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This chapter looks at the rise of anticolonial terrorism in Egypt, and especially at the role played by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. It argues that assassination became established among anticolonial nationalists in Egypt before the Brotherhood was founded and was then briefly practiced by the Brotherhood. The Brotherhood, however, generally preferred other varieties of violence, which it understood as jihad. Some of these were more obviously acts of political violence than others. The use of violence was never part of the Brotherhood’s main strategy, however, and in the end it proved disastrous for them. They definitively abandoned terrorism in about 1968.

This chapter presents a broad overview of the place of Europe and European questions in British political history. It establishes a sense of the historiographical context, considering in turn the ‘new’ political history of recent decades, the histories of party politics, diplomacy and its culture, Europe as Britain’s comparator, British identity, post-war attitudes to European unity, and structural tensions. Reflecting on this contextual framework prompts questions about the chronological parameters we use to assess the last two centuries of interaction with the Continent, not least about the historiographical role of the two world wars, their origins, and their impact. It also raises the issue of the generational phases through which the British polity has passed in its complicated dance with its European neighbours.

This article discusses the evolution of U.S. civil rights and civil liberties through the lens of Supreme Court decisions. It traces the evolution of negative rights against the state and positive liberties from nineteenth-century property rights decisions through early-twenty-first century decisions regarding same-sex marriage. It also traces the shift in the Court’s approach to rights cases from one in which the state is regarded as a threat to individual rights to one in which the state plays a complex role of balancing rights claims. As well, the article demonstrates that rights claims and cases have become more complex as notions of the “public interest” become more contested when the pursuit of general interests has a disproportionate effect on the interests of particular social groups.

Despite current concerns with good governance and policy delivery, little serious attention has been paid to the institution vital to both: the Civil Service. This chapter places present problems in historical context. Starting with the seminal 1854 Northcote–Trevelyan Report, it covers the ‘lost opportunity’ of the 1940s when the Civil Service failed to adapt to rapidly rising demands on the state, as advocated by Beveridge and Keynes. It then examines the belated attempts at modernization in the 1960s, the Service’s vilification in the 1970s, the final destruction of the ‘old order’ during the Thatcher administration, and the subsequent restructuring of the Service and the (highly flawed) embracing of the ‘new public management’ ethos.

This essay begins by examining the establishment of English political systems in the North American colonies in the seventeenth century. It then goes on to look at eighteenth-century developments, and particularly at the conditions that allowed the colonial assemblies to assume increasing importance in colonial government. The final section considers the efforts made by ministers and officials in London to check the power of the assemblies and assert more control from the imperial center. It sheds fresh light on the great constitutional dispute between London and the colonies that formed an important aspect of the American Revolution.

Federal involvement in communications came early with the development of a national postal system. Yet that involvement was intertwined with and influenced by international developments from the start. This chapter surveys the federal government’s long involvement in communication policy including telegraphy, radio, and the internet. While surveying this involvement, this chapter discusses such issues as antitrust regulation; federal development of communications systems; free speech and restrictive policies; overlapping federal agencies involved in communications; various attempts by the federal government to promote technological development; and the relationship of federal-private technological development.

This chapter focuses on the manifestations and characteristics of right-wing terrorism in twentieth-century Europe, particularly on developments in Germany and Italy. When viewed from a comparative perspective, a central characteristic for right-wing terrorism is the Tatglaube, the faith in deeds. Although the worldview justifying such terrorism is grounded in racism, ethnocentrism, and nationalistic concepts of superiority, the decisive factor is violence as an end in itself, a violence that generally forgoes any justifying pattern of argument and strives to annihilate the enemy physically. The repertoire of actions taken and the formulized language of right-wing terrorism have remained largely unchanged throughout the twists and turns of twentieth-century history. Nevertheless, it is possible to differentiate various phases of right-wing terrorism, which were also influenced, in turn, by the political and societal environment. Despite the ethnocentric and nationalistic worldview from which this terrorism springs, it also becomes evident here that right-wing terrorism has always been marked by transnational influences, particularly since the end of the twentieth century.

