bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
The Whig Context
Authors: Mitchell L G
Published: November 2023

In addition to the questions of blood and heredity, a Whig inheritance involved the absorption of certain prejudices that created a psychological mood, a context for thinking. Some contemporaries saw Melbourne’s personality struggling against this family bequest. The diarist Greville, for example, explained the ambiguities in Melbourne’s career by opposing his personality to his intellectual inheritance. ‘A thorough Conservative at heart’, he was ‘from education and turn of mind, and from the society in which he was bred and always lived, ... a Whig.’ As a result of this tension, ‘he was only half-identified in opinion and sympathy with the party to which he belonged in office’, and was ‘secretly the enemy of the measures which his own Government originated’. In other words, Melbourne was a conservative who, by sad chance, had been wrapped in Whig swaddling clothes. It was a popular line of argument with those of Melbourne’s critics, who felt that he could have done more to retard the speed of reform in his lifetime.
Marriage and Nemesis,1816-1828
Authors: Mitchell L G
Published: November 2023

After 1816, William Lamb’s marriage was something to be endured. His wife became increasingly slovenly and drunken. His son grew physically, but not mentally, stronger. London life became a terrible burden, so refuge was sought at Brocket. In its library, Lamb read voraciously and found a little peace, even if the price he paid was an inability to pursue politics seriously. Contemporaries wondered that the marriage survived at all. The diarist Greville noted that the Lambs had had ‘a sort of half-laughing, half-resentful reconciliation. They lived in this queer way.’ The pattern of extravagant behaviour followed by a penitence that some saw as self-indulgent reasserted itself. In 1817, Caroline assured Michael Bruce that ‘wicked as it may be I should not so much mind errors of the wandering heart, if I had been gentle and made William happy but as it is I am miserable and when I die he will not even be able to love my remembrance’. At this time, both William and Caroline claimed that they had no wish to go on living. They implored their friends to pray for them. There was no career, no acceptance in society, and little sympathy from friends or relations. Nor would there be any respite. From 1816, until her death in 1828, Caroline Lamb endlessly rehearsed her misery before the public by writing more novels and by provoking outrage. Ada Reis, giving a loosely veiled account of the Byron ajfaire appeared in 1823. A year earlier, Graham Hamilton had been published. It tells a familiar tale. Hamilton loves and marries a cousin. Both young people test their innocence and virtue against the decadent values of London society, and both are corrupted by it. They become victims of the ‘censorious, officious, intermeddling world’. The wife dies of grief and remorse. The husband flees to the New World. As in her earlier productions, Caroline portrays herself as destroyed by vicious social conventions against which an amiable but ineffective husband could not defend her.
Apprenticeship in Politics) 1806-1830
Authors: Mitchell L G
Published: November 2023

William Lamb entered Parliament in January 1806, six months after his marriage. For the next twenty-two years, with the exception of 1812-16, he was in theory a House of Commons man, representing seven different constituencies. Initially, his prospects were excellent. Lady Holland, a talent spotter of some distinction, hailed him as ‘one of the most rising men in public’. Unfortunately, William Lamb failed to rise. Until 1827, he was a political nonentity, with no offer of office and a blasted reputation. Even when he took on a junior post in Ireland, contemporaries might well have thought that this would be the ceiling of his ambitions. He was a minor figure, whose existence as a politician at all was entirely a matter of inheritance. He had the benefit of being born in influential circles. There was little else to recommend him. His catastrophic marriage was the major factor in his political eclipse, but there were others.
The Last Years, 1841-1848
Authors: Mitchell L G
Published: November 2023

Melbourne always feared the loss of office. As his government faced one crisis after another, each of them threatening a final dissolution, he grew. adept at rationalizing a determination to stay in power. Duty to friends and duty to country were invoked as justifications, as was the urgent need of a young queen for stable government. He frankly admitted that he ‘preferred being charged with tenacity of office, than with a readiness to abandon the government‘. Yet, power and the manipulation of men and events gave him little pleasure. As has been noted, he had little personal engagement with most of the great issues of his prime ministership.
The Postwar World
Authors: Caine Barbara
Published: November 2023

The postwar period is a particularly difficult one to deal with when writing a history of modern feminism. Just as the drama of the militant suffrage campaign made the quieter activities of interwar feminists almost invisible, so too the sudden and dramatic rise of the Women’s Liberation movement in the early 1970s has made it very hard to see or understand the feminist activity or debates about women of the preceding decades. The Women’s Liberation movement itself has made this task more difficult: in its concern to safeguard and record its own history it has collected and published a number of accounts which have served to re-enforce a strong sense that the ‘second wave’ of feminism created itself from conflicts experienced by women within left-wing political and youth movements of the 1960s, and that it was almost sui generis in relation to feminist organizations and activities.1 Seeking to emphasize the novelty and the politically and sexually radical character of the Women’s Liberation movement, its spokeswomen have emphasized the discontinuities between it and prior feminist agitation, barely deigning to recognize the campaigns for legal reform, for equal pay, and for an end to discrimination in the workforce which had continued for decades.
Opulence and Glory
Authors: Langford Paul
Published: November 2023

