bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction
Authors: Knox Philip
Published: February 2022

This introductory chapter lays out the key concepts that will inform the chapters that follow. It reflects on what can be learned from histories of reading and reception studies in order to think about how fourteenth-century responses to the Rose might be situated in relation to each other, shaped but not determined by the social and cultural environments in which they unfold. It explores how the intricate intertextual networks that the Rose draws into itself from its fore- and after-history form part of how we think about its place in English literary history. Finally, it examines how increasingly sophisticated scholarship is attending to the instability of the very categories of ‘English’ and ‘French’ medieval literature, and what this means for our understanding of the Rose in England.
Conclusion
Authors: Knox Philip
Published: February 2022

The Romance of the Rose transformed fourteenth-century English literature by transforming ideas about what literature should be or could be. It created new ways of asserting or disputing literary value, across a range of discrete but overlapping social and cultural spheres. The apparent disjunction of the different ways in which its afterlife might be imagined is one reason why the importance of the Rose for English literature has been so difficult to describe in modern criticism. But this multiplicity, and the colliding-together of different reading practices that it produced, should be seen in fact as the source of its importance to late medieval readers.
Distrust of Institutions in Early Modern Britain and America
Authors: Levack Brian P.
Published: February 2022

During the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries an increasingly literate and politically conscious public in England expressed growing distrust of national political, legal, financial, commercial, and ecclesiastical institutions. The increasing size and complexity of those institutions, the lack of personal knowledge of the officials who ran or controlled them, and their periodic abuses of power fed a rising chorus of distrust, for which the philosopher John Locke provided theoretical support in his Two Treatises of Government (1689). Distrust of government resulted in two revolutions in seventeenth-century England and the revolution of thirteen North American colonies against British rule in the 1770s.The corruption of justice and conflicts between the judiciary and juries in the seventeenth century contributed to lack of confidence in law courts and the judiciary, while the unfairness of treason trials led to the reform of treason law in Britain and the United States. Distrust of the Bank of England, the stock market, and large trading corporations resulted from the largest financial scandal in British history in 1720, while the system of taxation involved a loss of trust in government in England and America. Anticlericalism lay at the core of widespread Puritan distrust of the Church of England in the 1630s and 1640s, and the persecution of dissenters after the Restoration raised ecclesiastical distrust to unprecedented levels. After subsiding significantly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, distrust of public institutions in Britain and the United States began to mount again in the 1970s, reaching a peak in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.
Introduction
Authors: Levack Brian P.
Published: February 2022

This brief introduction explains that the book breaks new ground on the subject of trust by providing the various historical contexts in which distrust of public institutions arose in early modern Britain and North America. The introduction establishes the geographical and chronological boundaries of the study, while brief descriptions of the individual chapters show that the book deals with the loss of trust not only in government, which is the main concern among academics and journalists today, but also legal, financial, economic, and ecclesiastical institutions. The introduction identifies the intended audience of the book to include not only scholars and students but also general readers interested in the history of England, Scotland, the North American British colonies, and the early American republic, as well as the issue of trust in contemporary society.
Distrust of Legal Institutions
Authors: Levack Brian P.
Published: February 2022

A lack of confidence in English law courts first arose in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in response to the corruption of justice in outlying regions of the country. Reforms undertaken by the governments of Henry VII and Henry VIII helped to restore trust in the legal process, but distrust arose once again during the personal rule of Charles I and among law reformers in the 1640s and 1650s. Distrust of English law courts reached a peak in the late seventeenth century in reaction to the coercion of juries and the violation of defendants’ rights in trials of Whigs and religious dissenters. Other sources of judicial distrust in late seventeenth-century England and the early American republic were the procedures in treason trials, which resulted in the unfair prosecution of opponents of the government. The harshness and unfairness of punishments for all crimes also eroded faith in the entire criminal justice system in both Britain and America during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
Distrust of Financial and Commercial Institutions
Authors: Levack Brian P.
Published: February 2022

Distrust of the Bank of England, the stock market, and the large companies engaged in overseas trade reached a peak in the South Sea Bubble of 1720. Distrust of national banks later became a recurrent source of distrust in the United States, which led to the failure of the first two such banks and prevented a third from being established until 1913. Distrust of the system of taxation in Britain focused mainly on excise taxes, which the government was in large part successful in managing by the middle of the eighteenth century, whereas excise taxes, direct taxes, and customs duties levied on American colonists became a major source of colonial distrust of the British government in the 1760s and 1770s. This chapter also deals with the formation of legal trusts, which are transfers of property from one party to another, who holds the property “in trust” for a beneficiary. The main source of distrust of this system in early modern England came from the royal government itself when landed families used trusts to avoid paying taxes in the 1530s.
Victorians and Numbers
Authors: Goldman Lawrence
Published: February 2022

