A generation has passed since the appearance of Oliver MacDonagh's article 'The Nineteenth-century Revolution in Government: A Reappraisal' (Historical Journal, 1958), which gave enormous impetus to the study of the 'silent revolution' that had overtaken Whitehall and Westminster between 1830 and 1914. Following MacDonagh, scholars have turned with fresh eyes to old sources - departmental archives, bill payers and private memoirs - to explore the ways and means by which the changes he described had occurred. This book offers selected perspectives on an important facet of new research into the...

It has been said that history is a debate between the present and the past about the future. Nowhere are these lines drawn more significantly than in the study of science and war. And nowhere is the discourse more relevant, than in the study of science and technology as foundations and multipliers of military power. This book is concerned with one particularly seminal aspect of this development -- the history of chemical munitions during and immediately after the First World War. The Great War, as it came to be known, was not the first industrial war, but it was the first to involve all the...