bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The Reform of the Scottish Sheriffdoms in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
Authors: Whetstone Ann E. 
Published: November 2007

The main feature which distinguishes Scottish local government from English local government in the later eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century is the presence there of professional men—the sheriffs. The sheriff, and later the sheriff-substitute, was the key to the legal and administrative system in the Scottish countries. He had no English equivalent. Essentially he was a representative of the central government who administered justice at the local level. After the reforms of 1748 the sheriff was a bureaucrat in the finest sense—highly trained and efficient. The substitute acquired strict standards more slowly, but by 1830 he too had to meet high standards in training and performance.Before the mid-eighteenth century, the sheriff had hardly been a progressive figure. Indeed, the Scottish sheriff typified the backward state of Scottish local government, a state which had been little affected by the Act of Union. In 1700 Scotland lacked a uniform system of justice. Independent franchise courts and hereditary rights to judicial offices, including that of sheriff, were common throughout the Lowlands. They were relatively rare in the Highlands, because the king's justice had never made sufficient headway to make possible or necessary these particular legal perversions.
Little Tin Gods: The District Officer in British East Africa
Authors: Thomason Michael 
Published: November 2007

They were unlikely choices for revolutionaries and hardly the haughty autocrats the phrase “Little Tin Gods” conjures up. Yet many East African district officers felt it their duty to change the lives of the Africans they ruled, and against great odds they did. Sent out by their superiors in London and Nairobi as policemen and tax collectors, they saw themselves as secular missionaries for a superior culture. Working in the decade before the catastrophic first world war, they were the last generation of Europeans who easily believed their own superiority. Under pressure to produce revenue many district commissioners fostered economic development as a first step in reforming African society. They wished to develop an exchange economy based upon the fruits of a settled and productive peasantry working on its own land. They believed the Africans would adopt the basic values of hard work and even self-reliance, making an Edwardian revolution. If their assumptions about social change, economics, or even civilization itself seem unsophisticated, it is because they were amateurs. They had few resources beyond their own confidence and sense of mission. They began a revolution, but it was not the one they intended for they failed to retrieve colonial Kenya from the clutches of a handful of white settlers. Their vision of peaceful prosperity for the Africans was ultimately denied, and the hopes they raised became murderous frustrations. They offered Kenya an alternative course which imperialism could not accept.Kenya's first district officers came from diverse backgrounds, but most shared the middle class values they proposed for the Africans.
Fenians and Farmers: The Merger of the Home-Rule and Owner-Occupancy Movements in Ireland, 1850-1915
Authors: Huttman John P. 
Published: November 2007

Irish political activity diminished in the early 1850s from previously more intensive levels. The tenant-right movement, established to secure economic justice for tenant farmers whose numbers dominated the ranks of Irish cultivators, continued to elicit a sympathetic response. But by the middle of the nineteeth century, it had deteriorated to a shadow of its former strength. The enthusiasm of the rural Irish for political causes had seemingly been drained by the traumatic experience of the Potato Famine of the late 1840s. The potato blight, with the failure of a crop upon which many were heavily dependent, resulted in the death of over a half million persons. The flow of emigrants accelerated in the famine and immediate post-famine period. The population of Ireland was reduced from over eight million in 1841 to about six and one-half million in 1851. Landlords engaged in widespread tenant eviction during the famine episode. The established trend of the shift of agricultural land from crop to livestock production was accelerated.Rural assistance programmes initiated in the famine and immediate post-famine years were primarily intended to benefit landlords and large farm operators with measures for soil improvement and drainage control. Recovery from the famine was slow and tortuous: the real value of agricultural output was still ten percent lower in the early 1860s than in the early 1850s. The reduction of the value of crop output by about one-third was largely compensated by the rise of value of livestock output. It proved to be a hostile environment for those tenant farmers surviving the famine. The tenant farmers — all but three percent of the total number of farm operators — were defeated and submissive. They offered slight resistance to measures introduced for the consolidation of estates and for the transfer of title from indebted to more commercially oriented owners.
James VII's Forfeiture of the Scottish Throne
Authors: Barnes Robert P. 
Published: November 2007