This book examines the influence of statistics on Victorian society and culture, from the methods of natural science and the struggle against disease, to the development of social administration and conflicts between social classes. A defining feature of nineteenth-century Britain was its fascination with numbers. The processes that made Victorian society, including the growth of population and industry and the increasing competence of the state, generated profuse numerical data. Numbers were gathered in the 1830s by newly-created statistical societies in response to this ‘data revolution’. Their collection and analysis became a regular feature of government, and inspired new ways of interrogating both the natural and social worlds. William Farr used them to study cholera: Florence Nightingale deployed them in campaigns for sanitary improvement; Charles Babbage was inspired to design and build his famous calculating engines to process them; the statistics of living standards inspired working-class protest. The mid-Victorians employed statistics consistently to make the case for liberal reform. In later decades, however, the emergence of the academic discipline of mathematical statistics—statistics as we use them today—became associated with eugenics and a contrary social philosophy. Where earlier statisticians subscribed to the unity of mankind, later practitioners, following Francis Galton, emphasised variation and difference within and between groups. In chapters on learned societies, government departments, international statistical collaborations, natural scientists and intellectuals, as well as statisticians, this book traces the impact of numbers on the era, and the relationship of Victorian statistics to ‘Big Data’ in our own age.
Manchester: The Manchester Statistical Society
Authors: Goldman Lawrence
Published: February 2022

This chapter examines the other major statistical society created in the 1830s in Manchester. The industrial and urban context of the city is sketched as background to the institutional events. Historians have generally seen the society’s origins as responsive to purely local conditions. They have emphasized the commercial identity of the founders of the Society who have been depicted as capitalists hostile to the regulation of their factories by the state. This chapter advances different views. It is demonstrated that key figures in Manchester were involved in the events in Cambridge and London also, suggesting more of a common origin to the Statistical Movement. The bond uniting these men was affiliation to a branch of Christian non-conformity (i.e. non-Anglicanism), Unitarianism. Most were Unitarians or came from historically Unitarian families. This explains why the Manchester Statistical Society devoted much of its attention to elementary education in the 1830s, which was largely controlled by the Anglican Church, and which therefore failed to reach many English communities. In its campaign for a system of unsectarian public education in the 1830s, and its focus on free trade and the repeal of the Corn Laws in the 1840s, the Manchester Society is better conceived as a political pressure group than a learned society. The chapter argues that the famous text of 1832, The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes, by one of its founding members, James Kay-Shuttleworth, is best read as a manifesto for the Society’s ideas.
Clerkenwell
Authors: Goldman Lawrence
Published: February 2022

A body calling itself the London Statistical Society existed in the late 1820s and was responsible for the publication of the Statistical Illustrations of … the British Empire. Historians have largely dismissed it as unimportant, or lacking in evidence of institutional life. This chapter establishes the Society as the confluence of a national network of committees of artisans who, since 1817, had collected data and statistics to demonstrate the decline in living standards among the working classes across the early nineteenth century. The key figure was the Clerkenwell watchmaker and radical journalist, John Powell, an associate of the leading London trades’ unionist of this era, the Thames shipwright, John Gast. Powell set forth an economic philosophy based on cooperation, criticized elite corruption, and tried to show the relationships between rising crime, pauperism and poverty, and falling real wages. He mounted a critique of Ricardian economics—the doctrines and ideas of David Ricardo, which favoured laissez-faire and free trade, as set forth in his Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), and which depended on a priori deductions rather than evidence. Powell foreshadowed other members of the Statistical Movement like Jones and Whewell, who, in the 1830s, also opposed orthodox economics. The chapter thus substantiates the existence of artisan statisticians at this time and of intellectual linkages which define the identity of the Statistical Movement as a whole. It situates working-class statistics within the different genres of working-class protest described by E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class.
Adolphe Quetelet
Authors: Goldman Lawrence
Published: February 2022

