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The article talks about the Working Paper published by the Modern British Studies (MBS) research centre on new ways of thinking about the transformation of British society, culture, politics and economy between 19th century and 2015. It highlights the cultures of democracy and the rising political, social and cultural change. It states that the paper can be used as a study material for understanding the state of history in present times.

This paper celebrates Shauna Singh Baldwin, a Sikh woman's contribution to strengthening her national discourse through her novel, What the Body Remembers. This research also aims to examine the factors involved in creating a nation and nation-state, using the Partition of the Subcontinent and the creation of Pakistan and India as an example. The theories of nation and nationalism by Renan (1883), Gellner (1983), Anderson (1991), Stalin (1994), and Bhabha (1994) have been used to construct the theoretical framework for the current study. Through this novel, written by a woman and based on the Partition of India, the researcher highlights the "female voice." This paper concludes that Baldwin has reinvented Sikh history and customs in her novel and connected her people with their glorious past and the sacrifices of their ancestors. She has highlighted the Sikh community's contribution and disappointment during the Partition of the sub-continent. This research also highlights how Baldwin criticizes British policies, which became the main reason for huge bloodshed during migration. This paper may help the future researcher to focus on the reinterpretation of social, historical, and religious myths from the female point of view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The importance of newspapers in nineteenth-century British politics has long been recognized by historians. Lord Palmerston understood keenly the power of the press and cultivated good relations with a number of papers. This article will elucidate more thoroughly than heretofore his early forays into the world of press intrigue. Palmerston did not, however, earn the regard of The Times, at least not until much later in his career. The Times, edited by Thomas Barnes from 1817 until his death in 1841, was the most powerful newspaper of the era. This article will examine the origins of its long-running feud with Palmerston, demonstrating the personal and political differences at the heart of its inception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses how the British Labour Party's leadership opposed and then reluctantly welcomed the takeover in 1984 of the "Daily Mirror" newspaper and its sister papers by Robert Maxwell. It considers the significance of this decision by detailing the history of the Mirror's ownership and the particular importance of the paper not having a single proprietor for 50 years. It briefly outlines the position of Neil Kinnock and Labour on journalistic autonomy in the press prior to the Maxwell takeover. By outlining evidence from Neil Kinnock's private papers, it details the secret negotiations held between Kinnock and the Mirror staff in their bid to oppose Maxwell. It also considers how Maxwell intervened and why Kinnock had limited choice but to welcome this "monster," in order to maintain newspaper support for the Labour Party.

Historians have traditionally framed debates over Irish policy in the early 1840s between London and Dublin Castle in sectarian terms. Robert Peel's 'liberal-minded' attitudes towards Catholics have been portrayed as conflicting with his lord lieutenant's, which were supposedly anti- Catholic, sectarian and 'Orange'. Using the Earl de Grey's political papers in addition to Peel's for the first time in historical analysis, this article shows this is a misinterpretation which has concealed the actual nature of the policy debates between Peel and De Grey during the 'Repeal Year' period. Conflict arose, not along sectarian or ideological lines, but over the cause of the sudden rise in popular support for the Repeal Association and the nature of public policy which would best counteract this. De Grey thought the 'Repeal Year' crisis was the result of economic grievances, while Peel considered it a religious issue. In the resulting disagreement over the most effective policy, De Grey favoured policies based upon economic conciliation, and Peel prioritized religious concessions towards Irish Catholics. This anticipated debates in Irish policy much later in the nineteenth century between constructive unionists, who advocated economic conciliation to combat the rise of Irish nationalism, and those who supported religious and constitutional reforms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper establishes and explains the important role of the Conservative Government of 1959–1964 in supporting the raising of the school leaving age in Britain from the age of 15 to 16. This was a significant and high-profile national issue that generated much educational, social and political debate around conflicting priorities during this period, and was emphasized in both the Crowther Report of 1959 and the Newsom Report of 1963. The Treasury was strongly opposed to the proposal due to its high financial cost. There was a large element of electoral opportunism involved in the Conservative Government’s approval of raising the school leaving age (ROSLA), announced in January 1964, but it also highlighted deeper complexities and reservations in Conservative attitudes to ROSLA as well as a long-term ambition to consolidate education as a Conservative issue. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Devolution has become a key 'global trend' over recent decades as many states have decentralised power to sub-state governments. The UK resisted this trend until the late 1990s when devolution was enacted by the then Labour Government, taking a highly asymmetrical form in which different territories have been granted different powers and institutional arrangements. Devolution allows the devolved governments to develop policies that are tailored to the needs of their areas, encouraging policy divergence, although this is countered by pressures to ensure that devolved approaches do not contradict those of the central state, promoting convergence. This review paper aims to assess the unfolding dynamics of devolution and policy divergence in the UK, spanning different policy areas such as economic development, health and social policy. The paper emphasises that devolution has altered the institutional landscape of public policy in the UK, generating some high-profile examples of policy divergence, whilst also providing evidence of policy convergence. In addition, the passage of time underlines the nature of UK devolution as an unfolding process. Its underlying asymmetries have become more pronounced as the tendency towards greater autonomy for Scotland and Wales clashes with a highly centralised mode of policymaking in Westminster, the consequences of which have spilt over into the devolved territories in the context of the post-2007 economic crisis through public expenditure cuts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the historical formation of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) in the United States and argues that programme emergence depended on the ability of policy entrepreneurs to link the economic concerns of agricultural production with the ideational concern of national security. Using a historical institutionalist framework this paper stresses the critical juncture of the Second World War and the positive feedback loop created between agricultural industries and schools to understand the emergence of the NSLP. In addition, it stresses the role of frames in policy-making and focuses on the use by policy entrepreneurs of a security frame whereby child malnutrition was cast as a national security issue. The policy window of war gave policy entrepreneurs the chance to use the politically and culturally resonant frame of security, in the contexts of agricultural subsidies, to push for the creation of this programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages theories of mobility to examine the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company's (RMSPC's) 1851 expansion into South America. Through a focus on cooperative strategies and trans-oceanic connections, the article also considers the interplay between Atlantic and wider world shipping networks. The first part of the paper compares the RMSPC's South American branch to the more established West Indies route, and probes the significance of the Company's expansion into the South Atlantic in light of the RMSPC's perceived national and imperial role. The second part of the paper turns to the RMSPC's cooperative strategies and connections between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. Considered as a case study, the RMSPC indicates that the boundaries of British imperial influence incorporated a degree of flexibility during this period, pointing to a need to revise rigid conceptualisations of empire. An argument is also made for the continuing relevance of the Atlantic as a spatial unit during this era, despite the increasingly global connections of the nineteenth-century world. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: In the long 19th century, women seized new opportunities offered by parliament and played a growing role in public politics long before well‐known campaigns for the right to vote. As parliamentary politics grew more restrictive and formalised, women utilised older forms of interaction with the state and occupied spaces that were not explicitly barred to them. By looking at women's appearances before royal commissions and select committees, or women's participation in petitioning, this essay argues that women successfully pressured parliament and won their place in the blue books of government long before their names appeared on the electoral registers or in the columns of Hansard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines debates about the design and provision of post-war housing within the papers and report of the Parker Morris committee. It does so to show how the models of citizens' rights and expectations which underpinned post-war welfare provision were transformed by mass affluence and the dynamic sphere of commercial consumption. Parker Morris's deliberations demonstrate that, as early as the 1950s, the citizen-subject was reimagined as a consuming individual, with requirements based on their expressive needs and consuming desires, and that this had far-reaching consequences for social democratic systems of universal welfare provision. The introduction of consumerist imperatives into publicly defined models of citizens' needs enhanced the political and cultural authority of the commercial domain, prompted a heightened role for commercial experts and market logics within public governance, and served to devalue socialized forms of provision in favour of consumer choice in the private market. The article thus engages with the growing scholarship on the politics of mass consumerism by showing how the material and emotional comforts of post-war affluence came to be constructed as critical to social democratic citizenship and selfhood. Situating this uneasy entanglement of social democratic rights with consumer satisfaction as part of a wider trajectory of political change, the piece suggests that Parker Morris marks an early but significant moment in the transition from post-war welfarism and social democracy to the consumer- and market-oriented forms of governance which came to dominate British politics and society in the latter part of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of