bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Commitment and Ideology: the Case of the Second Reform Act
Authors: Himmelfarb Gertrude
Published: February 2004

Whatever our differences, I am grateful to F. B. Smith for what must surely be the best academic news of the year: that undergraduates somewhere, if only in Australia, can still find alluring such things as “style and footnote polemic”; our own undergraduates, alas, have headier tastes. In other respects, however, I must confess to finding Mr. Smith's communication disappointing. One of the longer footnotes in my essay in Victorian Minds is a rather detailed critique of his own book, The Making of the Second Reform Bill, a major work on the subject but one that seems to me – and I gave examples of this – to typify at several crucial points the standard “Whig interpretation.” The present discussion would be more fruitful had he addressed himself to those points instead of countering with a critique based on a misunderstanding and misrepresentation of my argument.

The extent of this misrepresentation is exemplified in his opening paragraph. The courteous critic to whom Mr. Smith refers (Robert Kelley) might be discomfited by the suggestion that the “substance” of his quarrel with me concerned my description of Gladstone as a utilitarian. This was only an “example,” as Kelley presented it, of one of his objections; his other objections involved nothing less than my interpretation of half a century of Tory history and of the relationship between intellectual and political history. In my response the issue of utilitarianism occupied one item out of six.
Fabian Socialism: a Theory of Rent as Exploitation
Authors: Ricci David M.
Published: February 2004

During the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in Britain, Fabians stood out among socialists as diverging from the Marxian view. Fabians rejected Karl Marx's analysis of surplus value, the most widely accepted and influential socialistic theory of capitalist exploitation. In its place the Fabian Society expounded an entirely distinct notion of exploitation, a radical theory of rent. That theory led to a program for the electoral overthrow of bourgeois liberal societies and the creation of democratic socialism.

The Fabian theory of rent – an ethical touchstone for evaluating the wealth and income of every man – is the subject of this essay. When the theory is abstracted from Fabian writings and fully elaborated, it becomes a blueprint for building a socialist society. That such a society could be founded upon an understanding of rent should be noteworthy to scholars interested in the philosophical origins of Fabianism. Moreover, the point may also be generally significant since it demonstrates that a socialist society may have a non-Marxian genesis and a nonauthoritarian end, two propositions that require constant reiteration in an American political climate which, as Louis Hartz has pointed out, is predominantly liberal.

I

For reasons indicated below, this analysis of rent theory centers upon the years from 1887 to the 1920s. To begin with the term itself, in this period the word “rent” appeared often in Fabian and non-Fabian writings alike and carried two possible meanings. In everyday affairs rent was money received by an owner for the use of his land or goods; thus one paid rent for a farm, an apartment, a truck, or an adding machine.
The Origins of British Opposition to Mussolini over Ethiopia
Authors: Robertson James C.
Published: February 2004

Scholars have not yet provided an authenticated explanation of Britain's support for the League of Nations against Mussolini's scheme to annex Ethiopia in 1935. Writing during the Italo-Ethiopian War and its immediate aftermath, A. J. Toynbee concluded that the Peace Ballot was responsible, a verdict followed by the two principal Italian historians of the war's diplomatic preliminaries, L. Villari and G. Salvemini. Their judgment was echoed by the author of the pioneer work on interwar British history, C. L. Mowat, and no doubt was cast on this version until 1961. Even then no credible alternative was advanced by the dissenter, A. J. P. Taylor, and in the more recent first full-scale diplomatic history of the conflict's origins, the American, G. W. Baer, has drawn substantially the same conclusions as his European predecessors, A. J. P. Taylor apart.

Villari worked from unpublished (still) Italian documents; Salvemini augmented these selections with a vast array of press material and other contemporary printed sources. When Mowat published his book two years later, only Sir John Simon and Sir Samuel Hoare of the main British participants had written their memoirs, the former having intentionally restricted himself to material already then made public. The Ethiopian affair figured only as an important second-stream event in Taylor's general study, which did not concern itself in detail with the books of Foreign Office officials, such as that of Sir Robert (later Lord) Vansittart, which had appeared in the meantime.
British Historiography Decentralizes
Authors: Raftis J. A.
Published: February 2004

One of the most remarkable features of the British historical scene since World War II has been the rapid professionalization of local history. The National Register of Archives was set up in 1954 “to record the location, content and availability of all collections of documents, both large and small, in England and Wales (other than those of the central government).” From 1949 something akin to a diary of the burgeoning interest in this area was provided by the journal Archives. Neither the work of the National Register nor the informed discussion of Archives would have been possible, however, without the labours of permanent professional archivists who were to be found in most county and other major local record offices by the 1950s. It is not the purpose of this article, however, to record archival activities as such or to follow the subdividing of these activities throughout the 1950s indicated by the Bulletin of the National Register of Archives, the Lists of Accessions, and the many catalogues issuing from local archives.