L. A. J. (Adolphe) Quetelet, a Belgian, was the preeminent social statistician in mid-nineteenth century Europe. Widely admired in Britain, where his influence on Florence Nightingale was profound, his friends included William Farr and Charles Babbage, and he had been tutor to Prince Albert. He was present in Cambridge in 1833 when the Statistical Movement was initiated. A mathematician and astronomer who had graduated to the study of social science, his major work Sur L’Homme et les Développement de ses Facultés: Physique Sociale, published in 1835, was a bible for many in Britain. Social Physics combined anthropometry (the study of the dimensions of the human body), demography, and statistical representation of social behaviour. Quetelet was controversial because his ideas veered towards determinism: the regularity of certain social processes led him to argue that men and women had only limited free will and that their actions were dictated by social and institutional contexts. Many Victorians believed strongly in individual moral responsibility, however. His idea of the average man (l’homme moyen) was just as confusing: at times it seemed that Quetelet was describing ideal characteristics rather than average attributes. This chapter attempts to explain his contribution to the British statistical movement, his key ideas, and his errors of reasoning and inference. It compares him to another liberal thinker of this era, the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, who was also interested in statistics, had attended the Manchester Statistical Society, but was a more cautious and sceptical democrat than Quetelet.
The International Statistical Congress, 1851–1878
Authors: Goldman Lawrence
Published: February 2022

This chapter shows how the liberal internationalism of the statistical movement at mid-century was undermined by the subsequent growth of nationalism and social conservativism across Europe. It concerns the history of the International Statistical Congress which held nine meetings in major European cities, 1853–78. The ISC has not attracted much historical attention but has generally been presented as embodying the noble aim of international social collaboration as articulated at its London Congress in 1860. In reality, however, there were many international political tensions, and wars of national unification, which undermined the organization, especially after the unification of Germany in 1871. The new German state was unwilling to cooperate with the Congress and to accept its policies and standards. Eventually, in the late 1870s, the ISC collapsed, though it was followed by a more successful professional forum for statisticians, the International Statistical Institute. This case study examines the international politics of statistics and the conflict between liberal practitioners and conservative statesmen and state structures. It also counterposes the continental European model of statistical organization under the control of the state, with the independence from government enjoyed by British statisticians.
The End of the Statistical Movement
Authors: Goldman Lawrence
Published: February 2022

Francis Galton’s genius was responsible for the development from the 1870s of mathematical statistics, a quantum leap from descriptive statistics to sophisticated analytical techniques including correlation and regression. Under the influence of Darwinism, Galton studied variation in nature and society and emphasized the inherited differences between individuals and social groups. He led statistics away from its liberal lineage and towards the discipline of eugenics, the study of heritable qualities and conditions, and the promotion of racial ‘improvement’ by different forms of demographic control. Galton’s work and ideology are examined through three case-studies. The first compares Galton’s classification of the population by inherited intelligence to Charles Booth’s social and environmental classification of the classes in London. In the second, Galton’s assault in the late 1870s on the amateurism of statistical work in Section F of the British Association demonstrates his frustration with the old-style social statistics. In the third, his long correspondence in 1890–91 with Florence Nightingale over the establishment of a professorship of statistics in the University of Oxford, a project Galton deterred, is used to mark the end of the Statistical Movement and its supersession by mathematical statistics. Galton’s lack of judgement, his moral failings, and those of the eugenics movement more generally, are emphasized. However, despite interest in eugenics among the late-Victorian and Edwardian intellectual elites, the eugenics movement made little headway against the prevailing environmentalism among policy-makers. Galton revolutionized statistics but did not change the outlook of most statisticians.
Social Production in a Capitalist World Market
Authors: Cammack Paul
Published: February 2022

This chapter sets out Marx’s ‘general law of social production’ and addresses its implications for the world of work and for gender, household, and family relations. Marx and Engels understood production to include the production of life itself and of individuals from day to day. At the same time, they thought that the development of industry on a global scale would transform social relations in ways that previous forms of production did not, as technological innovation led to increased division of labour and demanded versatile, flexible, and mobile workers. They were acutely attentive to the impact of these changes on families and households, but in their own lifetimes this was relatively limited. A comparison between gender relations, families, and households in their day and today shows how these have been transformed as capitalism has developed, and suggests, contrary to the arguments of some ‘social reproduction’ theorists, that capital tends without limit to penetrate and transform the ‘domestic sphere’. As women enter the labour market in increased numbers, they postpone or reject childbearing, while the ‘male breadwinner’ and the ‘nuclear family’ become increasingly uncommon. The proponents of the politics of global competitiveness embrace these changes, as they make for more competitive labour markets and a larger and more productive workforce.
The OECD and the World Market
Authors: Cammack Paul
Published: February 2022

Since its founding in 1961 the OECD has consistently sought to extend the world market, encouraging developing countries to compete with advanced economies in industrial markets, and condemning protectionism on both sides. Despite its restricted ‘advanced country’ membership, it looked forward in the last decade of the twentieth century to a ‘new global age’—a time when China and other emerging economies would dominate the global economy. Throughout, it valued competition in the world economy because it pressured all participants to pursue social and structural reforms to enhance their own productivity and competitiveness, and so promoted the development of global capitalism overall. In the present century, it has focused primarily on promoting the reform of welfare in the advanced economies with the objective of ‘making work pay’, and increasing the proportion of working-age populations in paid work. It sees the pursuit of competitiveness as a permanent and essential feature of global capitalism, and counsels states on means of managing the social disruption that welfare and related reforms and recurrent crises will inevitably generate.
The Social Politics of Global Competitiveness
Authors: Cammack Paul
Published: February 2022

