bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Dissent and Catholicism in English Society: A Study of Warwickshire, 1660-1720
Authors: Hurwich Judith J.
Published: February 2004

Puritanism has long fascinated students of the relationship between religion and society. Indeed, the social history of Puritanism has probably been studied more intensively than that of any other religious movement in modern history. However, most studies of Puritanism in England end either at the beginning of the Civil Wars or at the Restoration. The history of those Puritans who became Dissenters after 1660 has been left to denominational historians, who are understandably more concerned with the ecclesiastical and theological history of their own particular groups than with the broader question of the place of Dissent in English society.

This neglect of post-Restoration Nonconformity is unfortunate for the study of the social history of Puritanism, both from a theoretical and from a practical point of view. When English Puritans are cited as the classical practitioners of the “Protestant ethic,” reference is often made to the success of Nonconformists in finance and industry after 1660. Tawney's application of the Weber thesis to England relies heavily on the writings of such post-Restoration divines as Baxter and Steele, and on the rise of Nonconformist capitalists in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Tawney's hypotheses cannot be evaluated unless we have more information about the social background of Dissent: not merely a few exceptional individuals, but the group as a whole. From the practical point of view, quantitative studies of the social structure — both of the religious group and of the larger society—are more easily undertaken for the period after 1660 than for the period before that date.
Catharine Macaulay and the Uses of History: Ancient Rights, Perfectionism, and Propaganda
Authors: Withey Lynne E.
Published: February 2004

Late eighteenth-century London was a center of political debate, expressed variously in countless pamphlets, in coffee house discussions, and in extra-parliamentary political organizations. Intellectuals and political activists who argued about the problems of ministerial corruption and relations with the colonies had great faith in the power of reasoned discourse and the development of knowledge to improve the human condition. Most of them were interested in science and religion as well as politics. They were part of that broad intellectual ferment that we call the Enlightenment; yet for all the originality of some of their ideas and the radicalism of their political thinking, they owed a great deal to longstanding English political and religious traditions. They were rationalists who believed in God, and radicals who believed in history.

Catharine Macaulay was one of these intellectuals; she was surely not a particularly original thinker, but was unique in using history as her primary medium of political debate, and in being a woman tolerated in male intellectual circles. Macaulay and her associates owed a great intellectual debt to earlier radical thinkers, the “commonwealthmen” of the seventeenth century. What is perhaps less well understood is the extent to which their ideas were informed by religious beliefs as well as political ideology. Beliefs in both the ancient rights of Englishmen and in millennial perfectionism provided the basis for the particular brand of political radicalism espoused by Macaulay and her associates. History was an important part of their political thinking, both because the rights of Englishmen were rooted in historical experience and because the process of history was part of the ultimate achievement of perfection.
Peers, Patronage, and the Industrial Revolution, 1760-1800
Authors: McCahill Michael W.
Published: February 2004

… My Thoughts always return to the Necessity of exercising Politicks in cultivating & protecting & extending our Manufactures as the principal Source for improving our Lands, multiplying our People & increasing & establishing our Commerce & Naval Force.

Samuel Garbett to the Marquess of Lansdowne, 2 October 1786.

Students of the industrial revolution now generally admit what seemed obvious to Samuel Garbett, the Birmingham manufacturer and lobbyist, two hundred years ago; namely, that the state was an important participant in the early phases of the industrial revolution. Many scholars still emphasize the restraint of English government — a restraint which gave relatively free play to natural economic forces and to individual genius, a restraint which also aggravated the social repercussions of so momentous a transformation. But they recognize that entrepreneurs could obtain legal sanction for enclosures, canals, and a myriad of other “improvements' easily and at moderate cost by means of a private act of parliament, and they debate whether existing patent law stimulated invention by providing adequate rewards for the inventor or aimed primarily at discouraging stultifying monopoly. Because the processes of growth in the last decades of the century were so fundamental and pervasive, fiscal, commercial, colonial, and foreign policies were bound to have an impact on the embryonic industrial economy. Whether government by its various acts encouraged or impeded growth is open to debate at a number of levels. There can be no doubt, however, that politicians endeavored, if sometimes slowly and haphazardly, to adapt policy and law to changing conditions and that their decisions did affect the tempo and quality of growth.
Popular Humor and “The Black Dwarf”
Authors: Hendrix Richard
Published: February 2004

In 1819 Viscount Castlereagh, England's Foreign Secretary and perhaps the most hated member of the Government, complained in parliament that the journalist, T. J. Wooler (1786?-1853), had become “the fugleman of the Radicals.” His weekly journal The Black Dwarf was circulating from radical Westminster to northern colliery districts, where it could be found “in the hatcrown of almost every pitman you meet.”