The perspective of time has allowed most British historians to declare the English phase of the British Revolution of 1688-1689 “glorious” whereas the Scottish developments largely have been ignored as inconsequential. Although Scotland was included in Macaulay's History of England, for the past century it has been mentioned only briefly in historical treatments of the Revolution. Yet the Scottish Convention Parliament of 1689 not only followed and fulfilled the English Parliament's revolutionary initiative, but in an independent process paved the way for a more fundamental, uncompromising, and far-reaching constitutional settlement.Lacking foresight to know that their best efforts would be amalgamated in the Union of 1707, Scottish politicians in 1689 forged ahead with a radical revolution that terminated Stuart absolutism and provided a fleeting chance for national independence under a constitutional monarchy. The event which opened the way for a revolutionary constitutional settlement was the forfeiture of the throne by James II & VII and the subsequent conditional offering of the same to William and Mary by the Scottish Estates in the spring of 1689.In January 1689 following the final flight of James VII from Britain and the simultaneous collapse of his Scottish administration, the leaders of the Scottish aristocracy assembled at Whitehall and temporarily placed the government of their realm in the hands of Prince William of Orange pending a Convention Parliament.
Cromwell, Cranmer and Lord Lisle: A Study in the Politics of Reform
Authors: Slavin Arthur J. 
Published: November 2007

When Henry VIII raised Thomas Cromwell to the earldom of Essex, most observors were both dazzled by the ceremony and deceived as to its significance. The French ambassador Marillac had taken the measure of events, however. He had speculated that Cromwell would lose authority in religious matters, while perhaps retaining it in worldly affairs. Those whom Cromwell had put in the shade reserved “une bonne pensée” for him, Marillac said. And Cromwell's close ties to religious radicals (Friar Barnes and the Calais Sacramentarians) provided weapons to his enemies. Norfolk and his conservative friends feared further reformation might provide occasions for new waves of rebellion in a country already under diverse threats at home and abroad. They would not miss their chance to cast down the upstart.Modern historians have dismissed Marillac's chief point, that Cromwell would fall because he had used his powers to make a ‘party’ in the State. Foxe, Hall and Burnet had seen the king's minister in that light. Many of Cromwell's contemporaries held such views. But the weight of Professor Elton's opinion has lain heavily on the subject. He dismissed Marillac as little more than an ill-in-formed gossip. Then, turning to the evidence of the Act of Attainder passed against Cromwell, the Cambridge wizard treated it with equal severity. Allegations that Cromwell had illegally retained heretical men, in order to have a force with which to defend error with sword in hand, were obviously contrived.
Herman Merivale and the Native Question, 1837–1861
Authors: McNab David 
Published: November 2007

One of the most important consequences of the granting of colonial self-government in the British Empire in the early and mid-Victorian period was that it created complex problems for the Colonial Office concerning the future of native populations. In the nineteenth century this imperial dilemma was termed the “native question.” Natives were regarded as a lower class, like the Irish or the poor in Britain, and British liberals sought to better the material condition of these people by means of the panaceas of education and religion. Their object was humanitarian and their methods were usually paternalistic. Herman Merivale, in his role as a commentator on the native question, was both naive and at times Utopian in his attempts to find a solution. As an imperial administrator he was involved in the ineffectual attempts to implement the schemes of “amalgamation” (gradual union leading to assimilation) and “insulation” (reservations). British native policies failed largely because of resistance by native peoples and the weaknesses of imperial administration rather than British racial attitudes.For Merivale “race” was a cultural idea derived from early nineteenth century ethnography, not a pseudo-scientific rationale which determined that native peoples were physically and, therefore, intellectually and materially inferior. Until the 1860's, at least, his ideas on this subject were not very different from those of his British contemporaries and were derived from a wide variety of written sources rather than direct observation.
The Chartist Convention of 1839
Authors: Kemnitz Thomas Milton 
Published: November 2007

This article has two purposes: to present some of the most basic facts about the Chartist Convention in 1839, and to offer a new structure for interpreting the Convention.It is necessary to set forth the basic facts because historians have not bothered very much about them. The factual poverty of the historiography of the national Chartist movement was demonstrated recently by the publication of J. T. Ward'sChartism. Although the Convention of 1839 played a crucial role in the movement, Ward cannot tell his readers precisely who attended it or when it met. He states that fifty-four delegates attended it (p. 113), but in fact, seventy-one delegates attended the Convention. He incorrectly dates the adjournment for the simultanous meetings as 16 May (p. 123), and states that the Convention dissolved on 6 September (p. 133) when it met last on 14 September. Another sort of error in Ward's account involves the attendance of delegates. He asserts that Fletcher retired to Bury in March (p. 117), but Fletcher attended the Convention through July and sat in London on the Council in early August. He asserts Joseph Wood “left on 18 April” (p. 118); but no evidence exists that Wood attended the Convention after 18 February, and the evidence is overwhelming that he was not present at any time after 21 February. Ward says that Vincent and M'Douall were arrested in April (p. 121); in fact, Vincent was arrested just past midnight on the morning of 8 May, and M'Douall was taken by the authorities on 8 June. Ward asserts that Rider “led the summer resignations” (p. 125); he resigned on 2 May. Yet another source of error involves the sequence of events in localities as it affected the Convention and the delegates. Ward states that Richardson resigned to be replaced by Christopher Dean (p. 125); Dean was elected on 4 May, and Richardson resigned on 5 July. This dreary catalogue could be extended, but the point is clear.
The Role of Local Authorities in the Provincial Hunger Riots of 1766
Authors: Shelton Walter J. 
Published: November 2007