For the archivist, interest in local records seemed to follow naturally enough upon his scientific training in national collections. But such was not the case for the academic historian for whom “nationalization” of history had become identified with the development of scientific history itself. While the president of the Historical Association could admit in his Jubilee Address of 1956 that “One of the most important features of the first half of the twentieth century is the realization in one field after another that history is much more than the mere story of governments,” this realization has been very gradual.
The Becket Controversy in Recent Historiography
Authors: Alexander James W.
Published: February 2004

December twenty-ninth of this year will mark the eight hundredth anniversary of the martyrdom of Thomas of Canterbury. There will be no such superfluity of books as commemorated the nine hundredth anniversary of the Conquest, the one hundredth of the American Civil War, or the fiftieth of the Soviet Revolution. Few will even recall the murder, since the propers have been deleted from the general calendar of the Roman Church. If Thomas's feast has been quietly dropped from the missal, his career has by no means been neglected by historians in recent years. New editions of the writings of participants in the dispute have appeared, new interpretations of the quarrel are numerous, and important new studies in the history of canon law have altered traditional perspectives on the dramatic confrontation. Now is therefore an opportune time to survey modern scholarship on the Becket controversy and to indicate fruitful directions for further research.

There is, first, the problem of context. The most recent scholarly study of the dispute is that of H. G. Richardson and G. O. Sayles. The eccentricities of the provocative, peppery, and erraticGovernance of Mediaeval Englandhave been amply, if cautiously, alluded to by reviewers. Richardson and Sayles commence their discussion of the relations ofregnumandsacerdotiumin the later twelfth century with the reign of Stephen, neglecting questions of continuity from the reigns of earlier Norman kings. They dispute the received interpretation of Stephen's Second Charter, of which the central clause has been generally interpreted to mean that this King granted benefit of clergy in some form to the English church.
More, Morton, and the Politics of Accommodation
Authors: Davis J. C.
Published: February 2004

In the private conversation of close friends this academic philosophy is not without its charm, but in the council of kings, where great matters are debated with great authority, there is no room for these notions …. But there is another philosophy, more practical for statesmen, which knows its stage, adapts itself to the play in hand, and performs its role neatly and appropriately. This is the philosophy which you must employ.

This trimmer's prescription, with its blast of the breath of experience over the unguarded optimism of theory, is crucial to an understanding of More's Utopia and an appreciation of its unity. Was Thomas More seriously recommending the accommodational approach to politics here put forward by the fictional “More” in Book I of the Utopia, and what was the relationship between this approach and the ideal state described in Book II?

The various answers given to these questions can be seen as hinges on which the various interpretations of the Utopia have turned. The accommodational argument stands at the crux of the debate on counsel, which takes up almost the whole of Book I. Upon the interpretation of this debate can depend the view taken of More's intention in depicting the fictional society of Utopia, and involved in this interpretation is the knotty problem of whether the real More's opinions are voiced by Hythlodaeus or by the fictional “More.”

An examination of the two approaches most frequently adopted will reveal the importance of the problem. The first approach is that which sees the real More's views as expressed by the fictional “More” of the Utopia.
Steps to War: the Scots and Parliament, 1642–1643
Authors: Kaplan Lawrence
Published: February 2004

The Scottish role in the English Civil War, although generally recognized by historians to be a major one, has never been investigated in depth. Every student of the period knows how the resistance in Scotland to the English prayer book impelled Charles to summon first the Short and then the Long Parliament, thereby setting in motion the events leading to the Great Rebellion. Yet the Scots did more than help to precipitate the conflict: just a year after the actual fighting between the King and his Parliament began, they entered the fray as allies of the latter and remained active combatants in the first Civil War until its conclusion. Military aid was just one facet of this alliance. Scottish commissioners in London became embroiled in parliamentary politics, influencing positions taken by the two houses, while Scottish ministers stimulated the religious debate which characterized these years and assisted (despite their annoyance with the outcome) in the establishment of a new church government in England. Quite obviously the English Civil War was never exclusively an English matter.