the phrase 'basic research' as a term used in science policy discussion dates only to about 1920. At the time the phrase referred to what we today commonly refer to as applied research in support of specific missions or goals, especially agriculture. Upon the publication of Vannevar Bush's well-known report, Science - The Endless Frontier, the phrase 'basic research' became a key political symbol, representing various identifications, expectations and demands related to science policy among scientists and politicians. This paper tracks and evaluates the evolution of 'basic research' as a political symbol from early in the 20th century to the present. With considerable attention having been paid to the on-going evolution of post-Cold War science policy, much less attention has focused on the factors which have shaped the dominant narrative of contemporary science policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stinging nettle plant (Urtica dioica L.) is perhaps best known as an abundant and perennial weed, but throughout history it has been used as a source of fibre in many parts of the world. This paper explores the potential uses of nettle fibre within a historical context and describes efforts made by the German and UK governments to cultivate and process the fibre for special war purposes during World War I and II. There has recently been a revival of interest in this fascinating fibre, and recent attempts to commercialise production are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political impact of 'social acceleration' has recently attracted much attention in sociology and political theory. The concept, however, has remained entirely unexplored in the discipline of history. Although numerous British historians have noted the prominent position of acceleration in the late-Victorian and Edwardian imagination, these observations have never expanded beyond the realm of rhetorical flourish. The present paper attempts to build a two-way interdisciplinary bridge between British political history and the theories of social acceleration that have been posited in the social sciences, arguing that both British political historians and acceleration theorists have much to gain from further dialogue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first attempt, in the nineteen-thirties, to organize and produce a collaborative, multi-volume History of Parliament, researched and written from public funds, was the brainchild of the maverick Labour backbencher Josiah Wedgwood, who invested his scheme with an ideological as well as a scholarly purpose. Described from Wedgwood's viewpoint, the history of his History appears as a crusade in defence of democracy in the age of the dictators, and his bitter disagreements with the 'trades union' of academic historians a conflict between breadth and narrowness of vision. However, the records of the project, and the correspondence of the leading figures, demonstrate the role played by historians like A. F. Pollard, J. E. Neale and L. B. Namier in the framing of the scope and method of the History, and the vital importance of personality in determining the course of its development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The image of Margaret Thatcher appearing on television dressed in a ‘peacock blue sari’ must seem rather farfetched—and yet, for a brief moment, it appeared a distinct possibility. That such an event seemed plausible reflected the growing recognition among senior Conservatives of the electoral significance of ethnic minority voters. While Conservatives had begun to experiment with measures to appeal to BAME voters as early as 1951, from the mid-1970s formal party structures dedicated to the recruitment and representation of BAME voters began to emerge. In 1976 the Party launched the Anglo Asian Conservative and the National Anglo West Indian Conservative Societies, both of which sought to address poor performance among black and Asian voters. This paper explores the development of Conservative electoral strategies targeting BAME voters in the period after 1951, and reflects on what these strategies reveal about Conservative narratives of the nation in the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In 1967, at a rally organised by the International Socialists (IS) to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Russian Revolution C.L.R. James (1901-89) shared a platform with Tony Cliff and others (including the veteran British Trotskyist Harry Wicks and the Irish radical Gery Lawless). The rally, in many ways, encapsulated the contradiction of James as a figure who was paradoxically both respected as a towering intellectual presence on the British revolutionary Left for his contribution during the 1930s, as well as someone who was relatively politically isolated by the 1960s. In 1976, David Widgery could hail James as one of the leading ‘theorists of British Trotskyism’ alongside Tony Cliff and Gerry Healy, yet unlike them, James barely had even the nucleus of a revolutionary organisation around him. This paper explores James’s relationship to individuals and organisations in the ‘New Left’ in Britain after his return from Trinidad in 1962, in particular Solidarity and IS, compares him with two other great Marxist historians in Britain during the 1960s, Isaac Deutscher and E.P. Thompson. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at one of the more obscure moments in British constitutional history, the rise of federal devolution in the United Kingdom in the early 20th century and, in particular, the context to the Conference on Devolution that sat between October 1919 and April 1920. The conference, as this article will briefly discuss, has been relegated to footnote status in the historiography on federal devolution and British politics. However, while the conference has not been the subject of detailed academic attention, the claim that devolution and constitutional reform in this period was a by-product of the crisis in Ireland pre-partition has gathered considerable traction among political historians. This article will redress both the paltry analysis of the Conference on Devolution within the academic literature and the Irish-centric historiography on federal devolution in the early 20th century. On the latter front, this article will demonstrate that the conference was the product of forces that extended beyond the Irish crisis, in particular parliamentary congestion. As for the conference itself, this article will use a wide range of archival sources to examine critically the conference's deliberations and in doing so will challenge prevailing assumptions regarding the supposedly one firm source of agreement during the conference: the powers that the devolved bodies should enjoy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In more than half of the democratic countries in the world, candidates face legal constraints on how much money they can spend on their electoral campaigns, yet we know little about the consequences of these restrictions. I study how spending limits affect UK House of Commons elections. I contribute new data on the more than 70,000 candidates who ran for a parliamentary seat from 1885 to 2019, and I document how much money each candidate spent, how they allocated their resources across different spending categories, and the spending limit they faced. To identify the effect on elections, I exploit variation in spending caps induced by reforms of the spending-limit formula that affected some but not all constituencies. The results indicate that when the level of permitted spending is increased, the cost of electoral campaigns increases, which is primarily driven by expenses related to advertisement and mainly to the disadvantage of Labour candidates; the pool of candidates shrinks and elections become less competitive; and the financial and electoral advantages enjoyed by incumbents are amplified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the impact that the Fourth Reform Act had for the Liberal and Labour parties in Great Britain in 1918. The changes made by the act enabled the Labour Party to become a `national' party; Assisted Labour's strategy of eliminating the Liberal party as a parliamentary force; Significance of the act's timing.

The Irish Brigade in the British service, formed in the 1790s, was composed of Irish Catholic soldiers, who had recently regained official permission to serve in the British armed forces, and Franco-Irish émigré officers. The British government believed that the brigade offered Catholics a ‘fair chance’ to participate in the armed forces, but the reality was quite different. This paper examines the brigade’s origins, difficult formation, and arduous service in the West Indies and Nova Scotia, where it was consigned because of Irish Protestant distrust and political manoeuvring, and explores the changing nature of Irish military identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1880s there was fierce debate in colonial Australia and throughout the English-speaking world about the functioning of increasingly democratic societies and especially who, in terms of race, class and gender, was qualified to participate in the political process. In this formative period of what later became known as the 'White Australia policy', minorities were under intense scrutiny and, within the settler population, the Catholic Irish were the most numerous minority. This paper discusses two controversial and widely-reported 1881 articles by Melbourne writer, A.M. Topp. He argued strongly that the Celtic Irish were actually an 'alien' race, fundamentally antithetical to English governance and morality. Mass Irish migration, in Topp's view, constituted a threat to the political stability and racial superiority of the whole English-speaking world. Topp drew upon contemporary racial science and the works of leading intellectuals, but he was also influenced by political crises then occurring in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. Topp's articles, and the responses they elicited, highlight the complexities of race in colonial Australia by demonstrating that major racial differences were perceived by some to exist within what has often been portrayed as a largely homogenous 'white' settler society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses early years education policy in England from 1918 to 1972, applying the theoretical ideas of John Kingdon. Throughout this period, the educational needs of young children were a low political priority, but they did occasionally rise on the agenda. When the issue gained prominence, politicians considered two key policy alternatives for potential investment: the expensive, self-governing nursery school, orientated towards promoting children’s physical health, and the cheaper nursery class, attached to an infant school, perhaps better at easing transition to formal education. After an initial period of damaging indecisiveness, the choice fell first on nursery schools and then on nursery classes. The reason that such fundamental changes in approach were possible was that an underlying lack of political commitment meant policies were only ever partially implemented. This chaotic pattern of development has had a damaging effect on the coherence of early years services offered today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article explores the history of progressivism in Great Britain. Emphasis is given to debate over municipal socialism in political discourse and the development of the Progressive Party and its administration of the London County Council. Other topics include the influence of political parties, commitment to social progress, and the relationship between liberalism and socialism.