The success of the Seven Years War bred a certain complacency about Britain’s place in the world. It was temporarily shattered by the American War and replaced by a cautious optimism about a future which was not meant to include imperial ambitions. War in general was an inescapable experience for Englishmen born after 1720, but for most of them it was acquired at second hand or viewed more as theatre than reality. There was some sentimental dismay at the horrors of armed conflict, rarely developing into authentic pacifism. War had important economic consequences, though it is difficult in retrospect accurately to assess them. At the time there was concern about the under lying economic trends. In the absence of reliable statistics, it was possible to believe that the population was diminishing. The need to increase the nation’s stock of manpower was a characteristic preoccupation of the age. There was matching concern about the size of the National Debt, and the consequent strains imposed on.fiscal policy. Pessimism on these scores was offset, especially after 1760, by growing faith in the commercial vitality of British society. Technological advance aroused great enthusiasm. Voluntary organizations and associations expressed the contemporary interest in practical enlightenment. Particularly among businessmen, the emphasis was on marketing as much as mechanics. Industrial advance provoked some opposition, including violent resistance to the introduction of labour-saving machinery.
Death, Art, and Memory in Medicoal England
Authors: Saul Nigel
Published: November 2023

In this innovative and compelling book Nigel Saul approaches the world of the medieval gentry through the monuments they left behind them. The Cobham family left the largest and most spectacular collection of brasses in Britain in their church at Cobham, and other magnificent brasses in Lingfield, and elsewhere. Medieval brasses have hitherto been studied chiefly from an antiquarian or technical perspective; Nigel Saul for the first time shows how they served as a link between the living and the dead. Commemoration was inseparable from the wider dynamics of society. Through the brasses and through family history he takes us to the heart of gentry aspirations and fears, successes and disappointments. This extensively illustrated study offers a new paradigm for the study of medieval church monuments and makes a major contribution to our understanding of gentry culture.
Teaching with Henry Mayr-Harting
Authors: Goldman Lawrence
Published: November 2023

Henry returned to Oxford from Liverpool in1968 on his election to a fellowship (and an associated university lectureship) at St Peter’s College. Founded in1929 for the education of poor men in the evangelical tradition, St Peter’s had been granted its charter in 1961. Henry arrived at a singular moment, as the fellow¬ ship expanded rapidly during the late 1960s and as St Peter’s moved from the more enclosed atmosphere of a permanent private hall to take its place as a full college of the university. Few members of St Peter’s played a larger role than Henry in building up the reputation of the college, both in Oxford and outside. In three decades as a fellow he fashioned St Peter’s into a centre for historical learning and established a tradition of undergraduate excellence.
Gregory The Great’s Pagans
Authors: Markus R A
Published: November 2023

‘Pagan’ is a notoriously difficult word for historians. We think we know what we mean by it, and only the most pernickety among us keep insisting that we don’t, and that we had better be clear and define it. I have been as tiresomely insistent as anyone that we must at least begin with a preliminary clarification: we should be clear as to whether we are speaking of ‘pagans’ in our own terms, in which case we must be prepared to say what we mean by the word; or of ‘pagans’ as they were conceived by whoever is the subject of our discussion-early or medieval Christians, bishops, writers, missionaries-in which case we must be clear as to what they meant by it. For one thing is certain: the word has been slippery in the extreme, and its history—which is, of course, by no means over-is complex, interesting, and largely uninvestigated.
Duke Tassilo of Bavaria and the Origins of the Rupertus Cross
Authors: Scharer Anton
Published: November 2023

The confidence to embark in new directions and to attempt as a historian to interpret a work of art I owe to the honorand, who has in such a grand and convincing manner illuminated our understanding ‘of the interaction of religion and politics in an art closely connected with the court of the Saxon emperors’,1 and of Charlemagne as a patron of art. But my personal and intellectual debts to him, incurred over decades, are much greater than can be expressed here. May he accept the following as a modest expression of gratitude. I shall begin with a brief discussion of the Rupertus Cross itself I shall then put forward some suggestions as to its function and context, which will lead us finally to the wider issues of works of art connected with Duke Tassilo and their significance for court culture.
The Church of Worcester and St Oswald
Authors: John Eric
Published: November 2023