Early nineteenth-century popular radicalism took form in its journalism and its political tracts, pamphlet satires, caricatures, posters, and ballads. The best of the radical publications were shaped in turn by traditional popular attitudes and forms, including the rich resources of popular humor. Wooler's writing was unmistakably political, and often earnest in the manner of the polemical journalism of William Cobbett and Richard Carlile or the oratory of Henry Hunt. But his favorite tone was satirical, and this made him prominent among those radicals who did the most in the late Regency years to promote a public attitude of anti-authoritarianism rather than deference, of contempt for an unjust government rather than fear of it. E. P. Thompson has shown that it was “not the solemnity but the delight” with which the radicals “baited authority” that made the old order vulnerable. Wooler's journalism is a fine example of the political uses of popular humor, and a key to understanding the distinctive character of Regency radical culture.

I

Regency radicalism was a mixture of traditional and Enlightenment political ideas of natural rights and freedoms and an emerging class-consciousness of economics and society.
Working-Class Education and the State, 1839–1849: The Sources of Government Policy
Authors: Paz D. G.
Published: February 2004

The education of working-class children was a major governmental concern during the age of Peel and Cobden. In this period the state's financial commitment grew from £30,000 to £125,000, and a new department of state — the Education Committee of the Privy Council, with its bureaucratic establishment, the Education Department — was created to direct central policy. But who made that policy? Who guided education reform into channels which still, to some extent, contained the British educational establishment a century later? And does this example of Victorian reform suggest the dynamics of state intervention in other fields up to then left to private enterprise?

Civil servants, it has been alleged, were the responsible agents of change in this area. James Kay-Shuttleworth, the Education Department's first permanent secretary, has today a reputation as great as Chadwick's or Trevelyan's among historians. Henry Parris believes that he “organized” the department and made its policy; he calls his retirement in 1849 perhaps “the greatest single misfortune in the country's educational history.” David Roberts calls him “the chief architect of England's educational system;” he attributes to him all major government education policy between 1846 and 1849. That policy “came from the mind of a man who possessed not only a clear view of the ends which he wished to attain but also a sense of the possible means to those ends….” George Kitson Clark contended that his “services to public education have probably never been properly valued.”
Gladstone's Resignation of the Liberal Leadership, 1874-1875
Authors: Temmel Matthew R.
Published: February 2004

W. E. Gladstone resigned twice as leader of the Liberal Party. His final retirement of 1894 has received much attention, but his resignation two decades earlier is not well known. At age sixty-five, the recent loser in a surprise general election, the former prime minister stepped down from the Liberal leadership in January, 1875. Some observers doubted the permanence of his retirement, but previous speculation about the Liberal succession had assumed that Gladstone could hope at most for one further premiership. After he regained the leadership in 1880 and soldiered on as the Grand Old Man at the head of three further governments, Liberal sympathizers dismissed his 1875 resignation in retrospect as an unrevealing mistake, a temporary meandering from the true path of his career.

Recent studies have pointed to the decisive importance of Gladstone's course in the 1870s, especially to the implications of his return to public life. R. T. Shannon ties Gladstone's resignation to his loss of rapport with the popular forces that had once rallied to the banners of Reform and Irish disestablishment. His government's rejection at the polls in 1874 seemed to end “his great romance with the people of England.” Bitter, disillusioned, and mystified about the popular verdict, he resigned his post as Liberal leader. Freed from parliamentary responsibilities, Gladstone went on, almost in spite of his conscious intentions, to capture the soul of popular Liberalism, beginning with his hesitant but inspiring participation in the 1876 agitation against the Bulgarian atrocities, a campaign which held few attractions for the official Liberal hierarchy.
Ships and Mariners in Later Medieval England
Authors: Runyan Timothy J.
Published: February 2004

Contemporary perspectives on the activities of English medieval ships and mariners are somewhat distorted, since historians are rarely able to examine mercantile or marine activity from the personal records of merchants, mariners, shipbuilders, corderers, or others involved in maritime affairs. The sources are overwhelmingly royal and so they reduce the individual efforts of men and their ships to entries of income and expenditures in exchequer records, commissions of arrest or impressment, legal briefs, and occasional parliamentary records. The chroniclers prove of little help because of their general unfamiliarity with maritime affairs or because of the restricted interests of their patrons. Consequently, historians are forced to revert to the well-preserved English archival material which can shed light on the topic. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the value of the administrative records of medieval England in the study of ships and mariners. The focus of the essay is on the early history of the royal navy as opposed to the merchant ships impressed by the crown. Although this approach is not unique, questions regarding the composition, maintenance, or manning of royal fleets are traditionally answered by a discussion of the merchant marine. This study has been confined to the fourteenth century — a period crucial to the English experience because of the origins of the Hundred Years' War with France and the demands which the war placed upon the naval resources of England.