The Scots' intervention in their neighbors' affairs is also recognized to have resulted in disaster. Not only did they fail to realize their original ambitions; they were eventually forced to endure the humiliation of a military occupation. How then did Scotland manage to become involved in the upheaval taking place in England? The answer usually given by historians is a simple one: the Scottish Kirk, desiring to export Presbyterianism, worked successfully for an alliance with Parliament as a first step toward making England a Presbyterian nation.
Swift and Bolingbroke on Faction
Authors: Rogers Pat
Published: February 2004

The text for this essay comes from Sir Lewis Namier. “One has to steep oneself in the political life of a period,” so the decree reads, “before one can safely speak, or be sure of understanding, its language.” This article is an attempt to supply, not a complete grammar of Augustan politics, but a minor lexicographical entry. Historians sometimes talk as though the most urgent need were for an advanced glossary. The assumption behind this essay is that a more elementary gradus is required. The two key words under review, “party” and “faction,” have always occupied neighbouring berths in the British synonymy. Unfortunately, in the eighteenth-century vocabulary of politics, they became overlapping concepts. Or rather — this is the trouble — they sometimes merged, partially or completely; sometimes they did not; and sometimes they were even employed as antonymous terms. Examples of all these contrary applications are found in the work of Swift and Bolingbroke. As with other lexicographical enquiries, then, usage and abusage must be considered, as well as the simple dictionary definition of these terms.

I

Edmund Burke is still, in some quarters, valued more highly as a prophet than as a political thinker. His forecasts of the likely course of the Revolution have brought him a reputation for the occult among those who hold his moral views in little esteem, even though he may be regarded, most unfairly, as a sorcerer's apprentice who was engulfed by his own charmed vision.
Class Consciousness in Early Victorian Britain: Samuel Smiles, Leeds Politics, and the Self-Help Creed
Authors: Tyrrell Alexander
Published: February 2004

“During the late 1830's and 40's two forms of class consciousness were being forged in Britain, not one — middle-class consciousness and working-class consciousness.” Asa Briggs's belief is shared in all its starkness by many students of early Victorian Britain, including R. K. Webb, who has even referred to “the working class point of view,” which middle-class men could adopt only by becoming “traitors to their class.” Such statements have been severely taken to task by various historians, and from the beginning Briggs has seen the need to admit important qualifications. Quoting the nineteenth-century economist W. T. Thornton, he has agreed that “the labouring population … spoken of as if it formed only one class” was “really divided into several,” each distinguished from the other by wage rates, social security, regularity of earnings, climate of industrial relations, status in the local community, prospects of future advancement, and sophistication of political attitudes.

Unfortunately these qualifications are productive of confusion: it is by no means obvious why Briggs's readers should believe that only one form of working-class consciousness existed in such conditions of diversity. Nor is it obvious why similar qualifications should not be made concerning the middle classes. Was the gulf between William Lovett and those whom he called the “vicious many” not similar in extent to that between most members of the Leeds middle classes and their fellow citizen J. G. Marshall, “a millionaire mill-owner, a man aristocratically allied, and the manager of the largest factory in the world”? Nor is it necessary to rely on such an extreme example, if one believes Gibbon Wakefield, who detected the existence of an “uneasy class,” the product of a division within the ranks of the professionally qualified:

The learning, skill and reputation, united, of a professional man may be called his capital.
An Agricultural Journalist on the “Great Depression”: Richard Jefferies
Authors: Perry P. J.
Published: February 2004

Richard Jefferies is most often remembered and read as a writer on wild life and as the author of Bevis. His novels and strange autobiographical writings are largely forgotten; his agricultural writings — with the exception of Hodge and His Masters — are equally neglected. But it was with three letters on the Wiltshire labourer which appeared in the Times in 1872 that Jefferies first reached a more than local readership. During most of the 1870s he earned his living as an agricultural journalist, and such was his reputation that he was writing leading articles for a national farming weekly and essays on farming topics for the principal reviews when he was still only in his late twenties. Until his early death in 1887 he remained an occasional writer on fanning and the countryside.

The son of a not very successful small farmer, Jefferies was a realist rather than a romantic when writing on rural and agricultural topics. As a countryman he was both knowledgeable and exceptionally observant. His native north Wiltshire afforded him examples of several systems (and standards) of fanning and of a variety of views on the nature of the depression. His journalistic activity covered the last prosperous years of “high farming” in the late 1860s and the first decade of depression from the early 1870s to the early 1880s. This was a period of increasing difficulty for a large number of farmers and landowners, culminating in the almost universally disastrous summer of 1879.
The Trade Union Tariff Reform Association, 1904-1913
Authors: Brown Kenneth D.
Published: February 2004

The controversy over the respective merits of free trade and protection was an old one in 1903 when Joseph Chamberlain launched his campaign for tariff reform which became a dominant theme of Edwardian polities. Workingmen, with the exception of those in the Conservative workingmen's clubs and the National Free Labour Association, had not generally been very receptive to the ideas of fiscal reform mooted in the last years of Victoria's reign. In 1887, for example, J. M. Jack, chairman of the Trades Union Congress, had claimed that although there existed a “somewhat hazy conviction that the depression we are suffering from is in some way attributable to the fiscal system of the country,” it was well known that in protected countries “trade depression existed in an equal, if not greater degree.” The Social Democratic Federation took its opposition to fiscal change even further, organizing counterdemonstrations against the meetings held by the Fair Trade League in the 1880s. One such demonstration attracted an audience of thirty thousand in February 1886.