The hunger riots which spread across most of southern England in the summer and autumn of 1766 were the most extensive rural disorders in a century when food riots became chronic. More serious in their threat to the social order than the violent protests against the high cost of “necessaries” and the new Militia Act in 1756-57, the disturbances of 1766 placed a heavy strain upon the forces of order. They foreshadowed the more serious agrarian riots of the next century.While the War Office in September, 1766 moved its detachments across the countryside in a vain effort to parry the rapidly-shifting threats from militant labourers, colliers, tinners, weavers, and others of the provincial dispossessed, the rioters becamer bolder and seized control of large tracts of the countryside almost in the manner of an occupying army. As the crisis developed, demands for military protection from market towns and isolated country estates poured into the War Office. By late September the pattern of events had unfolded to the point where Lord Barrington, the Secretary-at-War, apprehended a threat of general insurrection. Striving to mobilise his limited resources, he ordered the commanders of both active troops and “invalides” to assist the civil magistrates “upon requisition,” while at the same time he urged the leaders of rural society, the aristocracy and the gentry to abandon their lethargy and use initiative in arming their servants to suppress less serious disturbances.
W. H. Auden in the 1930's: The Problem of Individual Commitment to Political Action
Authors: Bone Christopher 
Published: November 2007

In an age as confusing and volatile as the interwar period, it was perhaps to be expected that the main theme in literature among younger writers and poets particularly would be the social, political, and economic malaise of the time. Indeed, it was the delineation and analysis of this malaise and its relationship to individual life that set the tone of the so-called thirties poetry in Britain and which provided the focal point of W. H. Auden, the most distinguished and versatile English poet of the 1930's. Auden's work in the thirties was characterized by persistent intellectual effort and endurance. For as his contemporary John Lehmann pointed out, W. H. Auden was “the spiritual physician of his generation.” And he was the spiritual physician because more than any other prestigious English litterateur of the interwar years, Auden sought to resolve what seemed to be the most critical problem of the time: how the individual might take effective political action without losing his moral integrity. Or as Auden put the problem as early as 1930:
Here am I, Here are you,But what does it meanAnd what are we going to do?I should like, therefore, to examine two of W. H. Auden's works which most directly confront the problem of individual commitment to collective political action: “Spain,” and Journey to a War.The famous poem “Spain,” written in April 1937 and published in May of that year, seemed to announce that at last Auden offered unequivocal endorsement of politicial action. The poem further develops a theme set forth in his celebrated Look Stranger (1935) — the moral responsibility of carefully considered choice and action. The Spanish Civil War, to Auden, is the clear opportunity of an individual to make a decision and to act. A person could either do nothing, which in the face of the Fascist threat is virtually to commit moral suicide, or he could act in unison with other individuals against Fascism. In Auden's view, not only does the Spanish Civil War represent a crisis situation in the history of his generation, it represents also a pivotal point in the intellectual history of the Western World. Accordingly Auden places himself and his generation in a profoundly meaningful historical context. The first stanzas of the poem summarize the ingredients of the Weltanschauung which culminated in twentieth-century liberalism, with its political manifestation in Western parliamentary democracy. The poet also sketches the history of the application of science to conquer the natural world and the gradual victory of scientific method over the ages in which religious faith explained the whole of the world as but a symbol of a transcendental order.
The Testimony of Nature: Boyle, Hooke and Experimental Philosophy
Authors: Kargon Robert H. 
Published: November 2007

“The Office of the sense shall be the only judge of the experiment, and … the experiment itself shall judge of the thing.”Francis Bacon,The Great InstaurationThe first history of the Royal Society of London, published in 1667, and the most recent full study of that scientific organization published three centuries later, agree on one important point: that Sir Francis Bacon was the intellectual progenitor of the body, that in the denigrating words of a contemporary critic the Society was “Bacon-faced.” The author of the former, Thomas Sprat, termed Bacon the “one great Man, who had the true Imagination of the whole extent of this Enterprise,” and in “whose Books there are every where scattered the best arguments that can be produced for the defence of Experimental Philosophy.” The author of the latter, Margery Purver, agrees that “Bacon was the great formative influence on the Society's concept of science.”Yet it must be conceded at once that Bacon's legacy was ambiguous. While the early Royal Society indeed was Bacon-faced, “it saw many faces of Bacon.” The period after the founding of the Society, the 1660's and 1670's, was one of contending philosophies and of a continuing effort to fashion clearer notions of what an experimental philosophy was to be like and what role experience was to play in scientific argument. Two of the more important and influential members of the Society who were actively engaged in this pursuit were Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke; these men were, and saw themselves, as disciples of the Lord Chancellor. It is my intention here to illustrate the differing approaches to the Baconian legacy of Boyle and of Hooke by focusing attention upon an interesting analogy, used by both, which may aid us in interpreting the conception of experiment in the works of these two founders of the experimental philosophy.
The ‘Adventurers of England Trading Into Hudson's Bay’: A Study of the Founding Members of the Hudson's Bay Company, 1665–1670
Authors: Gough Barry M. 
Published: November 2007