English fleets in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries relied heavily upon the Cinque Ports whose commitment of 57 ships for 15 days' service per year was formalized in the thirteenth century by “ancient custom.”
Violence and Social Conflict In Mid-Tudor Rebellions
Authors: Manning Roger B.
Published: February 2004

Two of the most common manifestations of social tension in Tudor England were the enclosure riot and the seditious rumor. Both are essentially pre-political forms of social protest, but the first must be viewed as more primitive than the second. Enclosure riots, at least prior to the riots and rebellions of 1548-49, were not particularly directed against the governing elite, but rather were aimed at innovations which threatened the traditional agrarian routine within the manorial or village economy. Thus, enclosure riots, which were procured as frequently by gentry as by peasants and often were calculatingly combined with litigation, did not especially menace the social order. On the other hand, seditious rumors — particularly those that were threatening and anonymous — raised the possibility of social polarization and violent protest on a larger scale than that of the enclosure riot. Before the rebellions and riots of 1548-49, enclosure riots were almost invariably confined within a single village community or between two neighboring communities, but during those troubled years the wide-spread circulation of rumors threatening the gentry resulted in the destruction over a widely-scattered area of enclosing hedges which had stood unchallenged for generations.

The rumor as a vehicle of social protest could either express the collective fear that some supposedly hostile group such as the rural aristocracy had put together a conspiracy to harm the peasantry, or could, conversely, convey the desire of peasants and artisans for social levelling or even social inversion.
“Charles Stuart, That Man of Blood”
Authors: Crawford Patricia
Published: February 2004

By 1648 in England many of parliament's supporters believed that peace was as far away as ever. The members of parliament who had declared they were fighting to rescue the king from the hands of his evil counsellors may have rethought their views about the personal responsibility of the king, but they still believed that the only viable settlement would be one based upon agreement between king and parliament. Consequently they had dispatched, with wearisome monotony, negotiators and messengers with propositions for peace to the king. Their initiatives were always destroyed in the last resort because Charles refused the terms offered, but apart from governing without him for the time being, the members of parliament could think of nothing else but a settlement based on agreement with Charles. The political thinking of the majorities in both Houses was bound by convention: a king was essential. Outside parliament, pamphleteers had questioned the importance of the king, but parliament's view was not seriously threatened until 1647 when it showed itself incapable of settling the kingdom and the Army showed a willingness to intervene in politics. The outbreak of the second Civil War in 1648 convinced the soldiers that parliament's policies of either seeking terms with the king or of ignoring him were alike futile and dangerous. So long as Charles remained alive, at the center of royalist hopes, so long would wars continue and lives be lost. At this point the Army spoke of the king in a new way.
Charity Bazaars In Nineteenth-Century England
Authors: Prochaska F. K.
Published: February 2004

Ladies and Gentlemen, I have the honour to announce a sale of many interesting, beautiful, rare, quaint, comical and necessary articles. Here you will find objects of taste, such as Babies' Shoes, Children's Petticoats, and Shetland Wool Cravats; objects of general usefulness, such as Tea-cosies, Bangles, Brahmin Beads, and Madras Baskets; and objects of imperious necessity, such as Pen-wipers, Indian Figures carefully repaired with glue, and Sealed Envelopes, containing a surprise. And all this is not to be sold by your common Shopkeepers, intent on small and legitimate profits, but by Ladies and Gentlemen, who would as soon think of picking your pocket of a cotton handkerchief, as of selling a single one of these many interesting, beautiful, rare, quaint, comical and necessary articles at less than twice its market value.

Spoken amidst trumpet flourishes by Robert Louis Stevenson's “allegorical Tout,” these words introduce an institution familiar to all of us and one full of interest to the social historian — the charity bazaar. Tea-cosies, bangles, Brahmin beads, and Madras baskets may seem only quaint and comical, but they and similar trifles filled countless stalls in innumerable bazaars and raised tens of millions of pounds in nineteenth-century England for causes of every conceivable description. Men and women of all social classes found bazaars, fancy fairs, fancy sales, or ladies' sales as they were variously called, a most popular and fashionable way of making money for the charity of their choice. Many philanthropic societies depended on them for annual funds. Clergymen of all persuasions, not without a touch of compromise, looked to them as a last resort to build a church or to enlarge a school or drawing room.
Social Work and Social Welfare: The Organization of Philanthropic Resources in Britain, 1900–1914
Authors: Moore Michael J.
Published: February 2004