The history of American foreign and defense policy is framed by an enduring debate over the appropriate role of federal power in national politics. From the very beginning, parties formed around the role of the armed forces and how America should conduct its diplomacy. Competition between the branches of government, and the parties therein, over who should direct foreign and defense policy is central to their history. This chapter charts the contours of that competition, most notably between the president and Congress, and then considers the ideas that have driven these often overlapping public policies. It concludes by arguing that whilst this competition is basic to the history of the subject, continuity in foreign and defense policy is also an important part of the story.

This chapter seeks to bring out the interrelated quality of twentieth century discussions of democracy, drawing especially on debates in the 1930s and 1970s. It locates these within the longer history of the British conversation about democracy, a conversation that was both influenced by discussions elsewhere and informed by comparisons with, and imaginings of, other polities. It starts with an examination of the history of debating democracy in Britain and then turns to the British way of doing democracy. It argues that the former is essential to making sense of the latter. It moves on to consider how the British have done democracy, drawing upon an emerging cultural history of democratic practices. The final section offers thoughts on the prospects for the historiography of democracy in Britain, and on what its development so far says about the state of modern British political history.

Direct democracy was practiced within town meetings in colonial New England, driven by four overarching principles. First, citizens had a political voice as members of a specific geographic community, rather than as individuals. Second, “the mind of the town,” as it was called at the time, could be readily determined through public discourse in meetings of the enfranchised citizenry. Third, this collective will could be relayed to higher governing bodies by issuing specific and binding instructions to elected representatives. Finally, citizens who opposed the mind of the town could be forced to abide by it through community pressure. While the American Revolution elicited its own examples of popular, democratic politics outside of official chambers, the overall trend was in the opposite direction. Formal representational structures generally superseded meetings of the body of the people by liberty trees and liberty polls, county conventions of committees of correspondence, and local committees of safety, inspection, and observation.

The rivalry between the Whig and Democratic Parties, often called the “Second American Party System,” first emerged in Andrew Jackson’s administration (1829–1837). Democrats organized to secure Jackson’s 1828 election, then united behind his program of Indian removal, no federal funding of internal improvements, opposition to the Bank of the United States, defense of slavery, and the “spoils system” that used patronage for party building. Whigs supported Henry Clay’s pro-development American System, sympathized with evangelical reform, and reluctantly accepted Democratic techniques for popular mobilization and party organization. The mature parties competed closely in most states and briefly eased sectional conflict, before splitting in the 1850s over slavery in the territories. Whigs made no presidential nomination in 1856, and the Second Party System disintegrated. As it did, Northern Whigs and antislavery Democrats merged in the Republican Party, southern Whiggery steeply declined, and Democrats survived as the only national party.

This chapter attempts to draw out comparisons and make sense of devolution as a UK-wide phenomenon. Devolution has taken a variety of forms at different times in different parts of the UK. A key aim of the chapter is to describe these varieties and explain why no common form of devolution emerged. Devolution may be a form of constitutional development but it has always been linked to wider socio-demographic and economic developments as much as to the sense of collective identities. Some interpretations emphasize the role of national identity in the demands for devolution in Scotland and Wales while others lay more emphasis on differences in political preferences that stimulated demands for self-government. No understanding of the politics of devolution is complete without an appreciation of the roles of identity, the party systems, political and public policy preferences, and how these changed over time.

First, this chapter explores political violence in the late Middle Ages and the early modern era. Even though the term terrorism did not exist before the French Revolution, political phenomena that closely resembled various forms of modern-day terrorism have been known and feared since the fourteenth century. The late Middle Ages and the early modern period witnessed the assassinations of numerous princes. The authorities as well as the populace feared organized gangs of criminals in the pay of rival political or religious leaders. These gangs were said to attack the civilian population using arson and mass poisoning in order to destabilize whole states. The fear of the terrorist “state destroyer” was part and parcel of state building from its very beginning. Secondly, the chapter discusses nineteenth-century historiography about early modern political violence. Nineteenth-century historians refused to interpret early modern political crime as terrorism: they either denounced it as lacking any political concept or vindicated it as justifiable resistance.

The twenty-five-year political history of the early American republic, covering the period from the first federal election through the War of 1812, critically shaped the terms and path of American politics over the ensuing two centuries. During this time the United States emerged from the volatility of revolutionary politics to establish the bipolar party structure that has dominated the American political landscape ever since. The central ideological debate over the power of the national government was shaped by classical understandings of politics and by powerfully contested interests. This essay begins with a short chronological summary of the politics of the period, and then turns to the five broad frameworks that historians of the politics of the early republic have addressed over the past half-century: party structure, republican ideology, political culture, slavery, and state-formation.

