While the crucial question of the contribution of the troubles of the 1620s to the eventual dissolution of the old political order in Stuart England remains clouded in debate, with historians like C. Russell questioning the whole concept of escalating parliamentary opposition to the Crown in that decade, we are at least beginning to recognize the pattern of provincial unrest and the growing interaction of national and local agitation at this time. D. Hirst in particular has shown how constituencies were increasingly volatile and vociferous, a development which owed a great deal to the expansion of their electorates. In the boroughs country gentry joined forces with anti-oligarchic groups of citizens to broaden the franchise. Here agitation was strongly influenced by the severe economic and social problems of many county towns during the early seventeenth century.

Scholars whose speciality is Scottish church history have long been aware that in 1657 members of two factions of the Scottish Presbyterian church came to London to debate before the Lord Protector the method of selecting ministers for Scottish parishes, but these historians have overlooked some of the Scots' other activities. A close look at parliamentary happenings reveals that these men, Resolutioners and Remonstrants, were also deeply involved in secular politics. Their disagreements were not confined to church matters, for during their stay these groups lobbied vigorously both in parliament and in the council of state, taking opposing positions as to what should be the qualifications for voting in Scotland. In this country, most Scots had been disenfranchised since the conclusion of the Civil War and their defeat at the hands of Cromwell's soldiers. The problem to be resolved was which and how many past adherents of the Stuart cause in Scotland should now be allowed to vote and hold office.

The historiography of Locke's First treatise exhibits a vicious circle of oversight, prejudgement and caricature which has effectively prohibited detailed, structural interpretation of that work for generations. Twenty years ago the solitary voice of Herbert Rowen escaped the inertia and admonished scholars for their lack of attention. ‘There is more to the First treatise’, he argued, ‘than a refutation of Sir Robert Filmer's derivation of political authority from Adam in a straight line of inheritance.’ The central theme of the treatise had been misconstrued, Rowen thought, and that mistake helped to account for the general neglect. He urged a reassessment of the predominant dogma, maintaining that

Locke's First treatise turns out to be an essential portion of his total argument on behalf of the social compact state, and against the dynastic (and potentially absolute) state. Though its argument is negative, the First treatise is necessary to Locke's major, positive work in the Second treatise because it clears and defines the ground for it. It therefore merits more attention than has usually been given to it.

On 22 August 1849 a privately sponsored peace congress opened in the Salle de Sainte Cécile in Paris. In the chair was Victor Hugo, assisted as vice presidents and secretaries by a team of men from Britain, the United States, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Several of these men, such as Richard Cobden, were members of the legislatures of their respective countries: others were prominent clergymen and philanthropists. Seated before them were delegates from a slightly wider range of countries which in that blissfully Eurocentric era were deemed to represent the world. They had been brought together by an invitation sent by the London-based Peace Congress Committee to well-known individual sympathizers, peace societies, religious bodies, philanthropic and other civic groups. The business before them consisted of a series of propositions advocating international arbitration, general and simultaneous disarmament, a congress of nations, an international court, and various measures designed to facilitate international communication. This peace congress was the second in a series of four convened between 1848 and 1851 in Brussels, Paris, Frankfort and London to co-ordinate and develop various pressure-group activities which had gained momentum during the late 1840s in Britain and the United States.

On 27 February 1885, Kaiser Wilhelm I signed a Schutzbrief, or Imperial Charter, drafted under Bismarck's supervision at the Foreign Ministry, which placed about 60,000 square miles of east African territory under the protection of the German Reich. Incorporating the interior districts directly west of the island of Zanzibar, the German protectorate was based on treaties made with local chieftains late the previous autumn by Carl Peters, founder and co-director of the Gesellschaft für deutsche Kolonisation. Bismarck, in endorsing Peters' claims to territory in east Africa, approved as well the sending out of further expeditions. The eastern boundaries of the soon to be established Congo Free State were described as the anticipated limit of continued annexations which the German company was authorized to undertake at once.

Between the summer of 1912 and the summer of 1914, while the British political world seethed over Marconi, the National Health Insurance doctors' revolts, Home Rule, and the cost of oil-fired battleships, the chancellor of the exchequer, David Lloyd George, himself a centre of controversy, began to put together a legislative project to reconstruct the system of British land holding. He saw land reform as the major effort of his political career. Not only would it break up the monopoly of the squire in the countryside, but it would snatch away also the untaxed profits of the city land speculator. With a new system of land valuation, uniform throughout the kingdom, local authority rating resources would be immensely broadened, making possible the imposition upon local government of wide new responsibilities in public and personal health, education and housing. Land courts would set higher wages for labourers and lower rents for farmers, all at the expense of the landowner.

The Allies' conduct of the Great War has frequently been castigated by historians as inept and amateurish. But it is perhaps the conduct of their diplomacy which most merits this description. Until the creation of the Supreme War Council at the end of 1917 there existed, apart from a number of liaison officers, no machinery to synchronise the strategy and diplomacy of Great Britain and France other than the periodic meetings of the politicans and generals of the two countries. Yet, as David Lloyd George came to realize, these were not really conferences at all, but rather meetings of men with pre-conceived ideas who desired only to find a formula which could obscure the underlying differences of opinion from the general view. They were really nothing but a ‘tailoring’ operation at which different plans were stitched together. What was required was the construction of an inter-Allied General Staff, designed to examine and give advice on the changing military situation. Obviously no government could abdicate its right to issue orders, but if the Central Powers were to be defeated the Allies needed to concede that there was far more to participation in a coalition than the mere lip-service to unity involved in the periodic gatherings of soldiers and statesmen. An examination of the Calais Conference of December 1915, called at a time when Allied operations on all fronts were showing a marked lack of success, will illustrate many of the failings and dangers of this primitive form of war diplomacy.