This case study of the causes of the Thirty Years' War suggests an alternative framework to that of Absolutism, and views statebuilding as an interactive bargaining process that can engender challenges to political authority. It shows how selective court patronage changed the cultural habits of nobles in education, manners, and tastes, but failed to transform religious identities, which were intimately tied to noble interests. Instead, the confessionalization of patronage deepened divisions within the elite, providing multiple incentives for the formation of an anti-Habsburg alliance among...

Robert Walpole foiled the Atterbury Plot by preventive arrests and holding those he suspected illegally without bail or trial. When Parliament met and the Habeas Corpus Act was suspended, he used show trials, decided by votes along party lines and depending on forged evidence, to curb the Tory party, to reuinted the Whig party and to consolidate his hold on power. Rich in new material, this book unravels for the first time the scale and international dimension of a plot which posed the most serious challenge to the Hanoverian regime before the '45 rebellion.

This book explores components of national identity in Victorian Britain by analyzing travel literature. It draws on published and unpublished travel journals by middle-class men and women from England, Scotland, and Wales who toured the Continent and/or Britain. The main aim is to illustrate both the contexts that inspired the various collective identities of Britishness, Englishness, Scotsness, and Welshness, as well as the qualities Victorian men and women had in mind when they used such terms to identify and imagine themselves collectively.

This book examines the Whig theory of resistance that emerged from the Revolution of 1688 in England, and presents an important challenge to the received opinion of Whig thought as confused and as inferior to the revolutionary principles set forth by John Locke. While a wealth of Whig literature is analyzed, Rudolph focuses upon the work of James Tyrrell, presenting the first full-length study of this seminal Whig theorist, and friend and colleague of John Locke. This book provides a compelling argument for the importance of Whig political thought for the history of liberalism.

Following the abolition of the British slave trade in 1807, a group of politicians began to agitate for reform of England's "bloody code" of criminal statutes. This examines the politics and propaganda of criminal law reform from 1808 to the Whig succession to power in 1830.

In one of the more sudden shifts of perspective, and hotly contested controversies of recent historical and literary scholarship, our view of Johnson has been fundamentally changed. This volume offers the best up-to-the-moment account of what has been achieved, and points to the new directions in which scholarship is developing. It will be essential reading for all concerned with eighteenth-century studies.

This is the first study to focus on the idea of virtue and its place in political thought in eighteenth-century France. Virtue could be used to impart moral authority to arguments about political power. The development of this strategic idea is traced through the works of key Enlightenment thinkers. There is also consideration of the ways in which numerous popular writers of the day, including clerics, eulogists, journalists, novelists and lawyers, employed the idea of virtue in polemical discussions in their writings.

How successful were the East European Jewish immigrants in London compared with the vast majority that went to New York? This critical question - one that lies at the heart of debates on Jewish modernity, ethnic and racial assimilation, and the impact of culture on entrepreneurship - is assessed systematically for the first time in this volume. Using new evidence of Jewish immigration, mobility and assimilation, Andrew Godley shows that despite similar backgrounds and opportunities, the Jews in London were far less entrepreneurial and those in New York. As the Jewish immigrants assimilated...

Between 1808 and 1830, the Whigs made a remarkable transition from opposition to office that highlights important trends in early Nineteenth-Century Britain. The Whig Revival examines how a coalition between provincial interest groups and the parliamentary party established them as a viable governing party by 1830. Where earlier studies have focused on the Whigs experience in government or liberal reform movements, this work examines their years in opposition and how the struggle for power broadened the political nation beyond metropolitan elites.

The experience of the King's church in Early America was shaped by the unfolding imperial policies of the English government after 1675. London-based civil and ecclesiastical officials supervised the extension and development of the church overseas. The recruitment, appointment and financial support of the ministers was guided by London officials. Transplanted to the New World without the traditional hierarchical structure of the church - no bishop served in the colonies during the colonial period - at the time of the American Revolution it was neither an English-American, or American-English...