In spite of its extravagant claims, however, it is doubtful whether the N.F.L.A. enjoyed a very wide influence; thus when Chamberlain left Arthur Balfour's Government in 1903 to concentrate on his national campaign, he knew that he needed the support of workingmen on a far larger scale than protectionists had hitherto been able to secure, a fact he openly admitted in October 1903: “If I do not convince the working classes I am absolutely powerless. I can do nothing.”
Behind the Scenes at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919
Authors: Marks Sally
Published: February 2004

In January 1919 thousands of delegates, diplomats, and academic experts poured into Paris to redraw the map of the world and to settle its problems, supposedly forevermore. While the confusion attendant upon the negotiations was evident to contemporary observers, who also complained of the delay before the conference began, few considered the magnitude of the job of organizing so vast an assembly and of providing the larger delegations with the facilities for the many tasks facing them. In retrospect, it is indeed remarkable that Paris, after four and a half years of war, so well absorbed so many people and that anonymous officials laboring unobserved behind the scenes were able to provide the essential services necessary to the reasonably efficient functioning of the luminaries in the limelight.

The burden of arrangements for the conference itself fell upon the French, but so far as their own delegation was concerned, they had the inestimable advantage of operating upon home ground and of requiring few special arrangements. For the Americans, who sent the largest delegation, the problem of distance was so great that while an entire boatload of delegates and documents was shipped across the Atlantic, the personnel of the delegation remained stable and facilities for them were obtained largely from the French and from the American army because the oceanic barrier eliminated other alternatives. The Japanese, faced with the difficulty of even greater distance and the added complication of a language barrier, rested upon the French for their facilities and sent a small delegation composed of a few dignitaries from Tokyo and a number of senior officials from their European embassies.
The Court of the Verge: the Jurisdiction of the Steward and Marshal of the Household in Later Medieval England
Authors: Jones W. R.
Published: February 2004

The royal court known variously as the “court of the verge,” the “court of the steward and marshal,” or the “Marshalsea court,” and which was said to try “pleas of the hall” (placita aule), appeared as a distinct and separate tribunal during the second half of Edward I's reign. It is difficult to trace the process whereby it distinguished its highly specialized jurisdiction over matters of personal interest to the king and his household from the general jurisdiction exercised coram rege and thereby succeeded in separating itself from the undifferentiated Curia Regis. Since at least the early thirteenth century the steward of the household was viewed as having a special judicial role within the household, of which he was the appointed head. As a result of that process of departmentalization which created the other agencies of royal justice and administration, a special household jurisdiction appeared toward the end of the thirteenth century. About the year 1290 the court of the steward and marshal of the household emerged as a separate and identifiable judicial body with its own personnel, procedures, and rolls, and with a jurisdictional competence encompassing pleas of trespass within the verge, cases of debt involving members of the household, and pleas of contempt of the king's rights of purveyance and carriage. In substance, the court claimed to try cases involving the domestic servants of the crown and certain acts affronting the royal dignity and, in geographical terms, breaches of the king's peace within the vicinity of the royal residence, which was assumed to extend twelve miles in every direction from the especially sacrosanct presence of the sovereign.
James Harrington and the Good Old Cause: a study of the ideological context of his writings
Authors: Pocock J. G. A.
Published: February 2004

The life of James Harrington is singularly ill-documented. None of his manuscripts is known to survive; he makes few and insignificant appearances in the state papers of his time; and though he was clearly a sociable and talkative man, in an age when scholars and writers all knew one another and wrote letters which they kept, correspondence from, to or about him is altogether lacking. Apart from the personal reminiscences of John Aubrey (who knew him well) and a few details from Thomas Herbert, we depend for our knowledge of his life on information supplied through John Toland, deist and literary adventurer, who edited his works in 1699-1700. It seems that a sister, Lady Assheton, formed a collection of papers by and concerning her brother, which entered the possession of a younger half-sister, Dorothy, the wife of James Bellingham, then of Levens Hall in Westmoreland. She was alive in 1699, though no longer living at Levens, and made the Assheton collection available to Toland. He found there, and published, a number of Harrington's manuscript writings, and we must suppose that the detail he gives of Harrington's life and circumstances is based either on personal information from Dorothy Bellingham or on material from Lady Assheton's papers. But whether these still exist is unknown, and though some of Toland's statements can be corroborated and few have been proved wrong, there is a great deal of what he says which is very hard to test against independent evidence. This state of affairs is especially unsatisfying when one is trying to reconstruct an account of the intellectual and political situation in which works were read and responded to by their first public; for it is here that Toland (though a serious and conscientious editor), writing forty years later with strong ideological prepossessions of his own, is least likely to be of help.
Charles II, the Commons and the Newark Charter Dispute: The Crown's Last Attempt to Enfranchise a Borough
Authors: Edie Carolyn A.
Published: February 2004

