New Interpretations of Early Modern England

Reformation and Revolution 1558–1660. By Robert Ashton. (The Paladin History of England.) London: Granada. 1984. xx, 503 pp. £18.00.
Authority and Conflict: England 1603–1658. By Derek Hirst. (The New History of England, Volume 4.) London: Edward Arnold. 1986. viii, 390 pp. Hardback £27.50; paperback £9.95.
The Emergence of a Nation State: The Commonwealth of England 1529–1660. By Alan G.R. Smith. (Foundations of Modern Britain.) London: Longman. 1984. xiii, 479 pp. Paperback £8.50.     

FELLOW CITIZENS AND IMPERIAL SUBJECTS: CONQUEST AND SOVEREIGNTY IN EUROPE'S OVERSEAS EMPIRES

This article traces the association between the European overseas empires and the concept of sovereignty, arguing that, ever since the days of Cicero—if not earlier—Europeans had clung to the idea that there was a close association between a people and the territory it happened to occupy. This made it necessary to think of an “empire” as a unity—an “immense body,” to use Tacitus's phrase—that would embrace all its subjects under a single sovereign. By the end of the eighteenth century it had become possible, in this way, to speak of “empires of liberty” that would operate for the ultimate benefit of all their “citizens,” freeing them from previous tyrannical rulers and bringing them under the protection of more benign regimes. In such empires sovereignty could only ever be, as it had become in Europe, undivided. The collapse of Europe's “first” empires in the Americas, however, was followed rapidly by Napoleon's attempt to create a new kind of Empire in Europe. The ultimate, and costly, failure of this project led many, Benjamin Constant among them, to believe that the age of empires was now over and had been replaced by the age of commerce. But what in fact succeeded Napoleon was the modern European state system, which attempted not to replace empire by trade, as Constant had hoped, but to create a new kind of empire, one that sought to minimize domination and settlement, and to make a sharp distinction between imperial ruler and imperial subject. In this kind of empire, sovereignty could only be “divided.” Various kinds of divided rule were thus devised in the nineteenth century. Far, however, from being an improvement on the past, this ultimately resulted in—or at least contributed greatly to—the emergence of the largely fictional and inevitably unstable societies that after the final collapse of the European empires became the new states of the “developing world.”     

Continuity of Ideas and the Politics of Higher Education Expansion in Britain from Robbins to Dearing

This article examines the politics of higher education expansionin Britain between the 1960s and 1990s, bookmarked by the Robbinsand Deanng reports respectively. We argue that throughout thisperiod higher education expansion has been employed, by allpolitical parties, as an instrument of economic growth thoughthis justification has been dressed up to satisfy transientideological preferences. We first present a detailed account,based on archival and primary sources, of the three major reformsto higher education since the 1950s—Robbins, Thatcherism,and Dearing; and second, develop an argument about how the dominantideas about the rationale for higher education constitute aform of path dependency for policy choices once these institutionsare publicly funded and explicitly linked to economic needs.