bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
The ‘Negative Argument’ in J. S. Mill's Utilitarianism
Authors: Zimmer Louis B. 
Published: February 2004

In her recent book On Liberty and Liberalism — The Case of John Stuart Mill, Gertrude Himmelfarb is temporarily annoyed at Mill's use of the “negative argument” in the opening pages of his Subjection of Women. “It is astonishing, at first reading,” Himmelfarb writes, “to find Mill devoting so much space to what is essentially a negative argument.” What Mill does in his introductory chapter to prove that “the legal subordination of one sex to the other — is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement,” which “ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other,” is attack as strongly as he can the prejudicial nature of that subordination which had hardened into rigid and implacable legal barriers vastly inimical to that perfect equality Mill wanted to achieve. Here is a portion of Mill's summation of that legal subordination against which married women, in particular, had to contend:The wife is the actual bond-servant of her husband: no less so, as far as legal obligation goes, than slaves commonly so called. She vows a lifelong obedience to him at the altar, and is held to it all through her life by law …. She can do no act whatever but by his permission, at least tacit. She can acquire no property but for him; the instant it becomes hers, even if by inheritance, it becomes, ipso facto his … in regard to the children … they are by law his children. He alone has any legal rights over them. Not one act can she do towards or in relation to them, except by delegation from him. Even after he is dead she is not their legal guardian, unless he by will has made her so. . . . If she leaves her husband, she can take nothing with her, neither her children nor anything which is rightfully her own. If he chooses, he can compel her to return, by law, or by physical force; or he may content himself with seizing for his own use anything which she may earn, or which may be given to her by her relations.
The East India Trade, The Politicians, and the Constitution: 1689-1702
Authors: Horwitz Henry 
Published: February 2004

The war against France was the most potent force for change in English government and politics in William III's reign, but during those same years the contest for control of the lucrative East India trade also set off strong reverberations at Whitehall, in parliament, and even in the constituencies. Ever since its reorganization in the 1650s, the East India Company had been subjected to intermittent attack from a motley array of foes: some questioned the desirability of the bullion-greedy trade to the Far East, others disputed the Company's exclusive commercial privileges held under the royal charters of 1661 and 1683 and argued for a regulated company, and from the early 1680s onwards a number of once prominent Company members (most notably, Thomas Papillon) challenged the directorate of Sir Josiah Child. In turn, the Glorious Revolution ushered in the decisive phases of the dispute between the Company and its enemies — a controversy finally brought to a peaceful conclusion only in the closing months of William's reign.By 1689, the struggle for control of the East India trade had already developed a “constitutional” dimension and taken on a political tinge. On the one hand, there was the question, first raised by the critics of the early Stuarts, whether any group could be endowed with a commercial monopoly by virtue of royal charter alone. On the other hand, there was the issue of the Child clique's close identification with the Stuart Court during the 1680s — a “Tory” posture Sir Josiah and his associates had adopted in order to ward off challenges to their own predominance and to the Company's privileges.
From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the Scottish Enlightenment
Authors: Höpfl H. M. 
Published: February 2004

“He (Adam Smith) wanted to show how from being a savage, (man) rose to be a Scotchman.” (Walter Bagehot)The Rev. Dr. Folliott:“Pray, Mr. MacQuedy, how is it that all gentlemen of your nation begin everything they write with the ‘infancy of society?’”(Thomas Love Peacock, Crotchet Castle)The purpose of this essay is to consider an intellectual method which enjoyed a considerable vogue among the philosophes of Scotland. This method, ‘conjectural history,’ appears to be the direct or indirect source of many of the schemes of social evolution so popular in the nineteenth century, but it has itself been little investigated, and often misunderstood by assimilation to its progeny.I. The Nature of Conjectural History‘Conjectural history’ was, it seems, first distinguished from the more conventional narrative form of history by Dugald Stewart. He remarked on its use in the writings of Adam Smith, but the sort of inquiry to which we find Stewart referring is a method for understanding social phenomena which was characteristic of a whole group of Scottish writers, and we may take what he tells us about Smith as preliminary identification of the method.Stewart explained conjectural history as arising out of comparisons between “our intellectual acquirements, our opinions, manners and institutions, [and] those which prevail among rude tribes” (whether of the past or the present). Such comparisons, he claimed, cannot fail to raise the question “by what gradual steps the transition has been made from the first simple efforts of uncultivated nature, to a state of things so wonderfully artificial and complicated.”
Military and Civilian Justice in Eighteenth-Century England: An Assessment
Authors: Gilbert Arthur N. 
Published: February 2004