Late Victorian and Edwardian social reform has been studied in recent years in order to clarify that important transitional era when new state resources were being called upon to help redress the most glaring abuses which comprised the condition-of-England question. Most of these studies have emphasized the politics of social policy and have also subsumed the tangled and competitive world of philanthropy. But philanthropists were prominent in the politics and practice of social welfare. In his study of Edwardian social policy, Bentley Gilbert distinguishes three organizations as characteristic of “scientific social reform”: settlements (inspired by Canon Samuel Barnett), the Fabians, and the Charity Organization Society. His analysis of each concluded that “professionally-minded social work,” as represented by the C.O.S., least typified the transition from old to new attitudes about social policy. David Owen's examination of English philanthropy supports Gilbert's conclusions concerning the C.O.S., and less detailed surveys of social policy also cite that agency as representative of a philosophic individualism which rejected the policies necessary for reform. All agree that the charitable community called attention to many defects in the British social system, but they leave readers with the impression that it generally opposed state sponsored remedies for those ills.

It is the concern of this essay to show that the “professionally-minded” world of Edwardian philanthropy was, like the state, developing new agencies and reorganizing its resources to help meet the massive and diverse welfare needs of the twentieth century.
The “Diehards” and the Myth of the “Backwoodsmen”
Authors: Phillips Gregory D.
Published: February 2004

The term “backwoodsmen” originated in the rhetoric of an embattled Liberal Government intent on discrediting an overwhelmingly Unionist House of Lords during the struggle over the “People's Budget” of 1909. The description applied to those peers, supposedly the great majority of the Upper Chamber, who almost never attended debates and had nothing to do with national affairs. The “diehards”, the 112 temporal peers who voted against the Parliament Bill of 1911, have been characterized by both their contemporaries and later historians as conforming to the “backwoodsmen” stereotype. This politically motivated description of the “diehards” has been accepted as substantially accurate since it was first formulated. It is a prime example of a received historical “truth” repeated by many historians, but left uninvestigated.

Like other clichés used by historians, this characterization of the diehards as “backwoodsmen” has hindered the effort to understand the politics and society of the period in question. As Lord Willoughby de Broke, a prominent diehard, stated in his autobiography, the result of contemporary and later comment has been that “backwoodsmen” have “occupied a special niche in the public vision. They were presented as being a rare and rudimentary species of the human race.” The study of the diehards, believed to be composed of members of this odd species, has been perfunctory at best. For if the group is thought to be almost completely divorced from national politics and affairs, perhaps by its own choice, and if it is further thought to behave either simply in terms of landed reaction or as the willing tool of the Unionist leadership, further analysis would seem to be both unnecessary and unproductive for the understanding of modern British society.
Nevil Shute and the Decline of the Imperial Idea' In Literature
Authors: Lammers Donald
Published: February 2004

After John Buchan, Nevil Shute. In the long progression of popular British writers who have woven stories around the social facts and cultural values of empire, a progression which extends from Charles Kingsley and G. A. Henty through Paul Scott and, arguably, Ian Fleming, Nevil Shute occupies a distinguishable and important place. Both in his own right and as a representative figure he deserves analysis on account of his part in the literary re-statement of what has fairly been called the ‘imperial idea,’ that matrix of assumptions, beliefs, and attitudes which had sustained and rationalized the endeavors of several generations of politicians, publicists, and civil servants, but whose relevance to Great Britain's circumstances after the Second World War was increasingly open to doubt. This essay offers the elements of such an analysis and suggests some lines along which further inquiry might proceed.

For at least a decade before his death in January 1960, Nevil Shute had been the best selling of English novelists. Altogether, his nearly two dozen works of light fiction have sold over 14 million copies. When he died his books were earning him an income of about $175,000 a year. Such extended popularity can hardly have been fortuitous. Without venturing too far into the psychology of literary response, it seems reasonable to conclude that Shute must have gauged accurately the issues and situations which, imaginatively presented, would interest his readers, and further, that he must have expressed in his work a pattern of values which conformed generally to their moral predispositions (or at least did not offend them.) Hence it should prove worthwhile to take a close and comprehensive look at his themes and ideas on the premise that they can tell us something useful about his audience.
Population, Plague, and the Sweating Sickness: Demographic Movements in Late Fifteenth-Century England
Authors: Gottfried R. S.
Published: February 2004