This chapter falls into two unequal parts. The first charts, broadly chronologically, the shifting understandings, historical and historiographical, of the role of the state in economic life. The second focuses on debates about the performance of the economy, especially notions of ‘decline’ which have been central to those debates since the late nineteenth century. Variegated but overlapping senses of ‘decline’, originating in very specific historical circumstances, have overshadowed much writing on the modern British economy, with, it will be argued, often detrimental effects on our understanding. Such notions need to be historicized—placed firmly in the intellectual, ideological, and above all political contexts within which they arose.

This chapter evaluates the two principal methodologies adopted in studying elections over the past 200 years. The first prominently features ‘psephological’ analyses of aggregate voting data and social cleavages; the second is the revisionist ‘linguistic’ approach, which emphasizes the careful reconstruction and exploration of electoral languages and discourses, often in a specific locality. This chapter argues that, while both approaches have undoubtedly yielded considerable benefits, what was once a large field of scholarly endeavour has been split in two, with the empirical, quantitative tradition now associated with political science on one side and the now dominant cultural and linguistic approaches on the other. The chapter ends by exploring potential new directions and argues that the advent of the ‘digital turn’ and the vast proliferation of electronic sources in its wake now make possible an approach which could see the gap between electoral historians and political scientists begin to close.

This chapter charts the emergence of diplomacy in its modern sense—the peaceful and continuous management of relations between states—during the early modern centuries. It was brought about by two central changes: one functional, the other geographical. The principal roles of an ambassador were providing information, representing his ruler, and conducting negotiations, and these were all established by the sixteenth century. Initially the first two were more important than the third, but by the second half of the period examined the conduct of negotiations had become the most important dimension of a diplomat’s role. The second transformation was an extension of the network of diplomacy, from its origins in the Italian peninsula to Western Europe and—by the eighteenth century—to Eastern Europe as well. These changes were not linear in nature, but collectively they created the diplomatic system and culture which prevailed until the First World War.

William Augustus Bowles was a loyalist soldier during the American Revolution who also acted as an agent for the British governor of the Bahamas. Had events gone his way, he could have become the Anglo-Creek leader of a British protectorate on North America's Gulf Coast, but instead, was considered a pirate and died in a Havana jail in 1805 while awaiting trial. Bowles's saga shows that the British Empire was not only a formal but also an informal empire. None had a greater stake in understanding how Britain's informal empire worked than the citizens of the thirteen states that gained independence from the British in 1783. It would be more accurate to see the American Revolution as the moment when Americans began to make the history that other nations and people were prepared to let them make. In this entangled history, Britain played the most significant role. Three pillars of its informal empire were commerce, diplomacy, and international law.

This chapter explores the interrelated nature of the environmental and energy policies in the United States, particularly since 1900. As new technologies made new sources of energy viable, formal and informal political arrangements and laws were used to prioritize the United States’ ability to acquire necessary supplies. During the twentieth century, the essential need for energy has defined the concept of geopolitics and even served as a rationale for war. By the 1970s and 1980s, a separate policy mandate moved environmental concerns into formal local and federal politics. Although these applications of policy developed distinct from one another, a general chronology of their development from 1900 to the present demonstrates the growing interplay between environmental policy and energy management. In the twenty-first century, a new paradigm of economic development has moved energy and environmental policies together to wrestle with complex issues, including the sustainability of energy supplies and climate change.

This epilogue proposes a conceptual apparatus to explain the paradoxical fact that, as the chapters in this volume amply demonstrate, terrorism’s shocking acts of violence mean simultaneously to immobilize and mobilize its targets’ intellectual and aesthetic functions. It excavates a strand in the history of philosophy—from Plato to Burke, Arendt, Benjamin, and Rancière—that sees shock not as leading to the paralysis of our capacity to perceive and understand events, but rather as being related to thaumazein (wonder, amazement) and theoria. This philosophical understanding of shock not only grounds the logic of terrorism, especially in its classical incarnation as “propaganda of the deed,” but also exposes the roots of a counterlogic that can activate the kind of knowledge required for the development of a genuinely historical theory of terrorism.