On October 30, 1673 Sir Paul Neile took his seat in the House of Commons. In early August he and Henry Savile had been elected the first members from Newark-on-Trent, newly enfranchised by a royal charter granted the preceding March. But the seating of the two new members proved to be no simple thing. Determined parliamentary opposition not only to the king's grant itself but also to the terms of that grant were to delay the admission of Newark's burgesses for four years and to require a second election before that admission was finally accomplished. The Commons saw in this, Charles II's only attempt to enfranchise a borough by charter, a royal design to dilute and weaken their newly and hard-won power. In the charter's offending clauses, which limited the parliamentary franchise to the Mayor and Aldermen, or Corporation of Newark, they saw a scheme to grant privilege only to those whom the crown could readily control and through whom it might strengthen the court faction in the lower House. The debate was protracted, but intermittent. The Commons knew the force of legal precedent to support the king, but they also recognized what the consequence would be if the Newark attempt were to succeed. For though the argument was legal, the debate was political.

The question itself seems slight, but its implications were not. In the end the king was forced to acknowledge defeat. The increasing momentum of the opposition, and the emergence of more important issues finally indicated that to insist would be impolitic, and the king's faction settled for compromise.
What Indeed Was Neo-Classicism?: A Reply to James William Johnson's “What Was Neo-Classicism?”
Authors: Greene Donald
Published: February 2004

Bernal calls the Dark Ages the Age of Faith; the period from the end of the 17th to the beginning of the 18th century is often called the Age of Reason. — Scientific American

“Shortest damn age in history” was The New Yorker's comment on this little gem; and the phrase, which for some decades did manful duty among writers of school textbooks and “popular historians” like the Durants and Sir Harold Nicolson as a substitute for study and thought, deserves no better epitaph. To the serious historian, these questions of labeling — “Shall we call the Dark Ages the Age of Faith, or shall we call the Age of Faith the Dark Ages? Shall we call 1660-1800 in Britain the Age of Reason or the Enlightenment or the Neo-Classical Age or the Augustan Age?” — seem only tedious pseudo-problems, better left for journalists — and professors of literature — to play with if it amuses them and their readers; for his purposes, it suffices to call 1660-1800 “1660-1800.” He knows too well that such labels represent not only naive oversimplifications and distortions of history, but sometimes even reversals of the historical actuality. “The Age of Reason” is certainly one of these latter. Nothing is easier than to demonstrate that “reason,” as signifying the power of the human mind, without external aid, to arrive at valuable truth, was, together with its handmaid “logic,” seldom in worse repute than in Britain from 1660 onward. The whole tendency of the ruling empiricist philosophy of the time, that of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume — “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions” — is to minimize it and exalt experience in its place.
Bentham's Utopia: The National Charity Company
Authors: Himmelfarb Gertrude
Published: February 2004

Bentham has been the subject of much controversy in recent years, a controversy which has illuminated an important area of English social history but has left obscure an essential part of Bentham himself. The main point at issue has been his influence as a social reformer — the extent to which he was personally or ideologically responsible for the reforms of the nineteenth-century, ultimately the extent to which any person or ideology was responsible for those reforms. But a prior issue has been largely ignored. This is the question of his character as a social reformer, the character and quality of the reforms which he proposed and which are presumed to have inspired, or not to have inspired, the reforms later adopted. The only aspect of this question which has been raised is the hoary one of whether he was primarily a laissez-fairist or government-interventionist. And even here his general pronouncements have been quoted more often than his actual proposals for reform. For the rest, it has been assumed that his reforms were humane, benevolent, philanthropic, enlightened, rational, progressive; the words recur with tedious predictability in one account after another. Even those critics who have found his philosophy unsatisfactory have been content, and more than content, with his practical efforts to promote the greatest happiness of the greatest number. But while we are often called upon to admire and emulate “the humble, rational, humanitarian spirit of this great man,” we are rarely shown the actual working and practical results of that spirit — the reforms themselves.
The Siege of Chitral and the “Breach of Faith Controversy” — The Imperial Factor in Late Victorian Party Politics
Authors: Huttenback Robert A.
Published: February 2004

Throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the British authorities, both in London and Calcutta, were becoming progressively more concerned about the security of India's undefined northern border along which the empires of Britain, Russia and China and the kingdom of Afghanistan met. Although the Russian capture of Francis Younghusband in 1891 and the consequent danger of war had forced the British and Russians to the conference table, Russia, China and Afghanistan were still on a collision course in those reaches of the Pamirs beyond the purview of Anglo-Russian bilateral border talks. Consequently, when the Russians forced the Chinese to withdraw from Ak-Tash and defeated an Afghan force encamped at Somatash, the nightmore vision of Russian armies poised at the gates of India suddenly appeared both real and terrifying.

