The 10 most-cited articles in The English Historical Review, 2017

Abstract With the quincentenary of the German Reformation now upon us, it is worth revisiting how, and why, the posting of the 95 theses emerged as such a defining moment in the Reformation story. It is easy to understand why it has assumed pride of place in modern histories. What is less easy to understand, however, is why the theses-posting emerged as the critical moment in the early modern accounts, for there were many other moments with even more drama and proximate significance for the Reformation. Moreover, the posting of theses had little shock-value at the time. Many professors posted academic theses, many reform-minded Christians had questioned indulgences, and many high-profile German intellectuals had written at least one critical piece against Rome. The following article begins with a survey of the origins of Reformation history and traces the incorporation of the theses-posting into the narrative stream. The second section examines the reasons why this act remained so prominent in the Lutheran memory during the two centuries after the Reformation by relating it to a…

Abstract This article argues that we can only understand Bury St Edmunds’ post-Conquest dossier of forged Anglo-Saxon royal diplomas by viewing it alongside that house’s earlier acquisition of an authentic papal privilege from Alexander II (Oct. 1071). That is, the hitherto overlooked failure of that the genuine papal document to find any acceptance in 1070s England necessitated Bury’s recourse to royal forgery. The implications of this go well beyond Bury. Abbot Baldwin’s initial optimism in eliciting papal support sprang from the renewed strength of Anglo-papal relations in the decades preceding the Norman Conquest. The genuine document’s failure, and the subsequent turn to forging royal texts, is mirrored by an almost total absence of evidence of petitions for papal support in the post-Conquest decades. In light of this, we must be wary of attempts to date any part of the wider corpus of forged papal documents for English beneficiaries within these same immediately post-Conquest years: the failed application of even genuine papal acta under the new Anglo-Norman regime suggests…

Abstract Orthodox historiographies on Israel’s early policies in ‘black’ Africa and its relations with ‘white’ South Africa commonly, if disjointedly, assert that the state’s Jewish identity had played, in the early 1960s, a key role in Israel’s participation in the international ‘struggle against apartheid’. Revisiting this assertion, I examine Israel’s involvement in early United Nations debates on South Africa’s race policies. I trace the making of Israel’s position on South Africa’s treatment of persons of Indian origins in preparation for the 1950 General Assembly; present Israel’s voting praxis in that session; and demonstrate the persistence of both position and praxis in the 1952 Assembly session where apartheid first appeared on the UN agenda. Against the grain of existing accounts, I argue first that, on Africa, Israel’s multilateral diplomacy preceded its bilateral diplomacy; Israel’s encounter with Africa began not in the early 1960s but with its 1949 UN admission, compelling its envoys to vote and reflect on African and colonial questions, including apartheid. Secondly,…

Abstract Labour’s victory in the 1943 New Zealand general election allowed it to set the political agenda in New Zealand not only for the remainder of the Second World War, but, arguably, for forty years thereafter. The outcome of the election hinged on the votes of service personnel engaged in fighting the Second World War. This paper examines why soldiers, airmen and sailors voted overwhelmingly for Labour in 1943. Detailed returns showing the number of votes recorded for each candidate at each polling-place in the election are explored; the first social class survey of an army in the Second World War is constructed and assessed; and censorship summaries of the soldiers’ mail are interrogated. The paper shows that the forces vote was not determined by the socio-economic background of the military cohort or by the distance of the voting troops from the homeland or the length of time they were away. Instead, the paper finds that the most persuasive explanation for the pattern of voting among service personnel was their degree of participation in the war effort. The closer to combat…

Abstract This article offers a critical assessment of British policing and government monitoring and controlling of a ‘suspect community’ in inter-war London, which was also the subject of emigration control, the only colonial group to be thus treated prior to the Commonwealth Immigration Act 1962. The case is that of the Cypriots, who began to emigrate to the imperial metropolis in significant numbers in the late 1920s and largely settled in and around Soho. Their concentrated geographical location made them easy to police, monitor and control once their criminality and deviant communist politics made them a ‘suspect community’. They were also subjected to immigration control at their homeland by the Cypriot Colonial Government. There was significant co-operation between the Home and Colonial Offices to achieve the controls in both London and Cyprus. The immigration controls served as a prototype for the subsequent restrictions on other groups after the Second World War (namely those from India and Pakistan) and formed the basis of the Commonwealth Immigration Act.