This chapter documents the codification of the politics of global competitiveness in core documents published by the OECD and the World Bank in 2019 and 2020: the OECD’s Employment Outlook 2019: The Future of Work, and the World Bank’s World Development Report 2019: The Changing Nature of Work, and World Development Report 2020: Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains. These documents confirm the commitment of the two institutions, even after the major setback arising from the global financial crisis originating a decade earlier, to a global regime of competitiveness in labour and product markets, underpinned by policies aiming at the distribution of production around the world in accordance with the maximisation of profits, and a constant focus on the development of productivity-enhancing skills. They develop further the need to move away from inflexible and costly labour contracts, and argue for a common system of labour regulation and forms of social protection that incentivise paid work, and selective deregulation to boost the transfer of workers from the informal economy to the formal sector.
War and Peace
Authors: Apor Péter
Published: February 2022

Wars of liberation brought together the ‘Second World’ with Africa and Asia in the postwar period. This chapter traces how both sides recognized commonalities of purpose: how the memory of struggle of the Soviet Red Army, the Yugoslav partisans or even the nationalist Polish Home Army during the Second World War was integrated into a professed commitment to defend a hard-won anti-fascist and anti-imperialist world. Weapons were provided by Eastern Europeans as expressions of solidarity,and later as business opportunities; training camps for liberation movements were established across the region and beyond; its militaries took part in peace missions (e.g. following Vietnam), engaged in reconstruction efforts (e.g. Algeria) or resettled populations after other conflicts (e.g. Korea). Third World leaders sought to represent their own struggles as models to be supported by their Eastern European partners, whilst also identifying with the manner in which Europeans had overcome conflict on their own continent. Nevertheless, violence which had once been accepted as legitimate by a generation that had lived through the Second World War was more and more associated with the supposedly excessive demands of liberation movements, or with the threatening terrorism of Islamic groups. By the last decades of the Cold War, Eastern European Communist states were increasingly divided on these questions—whilst the Soviets and the GDR still saw revolutionary violence as acceptable in some circumstances, other elites preferred to propagate peace, solutions based in international law, and trade.
Culture
Authors: Betts Paul , Vučetić Radina
Published: February 2022

Cultural relations were decisive for making real these Second–Third World connections. Hot war and hard power of course continued to shape Eastern European–Third World encounters, but not exclusively so. Equally as significant were peace initiatives, soft power and cultural relations forged in the name of equality and exchange. In the case of the smaller Eastern European states, socialist fraternity with strangers abroad was identified as a means to escape political isolation (e.g. GDR, and Hungary after 1956); to gain Third World support with a view to protecting sovereignty and postwar European borders (e.g. Poland);, as well as to create distance from Moscow and Beijing in the name of distinctive national identities (e.g. non-aligned Yugoslavia and Romania). For cultural missionaries from the global South, these links with Eastern Europe advanced their broader understanding of nationalism, internationalism and socialism. In these cultural exchanges, anti-imperialism became the main ideological bridge between the Second and Third Worlds, serving as a Cold War socialist version of 1930s Popular Front activism. Cultural diplomacy, modernization, and even the defence of tradition became flashpoints in these exchanges. This chapter shows how the appeal of modernization paradigms lay in their combination of economic uplift with a respect for the recovery of national traditions and histories. Moreover, the defence of progressive tradition and religion, or the common appreciation of repurposed high European cultural forms, engendered far-flung socialist ‘imagined communities’ of mutual recognition that were pitted against the culturally destructive potential of western-led capitalist developmentalism. Such exchanges often brought these cultures together, but also sometimes heightened their differences..
Rights
Authors: Betts Paul
Published: February 2022

