Political History

This is a reinterpretation of the Georgian political order. Samuel Johnson's life (1709–84) spans most of the 18th century. His contacts in the literary and cultural, scholarly, and political worlds were wide, including Gibbon, Goldsmith, Fox, Burke, Reynolds, Adam Smith, and many others. This book uses Johnson's career as a point of entry into Hanoverian England. The book explores major contemporary issues, such as education, the poor, capital punishment, the colonies, and Toryism. He challenges many assumptions about Johnson's own attitudes, and offers a substantial modification to the traditional picture of Johnson and the political world of the 18th century.

This book examines the central role played by Ulster Presbyterians in the birth of Irish republicanism. Drawing on recent trends in British and American historiography, as well as a wide range of Irish primary sources, the author of this book charts the development of Presbyterian politics between the War of American Independence and the rebellion of 1798. He begins by tracing the emergence of a radical sub-culture in the north of Ireland, showing how traditions of religious dissent underpinned oppositional politics. He goes on to explore the impact of American independence in Ulster, and shows how the mobilization of the Volunteers and the reform agitation of the 1780s anticipated the ideology and organization of the United Irish movement. He describes how, in the wake of the French Revolution, Ulster Presbyterians sought to create a new Irish nation in their own image, and reveals the confessional allegiances that shaped the 1798 rebellion. Above all, this book uncovers the close relationship between theological disputes and political theory, recreating a distinctive intellectual tradition whose contribution to republican thought has often been misunderstood.

This is an in-depth analysis of the impact of Italian unification on the hitherto isolated communities of rural Sicily. Traditional explanations of Sicily's instability depict a society trapped by a feudal past. The book finds instead that many areas of the island were experiencing a period of rapid modernization, as local governments increased their organizational efforts. Beginning with the period prior to the revolution of 1860, the book shows why successive attempts at political reform failed, and analyses the effects of this failure. It describes the bitter and violent conflict between rival elites and the mounting tide of peasant unrest, which together threatened the status quo within the isolated communities of the Sicilian interior. Through an examination of the problems of local government — tax collection, conscription, the organization of policing — and of attempts to suppress peasant disturbances and control crime, the book shows that the modernization of the Sicilian countryside both undermined the control of the central government and made the countryside itself more unstable.

The English civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century produced two political thinkers of genius: Thomas Hobbes and James Harrington. They are known today as spokesmen of opposite positions, Hobbes of absolutism, Harrington of republicanism. Yet behind their disagreements, this book argues, there lay a common perspective. For both writers, the primary aim was the restoration of peace and order to a divided land. Both men saw the conventional thinking of the time as unequal to that task. Their greatest works — Hobbes's Leviathan of 1651, Harrington's Oceana of 1656 — proposed the reconstruction of the English polity on novel bases. It was not over the principle of sovereignty that the two men differed. The author of this book shows Harrington to have been, no less than Hobbes, a theorist of absolute sovereignty. But where Hobbes repudiated the mixed governments of classical antiquity, Harrington's study of them convinced him that mixed government, far from being the enemy of absolute sovereignty, was its essential foundation.

The popular image of the First World War is dominated by two misconceptions. The first holds that the war was an exercise in futility in which incompetent upper class generals callously sacrificed an entire generation of young men to no good purpose. The second holds that the debate about British strategic policy during the First World War was a gladiatorial contest between ‘brass hats’ (generals) and ‘frock coats’ (politicians). Historians, denied access for too long to the contemporary records of the private deliberations of policy makers, had been forced to follow both interpretations. This book challenges this orthodoxy and suggests that the policy makers were united in trying to relate strategic policy to a carefully considered set of war aims. Its conclusion is that the policy makers never lost sight of their goal, which was to ensure that Britain fought the war at an acceptable cost and emerged from it with its security enhanced against both its enemies and its allies.

Most historians of Britain now take for granted that a narrow and mostly landed élite managed to retain its social supremacy throughout much of the 19th century. But as of yet, there is no thorough explanation for the persistence of the old elite's political authority in an age when that authority was seriously questioned by many Britons. In this study, the book furnishes an important part of this explanation. It argues that the mostly Pittite governing élite helped to allay the suspicions of parasitism at the root of the familiar critique of ‘Old Corruption’ by responding to intense pressure to sanitize government. They did this by reducing and redistributing the tax burden; by eliminating serious administrative abuses such as the grant of lucrative sinecures and unmerited pensions; and by ostentatiously dedicating themselves to public business rather than the pursuit of wasteful privileges for themselves and their hangers-on. If the frugal, liberal state that partly resulted from these reforms was scarcely capable of ameliorating social injustice, at least it could no longer be seen to contribute to it through favouritism and a heavy and inequitable tax load. Such a state was well suited for the preservation of a narrow ruling elite.