St Oswald’s part in the revival of monasticism known as the Tenth-Century Reformation was the subject of an important study by Dean Armitage Robinson. He was mainly concerned with the part Oswald played in the transformation of the cathedral community at Worcester into a fully Benedictine monastery. This transformation has since been the subject of varying interpretations. The present enquiry reconsiders the question in a broad chronological framework, continuing across the Norman conquest. The outcome will, I hope, be a clearer view of the history of the mensa, extending from Oswald’s pontificate to the twelfth century.
The religious patronage of Robert and william of mortain
Authors: Golding Brian
Published: November 2023

The book of benefactors to St Albans (c.1380) is an extraordinary and unique compilation intended to commemorate all the significant benefactors of that great Benedictine house. Not only does it summarize the grants, but over 200 patrons are portrayed in naive miniatures. Amongst the men and women so memorialized we find Robert of Martain and Almodis his wife, as well as Alured, Robert's steward and a prominent vassal. At first sight this is appropriate, for some time between ro86 and his death in 1095 Count Robert granted half a hide in Redbourne and a virgate in Codicote (Herts.). Moreover, one of Robert's daughters, Mabel, was buried in the abbey.
Functions of a Twelfth-Century Recluse Revisited: The Case of Godric of Finchale
Authors: Ridyard Susan J
Published: November 2023

It is a summer day, early in the twelfth century. A group of peasants from the countryside around Finchale, near Durham, look with fierce resentment at the grain slowly ripening on the very spot where they, and their fathers before them, have been accustomed to pasture their sheep and cattle. It has been planted by a newcomer-brought in and given the land by the Bishop o f Durhama would-be hermit named Godric, a useless individual who shuns their company while threatening their livelihood.
Robert of Lewes, Bishop of Bath, N36-N66: A Cluniac Bishop in his Diocese
Authors: Ramsey Frances
Published: November 2023

The twelfth-century English church was notable for bishops of distinguish ed quality, and amongst such figures as Anselm and Becket, Henry of Blois and Theobald, Robert of Lewes cannot hope to rank highly. Yet he is not without interest. He was a Cluniac monk, one of only a handful to attain episcopal office in this period, and so the question arises as to whether there was anything specifically monastic, or more particularly Cluniac, about the way in which her an his diocese. He was also almost certainly the author of the Gesta Stephani, and thus a man of scholarly as well as administrative capacity.
Caricature And French Political Culture 1830–1848
Authors: Kerr David S
Published: November 2023

Charles Philipon (1800-1862) was the founder of the satirical illustrated press in France. With the newspapers he owned and directed, La Caricature and Le Charivari, he led an unprecedentedly coherent and vitriolic campaign of disrespect against King Louis-Philippe and his regime. Using a group of young caricaturists (the most talented of whom were Daumier, Grandville, and Travies) and the collaboration of a gifted team of writers (including Balzac) he crafted a new language of opposition. This book is the first full scholarly study of the structure of the illustrated press in the 1830s, its contribution to political debate in France, the dissemination of caricature and its potential as political propaganda, and the links between caricature and other forms of political-cultural discourse under the July Monarchy.
Caricature and Political Culture in Orléanist France
Authors: Kerr David S
Published: November 2023

The Revolution of 1830 fundamentally altered the relationship between the government and people of France. The rigid distinction between the pays légal (the small elite of notables which alone had the right and the opportunity to participate in politics) and the pays réel, which had formed the heart of the Charter of 1814 and the basis of political life under the Restoration, broke down on the streets of Paris on 27, 28, and 29 July. In the euphoria which followed, the people of Paris believed that they were reliving the glorious days of 1789; the July Revolution revivified the concept of the sovereignty of the people and widened the political world by encouraging classes previously excluded from the political process to reassert a claim to political influence. Although the new regime quickly passed an electoral law which reinstated a means-tested enfranchised elite only slightly larger than the pays légal of the Restoration, it took several years of increasingly aggressive repression to convince the populace that it had no place in politics.
The Collection of Data
Authors: Roffe David
Published: November 2023

Despite Their Inconsistencies, both GDB and LDB are marvels of administrative planning. Within the span of 850 folios economy of expression is linked to a systematic format that facilitates easy use to create a formidable work of reference. It is a work of genius and, not unnaturally, historians have sought the mind that masterminded the enterprise. Galbraith identified ‘the man behind the survey’ as Samson the chaplain, a Frenchman, probably from Bayeux, who subsequently became bishop of Worcester. His argument is a circumstantial one, being based on the observation that a manor held by Samson of the bishop of Bayeux at Templecombe in Somerset was entered in an abbreviated form in Exon in the same hand as that of the greater part of GDB. Curiously, the scribe incorrectly valued part of the estate, and this is perhaps surprising had he been entering his own land.
The Domesday Inquest and Domesday Book
Authors: Roffe David
Published: November 2023

