A B S T R A C T. The study of British attitudes to the French Revolution continues to attract substantial scholarly attention. In recent years, this has resulted not only in the excavation of a substantial volume of new detail, but also in increasing attention being paid to the political experiences of members of the middling and lower orders during the revolutionary and Napoleonic decades. While historians have been interested in radicals and reformers from these social strata since the publication of E. P. Thompson's The making of the English working class in 1963, it is only more recently that their loyalist and less partisan counterparts have been examined by scholars to the same extent. This article begins by summarizing the recent publication of large collections of primary sources and of major biographies in this area. It then discusses recent historiographical advances and debates in the following areas : the British debate over the French Revolution ; the political participation of members of the middle and working classes in patriotic and loyalist activities ; the culture of popular politics ; and the question of national identity.While a great deal of substantial and important work was published on British responses to the revolution in France during the 1970s and 1980s, it is not surprising that such a rich field of study has continued to attract scholars over the past fifteen years or so, mining an enormous volume of new detail as well as challenging previous wisdom and consensus. A substantial amount of attention has been paid to the political experiences of members of the middling and lower orders during the revolutionary and Napoleonic decades. How did they participate in loyalist and patriotic activities, as well as in radical and pacifist demonstrations ? Why did they display loyalty and patriotism? To what extent could the governing elite invite and welcome their participation in its defence ? Was there ever a danger that their political opponents, the adherents of radical politics, might have destabilized the state sufficiently to overthrow the government ? How did the measures taken by government to guard against such an enormity affect the ordinary British subject? What can we know about the political culture of middling and lower order loyalists and radicals ? How far did the experience of war against revolutionary and Napoleonic France draw

This is a very thoughtful and thought-provoking study of the meaning of the term 'independent' in Georgian England. As John Barrell's Imagining the King's Death (2000) did with the word 'imagine', so this book shows that a rich study of the usage of a single word can shed a generous quantity of light, in this case on the political mindset of England throughout the long eighteenth century. McCormack demonstrates that independence was not simply a relational term, but one which implied a condition or status, connoting manners, masculinity, personal virtue, national character, and, crucially, one which bestowed the qualification for political citizenship. None of this, perhaps, is absolutely novel, but he moves beyond high politics and social history to combine the two in a fascinating discussion of electoral history. He charts the shift from the emergence of a neo-classical political creed based on the independent citizen during the English Civil War to a definition of 'the independent man' by 1832 which allowed the electorate to be substantially widened. He argues that the Great Reform Act was not a triumph in which power was wrested from the upper classes, but rather the result of a change over the previous decades in the scope of the definition of 'the independent man', the 'legitimate political participant' (p.10).McCormack has many useful things to say about gender politics along the way, although the subtitle of the book correctly places gender politics after citizenship as the minor theme. For instance, it has now frequently been argued that the ideology of separate spheres was not a description of social reality, but McCormack's contention in chapter 1 that it could be used as a political idiom is illuminating: 'reformers emphasised the independence and domestic mastery of humble men in order to make a moral case for wider male access to political rights' (p.21). Indeed, this book is dense with stimulating material to be pondered: to take just one example, McCormack's unpicking of the common conflation of the terms 'loyalism' and 'patriotism' by historians of the 1790s, to show that they were two different commitments (p.141) which might be held together or not by the same people at different times, is very helpful, as is his further comment that 'conservatism', 'reaction', and 'counterrevolutionary' are also often lazily used as synonyms of the same phenomenon. Although the book is slightly inaccessibly written at some points, and rather censorious at others, it greatly repays the effort of reading it.

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The Enlightenment World series, no.6. 2008. viii + 340pp. £60.00. Bob Harris's new book is a tribute both to his enormous capacity for research in a wide variety of archives and to his careful, thoughtful scholarship. This study of the popular political culture of Scotland during the 1790s is a detailed and perceptive analysis of a period in Scottish politics which has sometimes been characterised by general, sweeping Elite and government responses are here treated only insofar as they were responding to popular politics, rather than to the French Revolution and the war.The book begins with a chapter examining the eighteenth-century origins of radicalism in Scotland. Harris argues convincingly that, while these may not have been so

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