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This introductory chapter highlights the special problems associated with this work including the inaccessibility of the manuscript for five decades, the incompleteness of the sketches, and the challenges of authenticity and legal issues faced by revisionists. It concludes with a summary of the book's chapters.

The book ends by summarizing the case made. It concludes that service attachés were a vital source of military and naval information for the British government, that they predicted developments ranging from the impact of Fokker aircraft through to the probability of Germany starting a major war between 1913 and 1915, and that their views influenced those in charge of British policy. This conclusion challenges the arguments of those revisionist historians who contend that Germany posed no threat to the existing European order and that the British Government had no reason to suppose that Germany had aggressive intentions. On the contrary, courtesy of the reports of the military and naval attachés, the Admiralty, War Office and Foreign Office and, through them, the rest of the Government had extensive grounds for worrying about Germany's aggressive intent. That they shaped their policy accordingly was, therefore, not irrational, as some historians suggest, but the logical response to the information available to them, as was Britain's entry into the First World War.

This final chapter considers the place of this book and its research finding in the current historiography of the Anglo-German naval race. It concludes, contrary to current revisionist interpretations, that Germany emerged as a major factor in British naval planning after 1901. However, this was not, as orthodox historians would maintain, because of the growth of the German battle fleet, but because of fears that parts of the German merchant navy would be used in wartime to attack British trade. It ends by considering why this has not been understood before. In this context it puts forward the suggestion of Admiral Slade that people have been hypnotized by the big ship question, thereby ignoring the less glamorous question of trade defence.

The constellation of post-1978 economic policy changes could, in principle, explain the accelerating pace of rural industrial growth, and this explanation features prominently in literature. The explanation offered by the orthodoxy is that private enterprise, both domestic and foreign, was crucial. In contrast, revisionist scholars emphasize the role played by fiscal decentralization. Neither explanation is compelling; the orthodoxy exaggerates the contribution of the private sector, whereas the revisionist approach understates the extensive decentralization of the Chinese fiscal system, which had already occurred before 1978. Both approaches err in neglecting the contribution made by the development of skills during the Maoist era to subsequent rural industrialization.

This introductory chapter surveys the recent scholarship in the social history of death, drawing attention to a relative neglect of studies on attitudes towards the dead. It discusses the benefits and limitations of social anthropology for the study of this theme, and places the book's argument in the context of the current historiography of the English Reformation, and of revisionist and post-revisionist approaches to the assessment of religious change in Tudor and early Stuart England.

This chapter discusses the reactions among conservative clergy to disestablishment that were generated by the French Revolution and Jefferson’s election as president in 1800. It examines the impact of the rise of evangelicalism through the Second Great Awakening, the subsequent creation of moral reform societies, and the leadership of Lyman Beecher. It documents the rise of evangelical revisionist histories which sought to establish the religious nature of the founding period by creating a myth about America’s Christian nationhood. Finally, it discusses ongoing resistance among Jeffersonians, including the controversy over Sunday mail delivery in the late 1820s.

This chapter focuses on two Anglo Protestant groups with genetic links to Puritanism: Presbyterians and Baptists. Both are well known in American history for the splits they suffered over revivalism, biblical interpretation, and slavery. But predestination always lurked just below the surface, and controversy erupted every time some faction attempted to articulate the definitive Presbyterian or Baptist position. When a movement arose among Presbyterians in the late 19th century to soften the Westminster Confession's statement on God's eternal decree, traditionalists cried foul. The revisionists eventually won a partial victory, but not before igniting a denominational firestorm and exacerbating North‐South differences. Baptists, meanwhile, had disagreed over predestination since the seventeenth century. In the Southern Baptist Convention, these tensions simmered until the turn of the 21st century, when the conservatives who engineered a successful takeover of denominational institutions descended into a bitter family feud over the Calvinistic doctrine of election.

This introductory chapter critically examines the historiography of Spanish decline in the seventeenth century. It considers the survival of the monarchy in the reign of Carlos II, identifying an alternative explanation for the success: the resilience of the Spanish imperial structure in that era.

This chapter aims to apply the revisionist approach to the study of the history of the press as an imperial institution. It examines how certain forces acted to undermine voluntary cooperation during the Second World War and the subsequent fragmentation of the British world. It adds that the examination of the imperial press system also fills the gap in the history of the British media. It shows that the relationship between commercial interest and identity was much more complex than has previously been acknowledged. It discusses that as with the press, the maintenance of the Anglo-Dominion relationship involved a process of bargaining and negotiation between various groups, offering possibilities for but also establishing the limits of closer imperial integration. It explains that an imperial perspective reveals a complexity that has previously been obscured by attempts to create disaggregated national narratives.