Thus Far The analysis of the Domesday inquest has proceeded in terms of processes, namely, the collection of data, executive action, the formulation of reports, and finally, the production of Domesday Book itself Two stages have been identified in the garnering of evidence. Initial sessions were held in local centres and were overseen by the regular personnel oflocal government. Their brief was limited, being confined to, in the words of the Anglo-Saxon chronicler, ‘how many hundred hides there were in the shire, or what land and cattle the king himself had in the country, or what dues he ought to have in twelve months from the shire’. Thereafter, further sessions were held in regional courts before commissioners who were charged with receiving presentments from tenants-in-chief on the resources of their estates. Executive action, notably the resolution of disputes, was thereby set in train in a process which was to continue independently but in parallel with the ongoing Domesday inquest. In the mean-time reports of one sort or another were drawn up and sent to a central point, and GDB was subsequently abbreviated from these materials.
Ireland before 3000 b.c.
Authors: Kelly M J O’
Published: November 2023

During the succeeding era, the quaternary, which opened about two million years ago, Ireland, in common with the rest of Europe, experienced a great ice age. This was not a single extended period of severe glaciation, but rather consisted of alternating phases of extreme temperature change. Each major advance of the ice sheet was succeeded by a period of higher temperature when the ice melted and disappeared. These warm interglacial periods varied greatly in duration, as did the so-called interstadial periods when the ice was either stationary or in minor recession.
The Place: A Changing Village in the Saarland
Authors: Blackbourn David
Published: November 2023

Immediately after his inauguration in November 1867, Bishop Eberhard of Trier issued a pastoral letter, in which he reflected on the great variations within his diocese. Alongside the ‘noise and bustle’ of new industrial regions to which people were thronging, stimulated by ‘the railway lines along which the iron horse rushes’, were rural areas that were ‘completely remote, cut off from communications, isolated, sometimes almost inaccessible’. Ostensibly at least, Marpingen belonged to the second category as surely as did those parts of the diocese in the Eifel and the Hunsrtück. The village was situated in the Saar-Nahe hill country, with its raw climate and difficult terrain. The Als valley in which Marpingen lay was over 800 feet above sea-level, and surrounding peaks—notably the local landmark of the Schaumberg—reached nearly 2,000 feet. To the east of the village were old Roman roads that had once linked Straßburg to Trier and Mainz to Metz, but in the nineteenth century the main lines of communicationpassedMarpingen by. During the 1850s and 1860s, as the railway expanded and communities pushed their claims for inclusion in the network, Marpingen remained miles distant from the nearest railhead. As one writer noted in the 1870s, it was ‘not marked on normal maps’.
Theatres of Cruelty
Authors: Evans Richard J
Published: November 2023

In August 1616 the Englishman John Taylor-poet, wit, traveller, and eccentric-embarked at Gravesend on a brief trip to the north German seaport of Hamburg. Not long after his arrival, he ‘saw at the common jail of the town, a great number of people were clustered together. I asked’, he wrote, ‘the cause of their concourse, and I was certified that there was a prisoner to be broken upon the wheel the next day, and that these idle gazers did press to gape upon him for want of better employments.’ Being ‘as inquisitive after novelties, as a traveller of my small experience might be’, Taylor made some further enquiries. He discovered that the prisoner had been found guilty of murdering his small daughter with an axe in a fit of rage. He determined to attend the execution, which was scheduled for the next day.
Denouement
Authors: Vital David
Published: November 2023

The curtain was rung down on the history of the Jews of Europe on 1 September 1939. With one moderately sized exception (the British) and three very small ones (the Finnish, the Swedish, and the Swiss) each of the continent’s communities would end by being placed either entirely or, as in the case of Russian Jewry, at any rate in great part at the mercy of Germany’s army, police, and civil administration. In German-occupied Poland this was immediate. In Hungary this occurred only in the final stages of the war. But the result everywhere was much the same. What transpired throughout the continent was Proskurov,1 but a Proskurov writ immensely large, not so much another instance of riders descending on a civil population in the tried and true manner of marauding bandits throughout the ages, but the work of a skilled and disciplined official apparatus of government operating under the helpful eye of a fighting army that, regiment for regiment, commanding officer for commanding officer, was probably the finest the continent had known since the Romans at their peak. Having failed to extrude the Jews, it became the purpose of the German state to destroy them. There having been little opposition to their policy towards the Jews in the years leading up to the war, the masters of Germany were left to conclude, correctly as things turned out, that they and their many allies would have an entirely free hand in the business of disposing of the Jews once and for all once the war was in progress. Multitudes of Jews were worked to death as slaves of the German war machine. Very much greater numbers still were rounded up and done to death without any delay at all.
Witchcraft and Catholic Theology
Authors: Baroja Julio caro
Published: November 2023