While the field of human rights has greatly expanded in recent years, comparatively little attention has been paid to the Communist understanding of such rights, especially in an international setting. Rights issues were hotly debated themes in Eastern Europe from the very beginning, reflecting shifting ideals regarding the relationship between the socialist citizen and society. From the 1950s through the 1980s human rights became a surprising point of convergence for Eastern European and African representatives at the UN and elsewhere to build new associations beyond superpower antagonism. Different versions of human rights provided these regions with a newly minted language of socialist solidarity and cross-cultural understanding. International organizations served as key forums for exchanging ideas and building new alliances in the international community around rights advocacy. This chapter shows how representatives of recently decolonized states in Africa and Asia formed new coalitions that often included smaller Eastern European countries, fighting for the right to self-determination and against racial and religious discrimination in the 1960s, and then for gender rights in the 1970s. It then explores how the universalized idea of human rights fractured in the 1970s, in part due to the fading international appeal of common social and economic rights. Just as some outside Europe turned to the idea of e.g. African or Islamic rights, so European socialists’ rights work was increasingly focused on collective security in the European sphere, as their commitment to collective justice and anti-racist work at international institutions went into steep decline.
Health
Authors: Iacob Bogdan C.
Published: February 2022

Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were significant actors in the dynamics and development of post-1945 regimes of global health. This chapter explores how expertise in disease eradication and basic health services that had been developed in interwar Eastern Europe—often with the assistance of the League of Nations—became part of new socialist health interventions on a global scale at the World Health Organization (WHO). The region’s predominantly rural character in the first decades of the twentieth century and socialism’s self-definition as the solution to backwardness helped establish their medical initiatives as models for overcoming disease and deprivation in the post-colonial world in Africa and Asia too. The export of such blueprints of modernity was achieved through involvement in WHO schemes (e.g. eradication programmes for malaria, smallpox, poliomyelitis), through humanitarian assistance, or in aid to national liberation movements. Such interventions were presented as humane alternatives to liberal medicine, but were challenged by Chinese and Cuban regimes. For them, European socialist medicine reproduced civilizational hierarchies , as became particularly apparent with the erosion of its commitment to rural medicine outside Europe. From the late 1970s, the profile of Eastern European medical internationalism changed: pharmaceutical multi-nationals from the region grew in the South and healthcare was increasingly commercialized, whilst states provided only limited support during major international health crises such as the successive famines in East Africa. By the late 1980s, Eastern Europeans forfeited their alternative medical modernity as they embraced Western-inspired privatization and abandoned their pioneering role in public healthcare in the developing world.
Overview
Authors: Zhang Luping
Published: February 2022

This chapter provides an overview of the resolution of disputes in international civil aviation. Section B introduces the significance of the topic by presenting a summary of the history of air law, the structure of the aviation market and special features of aviation, as well as setting out the main research question. The first question is targeted at answering questions about the nature of the dispute settlement power of the ICAO Council. The second question explores the issue of whether the current dispute resolution mechanisms in international civil aviation should be reformed. Section C provides an overview of the existing literature, with a particular focus on the ways in which these two core questions have been examined. Section D discusses the limitations of the study with a definition of the scope of this research.
Means of Dispute Resolution in International Civil Aviation
Authors: Zhang Luping
Published: February 2022

Chapter 4 distils the empirical data gathered from Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 and boils down two means of dispute resolutions—the political and legal means as two sets of toolkits for resolving disputes. This chapter first highlights the role of ‘aeropolitics’ in the resolution of disputes in international civil aviation under Section B. It starts with defining the notion of aeropolitics and analysis of diplomatic channels in the resolution of international civil aviation disputes in subsection B.1. The notion of aeropolitics is considered from two angles in subsections B.2 and B.3. Subsection B.4 explains the discrepancy between the text of treaties and State practices. Section C focuses on judicial powers in the aviation industry. In subsection C.1, it first defines judicialization in an international context by discussing quasi-judicial powers and their boundaries. In subsection C.2, it analyses how international civil aviation can move towards judicialization. In subsection C.3, even though there is not yet a perceived trend towards judicialization in handling disputes under bilateral air services agreements, it argues that institutionalizing dispute resolution mechanisms is still beneficial in this context. Section D concludes that there are two means of dispute resolution mechanisms in international civil aviation by focusing on two processes that are closely interlinked: the political aspect of dispute resolution, and the legal dimension thereof. This pendulum movement demonstrates an ever-evolving dispute resolution system in the aviation industry, which serves as the third cornerstone for Chapter 5.
Reforms of Dispute Resolution Mechanisms in International Civil Aviation
Authors: Zhang Luping
Published: February 2022