Demographic movements remain a controversial and largely unknown facet of medieval studies. This is particularly true for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the later middle ages, which in western Europe coincided with the second and most destructive pandemic of plague in recorded history. Most observers of late medieval England agree that population declined from sometime early in the fourteenth century, and that the decline extended to at least 1450, but the precise causes, extent, and chronology of this decline are still very much in debate. A recent analysis of 20,000 testamentary records from East Anglia, London, and Hertfordshire from 1430 to 1480 indicated that epidemic disease was the primary element in controlling and establishing demographic trends. It also showed, however, that this pattern began to change in the early 1470s when child replacement ratios, the generational measure of parents to progeny at fixed periods in time, began to rise for virtually all socio-geographic groups surveyed. By process of elimination, it was concluded that this was the result of an upturn in fertility. Since population increases generally have been attributed to changes in marriage patterns and/or mortality schedules, and since mortality was the major element in regulating population from 1348, the onset of the Black Death and the second plague pandemic, the postulated fertility rise of the 1470s took on even greater interest. Were the events of the 1470s anomalous, or did the projected fertility rise continue on into the 1480s, and even lead to the long-term period of population growth which occurred in the sixteenth century?
Solidarity In The Medieval Village? The Evidence Of Personal Pledging At Elton, Huntingdonshire
Authors: Pimsler Martin
Published: February 2004

The cooperative communal side of peasant life in the Middle Ages has been discussed widely, most often in the context of open field agriculture as being the basis of village solidarity. Although such writings state, or imply, the important truth that economic reality necessitated a degree of cooperation among peasants, they tend to offer little or no evidence to justify the romantic notion that the medieval village possessed a spiritual cohesiveness, that it represented a harmonious society with close emotional bonds between neighbors.

For example, one scholar suggests the romantic view of community life in the Middle Ages when he states:

Left to his own resources, the villein in his isolation found solace only in the bosom of his family, in the village community, and in his participation in the ceremonies and beliefs of a Christian life, which were brought within his reach in the thousands of parishes which had been created in the West.

Another writer presents a similar perspective in a discussion of the pre-industrial village:

… living together in one township, isolated, spatially, from others of comparable size, of very much the same structure inevitably means a communal sense and communal activity ….

One wonders about the meaning of the terms “solace” and “communal sense,” and also about the evidence which supports the above positions. The nature of the ties within the medieval peasant community represents a major question which should not be answered with the kinds of a priori assumptions quoted above.
The Occasional Conformity Controversy: Ideology and Party Politics, 1697-1711
Authors: Flaningam John
Published: February 2004

The occasional conformity controversy has been the subject of considerable study by historians, both contemporary and modern. However, recent research has tended to concentrate on the parliamentary and electoral aspects of the issue, with somewhat less attention given to its importance as an ideological question. Nevertheless, the latter aspect of the controversy is well worth examining, for aside from its impact upon the struggle for office and power, occasional conformity was also the subject of heated debate on the theoretical and philosophical level. And although this debate often degenerated into partisan diatribes and rhetoric, it also raised questions that transcended the political ploy on the one hand, and the theologian's quibble and the propagandist's stalking horse on the other. The arguments used by both sides during the controversy revealed the basic philosophical differences that lay at the heart of the rivalry between the Whig and Tory parties. Occasional conformity's role as an expression of, and its relation to, this struggle is the subject of this article.

The ideological debate over occasional conformity was necessarily stimulated by the parliamentary struggles during the first decade of the eighteenth century over the various bills which were designed to discourage the practice, and many of the tracts on the subject were written in response to these and other political maneuvers. But the pamphlet war had its own distinct existence, and the writers involved fought with their pens a battle that was parallel to the one that the politicians were fighting with votes and influence.
Mandeville and the Spirit of Capitalism
Authors: Goldsmith M. M.
Published: February 2004

Greed, avarice, rapacity, the quest for filthy lucre, are none of them traits peculiar to western Europeans of the last few hundred years — the capitalist epoch. Eastern potentates, feudal lords, magnates of the church, humble peasants, noble Romans, cultured Greeks and many others have been infected with the love of gold. The desire for wealth is not confined to capitalism; wealth for high living, conspicuous display or hoarding are all non-capitalist. Mediaeval and Renaissance monarchs shared with a number of ‘primitive’ tribes a taste for extravagant display. The hoarding of treasure typical of French peasants (at least until quite recently) is strikingly similar to the practices of wealthy Romans described by M. I. Finley.