Opinion in the eighteenth century varied widely on whether or not “military justice” was, in fact, justice by the civilian standards of the day. Many leading legal commentators viewed the system with disdain. Blackstone dismissed military justice in these words:Martial law which is built upon no settled principles, but is entirely arbitrary in its decisions is … in truth and reality, no law, but something indulged rather than allowed ….Another writer, arguing along similar lines, wrote: “The moment … a gentleman enters the service, he waives the Rights and Privileges he might be entitled to as an Englishman.” It was generally believed that law in the army was deemed less important than order and discipline. A man who opted for the army or was forced into service left more than his civilian clothes behind: he abandoned the legal rights under which he had been born and bred.Yet defenders of military justice were not lacking, particularly during the last half of the eighteenth century. Stephen Payne Adye, who had served as Judge Advocate in North America, wrote a treatise praising military justice; and at the end of the century, Alexander Tytler, drawing heavily on Adye's work, did the same. Other writers occasionally complimented the army on certain legal practices they viewed as superior to civilian court procedures. Still, then as now, the arguments of the advocates of the military system were largely ignored — a reflection of the deep distrust of all military institutions in Great Britain.
Henry Mayhew and the Life of the Streets
Authors: Maxwell Richard 
Published: February 2004

Lamb in the 1820s and Dickens in the 1830s had written about some of those who made their living or advertised their services in the streets of London: beggars, chimney sweeps, cab drivers, the vendors of baked potatoes and kidney pies. When, in the late forties, Henry Mayhew began his extensive study of the street-folk, he found reason to cite both these chroniclers.London Labour and the London Poor, however, is an enterprise different in kind from the essays and sketches it occasionally quotes. Somehow, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, the street-folk became a subject worth four volumes and sixteen hundred pages.The decision to devote so much attention to the people of the streets came at a crisis-point in Mayhew's journalistic career. He had undertaken for theMorning Chronicle(1849) a comprehensive study of the metropolitan poor. Defining the poor as “those persons whose incomings are insufficient for the satisfaction of their wants,” Mayhew proposed to discuss them “according as theywillwork, theycan'twork, and theywon'twork.” He had progressed part way through the first of these classifications when he quarrelled with the editors of the Chronicle and ended by severing his ties with them. On his own, Mayhew commenced the publication in parts ofLondon Labour. The “will, can't, won't” division, which persists in these volumes, was supplemented or perhaps superseded by another. Mayhew's ultimate object was still to study all the London poor but he now began with a trade-by-trade survey of the street-folk.
Gladstone as “Troublemaker”: Liberal Foreign Policy and the German Annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, 1870–1871
Authors: Schreuder Deryck 
Published: February 2004

“I think it my duty … to cherish respect and sympathy for every foreign state, without exception and distinction.“But, when there is apparent reason to believe they are prosecuting schemes adverse to liberty beyond their own borders, then, as I have tried in former times, so I will now raise up moral forces as far as in me lies, to defeat their aims….”Gladstone to Lord Reay, 9 April 1880.“He was by nature an interferer, by training a man of Power,” A. J. P. Taylor remarked of Gladstone in his noted Oxford Ford Lectures on “Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1791-1939,” later published as The Troublemakers. He continued: “Press Bright's policy to its conclusion and you arrive at isolation, inaction except in the case of actual invasion. Press Gladstone's doctrine to its conclusion; and you have universal interference, as the Radicals discovered too late.” This view of Gladstone's contribution to the foreign policy of Victorian England is highly attractive. It stresses the ethical basis for much of his “conscience politics;” and it points to the laudable actions of liberals in championing the cause of “national self-determination” — “peoples struggling to be free” — in nineteenth-century Europe. So far so good. But is it right to make a direct connection between liberal sympathies for nationality and the actual use of British power or prestige abroad? Indeed, is it true that Gladstone's “moral fervour tempted him to universal interference?” And if it is valid, did Gladstone always get his own way in the Cabinet?
British Labour and Roosevelt's New Deal: The Response of the Left and the Unions
Authors: Malament Barbara C. 
Published: February 2004