AT a time when so many works of great learning and discernment have been written concerning the history of magic in general and witchcraft in particular, it may appear foolhardy to seek to add to them. However, the present author would point out by way of excuse that he merely wishes to throw light on a specific subject, namely, how the figure of the witch, already known in pagan antiquity, took on different characteristics in subsequent periods, after the triumph of Christianity. Finally, as will be seen, the witch-figure became the basis of an immense theological and juridical construction, superimposed on far more ancient and simple facts; and this construction was the work of intellectuals, although their culture was of a very special type. As has been said, the theme is a limited one; but it is of particular theoretical interest, and may be relevant to a revision of the basic concepts of modern anthropology: functionalism on the one hand, structuralism on the other, and, finally, historicism.
Portugal: A Scrupulous Inquisition
Authors: Bethencourt Francisco
Published: November 2023

THE European witch myth, which we can characterize very briefly by five main elements–pacts with the devil, night flights, participation in collective assemblies (sabbaths), ability to metamorphose, and ability to produce malefice against persons and property –emerged fragmented (and even reinterpreted) in most of the statements by witnesses and accused persons as recorded in the Portuguese Inquisition files. The pact often had no connection with night flights and sabbaths; supernatural flight was not the exclusive province of witches and magicians and could involve others under their influence; the image of the witch was not clearly distinguished from that of the sorcerer; witches’ powers were often considered innate rather than granted by the devil; their action was not viewed as exclusively malefic, for considerable ambiguity can be observed in the moral assessment of their acts.
Scandinavian Witchcraft in Anglo-American Perspective
Authors: Monter E William
Published: November 2023

ATTEMPTING to assess the significance of Scandinavian witch-trials both through similarities with and direct influences on witch-trials in the English-speaking world requires at least three separate tasks. First, one must try to isolate the most important distinctive features of these trials within the various parts of this large region: what was peculiarly interesting about witch-hunting in Scandinavia? Second, one must search for any common features which may help distinguish witch-trials in northern Europe (scandinavia plus the British Isles) from those on the continent.
The Great Debate
Authors: Hitchins Keith
Published: November 2023

In the period between the two World Wars Rumanian intellectuals of the most diverse ideological commitments engaged in spirited polemics about the course of development their country should follow. With the Great War and the struggle for political unification behind them and with the task of organizing the new Rumania immediately ahead they were compelled to re-examine old values and seek new definitions of national character. The enhanced opportunities for political and cultural integration into Western Europe gave added urgency to their task. The responses they gave to these fundamental questions defied consensus. Yet, however diverse the issues they raised, two broad groupings of intellectuals are discernible which may be designated as Europeanists and traditionalists. The former treated Rumania as a part of Europe and insisted that she had no other choice but to follow the path of economic and social development already taken by the urbanized and industrialized West. The traditionalists, on the other hand, emphasized Rumania’s agrarian character and sought models of development based upon her own unique social and cultural heritage.
Church Courts and English Law
Authors: Haigh Christopher
Published: November 2023

IN 1530 William Tracy’s Lutheran will was a case of heresy, to be considered by the Oxford theologians; by 1532 it had become a constitutional cause celebre, and a case of ecclesiastical excess. The will was discussed in Convocation in 1531, and Tracy’s son Richard, common lawyer and member of the House of Commons, was summoned before the assembled clergy. The document was condemned as heretical. Copies of the will became recommended reading among heretics, and one was found in the possession of Thomas Phillip, a prisoner in the Tower of London. In January 1532 it was reported to Convocation that Thomas Browne of Bristol had made a will like Tracy’s, and an exemplary gesture was then thought necessary. Archbishop Warham instructed the chancellor of Worcester diocese to have Tracy’s body exhumed, since a declared heretic was unworthy to lie in consecrated ground. But the chancellor, Dr Parker, went too far: he burned the body for heresy.
The Making of a Minority, 1530–1553
Authors: Haigh Christopher
Published: November 2023