None of these people are capitalists in any strict sense of the word. Some of them own some means of production — although this would not necessarily be true of churchmen or princes who were the beneficiaries of systems forcibly expropriating a surplus from the producers. But even those who, like some peasants, own means of production, do not necessarily live in a capitalist system in a capitalist manner. They do not reinvest in order to procure further income; they merely exchange commodities for money, which is then exchanged for other commodities or hoarded (not ‘saved’ or invested, merely hoarded). Capitalism, on Marx's account, involves a different process — money is exchanged for commodities which are exchanged for money once more: M-C-M rather than C-M-C. In Capital Marx describes hoarding as a petrification of money; it exists in a naive form in traditional societies producing for a limited circle of wants.
The Habit of Deference: The Imperial Factor and the “University Question“ in Upper Canada
Authors: Schneider Fred D.
Published: February 2004

“Imperialism,” like “empire,” is a word with many connotations; briefly, it describes an attitude of mind to the possession and use of dependent territories by the metropolitan power and the effect of colonization on the society and polity of the colonized. Despite attempts to discover a common basis to imperialist thinking at all times in history, most historians perceive differences, both in degree and kind, between different empires and at various times in the history of a single empire. They approach their task either with a definition of “imperialism” or a theory about the phenomenon it is meant to describe, and are concerned primarily with the effects of policies rather than how and why they were made; or they ask why something happened when it did, in the way it did, and are concerned primarily with the making of policy and the motives of the policy-makers.

Following the second approach, this paper explores one of the most crucial and continuous questions that imperial administrators had to resolve: the problem of self-government in colonies of European settlement, leading to the ultimate transfer of power; and by looking at the “University Question” in Upper Canada during the half-century after 1791, it examines how the perpetual adjustment that was “policy-making” actually happened. More specifically, in answering the question, “Who ran the British Empire?”, it is concerned not so much with the effects of Britain's control over subject peoples as with the method by which it exercised that control.
Individualism Versus Collectivism in Nineteenth-Century Britain: A False Antithesis
Authors: Perkin Harold
Published: February 2004

The critical transition in social policy in nineteenth-century Britain, it is still generally believed, was the change from individualism to collectivism. Yet since Dicey came under fire in the late 1950s, there has been no accepted consensus about how and when this transition came about. Dicey himself, who was not strictly a historian but a theorist of jurisprudence, held a naive view of how things happen, how policy changes and is translated into law: a great thinker thinks, and converts disciples, who in turn contrive to turn the master's thoughts into the dominant wisdom or accepted common sense of the age, which then finds its way on to the Statute Book. In this way he arrived at his famous tripartite division of the nineteenth century into three periods of public opinion, government policy, and legislation: the first, up to 1825 or 1830, the period of Old Toryism, legislative quiescence, or Blackstonian optimism, dominated by Sir William Blackstone; the second, from about 1830 to 1865 or 1870, the period of Benthamism or Individualism, dominated by Jeremy Bentham and his disciples; and the last, from 1865 or 1870 to the time of his lectures on Law and Opinion published in 1905, the period of Collectivism, dominated, it seems, by no great thinker of powerful mind and principle, but merely by the pragmatic need to propitiate the emerging and increasingly powerful working-class voter. It is surprising that Dicey could not find a great thinker on whom to serve an affiliation order for fathering collectivism.
The ‘Negative Argument’ in J. S. Mill's Utilitarianism
Authors: Zimmer Louis B.
Published: February 2004

In her recent book On Liberty and Liberalism — The Case of John Stuart Mill, Gertrude Himmelfarb is temporarily annoyed at Mill's use of the “negative argument” in the opening pages of his Subjection of Women. “It is astonishing, at first reading,” Himmelfarb writes, “to find Mill devoting so much space to what is essentially a negative argument.” What Mill does in his introductory chapter to prove that “the legal subordination of one sex to the other — is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement,” which “ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other,” is attack as strongly as he can the prejudicial nature of that subordination which had hardened into rigid and implacable legal barriers vastly inimical to that perfect equality Mill wanted to achieve. Here is a portion of Mill's summation of that legal subordination against which married women, in particular, had to contend:

The wife is the actual bond-servant of her husband: no less so, as far as legal obligation goes, than slaves commonly so called. She vows a lifelong obedience to him at the altar, and is held to it all through her life by law …. She can do no act whatever but by his permission, at least tacit. She can acquire no property but for him; the instant it becomes hers, even if by inheritance, it becomes, ipso facto his … in regard to the children … they are by law his children. He alone has any legal rights over them. Not one act can she do towards or in relation to them, except by delegation from him. Even after he is dead she is not their legal guardian, unless he by will has made her so. . . . If she leaves her husband, she can take nothing with her, neither her children nor anything which is rightfully her own. If he chooses, he can compel her to return, by law, or by physical force; or he may content himself with seizing for his own use anything which she may earn, or which may be given to her by her relations.
The East India Trade, The Politicians, and the Constitution: 1689-1702
Authors: Horwitz Henry
Published: February 2004

The war against France was the most potent force for change in English government and politics in William III's reign, but during those same years the contest for control of the lucrative East India trade also set off strong reverberations at Whitehall, in parliament, and even in the constituencies. Ever since its reorganization in the 1650s, the East India Company had been subjected to intermittent attack from a motley array of foes: some questioned the desirability of the bullion-greedy trade to the Far East, others disputed the Company's exclusive commercial privileges held under the royal charters of 1661 and 1683 and argued for a regulated company, and from the early 1680s onwards a number of once prominent Company members (most notably, Thomas Papillon) challenged the directorate of Sir Josiah Child. In turn, the Glorious Revolution ushered in the decisive phases of the dispute between the Company and its enemies — a controversy finally brought to a peaceful conclusion only in the closing months of William's reign.