The objective of this paper is to present a legal theory of agency selection. The theory posits why certain legal forms of agency are chosen when agencies are created by the executive branch of government. At the core of the theory is the idea that the executive branch chooses agency forms that strike a politically optimal balance between maximising its control while minimising its legal and political accountability for agency activities. This optimal balance is determined on an issue by issue basis. As such, the rise of the regulatory state has provided a means by which the executive branch of government has been able to strategically choose to divest itself of and minimise its legal accountability for the administration of government while, at the same time, maintaining effective political control of the administrative arm of government. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Conservatives usually play down their intellectual credentials because it provides them with an effective means of distancing themselves from the ‘doctrinaire’ or the intellectualized politics of the left. But this approach was challenged by a significant group of Conservative MPs and intellectuals during the interwar period. Conservatives wrote articles for a range of periodicals, which were still important channels of communication for the sharing of political ideas between the wars. Stanley Baldwin banned government ministers from publishing independent journalism, which meant that it was mainly young, ambitious, or marginalized Conservative MPs who wrote for periodicals. When left-wing sentiment started to swell up during the Second World War, some Conservative supporters started to question the interwar leadership's neglect of the party's intellectual and publishing culture. It was now thought that the Conservative party lacked a convincing media-based popular ideology to compete with the left. But if Baldwin prioritized other aspects of the interwar party's appeal, the intellectual culture of Conservatism still acted as an important barrier to communist and fascist thought in elite political circles. This culture also had important resonances for the party in the post-war period because it contributed to its self-evaluation and policy restatements after 1945. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In ‘inventing’ and exporting modern sports to the world, the British influenced innumerable people. However, by the inter-war period, there was a general anxiety regarding British decline. The reasons were threefold. First, British health and fitness experts underlined the low physical standards of their people. Second, it became evident that Britain's leading position in international sport was under threat. Third, the fascist states seemed to be doing particularly well in this area. How could the British Empire last without strong men to defend it? Perhaps part of the solution might be found overseas in just the place where the present ‘danger’ came from. This paper studies this reversed influence and shows how German influence affected British fitness policies in the 1930s. In a period marked by appeasement, sports meetings, official visits and a large amount of cultural propaganda resulted in the sharing of British and German experiences. However, the attitude of the British was complex and their determination to go their own way limited the effectiveness of German influence. By the time the war broke out, the British had distanced themselves from German organization and values once again. The brief flirtation with fascist forms of physical culture was over. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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This article will discuss the defence arguments that were used to oppose the channel tunnel, the relationship between these arguments and Britain's island status, the perceptions of British insularity, together with how and possibly why these changed in the period 1882-1975. The opposition to the Channel Tunnel project, especially in the period 1880 to 1945, can provide historians with a valuable insight into the British relationship with the sea. In particular, the opposition to a channel tunnel provides a way of analysing concepts of island status within Britain and what being an island meant to the British sense of self and identity, as they were expressed in the media as well as in official papers. At the same time, the changing attitudes to a channel tunnel, notably in the inter-war period and the post-1945 era, also show how the British understanding of what being an island state gave them in terms of security and identity changed. Such a change was as a result of new or improving technologies, particularly the aircraft, and the resulting impact it had on conceptions of security that being an island provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the history of ‘criminal tribes’, policing and governance in British India. It focuses on one colonial experiment—the policing of Moghias, declared by British authorities to be ‘robbers by hereditary profession’—which was the immediate precursor of the first Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, but which so far altogether has passed under historians’ radar. I argue that at stake in the Moghia operations, as in most other colonial ‘criminal tribe’ initiatives, was neither the control of crime (as colonial officials claimed) nor the management of India's itinerant groups (as most historians argue), but the uprooting of the indigenous policing system. British presence on the subcontinent was punctuated with periodic panics over ‘extraordinary crime’, through which colonial authorities advanced their policing practices and propagated their way of governance. The leading crusader against this ‘crisis’ was the Thuggee and Dacoity Department, which was as instrumental in the ‘discovery’ of the ‘Moghia menace’ and ‘criminal tribes’ in the late nineteenth century as in the earlier suppression of the ‘cult of Thuggee’. As a policing initiative, the Moghia campaign failed consistently for more than two decades. Its failures, however, reveal that behind the façade-anxieties over ‘criminal castes’ and ‘crises of crime’ stood attempts at a systemic change of indigenous governance. The diplomatic slippages of the campaign also expose the fact that the indigenous rule by patronage persisted—and that the consolidation of the colonial state was far from complete—well into the late nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Following its late nineteenth-century emergence as an important element within federalist thinking across the British Empire, the idea of Greater Britain lost much of its political force in the years following the Boer War. The concept however continued to retain considerable residual currency in other fields of Imperial debate, including those concerning policies and practices of education across the Empire. This paper explores aspects of such debate by examining the intellectual contexts, theoretical assertions and conceptual formulations deployed in relation to questions about education, leadership, Imperial unity and racial identity in the early twentieth century. These issues are illuminated by an analysis of proposals by the Imperial theorist E.B. Sargant for the educational “colonisation” of the Empire of white settlement by “daughter” schools transposed from the traditional public schools of the metropole and staffed by teachers conceived as “the regulars of the State”. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

There is a discernable mood in macro-level public evaluations of party issue competence. This paper argues that voters use heuristics to transfer issue competence ratings of parties between issues, therefore issue competence ratings move in common. Events, economic shocks and the costs of governing reinforce these shared dynamics. These expectations are analysed using issue competence data in Britain 1950–2008, and using Stimson's dyad ratios algorithm to estimate ‘macro-competence’. Effects on macro-competence are found for events and economic shocks, time in government, leader ratings, economic evaluations and partisanship, but macro-competence also accounts for unique variance in a model of party choice. The article presents an aggregate-level time-series measure to capture the long-term dynamics of ‘valence’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay examines the model of state development put forward by Francis Fukuyama in his book, The Origins of Political Order. It argues that the evolutionary model used by Fukuyama experiences problems when it comes to dealing with specific historical examples. Its emphasis on the Qin state as the 'first modern state' places an excessive emphasis on coercion and violence as the basis of the state. It attempts to relegate Rome to being equivalent to a chiefdom to fit it into his model whereas in reality Rome evolved differently to China and relied much more on cooperation and networks. England after 1688 provides another example of how Fukuyama's model is deficient. On this basis the paper argues that a universal evolutionary model is insufficient to explain political development and it is more appropriate to begin analysis with real political societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay provides a statistical and qualitative analysis of the hierarchical coverage of politics by UK Television news. It finds that there is a rigidly structured hierarchy of political access and focus, whereby the Prime Minister dominates over the cabinet, the cabinet dominates over ordinary MPs, the governing party dominates over the opposition, the three main parties dominate overwhelmingly over smaller parties, and the political elites dominate over ordinary members of the public. The paper also provides a framing analysis of TV news both during and after an election campaign period, and finds a skew towards 'horse race' and personalization coverage which both outweigh 'policy' issues. Thus television news is characterised by a hybrid of hierarchical and exclusive coverage of politics, combined with a narrowly expressed 'cynicism' or populist antagonism towards politics that is personalized and anti-systemic in its focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the role of elder statesmen in mid-nineteenth century British party politics. Influence of elder statesmen in shaping the development of the British constitution; Role of elder statesmen in guiding the queen through a succession of political crises; Impact of the death of George IV on the royal prerogative to select and dismiss ministers.