ON 19 November 1530, four men did public penance through the city of London. They were led through the streets sitting backwards on horses, wearing paper hats inscribed ‘For crimes against the king’s proclamations’ and with copies of Tyndale’s heretical books pinned to their clothes. At Cheapside Cross they were made to throw the books into a bonfire, and were set in the pillory to be mocked by fellow citizens. Henry VIII’s earlier proclamations against heretics and their books were being enforced, a month after the Hampton Court meeting and Henry’s decision to coerce the clergy by praemunire. Though the king had begun what became a political Reformation, a Protestant Reformation was still contained by the power of the state. But not for long. The four men in the pillory were all friends of Thomas Cromwell, royal councillor and protector of heretics. As the king’s determination to achieve his divorce led him to adopt drastic solutions, Cromwell’s influence increased; so did his ability to advance (and shield) those who shared his evangelical preferences, and those who were useful in his attack on the clergy, their wealth, and the ideas which validated their authority.
Introduction
Authors: Dyer Christopher
Published: November 2023

The ‘transition’ in this book’s title refers to an old historical dilemma, which goes back to the beginnings of scientific history in the nineteenth century. The post-Roman centuries have usually been divided between the medieval and the modern periods, with a line drawn around the year 1500. Characteristics of modernity include new forms of the state, religious diversity, and the spread of renaissance ideas. Those influenced by Marxist ideas prefer to think of feudalism being superseded by capitalism, which can be dated as late as the eighteenth century, but the decades around 1500, the age of the English enclosures and the voyages of discovery, can be seen as a significant turning point in that process.
The Rise of the Great Estates and the Decline of the Yeoman
Authors: Daunton M J
Published: November 2023

‘The distribution oflanded property’, remarked James Caird in 1878, ‘is, by the growing wealth of the country, constantly tending to a reduction in the number of small estates.’1 The increasing concentration of landownership fuelled political controversy in the nineteenth century, and one outcome was the compilation of figures on English landownership in 1873 which defenders of landed society hoped would refute the claim that the countryside was in the grip of a few great magnates. They were disappointed, for the ‘new domesday’ showed a concentrated pattern of ownership (Table 3.1). At the top were great magnates with 10,000 acres and above, such as the dukes of Bedford or Devonshire with their country seats at Woburn and Chatsworth, and their great London mansions. They shaded into the greater gentry and squires, who were more likely to have local influence than a national role. An estate of about 1,000 acres marked the boundary of a gentry life-style, with three or four tenants and a manor house, although some owners of300-1,ooo acres aspired to gentry society, particularly those who had non-agricultural income and had bought a small estate as an investment or a guarantee of social status. The proportion of land held by genuine ‘yeomen’ or owner-occupying farmers was probably about IO per cent in England in 1873.
Capital and Credit: Financing Industrialization
Authors: Daunton M J
Published: November 2023

In 1935, M. M. Postan asked a fundamental question: was the supply of investible funds adequate for industrialization, or did shortages impose limits? His surmises were largely confirmed by detailed research, and a consensus was firmly established. Britain, he argued, was wealthy beyond the relatively modest requirements of early industrialization. Eighteenth-century Britain was able to find funds for major undertakings. Naval vessels and dockyards were huge enterprises, overshadowing most industrial concerns; great country houses such as Chatsworth or Holkham exceeded the investment in the largest factory; and the pleasure resort of Bath absorbed more money than the entire cotton industry. A country which could afford these expensive investments could meet the needs of industry, for Postan claimed that these were ‘modest’: machinery was relatively simple and often hand-driven; production was labour intensive; buildings could be converted or extended piecemeal. Capital shortages, when they did occur, were localized rather than general. The earl of Leicester was willing to invest in the construction of his Palladian house at Holkham in north Norfolk; his wealth was oflittle use to a cotton-master in Lancashire. Areas with commercial and industrial wealth might be in relative decline, such as the west of England or Kent; industrialization could be located in areas such as south Wales which lacked prosperous commercial and industrial families. The problem was not absolute shortages of capital so much as the provision of effective channels for savings to flow into productive enterprise. In Postan’s words, ‘the insufficiency of capital was local rather than general, and social rather than material’.
Transport
Authors: Daunton M J
Published: November 2023

The growth potential of the economy could be released by a reduction in transaction rather than production costs, which allowed agricultural and industrial goods to be exchanged more cheaply, so reducing market imperfections and encouraging areas to specialize in those goods to which they were best suited. Such a process of specialization could have a greater impact on total costs than changes in production technology, which could well emerge from an ability to concentrate on one commodity and to devise new methods of production and organization. Above all, transport costs could impose severe limits on the creation of an integrated, competitive market, preventing low-cost producers from supplying a wide area and allowing high-cost producers to survive.
Banks and Money
Authors: Daunton M J
Published: November 2023