By 1689, the struggle for control of the East India trade had already developed a “constitutional” dimension and taken on a political tinge. On the one hand, there was the question, first raised by the critics of the early Stuarts, whether any group could be endowed with a commercial monopoly by virtue of royal charter alone. On the other hand, there was the issue of the Child clique's close identification with the Stuart Court during the 1680s — a “Tory” posture Sir Josiah and his associates had adopted in order to ward off challenges to their own predominance and to the Company's privileges.
From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the Scottish Enlightenment
Authors: Höpfl H. M.
Published: February 2004

“He (Adam Smith) wanted to show how from being a savage, (man) rose to be a Scotchman.” (Walter Bagehot)

The Rev. Dr. Folliott:

“Pray, Mr. MacQuedy, how is it that all gentlemen of your nation begin everything they write with the ‘infancy of society?’”

(Thomas Love Peacock, Crotchet Castle)

The purpose of this essay is to consider an intellectual method which enjoyed a considerable vogue among the philosophes of Scotland. This method, ‘conjectural history,’ appears to be the direct or indirect source of many of the schemes of social evolution so popular in the nineteenth century, but it has itself been little investigated, and often misunderstood by assimilation to its progeny.

I. The Nature of Conjectural History

‘Conjectural history’ was, it seems, first distinguished from the more conventional narrative form of history by Dugald Stewart. He remarked on its use in the writings of Adam Smith, but the sort of inquiry to which we find Stewart referring is a method for understanding social phenomena which was characteristic of a whole group of Scottish writers, and we may take what he tells us about Smith as preliminary identification of the method.

Stewart explained conjectural history as arising out of comparisons between “our intellectual acquirements, our opinions, manners and institutions, [and] those which prevail among rude tribes” (whether of the past or the present). Such comparisons, he claimed, cannot fail to raise the question “by what gradual steps the transition has been made from the first simple efforts of uncultivated nature, to a state of things so wonderfully artificial and complicated.”
Military and Civilian Justice in Eighteenth-Century England: An Assessment
Authors: Gilbert Arthur N.
Published: February 2004

Opinion in the eighteenth century varied widely on whether or not “military justice” was, in fact, justice by the civilian standards of the day. Many leading legal commentators viewed the system with disdain. Blackstone dismissed military justice in these words:

Martial law which is built upon no settled principles, but is entirely arbitrary in its decisions is … in truth and reality, no law, but something indulged rather than allowed ….

Another writer, arguing along similar lines, wrote: “The moment … a gentleman enters the service, he waives the Rights and Privileges he might be entitled to as an Englishman.” It was generally believed that law in the army was deemed less important than order and discipline. A man who opted for the army or was forced into service left more than his civilian clothes behind: he abandoned the legal rights under which he had been born and bred.

Yet defenders of military justice were not lacking, particularly during the last half of the eighteenth century. Stephen Payne Adye, who had served as Judge Advocate in North America, wrote a treatise praising military justice; and at the end of the century, Alexander Tytler, drawing heavily on Adye's work, did the same. Other writers occasionally complimented the army on certain legal practices they viewed as superior to civilian court procedures. Still, then as now, the arguments of the advocates of the military system were largely ignored — a reflection of the deep distrust of all military institutions in Great Britain.
The London ‘Insurrection’ of December 1792: Fact, Fiction, or Fantasy?
Authors: Emsley Clive
Published: February 2004

