Crown policy towards the nobles and the rule of the provinces under the early Tudors reflected the values and social structures of ‘civil society’ in lowland England. Using as a case-study the Dacres, a minor peerage family who were wardens of the Anglo-Scottish marches, this paper explores the strains and tensions which were created by the application of these norms to the ‘peripheral’ parts of the Tudor state. The paper outlines the political ambitions, resources, and estate-management policies of a border baron, and argues that Henry VIII's policies for the rule of the borders and his expectations of his officials there were unrealistic. It also suggests that the traditional approach of historians to the problems of Tudor politics and government reflects too much a view of events as seen from ‘the centre’ and needs to be balanced by a more sensitive treatment of the problems of the ‘periphery’.

The main aim of the article is to question the widely held view that Francis Bacon's different writings form a single great project. His numerous writings on the greatness of states were not part of his scientific programme. Since Bacon's scientific writings do not provide us with the context in which we should place his texts on the greatness of states, the attempt is made to place them in their contemporary political context. These texts, it is argued, addressed the issue of the union of England and Scotland as well as the question concerning England's possible intervention in the European war in early 1620s. Several scholars have also claimed that, in accordance with Bacon's scientific project, his idea of the greatness of states was an essentially modern programme. Nevertheless, the article attempts to show that as far as his writings on civic greatness are concerned Bacon's moral and economic ideas could be classified as classical republican. James Harrington's analysis of Bacon offers a historical point of departure for reading of his writings on the true greatness of states.

While the restoration of monarchy in 1660 has attracted considerable scholarly interest, historians have usually focused upon the events that led to the abrupt change in the fortunes of Charles II rather than the less dramatic tactics by which the restored king consolidated his power. Yet the challenges Charles faced at his return were formidable, his initial personal popularity surprisingly short-lived. Somehow the regime had to quiet political and religious dissension, satisfy sharply conflicting expectations, and retrieve the power of the sword from a republican army and a volatile and well-armed public. Existing studies of the restoration years fail to explain precisely how the royal government successfully negotiated these difficulties. This essay describes the methods by which order was maintained and control reasserted; how the peaceful disbandment of the republican army and the subsequent control of its veterans were achieved; a police establishment of unprecedented size and effectiveness organized; the foundation for a permanent army laid; and the capacity of English subjects to rebel effectively diminished. In sum, it exposes the policies used to reconstruct royal authority so swiftly and securely that a host of enemies and public disenchantment failed to dislodge it.

During the late eighteenth century organized anti-slavery, in the shape of the campaign to end the African slave trade (1787–1807), became an unavoidable feature of political life in Britain. Drawing on previously unpublished material in the Josiah Wedgwood Papers, the following article seeks to reassess this campaign and, in particular, the part played in it by the (London) Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. So far from being a low-level lobby, as historians like Seymour Drescher have suggested, it is argued here that the Committee's activities, both in terms of opinion-building and arranging for petitions to be sent to the house of commons, were central to the success of the early abolitionist movement. Thus while the provinces and public opinion at the grass roots level were undoubtedly important, not least in the industrial north, it was the metropolis and the London Committee which gave political shape and significance to popular abolitionism.

This article is concerned with explanations of the failure of stateformation and nation building in liberal Italy, and concentrates on attempts to integrate western Sicily into the new political framework. The marxist account of this process has emphasized the extent of peasant revolt against the new state, and its brutal repression. Unification, it is argued, failed because it was based on coercion and domination rather than on leadership by popular consent. The present article suggests that this explanation is incomplete as it ignores the behaviour and attitude of local elites within western Sicily. The dominance of local affairs by such groups was challenged by the advent of a modern centralizing state. The article uses records from this period to show that many local notables frustrated government efforts to set up new town councils, new police forces and a liberal judicial system. This kind of resistance was far more difficult to overcome than popular revolt, because it could (and did) challenge the whole basis of centralized liberal rule. The article also looks at the military repression of the 1860s and argues that it too was undermined by the opposition of local elites. An additional reason, therefore, for the failure of unification after 1860 may be the new state's lack of appeal among its supposed class allies.

