‘Barons’ Wars,under Other Names’: Feudalism,Royalism and the American Founding

SUMMARY

The Machiavellian Moment was largely responsible for establishing what remains the dominant understanding of American Revolutionary ideology. Patriots, on this account, were radical whigs; their great preoccupation was a terror of crown power and executive corruption. This essay proposes to test the whig reading of patriot political thought in a manner suggested by Professor Pocock's pioneering first book, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. The whig tradition, as he taught us, located in the remote Saxon past an ‘ancient constitution’ of liberty, in which elected monarchs merely executed laws approved by their free subjects in a primeval parliament. This republican idyll, whigs believed, was then tragically interrupted by the Norman Conquest of 1066, which introduced feudal tenures and monarchical tyranny. Did patriot theorists accept this narrative? The answer, I shall argue, is strikingly mixed. By the early 1770s, appeals to the ‘ancient constitution’ had become less common in patriot writing. And by the end of the 1770s, many patriots had absorbed a completely different understanding of the feudal past—one pioneered by Royalist historians of the seventeenth century and then adapted by Scottish historians of the eighteenth. This shift reflects a broader transformation in patriot political and constitutional theory.     

Cocaine and the British Empire: The Drug and the Diplomats at the Hague Opium Conference, 1911–12

This article will consider the reasons for the inclusion of cocaine in the Hague Opium Convention of 1912. This was the first time that the emerging international drugs regulatory system considered substances other than opiates and it was British delegates who took the initiative to include cocaine in discussions and in the final version of the agreement. Historians have tended to keep brief their accounts of this episode, seeing the British agenda on cocaine as driven primarily by their wider interests in opium, or alluding briefly to colonial anxieties about manufactured drugs. This article returns to the events of 1911–12 and argues that Britain's position on cocaine deserves greater attention. It shows that British administrations in Asia had tried to control a growing market there for the drug since the turn of the century, and that their efforts had failed. In exploring the history of these efforts, and their impacts in the early days of the international narcotics-control regime, the article suggests that imperial policies are more complex than many historians have previously acknowledged, and that it may be time for fresh thinking on the relationship between empires and drugs in modern Asia.     

The Imperial War Relief Fund and the All British Appeal: Commonwealth,Conflict and Conservatism within the British Humanitarian Movement, 1920–25

This article explores the intersection of internationalist and imperial humanitarian ideals in the aftermath of the First World War via a case study of a hitherto overlooked humanitarian organisation—the Imperial War Relief Fund. In an era of increased international collaboration between humanitarian organisations, the Imperial War Relief Fund instead promoted an imperial approach, seeking to unite the ‘efforts of the dominions and mother country’ for the relief of Europeans suffering the effects of the First World War. The Fund was enthusiastically supported in Britain by a number of leading conservative public figures, who hoped that an empire-wide humanitarian campaign might guard against imperial disintegration and reverse Britain's perceived loss of prestige in the postwar order. Despite its initial successes, the Imperial Fund was subsequently usurped by British humanitarian organisations which were more internationalist in their outlook and rhetoric, most significantly the Save the Children Fund. This did not represent, however, a straightforward displacement of imperial co-ordination in favour of more internationally focused humanitarian action. Rather, the Save the Children Fund was able to draw support away from the Imperial Fund only by echoing its imperial rhetoric. This article argues, therefore, that, while the Imperial Fund was a relatively short-lived venture, its lasting legacy was to ensure that the British humanitarian movement was a space in which notions of Britain's imperial status, and its concomitant duties, would survive within an humanitarian landscape in which internationalist ideals were increasingly prevalent.     

The benevolent proprietor and the property law: A British‐Indian dilemma

British Indian revenue policy determined British‐Indian property law. ft was essential to establish a class of landed proprietors, entitled by law to collect rents from their tenants, from which in turn government could legally assess its revenue demand. Revenue was principally settled with the zamindars, who had had rights to a share in agricultural produce which carried a duty to meet government's revenue demand recognised by the Mughal government. The zamindars were redefined unequivocally as landlords by the British‐Indian property law. Their estates were assigned on the basis of existing records and were composed for the most part of disparate shares in villages. Such estates were essentially not economically viable; the social and domestic circumstances of the zamindars further compromised the management of their estates. Government intended that the landlords should become progressive farmers, but conditions, as much a product of legal enactment as of economic reality, frustrated that aim. The history of the nineteenth century administration of British India illustrates the dilemma of government, and the conflict between conservatism in the rural sphere and the pursuit of progressive policies. The radical reform of the zamindars’ estates, namely the drastic curtailments which took place under the zamindari abolition statutes under the Congress government's programme for land reform, has paradoxically achieved for independent India that which the government of British India struggled throughout a century and a half to achieve: the creation of the progressive proprietor.     

“British Tribute to Virginia Valor”: Unveiling the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Statue

This article outlines the political agendas surrounding the dedication of the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Statue, an early Confederate monument commissioned in Britain in 1863 and unveiled with much fanfare in Richmond, Virginia in 1875. It argues that the statue’s British provenance made it an ideal means of expressing the distinctive claims of the Conservative Party of Virginia. By commemorating both General Jackson and Britain’s Confederate sympathizers, modernizers in the Conservative Party presented themselves as representatives of an Anglo‐Saxon Christian value system, guardians of the “Old Dominion’s” immemorial character, and defenders of political views that held national and international significance. Thus the Conservatives dedicated an international monument to a transatlantic and implicitly racist cultural tradition as part of their larger effort to facilitate Virginia’s integration into the reconstructed national union on terms favorable to the former Confederates.     

'Unwitting Assets?': British Intellectuals and the Congress for Cultural Freedom

The purpose of this article is to document the activities, inBritain during the 1950s, of the Congress for Cultural Freedom(CCF), a body of anti-communist intellectuals based in Pariswhich received covert subsidies from the Central IntelligenceAgency. Although initially unpopular in Britain, the CCF eventuallywon significant support among the country's literary, political,and academic intellectuals, including most notably the youngLabour politicians known as the Gaitskellites. While suggestingthat the influence of the CCF, and therefore of the CIA, oncold war Britain was greater than has previously been supposed,the article also shows how the behaviour of British intellectualsoften confounded and frustrated the intentions of their secretiveAmerican patrons. ^* I am grateful to Brandon High, David Martin, Jasper Ridley,and Frances Stonor Saunders for their comments on earlier draftsof this article, the research for which was funded in part byMiddlesex University and the Fulbright Commission.