Britain developed two distinctive banking systems in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, one in Scotland and the other in England and Wales, whose relative merits were debated by contemporaries and are contested by historians. Rondo Cameron, in his comparative analysis of banking and economic development, had no doubt which was the more efficient and conducive to economic growth. Scotland, he claimed, had ‘the strongest, most competitive, most efficient banking system of the times’, in contrast to England where there was a sorry tale of missed opportunities. ‘At almost every point at which banking and monetary policy might have been used constructively to promote economic growth’, he complains, ‘the authorities either made the wrong decision or took no action at all.’ The result, if Cameron is to be believed, was that banks assisted the process of rapid industrialization in Scotland, whereas in England and Wales economic growth took place almost despite the banks.
Births, Marriages, and Deaths
Authors: Daunton M J
Published: November 2023

Malthus, in the 1826 edition of his Essay on Population, attempted to discover ‘the only effectual mode of improving the condition of the poor’. He was certain that any attempt to increase output faster than population growth was bound to fail, for the powers of reproduction could always keep pace with the supply of commodities, and there would be no long-term improvement in the condition of the poor. The alternative was to concentrate on slowing down the growth of the population, so that there was more for everyone and the condition of the poor would improve. There was, he suggested, a race between the tortoise of output and the hare of population, and only one effective means of raising the standard of living: ‘If we can persuade the hare to go to sleep, the tortoise may have some chance of overtaking her.’
Taxation and Public Finance
Authors: Daunton M J
Published: November 2023

Britain in the eighteenth century was a nation at war, locked in a world-wide struggle with the French which ended with the battle of Waterloo in 1815. The clash of empires may be charted through military and naval campaigns; less stirring, though no less important, is the question of finance. Money provided the sinews of war, to provision and pay the army, to finance the fleets which straddled the world, and to operate the massive naval dockyards which built and maintained the ships. The navy was the largest business of the eighteenth century. A first-class naval vessel with a crew of 900 exceeded the work-force of the largest factory; it involved large fixed capital in dockyards; and demanded a massive provisioning system to supply food, munitions, ropes, sails, and myriad pieces of iron, brass, and copper. Britain in the eighteenth century was a ‘fiscal-military state’,1 and governments were dominated by the needs of the army and, above all, the navy for money to wage war. The outcome was an efficient system of tax collection and public finance which allowed Britain to bear a heavier financial burden than France, yet without a political crisis threatening the state.
Mercantilism and Free Trade
Authors: Daunton M J
Published: November 2023

In January 1846 Richard Cobden addressed a great rally at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, at the heart of the cotton district. The Hall was built by the Anti-Com Law League which, under the leadership of Cobden, protested against protective duties on imported corn; more generally, the ‘Manchester school’ preached the virtues of free competition and unfettered trade. The introduction of free trade, Cobden assured the audience which packed the Free Trade Hall, would lead to peace and prosperity: the physical gain will be the smallest gain to humanity from the success of this principle. I look further; I see in the Free Trade principle that which shall act on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe—drawing men together, thrusting aside the antagonism of race, and creed, and language, and uniting us in the bands of eternal peace. . . . I believe that the desire and the motive for large and mighty empires; for gigantic armies and great navies—for those materials which are used for the destruction of life and the desolation of the rewards of labour—will die away; I believe that such things will cease to be necessary, or to be used, when man becomes one family, and freely exchanges the fruits of his labour with his brother man.
State Control of Produce
Authors: Fieldhouse D K
Published: November 2023

Although few suspected it at the time, the Second World War proved to be the beginning of the end of the era of merchant capital in West Africa that dated from the nineteenth century and beyond. War necessarily had many disruptive effects on this and all international trades, but most of these were potentially temporary. For UAC, other European traders, and the West African economies themselves, the decisive effect of the war was that the imposition of state control of both the export and import trades, and the creation of state trading agencies in place of the market, proved to be permanent. During the 1950s state control over imports was largely dismembered, but control of the produce trade survived, embodied in the marketing boards of British West Africa, and these were to become a dominant feature of West African economic life during the following decades of political independence.
UAC and African Nationalism
Authors: Fieldhouse D K
Published: November 2023

There has been much speculation about the attitude of European capitalist firms to the movement towards political independence in Africa during the fifteen or so years after the end of the Second World War. Did the big trading and mining companies fear and oppose such a movement on the ground that independence might destroy the favourable conditions created by colonial rule, or did they welcome it, on the assumption that colonialism had by then so reconstructed African societies that capitalism would not only be safe but potentially more profitable? There have so far been few detailed studies of the attitude of such foreign firms.
Participation and Disinvestment
Authors: Fieldhouse D K
Published: November 2023