Changes in economic direction in Britain in the twentieth century were incremental, rarely permanent, and strongly contested, although trends to deindustrialisation, widened inequality and the ostracism of trade unions from policy-making were clear by the mid-1980s. This followed the defeat of the striking miners in 1984–5, a decisive movement in macro-economic direction. This case study of the Scottish coalfields uses generational analysis to illuminate the contested nature of these long-running economic changes. Three distinct trade union generations are identified, each of which was linked to successive ideal-types of economic unit. Each type represented an ever-larger economy of scale and qualitative changes in coalfield employment: ‘Village Pits’, ‘New Mines’, and ‘Cosmopolitan Collieries’. The evolving organisation of production, combined with other powerful experiences in early adulthood, gave rise to different political goals for each successive generation. The first, born in the 1890s, won the primary objective of nationalisation in 1947; the second, born in the 1920s,…

Abstract Royal charters to towns—once the bedrock of medieval urban history—have received little attention in recent years from historians of urban politics in late medieval England. This paper seeks to rehabilitate the role of the royal charter in urban history by proposing that it represents not merely the relationship between individual civic governments and the Crown, but also the less formal and often otherwise unrecoverable interpersonal networks between politically important townspeople. Periods when a large number of towns requested the same types of liberties from the Crown were not usually the result of royal policy or local circumstance, but instead of frequent communication between elite merchants of different towns that took place in parliament or through trans-regional mercantile organisations. In studying patterns of charter acquisition by towns, therefore, it becomes possible to identify an inter-urban network in medieval English politics, to chart its membership, and to observe the fluctuating nature of its influence over time. By recognising that charters—documents…

Abstract Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) is notorious for his description of economics as ‘the dismal science’. In the existing literature, Carlyle is portrayed as an ignorant and philistine critic, who rejected the science from the outside, on purely ‘moral’ grounds. In contrast, the current article offers a close, comprehensive, and contextualised reading of Carlyle’s oeuvre, continually following up his sources, interlocutors, and reception. In short, it argues that Carlyle was relatively well-informed, participating in some key debates within political economy. The article begins by situating Carlyle in 1820s Edinburgh. Whereas Smith had understood political economy as a subordinate branch of the ‘science of the legislator’, Stewart and McCulloch drew a sharp distinction between political economy and politics. Having established political economy as an independent science, they called upon the legislator to withdraw from economic life. Having expressed severe misgivings, Carlyle found an alternative in Sismondi and the Saint-Simonians, who sought to shift the emphasis away from the…

Abstract The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has been regarded as an unproblematic guide to the first viking raids on the English-speaking peoples. The hiatus in records of viking raids in the Chronicle from AD 794 until 835 has led scholars to believe that southern Britain suffered little piratical activity in those years. This paper uses the evidence of contemporary letters, foreign chronicles and charters to provide an alternative narrative. These sources demonstrate that Kent suffered under the threat of seaborne attacks from the 790s until the 820s when no events are recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The paper invites reconsideration of the textbook accounts of the beginning of the Viking Age in England.

Abstract The aftermath of the First World War saw manifold efforts to (re-)construct an international community. One striking feature of this development was the foundation of a number of international student organisations. This article analyses the largest of these organisations—the International Confederation of Students (Confédération internationale des Étudiants, CIE), using it as a prism through which to examine four major aspects of inter-war student internationalism: nationalism, intellectual co-operation, mobility and radicalism. The CIE brought together the representatives of different national unions of students and thus involved activists who could cast themselves as future leaders. It portrayed its activities as ‘apolitical’, embracing an internationalism that sought to consolidate, rather than overthrow, the international order. To this end, the organisation co-operated with the League of Nations, particularly in the realm of student travel. Yet, despite its discourse of peace and non-partisanship, the CIE suffered from manifold national divisions and maintained an…