The Conference on Devolution, 1919–1920 has been a little studied event in Britain’s constitutional history. However, recent analysis has shed new light on this little studied moment in British constitutional history. Building on Evans (2015), this article focuses on the Conference’s deliberations on the units that would be represented by devolution (i.e. whether devolution would be on national or regional lines) to provide further evidence that the division between intra-parliamentary and directly elected devolution was a cleavage that cut through the entirety of the Conference’s work, as opposed to simply being a source of disagreement at the end of its proceedings. As this debate essentially focused on how England should be governed post-devolution, this article also sheds further light on the history of ‘the English Question’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article examines the origins and early history of the Order of the Garter, a princely order of knighthood founded by the English monarch Edward III in 1348. Considering the interplay of the fraternity's characteristics such as monarchical patronage, an emphasis on chivalric values and its distinct religious ethos, the study analyses the Order's impact on both image and power of its first two royal patrons, the sovereigns Edward III and Richard II. First, the paper concentrates on the role of the monarch as patron of the Order; in this context, it focusses on Edward's initial motivation underlying the establishment of the confraternity as well as on royal decisions regarding the choice of insignia, motto and headquarters, which accompanied the foundation. Especially under the reign of Edward, the Order's advancement indicates structural developments in late Medieval English politics as rulership became increasingly corporate and collegial. Still, inclusion into or omission from the Order was largely dependent on the king's will, being determined by close personal relations to the royal court and the monarch himself. A detailed analysis of the membership therefore provides important clues for understanding the significance of the fraternity as a political tool and for recognizing patterns of interaction between monarch and elites. Similarities and differences in Edward III's and Richard II's presidency reveal the adaptiveness of the institution which was, however, only one instrument of power among others. Moreover, the study discusses secular elements of the Order's ceremonial and ways in which the annual feast on St George's Day, the use of particular robes and the integration of Arthurian themes added to the prestige of the confraternity and its cultural meaningfulness. Religious establishments at Windsor Castle and practices associated with the Order of the Garter further aimed at promoting Plantagenet monarchy and ideology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines a crucial and formative decade in the life of Vladimir J. (Kaye) Kysilewsky (1896-1976), a Ukrainian-Canadian newspaper editor, lobbyist, university professor, and historian, who is most familiar to Canadian researchers as the federal civil servant responsible for liaison with ethnic groups and the ethnic press during the early years of the Cold War. It argues that the attitudes and methods (Kaye) Kysilewsky brought to his job as a liaison officer were shaped by his experience as director of the Ukrainian Bureau in London. There, during the 1930s, he met and was counselled by a number of British parliamentarians, academics, and journalists, as he attempted to bring to public attention the murderous famine in Soviet Ukraine (which was denied by the Stalinist regime) and as he tried to contend with the Bureau's obstreperous Ukrainian émigré rivals, in particular the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the criminal law reform career of James Mackintosh (1765–1832). As Recorder of Bombay (1804–11), writer and Whig MP (1813–32), Mackintosh engaged with diverse aspects of criminal law. His view of the organic relationship between law, society, and public opinion, which was shaped by his Scottish intellectual background and Foxite Whig politics, was distinct from the radical and liberal political perspectives most often associated with criminal law reform. The article traces the implications of Mackintosh's approach for the practice of politics and legislation in the period and suggests cause to revise assessments of its outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper reports findings from a study of the changing nature of the narrative contents and production formats of Party Election Broadcasts (PEBs) produced by the Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democratic parties for UK general elections from 1979 to 2010. This analysis tracked production changes that might signal a movement on the part of the political parties toward using marketing-oriented techniques of the kind found in televised advertising. Although PEBs are not technically classified as advertisements by the broadcasting industry, but rather as programs, they nevertheless present an opportunity to political parties to promote themselves and their policies. Using content analysis, it was found that PEBs have grown progressively shorter from 1979 to 2010 and become faster paced. They have become more sophisticated as productions with wider use of dramatized documentary formats rather than talking heads, popular music, and professional performers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the 1770s and 1780s as many as 40,000 German soldiers were hired to defend British imperial interests on four continents. The vast majority--at least 30,000--saw service in America. This article focuses on British and American public reactions to the plan in the period between 1774, when rumors about the intended use of foreign troops first emerged, and the summer of 1776, after the first contingents of German troops had arrived in North America but before military encounters with the colonists had taken place. In Britain, the reliance on forces from outside the empire in a conflict believed to be about British liberties provoked strong