The Government of India's reaction was prompt. The governor general, Lord Lansdowne, determined to strengthen the garrison at Gilgit, the British station to the north of Kashmir. But the position in Gilgit was viable only if Chitral, to the west, were secure. This mountain satrapy was, in the eyes of Calcutta, the key to the defense of the whole northern border, and while Mehtar Aman-ul-Mulk occupied the throne of the state, British influence was paramount. But in September 1892, this venerable and crafty autocrat died, opening a Pandora's box of succession controversy that had remained largely sealed during the deceased ruler's lengthy hegemony.

The immediate consequences of the mehtar's death gave little indication of what was to follow.
The British South Africa Company and the Jameson Raid
Authors: Galbraith John S.
Published: February 2004

When a powerful state seeks to impose its will on a weaker one, it expects to be subject to condemnation, which must be weighed against its assessment of national interest. Failure does not eliminate the condemnation; indeed it may intensify it. In most books and articles on the Jameson Raid and its antecedents, the fact that it was a fiasco foredoomed to disaster seems to add to the gravity of the indictment against those who planned it. In recent years scholars have devoted considerable attention to the question of the complicity of Joseph Chamberlain. Most of them have concluded that he was aware of an impending rising but that he was not acquainted with the details, principally because he did not choose to know. Most investigators have also averred that the High Commissioner in South Africa, Sir Hercules Robinson, knew far more about the preparations for a coup than he was willing to admit.

The overthrow of the Transvaal Government, of course, had been the subject of discussions among Imperial officials long before the Raid. Robinson's predecessor, Sir Henry Loch, had plans as early as 1893 to intervene in the Transvaal in the event of an insurrection and the Secretary of State for Colonies, Lord Ripon, knew of these plans and did not prohibit such action, even though he did not encourage it, and at the time of Robinson's appointment in 1895 he discussed with Ripon intervention to support a Johannesburg rising. Edmund Garrett, who talked to Ripon at this time, stated that if the raid had occurred while Ripon was in office, he could have telegraphed, “Ripon is in it up to his neck.”
Reopening the Case of the Lloyd George Coalition and the Postwar Economic Transition 1918-1919
Authors: Cline Peter K.
Published: February 2004

Eric Hobsbawm recently observed that “a good deal of economics has the function not so much of telling government or business what they ought to do, as of telling them what they are doing (or not doing) is right.” Economic history, happily or unhappily, does not suffer from the same weakness. Its problem is rather the reverse: a good deal of economic history has the didactic function of telling us what should have been done, as though that were always possible. So it is with the critics of the Lloyd George coalition's postwar economic policies; they work from a retrospectively-divined ideal back to an explanation for the coalition's melancholic failure to grasp and pursue that ideal. This has made for portrayals of the untried paths as relatively unobstructed, clearly marked and negotiable, while the route actually taken is seen as a gamut, bordered by briars and surfaced with quagmires, through which the nation emerged badly scathed and shaken. To veer off the course of this prickly metaphor, the critics of the coalition's refusal to deflate or its negligence – one might almost say abandon – toward inflation and permissiveness make two types of arguments.

Most conspicuous by their unmitigated scorn are the socialists who see in the wartime state the first buds of what a socialist Britain could flower into.
Wall-Breakers and River-Bridgers: Military Engineers in the Scottish Wars of Edward I
Authors: Freeman A. Z.
Published: February 2004

Welshmen and Scotsmen provoked their stronger neighbors of England in the late thirteenth century into wars that almost filled the reign of Edward I. Whether in keeping with “Manifest Destiny” or not, King Edward accepted the provocation of the Welsh and sent his troops into their land in an attempt to subjugate them; by a workmanlike series of campaigns he conquered and pacified them between 1277 and 1294. Then began an almost unbroken period of war against the Scots, a period lasting well beyond Edward's own death in 1307. By their persistence and by their tactics the Scots forced Edward and his people to a major effort, one that made every Englishman aware of his obligation, whether to fight, to feed the fighters, or to support the fighters with works.