Chapter 5 responds to the deficiencies from empirical data in Chapters 2 and 3, as well as theoretical analysis in Chapter 5 systematically. In Section B, it first discusses evolutionary trends in international dispute resolution: the first stage is the proliferation of international courts and tribunals; the second stage is the fragmentation of international courts and tribunals; the final stage is the exit or withdrawal of membership from international courts and tribunals (subsection B.1). Under subsection B.2, it reviews proposals that have been made in the past for the reforms of dispute resolution mechanisms in international civil aviation. In Section C, it argues that of all the proposed options, the reform of the ICAO Council is the optimal choice. It offers two frames for reforms by first assessing past proposals based on two pieces of the foundation. The first piece is a sectorized demand for dispute resolution mechanisms in international civil aviation (subsection C.1). The second piece is the possibility of establishing a new international judicial institution for civil aviation disputes (subsection C.2). Following the analysis of different models, past proposals, and the foundation of a sectorized demand in dispute resolution mechanisms, it sets two feasible frames for reforms: one is a procedural reform in the ICAO Council without creating new organs in subsection C.3, the other is establishing an arbitration institution in the ICAO Council with corresponding expertise, procedure, and a tailor-made arbitration policy in subsection C.4.
An Important Compendium
Authors: Beiser Frederick C.
Published: February 2022

This chapter examines the most important compendium Herbart ever wrote: his Lehrbuch zur Einleitung in die Philosophie. It considers Herbart’s definition of philosophy as the Bearbeitung der Begriffe and how it differed from competing account of philosophy. It also treats Herbart’s aesthetic approach to ethics, his attitude toward a skepticism, and his idea of god.
Return to Göttingen
Authors: Beiser Frederick C.
Published: February 2022

This chapter examines the last period of Herbart’s career, which is marked by his return to Göttingen in 1833. It considers the most important works of this period: Umriss pädagogischer Vorlesungen, Über Willensfreiheit und Determinismus, and the Analytische Beleuchtung des Naturrechts und der Moral. The final section considers Herbart’s participation in the controversy surrounding the protest of the seven Göttingen professors against the king’s abolition of the new progressive constitution.
Standards of Living in an Age of Transition
Authors: Larson Peter L.
Published: February 2022

Modelling a peasant budget shows that a tenant with 30–36 acres would be secure in times of low prices while still living comfortably, allowing for adding to the holding or investing in capital equipment. Those with 15–20 acres could do well in some years but needed to restrict consumption in bad years. Diet largely remained the same into the sixteenth century, with more beef, wheaten bread, and ale; in the sixteenth century, an increasing number of spices and luxury foods became cheaper and more readily available. Likewise durable consumer goods including table linen, pewter, brass, featherbeds, and more became common items in parish homes. Altogether this was an evolution more than a consumer revolution. However, the disparity of wealth grew greater, showing two Durhams: one wealthy and prospering, one poor. Comparison of wealth recorded in probate inventories puts Durham ahead of other counties including Kent until the mid-seventeenth century.
The Expanding and Evolving Economy
Authors: Larson Peter L.
Published: February 2022

Durham’s agriculture evolved to meet increasing needs; some farmers in the two parishes focused on grain, others on livestock. Durham had ample pasture from unenclosed waste but the three villages also had several closes and fields in severalty. Larger scale enclosure began in the 1580s, individually and collectively. Evidence of changing practices is seen in the bishop’s courts, both increasingly large herds and departures from communal agriculture. Individualism was tolerated as long as the animals and crops of others were not damaged. The parishes remained rural and agricultural; despite earlier references to it as a town, Sedgefield did not urbanize and there were few full-time artisans in the parishes. Spinning wool was common, and some farmers made malt in commercial quantities. Servants were common in the villages and while information is scarce, they appeared to be paid the same as servants elsewhere in England. Economic growth was made possible by local and regional credit networks, and in the seventeenth century yeomen were taking out loans of several hundred pounds and repaying them swiftly.
Individuals and Communities
Authors: Larson Peter L.
Published: February 2022

Village and parish communities persisted despite agricultural, religious, and political upheaval. Families stayed in the general area but moved to different villages and back again; this included villages in other neighbouring parishes. The reason these strong communities persisted despite changes that radically reshaped communities elsewhere lay in the leadership. In each village there was an oligarchy of wealthy peasant and then yeomen families who had been in the parish for generations; they served as manorial court jurors and churchwardens; these were also the men most likely to focus on commercial agriculture and more ‘individualistic’ practices. There was scope for individual actions, but there were also boundaries. This can be seen in reactions to the rebellion in 1569 and the English Civil War; conformity was key.
Self-Help and the Court of Star Chamber
Authors: Kesselring K.J. , Stretton Tim
Published: February 2022

Chapter 2 turns to records of the Star Chamber, a court that straddled equity and common law, but one that ultimately entrenched coverture’s restrictions on married women’s rights at law. Star Chamber ostensibly had no business dealing with marital separations but heard many cases that provide evidence of the ways in which people sought to deal with failed unions on their own. It also heard the 1602 case of Hercules Foljambe, a man with three wives, a case that induced the clearest statement from authorities that whatever some Protestant reformers urged, separations for adultery would not allow remarriage. While the case receives brief mention in many surveys of divorce’s history, we provide here the first detailed examination of the original court records.
Bigamy and Adultery
Authors: Kesselring K.J. , Stretton Tim
Published: February 2022