opposition. Critics used the hire of "barbarians" as evidence of a sinister plot to deprive Englishmen of their liberties. In America, news of the plan to hire Germans gave radicals an effective tool in their efforts to unite the colonists against the British. An analysis of these public debates sheds light on conflicting perceptions of Britishness and "foreignness" during the Revolutionary period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have long documented changes in knowledge regimes and power relations characteristic of state-centric drives to pacify conflicts and govern populations. But the mechanisms through which social conflicts are 'made legible' in routine policy processes - as well as the reasons why some ongoing conflicts are pacified and others are persistent - have remained less clear. I explore these issues through an analysis of the shifting analytic terrain of national-level commissions of inquiry, an historically powerful form of government organization designed to combine publicly-engaged and 'objective' explanation with recommendations for concrete policies of governance. Drawing principally on 19th and early 20th Century British Royal Commissions, I show how investigations into three fields of social conflict - involving prisoners, the working class, and colonial populations - were characterized by cyclical drives to bureaucratize conflict. Yet strikingly, only two of the three substantive fields - prisons and labor - achieved relative bureaucratic closure. Evidence from commission reports is marshaled to explain why some types of conflict have been resistant to incorporation, while others are more readily absorbed into an apparatus of governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The enclosure of commons and open fields was carried out by many different methods over a long period of time. Traditionally, enclosure methods have been thought to have replaced one another chronologically, unity of possession being replaced by agreements, which were in turn replaced by Acts of Parliament in the mid-eighteenth century. Recent research has however revealed the continuing importance of non-parliamentary methods in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In light of this it is necessary to examine the reasons behind the selection of a particular method of enclosure, which will be attempted in this paper. It is found that the most formal, and thus most expensive, methods were used only when necessary in order to avoid conflict or legal ambiguity, or where specific local problems required them. Less formal methods were preferred where the circumstances were appropriate. Parliamentary enclosure was used as a particularly formal type of enclosure in the most complex or contentious situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Jacobitism -- under the impact of new perspectives in political thought, religion, culture, and society -- remains a contested subject of British historiography. The present article examines various aspects of this academic debate and warns against a monolithic view of the discord that fueled Jacobite disaffection. It shows that Jacobitism -- whether Scottish, English, or Welsh -- was riddled with ethnic and sectarian divisions that made collective, cooperative measures all but impossible. The paper also draws attention to fresh manuscript material that gives greater precision to the myriad forces shaping the agenda and direction of Jacobite activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While elite women's imperialist activism in early-twentieth-century Britain is now well recognised, little attention has been paid to how this female imperialism was integrated into broader right-wing politics. The adherence of many right-wing women to a conventionally ‘masculine’ model of empire is also under-researched. This article explores the connections between imperial and wider right-wing politics, the new forms of Conservative activism for women they generated, and the ‘masculinist’ gender model of this imperial Conservatism, through an investigation of the political life of Violet Milner (1872–1958). It emphasises the impact of the South African war in forming imperial ideologies which influenced attitudes to ‘domestic’ as well as imperial politics; highlights the degree to which elite women participated in the campaigns of the Edwardian radical right over tariff reform, national service and Ulster, and in the interwar ‘diehard’ campaigns over India; and traces the enduring influence of turn-of-the-century imperial attitudes into the post-war era as demonstrated by her revival of the ‘Milner religion’ and her editorship of theNational Review. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Observing the increasing, yet still partial exploration of pluralism, complexity and multiplicity in recent Labour party historiography, this article pursues a pluralist approach to Labour on two central, related themes of its middle-century evolution. First, it probes the plurality of Labour's different conceptions of time, specifically how it lived with the ambiguity of simultaneously viewing social progress as both immediate and rapidly achievable, yet also long term and strewn with constraints. This co-existence of multiple time-frames highlights the party's uncertainty and ideological multi-dimensionality, especially in its focus both on relatively rapid economic or structural transformation, and on much more slow-moving cultural, ethical, and educational change. It also complicates neat characterizations of particular phases in the party's history, challenging straightforwardly declinist views of the post-1945–51 period. Secondly, time connects to Labour's view of the people. Whilst historians have debated between positive and negative perceptions of the people, here the plural, split mind of Labour about the progressive potential of the citizenry is stressed, one closely intertwined with its multiple outlook on how long socialism would take. Contrasts are also suggested between the time-frames and expectations under which Labour and the Conservatives operated. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]