For medieval soldiers, like their modern descendants, war was mostly a matter of working and waiting. Battles punctuated the wars, then as now, and at these times the combat troops spent their strength. During the long stretches between battles, however, support elements continued to supply the troops and put them into position to fight. The men in the armies of Edward I who kept the war going in this way and kept going themselves were the auxiliaries: the ditchers, woodcutters, smiths, carpenters, paymasters, provisioners, and the engineers. Important as they were in medieval warfare, the engineers have received little credit for it. Their work, bridging, building fortifications, and operating artillery, rarely rates a description in a chronicle and they receive little notice in secondary works.
Proctorial Representation in the House of Lords During Edward VI's Reign: A Reassessment
Authors: Graves M. A. R.
Published: February 2004

In his recent examination of licensed absenteeism and proctorial representation in the Edwardian house of lords, Professor Vernon F. Snow sustained and elaborated the thesis which he first postulated in an earlier article on the upper house in Henry VIII's reign. He claimed that these procedures benefited both the Crown and the individual member. They permitted the latter to secure leave of absence in the case of bona fide personal difficulties — sickness, age, poverty — yet to retain, in the person of his proctor, a voice in the affairs of the house. At the same time they satisfied the Crown. They committed the licensee to decisions taken in his absence. They could be used to authorize the royal servant to remain at his post. And above all they enabled the Crown, through the privy council, to control the House of Lords. The procurators “possessed latent power in proportion to the number of proxies they held.” As the great majority of proxies were concentrated in the hands of councillors, the Crown was able to control proceedings in the upper house through a large, perhaps majority, bloc of committed spokesmen and voters. The arithmetical essense of Snow's thesis is that parliamentary power in the Lords, whether it be of the individual or of the Crown, increased in direct proportion to the number of proxies held. The council's possession of most of them constituted a power additional to the traditional devices for influencing the composition of the upper house and the distribution of power within it: the ennoblement or promotion of faithful lords temporal, the translation or deprivation of obstinate lords spiritual, detention or the denial of writs from prominent opponents of the Crown.
A Rejoinder to Mr. Graves's Reassessment of Proctorial Representation
Authors: Snow Vernon F.
Published: February 2004

It would be rewarding at the outset of this rejoinder to single out several areas of agreement between Mr. M. A. R. Graves and myself. First, we share a common objective: both of us aim to describe the system of parliamentary politics in the Edwardian House of Lords. Since Graves found little fault with section I of my article, which explained the proxy procedures, I assume that he concurs with that explanation. Secondly, we both are attempting to account for the behavior of individuals and groups within that system. Here we seem to agree on intention, although we differ on many specifics. Thirdly, we both rely upon quantitative techniques to explain certain political actions. It is in this area that the gap between objectives and results appears to be greatest. Graves has leveled most of his criticism at my statistical evidence, the method of quantification and the conclusions drawn from that evidence.

It is appropriate at this juncture to make some concessions. Graves has made a more complete survey and intensive study of attendance and absenteeism than I have. While I confined my attention to proctorial representation and absenteeism reflected in the proxies, he has amassed statistics and calculated percentages from the daily attendance records as well, and in so doing has improved the methodology and produced more accurate calculations pertaining to the political behavior of absentees. In short, he has out-quantified me and I concede that most of his conclusions relating to the incidence of absenteeism are sound.
The Universities and Science in Seventeenth Century England
Authors: Shapiro Barbara J.
Published: February 2004

In the course of the debate over Puritan contributions to the scientific movement it sometimes has been asserted, and even more often assumed, that the English universities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were either unsympathetic towards or even hostile to the “new philosophy,” and that scientific studies had no place within their confines. Proponents of this position acknowledge one major exception to the scientific hiatus at Oxford and Cambridge, that of the Wadham group organized by John Wilkins in the 1650s which was the precursor of the Royal Society. However, the exception itself is said to result from Puritan intervention in the universities, and the dissolution of the group to follow from the demise of the Puritan regime.

It will be the purpose of this paper to examine the state of the sciences in Oxford and Cambridge prior to, during, and after the Interregnum in order to suggest that universities had shown a continuous interest in science, that Puritan intervention did not significantly alter the pattern of scientific concerns and that the existence of the Wadham group of the 1650s does little to lend support to the notion of a connection between Puritanism and the development of science.

The evidence for science in the universities before the Puritan Revolution is necessarily incomplete and scattered as is much of our knowledge of university life in that period. It might be best to begin with the work of Mark Curtis and F. R. Johnson who have already shown that the traditional framework of studies permitted the introduction of new ideas. By 1610 Oxford men had been disputing about such topics as the Copernican thesis, the infinity of the universe, the plurality of worlds, the habitability of the moon, and the earth as a magnet in formal university exercises.
English Government Borrowing, 1660-1688
Authors: Nichols Glenn O.
Published: February 2004

Borrowing was a necessary and important part of government finance during the period from 1660 to 1688. During Charles II's reign, over twelve per cent of the government's receipts were loans paid directly into the Exchequer and, during some years, loans made up as much as one-third of the total receipts. Clearly borrowing was essential. Anticipatory borrowing, for instance, was necessitated by the very nature of government finance. With the exception of the scheduled payments made by private tax collectors, tax revenues were received by the government irregularly during the course of a year. In addition, the government's expenditure was not easily apportioned over the entire year; in most cases, large lump sums were required, and consequently it was necessary for the government to anticipate future revenue receipts by borrowing in order to meet its current expenditure obligations. Of course the government could have solved this problem by accumulating surplus revenue and using it as reserve from which large payments could be made without recourse to borrowing. But during Charles II's reign, the demands on the revenue were generally larger than the income.

