European History Quarterly

This article draws attention to William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne’s (1737–1805) capacity for fostering a culture of mutual respect and constructive interaction in Anglo-French relations that had no contemporary equivalent, and explores his contacts with the French political world before the Revolution. For someone who was usually lambasted for sophistry and inconsistency, his career-long commitment to Anglo-French cordiality over three decades stands out, and his activities thus offer the historian a major case study in gallophilia, that neglected enlightened counterpart to its obverse: rooted antipathy to the French ‘other’. This paper argues that this apparently enlightened attitude played a significant and neglected role in explaining why an individual as gifted as Shelburne failed so conspicuously as a politician.

Between 1750 and 1830 the Dutch state developed from an oligarchic republic into an enlightened autocratic monarchy via a brief experiment with representative democracy. During this period, there was an ongoing debate about the right to petition. Political actors and opinion-makers addressed the questions to what and to whom this right extended, and what it meant to have such a right. While theorists of the different types of government had sharply contrasting views on the place of the people in the political process, ideas about petitioning, which throughout the period under discussion remained the principal instrument for popular involvement in politics, stayed remarkably stable. Through an investigation of the debate on the right to petition in the crucial transitional phase from the Dutch Republic to the Kingdom of the Netherlands, this article contributes to bridging the divide between petition research of the early modern period and that of the modern era.

Throughout the nineteenth century and up to the proclamation of the Second Republic in 1931 the Catholic Church played an essential role with regard to death in Spain: it had the power to decide where the dead were buried. It could refuse to bury a body in a Catholic cemetery, or prevent one from being interred in a civil cemetery. The prohibition of burials in consecrated ground frequently gave rise to serious conflicts with the relatives of the deceased, as in other countries such as France, Italy or Portugal where Catholicism had been the hegemonic religion at the beginning of the late modern period. However, in the early 1900s the Church changed its strategy. Without renouncing any of its principles, but aware that the prohibition of burials in holy ground was encouraging the growth of civil funerary rituals, it gradually set aside the denial of ecclesiastical burial. Nevertheless, in order to combat the spread of secular funerals, it still demanded that all those who had been baptized and had not formally renounced their religion should be consigned to Catholic cemeteries, even when their families wished for a burial in a civil cemetery, so that this new policy continued to provoke conflicts around the issues of death and burial.

This article analyses this type of clashes in Spain between 1874 and 1923: in particular, the Church’s criteria for denying ecclesiastical burial or claiming the dead for Catholic cemeteries; the ways families, friends, neighbours or political associates of the dead reacted; and the attitude taken by the civil authorities.

The article reads the works of Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) and Karl Polanyi (1886–1964) in the light of their political commitments to neoliberalism and socialism respectively. It argues that both thinkers were inspired to explain history and recent events in line with these commitments in their 1944 publications, The Road to Serfdom and The Great Transformation. Furthermore, they both developed their most significant insights by attempting to counter perceived challenges from political projects to which they were opposed. Polanyi spent much of his life trying to disprove a liberal attack on socialism as out of touch with the realities of human nature, whereas it was in debates with socialists that Hayek developed a new theory of the epistemological functioning of markets, which then became foundational for the neoliberal project. Taking into account the high-stakes politics of Vienna in the interwar years is crucial for fully understanding the social theory of these two thinkers.