‘Participation’ (or dilution of the equity in a locally registered subsidiary) had two distinct though connected connotations in the context of foreign merchant capital in Africa. It might be voluntary, or it might be imposed. The difference was very important. It has been seen that many of the industrial and other ventures in which UAC and its fellows took part were undertaken in partnership with African states, provinces, or individuals. These partnerships were always entered into by choice, and it was accepted that the result would be a reduction in both the company’s freedom of action and its share of the dividends. Alternatively, UAC might choose to sell shares in a subsidiary because it wished to raise more capital without increasing its own input, or perhaps to strengthen its links with the local society or with distributors of its products. But from the 1960s there was an increasing tendency for African governments to insist on the sale or expropriation of a proportion of the equity of foreign enterprises, either to the state or to indigenous citizens, whether or not the foreign company wished to do this. The subject of this chapter is the process by which voluntary partnerships or sale of part of the equity were increasingly replaced in certain countries by obligatory sale of shares. The main emphasis will be placed on the same four territories or regions as have been made the focus of other chapters, but a preliminary comment is necessary on the evolving general attitude of Unilever and UAC to participation in their overseas ventures.
Reconstruction and Reform, 1266-1294
Authors: Prestwich Michael
Published: November 2023

The disturbed and divisive years that had ended with the dejected garrison of Kenilworth trudging out in bitter surrender in 1266 were followed by a period of remarkable achievement lasting until the early 1290s. There was a great programme of legislation. Parliament developed, and became increasingly central to the running of the English State. Royal Enhances were placed on a new and more secure footing. The recovery from the disasters of the civil war was astonishing. This was an outstanding period of positive development.
Times of Trouble, 1311-1330
Authors: Prestwich Michael
Published: November 2023

In 1312, on Blacklow Hill in Warwickshire, Piers Gaveston was brutally killed. One man ran him through with a sword, the other cut on his head. Politics had reached a new low. The succeeding years were to see crisis follow on crisis, with no evident way out. By 1327 the monarchy had reached its apparent nadir, with the deposition of Edward II; but the regime that came next, that of Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer, proved quite as corrupt and incompetent. It is remarkable that a monarchy that had appeared so strong in the hands of Edward I should have collapsed in so dramatic a way.
England and France
Authors: Prestwich Michael
Published: November 2023

By the 1340s and 1350s England had become the most powerful military force in Europe, as the victories of Crecy and Poitiers conWrmed. There had been intermittent wars between England and France through the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, which escalated in seriousness and scale in the reign of Edward III with the outbreak of the Hundred Years War in 1337. It is only with hindsight that this war is seen as a single entity, somehow divergent in kind from the Anglo-French disputes that had preceded it. Contemporaries did not see the war that started in 1337 in this way. It is certainly true that Anglo-French conXict intensiWed in the fourteenth century, but many if not all the issues between Edward III and Philip VI were the familiar ones from the past.
The Great Lords
Authors: Prestwich Michael
Published: November 2023

The Great Lords Society in medieval England was highly stratified, but the distinctions between different groups were not always as clear-cut as historians might like. Wealth, lineage, and status might define a man beyond possible doubt, but it was possible for a baron to be wealthier than an earl, while a knight might possess a more distinguished lineage than a baron. Status might not equate with economic power. Terms such as 'gentry’ provide convenient shorthand, but are not always easy to map onto the reality of medieval society. In the following chapters a division is made between the great lords, lay and ecclesiastical, the knights, the peasantry, and the merchants. These distinctions are convenient, but should not be regarded as definitive; social standing was made up of multiple elements, which were not always consistent.1
The Towns
Authors: Prestwich Michael
Published: November 2023

In 1283 Edward I founded what was intended to be an ideal thirteenth-century town at Conwy in north Wales. It had a Went site at the mouth of an estuary, making transport and communication by sea easy. It was defended by a magniWcent castle, and by an equally splendid town wall, which provided a clear line of demarcation between the urban settlement and the surrounding countryside. Within the walls, the town was carefully planned, with its streets laid out on a grid pattern, and the oblong tenements equally spaced in Went geometric order. Conwy received a charter from the king in 1284, in which he conferred full burghal rights on the inhabitants. By 1295, 112 plots of land were occupied; ten years later a survey reveals that there were twelve shops in the marketplace, and two butcher’s stalls.
The Crisis of the Dynastic élite in the Transition from Monarchy to Republic, 1929-1931
Authors: Ben-Ami Shlomo
Published: November 2023

A leading role played by élites characterizes transitions from traditional politics to a modern political system. Spain’s transition to the Second Republic was preceded by years of social and political change that undermined the position of the traditional élites—bourgeois politicians, landowners, army, and church—as real power elites. Moreover, social and political development brought these traditional élites into conflict with each other over the proper role of government in a changing society. Consequently, they failed to respond in a united and coherent way to the challenge of modernization.