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This thesis attempts to give an account of how Whitehall planned Britain's withdrawal from extra-European commitments in the years 1959-1968, demonstrating that foreign policy development was essentially a cross-departmental process, involving a synthesis of views articulated by the Treasury, Board of Trade, Ministry of Defence, Colonial Office, Commonwealth Relations Office, as well as the Foreign Office. More specifically, the thesis is concerned with the direct effects of the interplay of different departmental policies on British retrenchment from Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East. Most accounts of how ministers and officials approached the subject of withdrawal from international commitments lack any substantive analysis of documentary evidence, a fact attributable to the 'thirty-year rule'. Many academic works also contain a reference to 'delusions of grandeur' as the main explanation as to why Whitehall guided a tentative course in extracting Britain from its remaining overseas obligations. By examining Whitehall's attempts to review future policy, usually on an inter-departmental basis, this thesis questions the commonly held assumption that an outdated imperial sentiment permeated the political establishment until economic reality, namely the devaluation of sterling in November 1967, forced Britain to confront the fragility of its position. Developing and expanding upon previous scholarship, this thesis makes a contribution to historical knowledge by providing the first sustained and unified study of how the highest echelons of Whitehall framed Britain's long-term strategic aims in the late 1950s and 1960s. This thesis is a contribution to administrative, diplomatic and military history, and provokes a number of questions. To what extent, for example, did economic considerations inform the decisions of leading policy-makers? Did a misjudgment over the strength of British 'power' lead to the pursuit of inappropriate foreign policy objectives? How was foreign policy affected by defence policy? What influence did the Treasury exert over high foreign policy? Did the influence of civil servants vary according to policy issues and the personalities involved? In what ways did the views of the departments responsible for economic matters differ from those in charge of defence policy on the priority attached to military expenditure? To what extent did the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence disagree on matters regarding Britain's overseas commitments and possessions? In answering such questions, this thesis casts new light on how Whitehall, between 1959 and 1968, reduced the scope of Britain's international commitments, redirecting the central thrust of British foreign policy away from extra-European commitments towards Europe.

The topic of this thesis is the confrontations between William Gladstone and the Bank of England. These confrontations have remained a mystery to authors who noted them, but have generally been ignored by others. This thesis demonstrates that Gladstone's measures taken against the Bank were reasonable, intelligent, and important for the development of nineteenth-century British government finance. To accomplish this task, this thesis refutes the opinions of three twentieth-century authors who have claimed that many of Gladstone's measures, as well as his reading, were irrational, ridiculous, and impolitic. My primary sources include the Gladstone Diaries, with special attention to a little-used source, Volume 14, the indexes to the Diaries. The day-to-day Diaries and the indexes show how much Gladstone read about financial matters, and suggest that his actions were based to a large extent upon his reading. In addition, I have used Hansard's Parliamentary Debates and nineteenth-century periodicals and books on banking and finance to understand the political and economic debates of the time.

The most well-known events and occurrences that caused the American Revolution are well-documented. No scholar debates the importance of matters such as the colonists’ frustration with taxation without representation, the Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, and the Coercive Acts. However, very few scholars have paid attention to how the 1772 English court case that freed James Somerset from slavery impacted American Independence. This case occurred during a two-year stall in the conflict between the English government and her colonies that began in 1763. Between 1763 and 1770, there was ongoing conflict between the two parties, but the conflict temporarily subsided in 1770. Two years later, in 1772, the Somerset decision reignited tension and frustration between the mother country and her colonies. This paper does not claim that the Somerset decision was the cause of colonial separation from England. Instead it argues that the Somerset decision played a significant yet rarely discussed role in the colonists’ willingness to begin meeting with one another to discuss their common problem of shared grievance with British governance. It prompted the colonists to begin relating to one another and to the British in a way that they never had previously. This case’s impact on intercolonial relations and relations between the colonies and her mother country are discussed within this work.

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Bibliography: leaves 453-490.

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This thesis argues for the deep implication of William Wordsworth’s writings over the period 1794 to 1814 in contemporary discourses of the Gothic. My investigation pivots upon the analogy offered in the preface to The Excursion (1814) between the incomplete epic poem The Recluse and a ‘gothic Church’, and aims, through a reconstruction of its literary and historical contexts, to establish the interpretative value of this figure in reading Wordsworth. I begin with a survey of previous critical approaches to, and a new close reading of, Wordsworth’s Gothic figure for his œuvre. I then trace the history of Gothic as a term in British public discourse since the English Revolution, showing how its contested status in the Revolution controversy of the 1790s inflects such texts as the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), the ‘Liberty’ sonnets of Poems, in Two Volumes (1807), and the Preamble to The Prelude. I then move to a series of detailed historical readings of Wordsworth’s key Gothic texts, starting with Salisbury Plain (1794). Recovering the network of associations that made Salisbury Plain legible to Wordsworth in 1793-4 as a map of British history, I show how the poem first subverts and then restores the English Gothic narrative of ‘Celtic night’ giving way to ‘present grandeur’. I then turn to Wordsworth’s Burkean prose tract on the Napoleonic Wars in Spain, The Convention of Cintra (1809), reading it in the context of the Gothic imagery of the conflict, and then arguing on this basis that it forms a vital part of the ‘gothic Church’ of The Recluse. Building upon this reading, I then argue that The Excursion’s advocacy of Andrew Bell’s ‘Madras’ system of ‘tuition by the scholars themselves’ shows Wordsworth’s progressive Gothic politics in action. In concluding, I turn to reconsider, in the light of the preceding chapters, in what sense Wordsworth can be called a Gothic poet.