This concluding chapter emphasises how changing attitudes towards the dead represented a revolution of sensibilities, and led to the creation of new patterns of church life; new forms of public and civic commemoration; new uses of ritual space; new possibilities for cultural expression. Against the suggestion of some literary critics and post-revisionist historians — that the space left by the demise of purgatory was readily filled with functional substitutes — it argues that purgatory's disappearance represented a cultural change of profound significance. Yet the Reformation did not lead to a compete ‘separation’ of the living and the dead, and substantial continuities remained. The book concludes with the paradoxical reflection that the religious and cultural problem represented by the dead could be both a force for radical change, and for cautious conservatism, and that the necessity of dealing with the dead was a profound influence on the complex character of the English Reformation as a whole.

This book examines the alliance dynamics of Cold War East Asia during the period 1949–1969, arguing that disunity, lack of coordination, and intra-alliance rivalry increased both the chance that regional conflicts would occur and the likelihood that existing conflicts would persist and escalate. It shows that, in their formative years, both the U.S.-led alliance system and the Asian communist alliance sent dangerously confusing signals regarding the cohesion, resolve, and intent of their respective blocs. These signals undercut coercive diplomacy in Asia and created conditions for both crisis and war. The book considers two forms of dangerous dynamics among enemy alliances: poor coordination and, in the case of revisionist alliances, the catalyzing effect of ideology and the pursuit of prestige on aggression toward enemies. It also explores the legacies of U.S. Cold War alliances for contemporary Sino-American relations and concludes with a chapter on post-Cold War East Asia.

This chapter first sets out the current lines of debate over British naval policy before the First World War. The traditional or orthodox school of thought, typified by the works of Arthur Marder, argues that around 1902 the growing German navy replaced the navies of France and Russia to become the main threat to British maritime security in the eyes of the British Admiralty. A revisionist school argues that, because the German navy was composed of battleships and could not, therefore, target British trade, France and Russia remained the main opponents. This introduction contests both of these views. It proposes that Germany became a danger around 1902, not because of the growth of the German battle fleet but because Germany had a means of attacking British trade by arming its fleet of fast transatlantic liners. The Admiralty recognized this and devoted the next decade to developing countermeasures.

This chapter examines the ideological positioning of the revisionist Qing drama. Yongzheng Dynasty (Yongzheng wangchao, 1999), Kangxi Dynasty (Kangxi wangchao, 2001), and Qianlong Dynasty (Qianlong wangchao, 2003) are the best illustrations of the revisionist genre. They feature emperors and patriots who struggle against internal corruption and social injustice as well as external threats, depicting a fictional time of heroic figures and events. The chapter argues that the revisionist drama is informed by post-1989 Tiananmen Square intellectual debates concerning the current state and future direction of China's march toward modernization and the ramifications of this. Yongzheng Dynasty serves as a case in point to illustrate how dynasty dramas have responded to the political and cultural ethos of the time.

This Introduction provides a brief background of the life, bonds, and challenges that faced the black slave community in Loudoun. Proponents of slavery claimed that conditions for the creation of a stable, nuclear family for slaves was made possible by the institutions of Loudoun, and that support, in terms of living costs and moral training, was made available to these people by their owners' generosity. Revisionists have argued against this view, citing instances where even the size of the slaveholdings could not provide the stability necessary for the formation of traditional families. Instead, flexible extended slave families were formed to provide nurture, education, and socialization for its members, to cope with the ever-present threat of displacement by their owners. In the next section, the lives of emancipated black people in the community are discussed and contrasted with their slave kinsmen, along with the emergence of opposition to the proslavery ideology.

Examines the question of whether it is morally permissible to treat people in ways ruled out by the Principle of Permissible Harm (PPH; this was introduced in Ch. 7 and provides an account of certain restrictions/constraints on killing) only for the sake of minimizing violations of the PPH itself, or whether there is a constraint on doing this. Ch. 9 examines further one approach to the Selection Problem introduced in Ch. 8 that arises in justifying restrictions/constraints, namely, agent differentiation: the fact that something would be done by me rather than by someone else. Traditional victim‐focussed views (the victim's right or the inappropriateness of the relation in which he would stand to those for whom he would be sacrificed constrain and make it wrong for the agent to kill) are contrasted with four revisionist (agent‐relative and agent‐focussed) views on dealing with cases in which one person is killed in order to save others from being killed. Different notions of the self, act‐scenes, negative factors to be avoided, temporal dimensions, doomed victims, and degrees of self‐indulgence are examined in relation to the problem of justifying the constraint. One revisionist view is shown to bear a crucial similarity to the traditional view.