In this year of the tercentenary of the incorporation of the Hudson's Bay Company it is appropriate to examine the founding membership of what may still be called “The Great Company.” It is surprising that the literature which chronicles the early adventures of the Company in the northern reaches of Canada has largely neglected a close scrutiny of the founders. The purpose of this article is to examine the early partnership, note the walks of life and social groups from which the adventurers came, and identfy those who formed the nucleus of leadership in planning and executing the endeavors for which the Hudson's Bay Company became renowned.In general, the men who established the Hudson's Bay Company were representative of the era of extensive oversea expansion that characterized Restoration England. They were essentially promoters and imperialists. Yet they were not the first of their kind, for in the thirteenth century merchants had formed regulated organizations for prosecuting the cloth trade. Nor did they ever possess the financial power or parliamentary lobby of the East India Company. Nonetheless, their interest in the fur trade, in a Northwest passage and in general scientific inquiry prompted these men to lay the basis of a firm that by the height of its influence in the early 1840 was engaged in business throughout most of British North America as well as on the Pacific slope south to San Francisco Bay, in the Pacific islands, and in Canton. Today this organization remains the oldest merchant trading company in the world and the oldest business firm on the North American continent.
Liberal Women's Organizations and the War Against the Boers, 1899-1902
Authors: Hirshfield Claire 
Published: November 2007

In October of 1899 war broke out between Great Britain and the Transvaal Republic following a Boer attack upon Natal and Cape Colony. Thus opened what was destined to be the most melancholy chapter in imperial history.1 Although Britain ultimately achieved military victory, the circumstances surrounding the start of the war and the methods by which it was fought provoked serious domestic division and crisis, especially within the opposition Liberal party.Because of the Boers' apparent aggression against British territory in South Africa, the majority of Britons, irrespective of social class, responded with an unprecedented display of outraged patriotism and national pride. The war was characterized by no less a critic than Keir Hardie as “the most popular ever waged in England.” “Mobs of workingmen”, he complained, “nightly invade and smash up public meetings held in the interests of peace and assault the speakers with stones.”From the start, however, a small minority, derisively called pro-Boers, dissented from the national consensus, attacking Unionist policies and motives, and waging one of the most sustained anti-war campaigns in modern history. Though the movement encompassed socialists, trade unionists, clergymen, journalists, and a variety of intellectuals, at its core was a bloc of parliamentary Radicals and Lib-Labs which consistently espoused a position independent of the official Opposition. Variously denouncing the war as unwise, unnecessary, and unjust, the Radical bloc enunciated views during the war years which strikingly foreshadowed the anti-imperial rhetoric of a more modern era.
Churchill, Macmillan, and the Reactivation of “Force X”
Authors: Zebel Sydney H. 
Published: November 2007

Harold Macmillan, the future Prime Minister who was Resident Minister and political adviser at Algiers during 1943, devotes a chapter in his autobiographical volume dealing with World War II to the reactivation of the French naval squadron known as “Force X.” Although brief, impressionistic and lacking balance (students would be better advised to consult Sir Llewellyn Woodward's scholarly treatment), his account makes it evident that he had serious differences with Winston Churchill. The explanation he offers is that the Prime Minister resented his warning against the use of “bullying tactics.” Churchill, in his great war history, devotes only a brief paragraph to this curious episode and omits any reference to the important part Macmillan played. But a recent investigation of unpublished correspondence in the Prime Minister's Operational Papers, and of other pertinent materials, casts considerable light on the nature of their disagreement. These sources also provide valuable insights into the Force X problem generally, notably with respect to its linkage by Macmillan with the larger and much more important issue of French political unity. Actually minor in global war perspective, the Force X problem became a symbol of British difficulties in dealing with a defeated and divided France.Force X was the French eastern Mediterranean squadron, commanded by Vice-Admiral René Godfroy, which was blocked in the port of Alexandria by a more powerful British fleet at the time of the Franco-German armistice in June, 1940. It consisted of one battleship, four cruisers, three destroyers, a half-dozen torpedo boats, and one submarine. The Force X commander, although claiming to be an Anglophile, believed that the French government had no option at that critical juncture but to abandon its ally and to accept Hitler's cease-fire terms.