During the Second World War, attention turned to reconstructing the world economy by moving away from competitive devaluations, protectionism and economic nationalism that had marred the 1930s. The Americans had considerable economic and political power, and they wished to restore multilateral trade, fixed exchanges and convertibility of currencies. The British government was in a difficult position, for it faced a serious balance of payments deficit and large accumulations of sterling in the Commonwealth and other countries. Multilateralism and convertibility posed serious difficulties. This address considers whether the American government had economic and financial hegemony after the war, or whether it was constrained; and asks how the British government was able to manoeuvre between America, Europe and the sterling area. The result was a new trade-off between international monetary policy, free trade, capital controls and domestic economic policy that was somewhat different from the ambitions of the American government and from British commitments made during and at the end of the war.

Our understanding of ties of loyalty and dependence formed at the level of the Carolingian political elite has been much improved by a great deal of excellent recent research. As mutually beneficial relationships freely entered into, they tend to be sharply distinguished from ties of dependence involving members from the lower echelons of society: the latter ties, on the contrary, are usually seen as the result of coercion, and they were long seen as emblematic of the increasingly oppressive control of local lords. Commendation for these less powerful members of society is thus often seen as tantamount to forfeiting free status. Because oppression, for legitimate reasons, has been so strongly emphasised in historical treatments of this type of relationship, paradoxically little attention has been given to what influence the lower-status party may have had on the proceedings, the extent of their negotiating ability or the range of duties and benefits involved in such agreements. But not all lower-status people made the same deals: the Frankish formularies, an important source of evidence regarding such arrangements, show a complicated situation, indicating that ties formed at this lower level need to be treated with as much nuance as higher-status relationships.

Focusing on London, the paper discusses the interaction between theoretical, descriptive and quasi-historical writing about cities, a growing capacity to visualise city landscape and activities, and forms of graphic representation that drew on those ideas. Reading this interplay as a political space, the paper explores the structure, content and purposes of the ‘London Collection’ of national laws, pseudo-laws and city customs put together in London at about the time of Magna Carta. Though no more than a preliminary investigation, the exercise reveals the extent to which London interests, especially with regard to the politics of international trade, the ‘law of London’, earlier episodes of communal activism and a sense of London's historic destiny within that of the nation pervade the collection as a whole. This casts some doubt on the supposed antiquity of some of the London laws in the collection, which may well have been adjusted for the occasion.

The rapid spread of print in the fifteenth century masks considerable difficulties that faced the industry in adapting to the new disciplines of mass production. Many early print shops were short-lived. Within two generations production of printed books was concentrated in a comparatively small number of major centres of production. This paper explores the implications of these developments for our understanding of the ‘print revolution’. It considers in particular the contrasting fortunes of three major markets: France, one of the largest centres of production; the Netherlands, a major hub of international trade; and England, which lay towards the periphery of the European book world.

This article seeks to relate the course of Edmund Grindal's disgrace to the formulation and enforcement of policy against catholics. It argues that the two were integrally related and that the nature of that interrelationship can be seen as a function of certain manoeuvres and debates about a range of issues involving the queen and her councillors and bishops and indeed members of the wider regime. The resulting exchanges were conducted in terms of the nature and relative significance of the popish and puritan threats. The aim here is to reveal the dynamics of the resulting mode of ideological politics and to show how very serious differences of approach, priority and world view could be both canvassed and contained within the consensual mechanisms and assumptions of the Elizabethan regime. Through a close analysis of one political moment the paper also hopes to demonstrate the extent to which a series of conventionally separately told stories – about ecclesiastical affairs, about foreign policy, about puritans and about catholics, about both court and local politics – need to be seen as parts of a unitary political narrative or process, the nature of which this paper is an attempt to reveal.

The question of whether Ireland had been conquered by England has received some attention from historians of eighteenth-century Ireland, mainly because it preoccupied William Molyneux, author of the influential The Case of Ireland . . . Stated (1698). Molyneux defended Irish parliamentary rights by denying the reality of a medieval conquest of Ireland by English monarchs, but he did allow for what could be called ‘aristocratic conquest’. The seventeenth century, too, had left a legacy of conquest, and this paper examines evidence of consciousness among Irish Protestants of descent from ancestral conquerors. It considers how and why this consciousness took a more pronounced sectarian turn during the 1790s. Williamite anniversaries, increasingly associated with the Orange Order, became identified in the Catholic mind as symbolic reminders of conquest. Thanks to the protracted struggle for ‘Catholic emancipation’, this issue continued to feature in political debate about Ireland well into the nineteenth century, while the passing of the Act of Union (1800) revitalised the older debate about whether England could be said to have conquered Ireland. Liberal Protestants and Catholics contended that England had invariably intervened to prevent any possibility of reconciliation between conquerors and conquered. Thus the language of conquest remained highly adaptable.

The Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45 was perhaps the single most destructive event in twentieth-century Chinese history. However, there has been relatively little attention paid to how war was experienced in the Nationalist-controlled area (‘Free China’) under Chiang Kaishek. Two autobiographical texts are examined here, one a sequence of reportage from the early war years by the journalist Du Zhongyuan, and one a biji (notebook) written immediately after the war's end by the social scientist Xu Wancheng. By choosing particular modern or anti-modern genres and styles to write in, the authors expressed a wider sentiment about the war's ambiguous role in modernising China. Du's work hopes to create modernity from destruction; Xu's suggests that modern warfare has created chaos.

This paper argues that the meaning of consumer society has changed over the last half century, principally through the prioritisation of choice over access. It does this through an examination of the global consumer movement and a consideration of its successes and failures. It demonstrates that through the movement's own tactics, and the defeats it suffered by opponents of regulation, its earlier emphasis on the right of consumers to enjoy basic needs has given way to a greater focus on choice. Consequently, the changing fortunes of consumer activism around the world both reflect and explain the reorientation of global consumer society over the last few decades.