By hook or by crook, sometimes by both at the same time, great landowners, and many of the not so great, have survived into the final decade of the twentieth century. Some of the survivors are, no doubt, clinging on by their fingernails, huddled over a single-bar electric fire in a damp and draughty room of a family mansion that is slowly crumbling over their heads, living on baked beans and memories in the manner of an A. S. Byatt novel. Many, however, are extremely wealthy. Old-established landed families provide between a fifth and a quarter of the 200 wealthiest people in Britain in the early 1990s, a proportion which has changed very little since the 1880s. But what are they for? A hundred years ago it was unnecessary to ask such a question. Meredith Townsend, who with J. L. Sanford produced two volumes on The Great Governing Families of England, writing in 1865 had little need of argument or evidence to support his statement that the great landowners were the governing class. He was more defensive in justifying his selection of just thirty-one families as the core of that class, but in 1865 it was not unreasonable to prophesy that ‘in another hundred years these thirty one families will be the marked and ticketed families among two hundred millions of English-speaking men’, and to argue that: ‘The redivision of property may ultimately shatter their power, but short of that their dignity and consideration will probably for a century steadily increase.’

Among the voluminous papers produced at the Admiralty during the Fisher era in anticipation of a war against Germany there is one entitled ‘Preparation of War Plans’. It is unsigned and undated, but was printed for internal circulation on 24 June 1908 and may thus form part of the work undertaken by the Naval Intelligence Division and the Naval War College in 1908–9 rather than the better-known deliberations of the ‘Ballard Committee’ of 1906–7. Its authorship must remain a matter for speculation, and it may be the product of more than one hand, but the memorandum's breadth of historical understanding suggests that the influence of two men who played a leading part in Admiralty planning at this time: Rear-Admiral Edmond Slade, the Director of Naval Intelligence, and Julian Corbett, the eminent naval historian. The memorandum begins by arguing that British war plans must take into account the political dispositions and commitments of the European powers. Since 1904, it says, these have undergone a profound change, resembling the regrouping of powers which occurred in the mid-eighteenth century. ‘The result on the peace strategy of this country has been tremendous; it has necessitated a complete reorganisation of the whole of our arrangements, and it has forced us to face east, instead of south and west.’ Even though Germany must now be reckoned Britain's chief potential enemy, the situation is still extremely fluid, and the area of greatest uncertainly lies in northern Europe.

Because research calls for work, and work for specialisation, the study of history tends always to subdivide. The deepest of its subdivisions is that between the ‘outer’ and the ‘inner’: between things like war, politics, business and law on one side, and on the other, thoughts and emotions. ‘History’ tout simple has come thus to refer mainly to the external, things usually handled in the past by men, while from the side of this Adam have sprung separate disciplines with names like die history of ideas, or mentalités,—not to mention the literatures in various languages. A glance even at the buildings of a university will confirm this.

By the fourteenth century the descendants of those who had gone from Britain to Ireland in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries had come to call themselves ‘the English of Ireland’ or ‘the English born in Ireland’. Or, to be more accurate, they did so when faced by Englishmen from England: within Ireland they described themselves simply as ‘the English’. From the 1340s onwards a series of disputes with agents of the king formed a context in which they collectively stressed their Englishness. By the fifteenth century this identity was from time to time problematical, both for those who claimed it and for the metropolis. Historians who work on the late medieval and early modern periods have found it equally so, and have argued about the atuitudes and nationality of the settler élite. While fourteenth-century evidence has been called upon in these debates, there has been little serious consideration of the first two centuries of the lordship of Ireland. In what senses were those who went to Ireland during the founding period ‘English’? Why does the emphasis upon being English appear to have intensified among their successors as time went by? What does the self-proclaimed Englishness of the fourteenth century signify? How far do the complexities and tensions associated with it foreshadow the better-known difficulties of later periods? These are the matters I wish to explore.

For the past 40 years the dominant influence over architectural history, and in particular over stylistic analysis, has been the Modern Movement. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes unconsciously, architectural history has been seen through the teleological spectacles of the Modernists who viewed architecture as a progressive force leading inevitably towards the ultimate triumph of Modernism. At its most obvious this can be seen in studies of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century architecture which concentrated on those strands that could be said to have been the precursors of Modernism, while ignoring powerful contemporary factors which do not fit in with the Modernist thesis, like the strength of Classical architecture in the 1930s. But even when discussing earlier periods the same basic assumption has prevailed, that architectural style should be seen as progressive. Thus what became important was identifying new fashions and tracing the precedents. As architectural style always moved on, anything that was not innovative or seemed to be regressive was assumed to be old fashioned and the result of ignorance or lack of skill, and consequently of little interest. With die collapse of Modernism, or at least of the assumption that Modernism is the only acceptable way in which to build, and with the revival of older styles which 10 years ago were thought to be dead and buried, this teleological approach to architectural history needs revision. The study of Gothic Revival architecture in England is one area that is revolutionised by the removal of Modernist assumptions.