Chapter 3 turns to the records of parliament, examining measures that crossed the thin line between litigation and legislation. Parliament passed acts both private and public that honed its ability to end failed marriages through death, either civil and fictive or all too real. The chapter focuses on the developments that followed the Foljambe decision of 1602 in trying to resolve the disagreements and differences that had arisen around divorce. It addresses the so-called Bigamy Act of 1604 that criminalized marriage of a second spouse in the lifetime of the first, putting it in the context of other, failed measures to make adultery a capital offence. Turning to look more directly at adultery and bigamy as discussed in parliament—the body claiming to be the highest court of the land—lets us see from another angle the ramifying effects of coverture and of jurisdictional pluralism on marital separations in post-Reformation England.
Private Litigation and Parliamentary Divorce, c.1660–1700
Authors: Kesselring K.J. , Stretton Tim
Published: February 2022

Chapter 6 examines attempts made in the Restoration era to reverse the changes of the revolutionary decades. The reactionary retrenchments of the 1660s saw heated attacks on what some elite men perceived as dangerous new liberties for married women through the unduly generous provision of alimony. Coverture received strong reassertion in the infamous case of Manby v Scott (1663); the later decision in Whorwood v Whorwood did much the same for the primacy of the restored church courts. Even so, Chancery retained and developed a role in protecting separate estates for married women and offering some recourse to women and men in failed marriages. More and more couples relied on negotiated settlements and trusts to secure adequate maintenance for wives during marriage and in the event of widowhood, but these same arrangements could operate during separations. And divorce did become possible in these post-revolutionary decades, though not in the ways Archbishop Cranmer and others had envisioned in the heady early days of the Reformation. The spirit of the Adultery Act revived, when parliament began to offer a select few men private divorce acts, acts that evaded the problem of coverture not by wiping it away but rather by treating the adulterous wife as if she were dead at law.
Afterword
Authors: Kesselring K.J. , Stretton Tim
Published: February 2022

The Afterword traces briefly the connections between the post-Reformation story told in the preceding chapters and the better-known nineteenth-century reforms to divorce law and coverture. The civil death upon which parliamentary divorces and coverture were premised continued, and if anything legal patriarchy tightened, in the years between 1700 and the divorce and property law reforms of the 1800s. Drawing upon eighteenth-century work by Sarah Chapone and William Blackstone, the Afterword then turns to the writings of Caroline Norton to help sketch the changes that helped propel the Divorce Act of 1857. It briefly alludes to the links between the history examined in the book and continuing inequalities within marriages and related legally-regulated conjugal partnerships even today.
Making Refugees in India
Authors: Kapoor Ria
Published: February 2022

A global history of India’s refugee regime, this book explores how one of the first postcolonial states of the mid-twentieth-century wave of decolonisation rewrote practices surrounding refugees—signified by its refusal to sign the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. In broadening the scope of this decision well beyond the Partition of India, starting with the so-called ‘Wilsonian moment’ and extending to the 1970s, the refugee is placed within the postcolonial effort to address the inequalities of the subject-citizenship of the British Empire through the fullest realisation of self-determination. India’s ‘strategically ambiguous’ approach to refugees is thus far from ad hoc, revealing a startling consistency when viewed in conversation of postcolonial state building and anti-imperial worldmaking to address inequity across the former colonies. The anti-colonial cry for self-determination as the source of all rights, it is revealed in this work, was in tension with the universal human rights that focused on the individual, and the figure of the refugee felt this irreconcilable difference most intensely. To elucidate this, this work explores contrasts in Indians’ and Europeans’ rights in the British Empire and in the Second World War, refugee rehabilitation during Partition, the arrival of the Tibetan refugees, and the East Pakistani refugee crisis. It finds that the refugee was constitutive of postcolonial Indian citizenship, and that assistance permitted to refugees—a share of the rights guaranteed by self-determination—depended on their potential to threaten or support national sovereignty that allowed Indian experiences to be included in the shaping of universal principles.
Introduction
Authors: Edmondson Belinda
Published: February 2022