As the likelihood of war with revolutionary France grew at the end of 1792 and beginning of 1793, the pro-government press in England reported that a serious plan for an insurrection, scheduled for the first weekend in December 1792, had been nipped in the bud by the authorities. On December 3 The Times stated that, as it had not wished to create alarm, it had not previously mentioned the full facts of the seditious attempts being made in the country. These attempts, the newspaper maintained, had prompted almost daily meetings of the Cabinet climaxing in a meeting at Lord Grenville's house which had lasted until one a.m. on the preceding Saturday morning (December 1). It was from this meeting that the Cabinet had issued the royal proclamation which embodied part of the militia and which deplored the ineffectiveness of the May 1792 proclamation against seditious meetings and writings. Three weeks later, beneath the headline “Revolution Plans,” the World reported that two parties were involved in the projected insurrection: the “moderates” who sought first the destruction of the House of Lords, the Herald's Office, and the Horse Guards, and then the enlarging of the Commons; and those whose plans were “more extensive” and who would have gone on to destroy St. James's Palace, the Bank, the law courts, the prisons, the customs house, and excise office. A month later, under the headline “Project of an Insurrection,” the London Chronicle gave similar details of a plot “to overturn the government and the constitution of this country.”
Henry Mayhew and the Life of the Streets
Authors: Maxwell Richard
Published: February 2004

Lamb in the 1820s and Dickens in the 1830s had written about some of those who made their living or advertised their services in the streets of London: beggars, chimney sweeps, cab drivers, the vendors of baked potatoes and kidney pies. When, in the late forties, Henry Mayhew began his extensive study of the street-folk, he found reason to cite both these chroniclers.London Labour and the London Poor, however, is an enterprise different in kind from the essays and sketches it occasionally quotes. Somehow, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, the street-folk became a subject worth four volumes and sixteen hundred pages.

The decision to devote so much attention to the people of the streets came at a crisis-point in Mayhew's journalistic career. He had undertaken for theMorning Chronicle(1849) a comprehensive study of the metropolitan poor. Defining the poor as “those persons whose incomings are insufficient for the satisfaction of their wants,” Mayhew proposed to discuss them “according as theywillwork, theycan'twork, and theywon'twork.” He had progressed part way through the first of these classifications when he quarrelled with the editors of the Chronicle and ended by severing his ties with them. On his own, Mayhew commenced the publication in parts ofLondon Labour. The “will, can't, won't” division, which persists in these volumes, was supplemented or perhaps superseded by another. Mayhew's ultimate object was still to study all the London poor but he now began with a trade-by-trade survey of the street-folk.
Gladstone as “Troublemaker”: Liberal Foreign Policy and the German Annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, 1870–1871
Authors: Schreuder Deryck
Published: February 2004

“I think it my duty … to cherish respect and sympathy for every foreign state, without exception and distinction.

“But, when there is apparent reason to believe they are prosecuting schemes adverse to liberty beyond their own borders, then, as I have tried in former times, so I will now raise up moral forces as far as in me lies, to defeat their aims….”

Gladstone to Lord Reay, 9 April 1880.

“He was by nature an interferer, by training a man of Power,” A. J. P. Taylor remarked of Gladstone in his noted Oxford Ford Lectures on “Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1791-1939,” later published as The Troublemakers. He continued: “Press Bright's policy to its conclusion and you arrive at isolation, inaction except in the case of actual invasion. Press Gladstone's doctrine to its conclusion; and you have universal interference, as the Radicals discovered too late.” This view of Gladstone's contribution to the foreign policy of Victorian England is highly attractive. It stresses the ethical basis for much of his “conscience politics;” and it points to the laudable actions of liberals in championing the cause of “national self-determination” — “peoples struggling to be free” — in nineteenth-century Europe. So far so good. But is it right to make a direct connection between liberal sympathies for nationality and the actual use of British power or prestige abroad? Indeed, is it true that Gladstone's “moral fervour tempted him to universal interference?” And if it is valid, did Gladstone always get his own way in the Cabinet?
British Labour and Roosevelt's New Deal: The Response of the Left and the Unions
Authors: Malament Barbara C.
Published: February 2004

There are two prevailing views concerning Labour's response to the New Deal. Labour is said to have been either uninterested in the New Deal or else sharply divided, with sympathetic trade unions on the Right, and critical or even hostile socialists on the Left. This discussion will deal with each of these views, but it will focus on the second, which grew out of the attack on unions by the Left in the 1930s. Unions were attacked at that time not only for their defense of capitalist democracies and for their commitment to parliamentary procedures, but also for their willingness to consider short-term remedies in connection with the problem of unemployment; their interest in remedies proposed by such middle-of-the-road organizations as the Council of Action or the Next Five Years Group; and, not least, for their enthusiastic response to the New Deal. Repeatedly, unions were challenged to explain,

if the Trades Union Congress would have something further to say about the situation in America under Roosevelt's National Recovery Plan. At their Annual Congress at Brighton in September they gave their blessing to the scheme and urged the British Government to follow the American lead.

In doing this, they, perhaps not designedly, but none the less surely, propagated among Trade Unionists the idea that Capitalism could be restored to a prosperous and stable condition. It was … a great disservice to the cause of working-class freedom in this and other lands.