This paper requires some justification. In what is otherwise an under-researched period, the campaign for reformation of manners in the 1690s has been a very well-ploughed furrow indeed. Since the publication in 1957 of Dudley Bahlman's The Moral Revolution of 1688, there have been half a dozen major essays on reformation of manners, as well as some outstanding unpublished research. The work has not only been copious, but also of a very high standard. Nevertheless, there is one aspect of reformation of manners that has only been dealt with tangentially in the existing literature: the relationship between godly reformation and the cause of Protestant union. Historians have noted that the societies for reformation of manners were composed of both churchmen and dissenters, and that this stimulated high church attacks upon the societies in Anne's reign. But there has been little analysis of the ways in which the ideal of Protestant union coloured some aspects of reformation of manners. The second half of this paper seeks to fill that gap. But first it will be necessary to explore the providentialist context of reformation of manners ideology. We shall begin by taking a brief excursion to the island of Jamaica.

The great Helmuth von Moltke, addressing the German Reichstag in May 1890 in the last year of his very long life, gave a sombre warning of wars to come: Gentlemen, if the war which has hung over our heads for more than ten years like a sword of Damocles—if this war were to break out, no one could foresee how long it would last nor how it would end. The greatest powers in Europe, armed as never before, would confront each other in battle. None of them could be so completely overthrown in one or two campaigns that they would have to admit defeat, accept peace on harsh terms, and not be able to revive again after a years' -long interval to renew the struggle. Gentlemen, it could be a Seven Years' War; it could be a Thirty Years' War; and woe to the man who sets Europe ablaze, who first throws the match into the powder barrel.

On the north wall of the cloisters in Bristol Cathedral there is a small headstone ‘Sacred to the Memory of Thomas Daniel Esq … a respectable Merchant of this City who was born in Barbados on the 14th March 1730 and departed this life on the 23rd February 1802.’ In the north transept, on a floor marble over the family vault, another inscription to the same man can be found. Thomas Daniel Sr, as he was known, came from a mercantile family that had settled in Barbados in the mid-seventeenth century. He spent his early career in that island and later emigrated to Bristol in 1764. From then onwards he built up a substantial business as a Bristol West India merchant, and handed this down to his son, Thomas Daniel Jr, at the turn of the nineteenth century. The son expanded his trade in Caribbean sugar and acquired slave plantations in Barbados, Antigua, Nevis, Montserrat, Tobago and British Guiana. After Emancipation in 1834 he and his brother, John, received £102,000 in compensation for the loss of their slaves— the second largest sum awarded to Bristol proprietors. The money accumulated by Thomas Daniel Jr enabled him to purchase a fine town house in Berkeley Square, in a fashionable residential area, plus a pleasant country seat at Henbury, just beyond the north-western boundaries of the city. Burgeoning wealth went hand in hand with civic status. From 1785 until 1835, Daniel served on the Bristol Common Council, the governing body of the city.

Looking at the Atlantic in the eighteenth century, it seems to me that we still lack a comprehensive view of what changed during this period, where we should set its boundaries, and how we might interpret the salient characteristics of the century. Perhaps, we have been both too general and too specific, simultaneously seeking with the synthesisers to explain too much and with the more specialised monographic literature to explain too little.

Over recent years, questions concerning the character and direction of social change in colonial India have become increasingly complex. Until the 1960s, it remained possible to conceive the coming of British rule as representing ‘the beginnings of modernisation’ and to write Indian history in terms of an ‘heroic’ struggle to fulfil the civilising mission: ‘heroic’, in the British sense, because it largely failed. Except among a narrow stratum of elites, Indian society obviously refused the West's invitation to ‘usher it into history’ and India's culture moved very little towards convergence with the West's.

We live in an age (perhaps particularly apparent to those of us who work in universities) when informality is de rigueur, its own conventions and forms to be mastered if one is to live easily and effectively with colleagues, students, acquaintances or even the members of one's family. That it was not always so is a truism which attests to the reality of social change. One of the markers of such change, or of changes in social expectation, will be the realignment of relationships between the formal and the informal and of perceptions which govern interpretation of such relationships. In an age of revolution, or revolutionary aspiration, we might expect such realignments to be particularly dynamic or, more radically, for the categories of informal and formal themselves to be called in question.