This chapter identifies and defines key concepts in the literary history of Caribbean Creole (or dialect) literature. It theorizes the concept of literary miscegenation, or the relationship between orality and literature, often coded racially as black (orality) and white (literature). It lays the groundwork for the book’s argument that Creole language itself is not just a characteristic of black populations but has origins in white creole speech. The chapter investigates Noise theory, Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of nation language as it relates to Caribbean Creole, and the roles of violence and blackface minstrelsy in the emergence of Creole literature. Nineteenth-century Caribbean Creole grammar books by early Caribbean grammarians John Jacob Thomas and Thomas Russell are discussed. It explains the interchangeable use of the terms “dialect,” “Creole,” and “vernacular.” The chapter links the emergence of Creole literature in the eighteenth century with today’s popular Creole grammar books and novels.
White Creoles, “Bad” Grammar, and the Birth of Dialect Literature
Authors: Edmondson Belinda
Published: February 2022

This chapter investigates the origins of Creole literature in the early writings of the white creoles of the Caribbean, most of whom were hostile to Emancipation during the slavery era. Early literary dialect used forms of racial ventriloquism or pseudo-transcription to argue against the freeing of the enslaved blacks. These ventriloquists, and those that they ventriloquized, yielded a lasting template for an original Caribbean narrative form. The chapter explores the “dialect war” between the abolitionist English author J.B. Moreton and pro-slavery white creole author Samuel August Mathews. White stereotypes of strong black Caribbean women as vectors of Creole speech are discussed.
Travelling Dialect
Authors: Edmondson Belinda
Published: February 2022

Dialect is a paradox. Bounded by its geographic and cultural specificity, it is, by definition, insular and local, the product of limited interactions; its literary concerns fleeting and dated, not universal, cosmopolitan, or of lasting value. And yet dialect narratives and musical traditions have been global fixtures for hundreds of years. This chapter explores the theme of travelling dialect in Creole literature. It describes how, in the post-Emancipation period, African-American dialect via sketches and “plantation songs” became a model for the literary rendering of Caribbean dialect. It examines Caribbean attitudes towards African Americans in the nineteenth century, the popularity of blackface minstrelsy in the Caribbean and touring choirs such as the Fisk Jubilee Choir and the Native Choir of Jamaica as major influences on the development of the Caribbean Creole literary tradition.
Home to Harlem
Authors: Edmondson Belinda
Published: February 2022

This chapter illustrates the importance of New York city, Harlem especially, as the location around which Caribbean literary dialect and performative modes coalesced in the early twentieth century. Utilizing the concept of the pan-Caribbean vernacular axis, the chapter discusses the influence of popular Caribbean calypsonians who travelled to New York both to perform and to record calypsos. The lyrics of these calypsos became part of the popular vernacular on both sides of the Atlantic. The career of the Trinidadian calypsonian and comedian Sam Manning is examined, as well as that of the playwright and ex-wife of Marcus Garvey, Amy Ashwood Garvey. The literary career of Jamaican dialect poet and Harlem Renaissance author Claude McKay is used as an example of the pan-Caribbean vernacular axis. It includes a discussion of the controversy over his novel Home to Harlem, and the relationship between Garveyism and dialect.
Epilogue
Authors: Edmondson Belinda
Published: February 2022

This chapter links the emergence of internationally acclaimed contemporary Creole literature to earlier historical eras and literary texts. Utilizing the concept of Creole transnationalism, it discusses the marketing of Caribbean Creoles in the works of authors Marlon James and Junot Diaz. The most extraordinary thing about James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings is that a book written mostly in Jamaican Creole found not just an international audience but a popular one. Jamaican Creole, one of the baddest of the bad grammars, is now part of a global lexicon of, not English, but Englishes. The chapter meditates on the twinned issues of sexual identity and exile in James’ work, and its relationship to his use of Creole. It links the issues of sexual identity and exile to black nationalism and gender politics to the politics of Creole literature in the Caribbean.
Staging Touch in Shakespeare's England
Authors: MacConochie Alex
Published: February 2022

This book offers a social semiotics of contact on the early modern stage. Its central argument is twofold. First, dramatic characters use touch to define and contest the nature of their relationships, with different forms of touch embodying different power dynamics, from submission to reciprocity, to mutuality and consent. Second, touch acts do not have stable meanings offstage, to which characters’ behavior conforms. In this period, the proper social role of touch was up for debate, especially in conduct literature addressing courtesy and civility. The theater, therefore, does not simply reflect offstage codes of conduct. Instead, it participates in debates surrounding the appropriateness of touch gestures like kissing, embracing, or holding hands in contexts like courtship, friendship, marriage, politics, and business. In the playhouse, then, audiences encounter new models or scripts for interpersonal behavior. With its focus on social signification, this approach addresses topics central to early modern sensory studies—affect, cognition, the nature of sensation—from the outside-in, offering a sociology rather than phenomenology of contact. In the process, it shows how theatrical depictions of touch are central to the Shakespearean theater’s investigation of questions surrounding embodiment, among them consent, gender, sexuality, intimacy, and individual agency.