Wordsworth's romantic critique of industrial life and society was backward-looking. His 'Golden Age ideal' of pastoral life and rural relationships falls within the scope of English 'populism' as found among the middle ranks of small independent producers and their idealogues. Furthermore his rural education and up-bringing in the remote North of England explain his long-term shift from radical and whig reformer to tory placeman in the years 1789 to 1832 as well as his relative demise as a poet.

Britain's loss of its empire and its turn to Europe are the two most striking features of its foreign policy in the 30 years after 1945. The contributors to this book examine the connection between the two processes. Utilizing a range of sources, the authors challenge conventional interpretations of the connection, and in doing so raise important questions about the nature, motivation, and effects of British policy.

This book looks at neo-classicism as a context for understanding early-modern English historical writing, and traces the implications of neo-classical history for English political culture at large. By paying close attention to historical genres and audiences, it reassesses both the famous and lesser-known historians of this era, dramatizing them as engaged in a struggle to preserve ancient models of historical composition in the face of a rapidly modernizing society characterized by party politics, print, Christianity, and antiquarian erudition.

This book analyses English social and occupational behavioural ideals from the courtesy book's demise in 1774 to the Medical Act's passage in 1858. Ideals from conduct and etiquette books mix gracefully with those displayed by professional groups, particularly medical practitioners, in an analysis that challenges conventional thinking about class and social change in early-industrial England. Dr Morgan's study will be essential reading for British historians, as well as for all those interested in how individuals establish personal identity and infuse confidence into human relations in an...

The theories of language and society of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) are examined in this textual analysis of the full range of his theoretical writings, with special emphasis on his little-known early works. Vico's fundamental importance in the history of European ideas lies in his strong anti-Cartesian, anti-French and anti-Enlightenment views. In an age in which intellectuals adopted a rational approach, Vico stressed the nonrational element in man - in particular, imagination - as well as social and civil relationships, none of them reducible to the scientific theories so popular in his...

Empire is an evocative, yet little examined, word. It can mean the domination of vast territories, a Christian world order, a corrupt form of government, or a humanitarian endeavour. Historians relegate the concept of empire to the pre-modern world, identifying the state as the characteristic political form of the modern world. This book examines the range of meanings attributed to the concept of empire in the medieval and early modern world, demonstrating how the concepts of empire and state developed in parallel, not sequentially.

Between Resistance and Collaboration explores the various means by which the local population both protested the hardships brought about by the Nazi occupation of Northern France, often forcing the authorities to do something about them, and evaded the plethora of regulations, political and economic, when the authorities were unable or unwilling to act.

In turn, Tory minister, Jacobite renegade, English philosopher and anti-minister, Bolingbroke has elicited mixed reactions from his compatriots, both contempories and historians. Bernard Cottret discusses here his political writings in the context of contemporary thought in England and France. His analyses of 'A' Dissertation upon Parties' and 'The Idea of a Patriot King' are supported by a full mid-eighteenth-century political thought.

This is an examination of what republicanism meant to the Americans who drafted and ratified the United States Constitution, guaranteeing a republican form of government to every state in the Union. The book compares the writings and speeches of the founders with the authors they read and imitated to identify the central tenets of American republicanism, and to demonstrate that American republican thought directly reflected classical models, rather than a mediating tradition of English or continental political theory.

This text concerns the efforts of Britain, France and the United States to reshape German party politics immediately after World War II. Based on archival research in the four countries involved, it concludes that interference by the occupiers made a stable and moderate party system in the Federal Republic of Germany much more probable. This interference was propelled not by concrete Allied plans for a German political revival, but by fears of reaction, revolution, nationalism and political fragmentation.