the measure itself has received little sustained analysis or discussion. F.R. Bolton's monograph, first published in 1966, remains – more than three decades later – the standard reference. In part this is a tribute to the depth, breadth and penetration of Bolton's account. But there is also at least the suggestion that the negotiation and passage of the union legislation, during 1799–1800, is to be seen as unproblematic, a relatively straightforward event providing a terminus or a starting point for discussion of the more complex and challenging periods on either side.

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