The real significance ofthe Representation of the People Act, 1918, for the Liberal and Labour parties lay in its mundane and little discussed financial provisions, not in its extension of the franchise. Despite the electoral reforms of 1883–5, election contests before 1914 were still expensive enough effectively to exclude the Labour party from politics outside the industrial centres. In 1918 the politicians of the older parties took the opportunity to relieve their pockets of a substantial part of the expense of elections. However, Labour was the main beneficiary: its new strategy of contesting seats nationwide was only made possible by the changes in and underlying the Fourth Reform Act. These changes, in turn, enabled Labour to benefit from being a ‘national’ party and ‘alternative government’, during a period when the established leading ‘progressive’ party was divided and weakened. The Fourth Reform Act also assisted Labour's strategy of eliminating the Liberal party as a parliamentary force: Liberals could be denied election victories in the countryside and the suburbs by hopeless but inexpensive Labour interventions.

On September 4, 1939, a special bureau was established within the legal department of the Wehrmacht with the task of ‘ascertaining violations of international law committed by enemy military and civilian persons against members of the German armed forces, and investigating whatever accusations foreign countries should make against the Wehrmacht’. The purpose of this article is to provide a brief overview of the material collected by the Germans during the war, to test the credibility of the German investigations, review case-studies and inquire into the integrity of the judges carrying out the investigations. The Wehrmacht bureau functioned from the very beginning until the final days of war. It investigated some 10,000 war crimes, of which the files for perhaps some 4,000 have survived. Half the files contain investigations of war crimes in the Soviet Union; the other volumes refer to war crimes allegedly committed by American, British, French, Polish, Yugoslav and other Allied nationals. After a careful review of the bureau's records and methods of operation, the conclusion is warranted that the investigations were carried out in a methodically correct manner and that many of the reports present prima facie cases that deserve further investigation. There remains thefundamental question of the judges' integrity, how it was possible for them to carry out investigations into Allied war crimes, when the German government, the SS, the Einsatzgruppen and the Wehrmacht were engaging in various degrees of official criminality. In search of an answer, the author reviews the testimony of numerous witnesses at the Nuremberg trials, including SS judge Georg Konrad Morgen, who had the commander of Buchenwald arrested on corruption charges, but was prevented from completing investigations into concentration camp killings. Hitler's order no. I concerning secrecy appears to have been largely observed, thus frustrating investigation attempts and keeping knowledge of the Holocaust relatively limited.

Although Conservative M.P.s were instrumental in defeating equal pay proposals in parliament in 1936 and 1944, it was a Conservative government which in 1954 decided to proceed with equal pay for female civil servants. Previous explanations for this reversal of traditional Conservative policy have focused on the need to increase the supply of female applicants for civil service positions, and the equal pay campaigns by white–collar unions and by the feminist Equal Pay Campaign Committee. Drawing upon previously unused sources, including P.R.O.files, this article offers a more overtly political explanation.

Within four weeks after the Labour party announced in January 1954 that it would ‘immediately’ implement equal pay when the next Labour government was formed, R. A. Butler, the chancellor of the exchequer, informed his treasury advisers that he wished to proceed with equal pay. With a general election looming in the near future, and believing themselves engaged in a close race with the Labour party, the cabinet reluctantly endorsed reform, fearing that a failure to act might tip sufficient female voters toward Labour to determine the outcome of a close election.

This article surveys the debate on the ‘General Crisis’ of the seventeenth century in the light of hitherto neglected research. Firstly, most theories of the crisis fail to combine its economic and socio-political aspects. Secondly, few explanations of the crisis take account of evidence from the local and regional levels. Thirdly and most seriously, theories of the crisis have ignored Germany, while historians of Germany have ignored the crisis debate. This article seeks to Jill these gaps. It puts Germany at the centre of a comprehensive theory of the crisis that takes existing crisis theories as its starting point, but also shows how the Thirty Tears War, largely caused by the peculiar institutional structure of the Holy Roman Empire, in turn wrought significant institutional change, not just in Germany, but throughout Europe.