Before 1688, in most cases the only guarantee a potential creditor of the government had that the loan would be repaid on time, if at all, was the vague security of the king's word. This was largely the result of the constitutional status of government finance. When Charles II was restored to the throne in 1660, there were no major changes in the constitutional status of government finance.
Octavia Hill and The Homes of the London Poor
Authors: Wohl A. S.
Published: February 2004

It has been Octavia Hill's fate to survive, rather like some great “classic,” well-known by name, but neglected and unread – of the major Victorian social reformers perhaps the most misunderstood and inadequately handled. Geoffrey Best in his study of the Church of England Ecclesiastical Commissioners has drawn attention to her profound respect for the principle of self-help and comments, “She was on one of history's losing sides, and, as is the way with losers who are in no way romantic, she has rather dropped below the horizon of modern knowledge.” Octavia Hill has, unfortunately, been the victim of partisan history. Abruptly dismissed, on one hand, as an absurd anachronism, a devout believer in individualistic solutions in an age of creeping state and municipal socialism, she has been too uncritically praised, on the other, by those who were related to her or closely associated with her work. Her life (1838-1912) encompassed many vital reforms. She was co-founder of the National Trust and a great Victorian conservationist, whose devotion to the preservation of commons and parks, and concept of a “green belt” enabled London and other large towns to pass into the twentieth century, civilized and relaxing places in which to live. Her successful efforts to save Parliament Hill and Hampstead Heath from the encroachments of late Victorian speculative builders deserve the closest examination, from all those interested in urban development and the preservation, in and around our cities, of the natural environment.
Temperance and the Liberal Party — Lord Peel's Report, 1899
Authors: Fahey David M.
Published: February 2004

At the turn of the century the temperance question ranked among the handful of public issues which dominated British politics. It aroused powerful pressure groups which insinuated themselves in the political process at every level from constituency to Cabinet. The politics of drink raises difficult questions about the effectiveness and style of these temperance and trade pressure groups, the internal dissension which sometimes dissipated their influence, and their relationship with political parties and factions at a time of uncertain allegiances and narrow pluralities. The temperance question worried the Conservatives intermittently, the Liberals incessantly. It strengthened the Liberty Party, strained it, and sometimes threatened to shatter it.

Paradoxically at a time of decline in per capita consumption of alcohol, the temperance movement gathered impressive new support and the beleaguered drink trade achieved unprecedented political effectiveness. The dominant tradition in the temperance movement, that of the prohibitionist activists, was rooted in a hatred of drink as innately and infectiously evil, a force destructive of everything good, and in a Christian humanitarian concern for the security of the home. Many moderate reformers who did not look upon drink as sinful in itself or share the ideology of the teetotal home also worried about the effect of heavy drinking on the country.
The Problem of “Nationalism” and “Imperialism” in British Settlement Colonies
Authors: Cole Douglas
Published: February 2004

Nation-making, said Canadian journalist Sir John Willison, was one of Canada's infant industries. Canada had first become a nation in 1867, and, according to party literature, with every subsequent change of government “we have been made a nation over again.” Sir John was not exaggerating the number of times that writers have made Canada a nation, and, since historians have often been employed in the same nation-making industry, this paper will concern itself with the problem of the historian in dealing with the conceptions of “nationalism” and “imperialism” in Canada and other colonies of British settlement.

The study of nationalism in British settlement colonies is hampered by difficulties of terminology, conceptualization, and ideological inflection. Looseness of word-usage, such as using “nation” for both state or country and as a word to describe a group of people with some common features, constitutes a major difficulty, especially when historians accept the looseness uncritically and without analysis. Sometimes “national” is used as a euphemism for the policy of protection – Sir John A. Macdonald's Canadian National Policy was originally little more than that. The same term was used by Queensland's Premier McIllwraith in 1882, and there “national” could only have meant the economic development of the Queensland “nation.” “National” sometimes simply means a geographic whole or a common, central institution – that is, a “national” government can merely mean one government governing four provinces, or six states. The word can even, as in “national schools,” mean non-denominational.