There are two prevailing views concerning Labour's response to the New Deal. Labour is said to have been either uninterested in the New Deal or else sharply divided, with sympathetic trade unions on the Right, and critical or even hostile socialists on the Left. This discussion will deal with each of these views, but it will focus on the second, which grew out of the attack on unions by the Left in the 1930s. Unions were attacked at that time not only for their defense of capitalist democracies and for their commitment to parliamentary procedures, but also for their willingness to consider short-term remedies in connection with the problem of unemployment; their interest in remedies proposed by such middle-of-the-road organizations as the Council of Action or the Next Five Years Group; and, not least, for their enthusiastic response to the New Deal. Repeatedly, unions were challenged to explain,if the Trades Union Congress would have something further to say about the situation in America under Roosevelt's National Recovery Plan. At their Annual Congress at Brighton in September they gave their blessing to the scheme and urged the British Government to follow the American lead.In doing this, they, perhaps not designedly, but none the less surely, propagated among Trade Unionists the idea that Capitalism could be restored to a prosperous and stable condition. It was … a great disservice to the cause of working-class freedom in this and other lands.
Anatomy of an Oligarchy: the Oxford Town Council in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries
Authors: Hammer Carl I. 
Published: February 2004

The conventional wisdom of English urban history holds that town government in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was coming increasingly under the domination of a tight, resurgent oligarchy. This view was embalmed by Jacob in his volume of the Oxford History of England, and is reproduced in the newest works on medieval and early-modern towns. Clearly, the doubts voiced at length by Mrs. Green in the late nineteenth century and developed quite vigorously by Bridbury in 1962 have found no echo, and the doctrine is now, in the words of one historian, “apparently beyond dispute.”Yet, in spite of such remarkable unanimity, any student of urban history in this period must feel some unease due to the slender empirical basis upon which this view has been predicated. Monographs on late-medieval and early-modern English towns are few, and specialized studies of town government are equally rare. Indeed, Hoskins has recently identified “the personnel of the governing class” as “one important and almost unfilled field of urban study.” Thus, an extended examination of the structures and personnel of a late-medieval and early-modern urban “oligarchy” needs little justification because of its potential substantive and methodological implications for the constitutional, political, and social history of the English town.The following study attempts to do this for Oxford, a middling urban center at this time, which, according to Mrs. Lobel, shared in the heightened oligarchy of the age. It is neither a proper study in constitutional history nor a narrative of local politics or governmental activities. Rather, it focuses upon the changing structures and personnel of the town in order to shed some new light on the problems raised above.
Continuity in Change: Bishops of London and Religious Dissent in Early Stuart England
Authors: Kalu Ogbu U. 
Published: February 2004

A significant aspect of the religious scene in the early Stuart period was the survival of vibrant religious nonconformity in spite of Bancroft's “reconstruction of the English Church.” Historians have recently concentrated on the periods of excited religious politics under Elizabeth and the latter part of Charles I's reign and have tended to accept Hacket's Restoration apology that there was no serious opposition to official religious policy in the intervening years. But attempts to explain the phoenix-like rise of Puritanism in Caroline England by reference to socio-economic disequilibrium are not fully satisfactory.Decades ago, Roland G. Usher, who did much to highlight Bancroft's reconstruction, explained the origins of the resurgent Puritanism of the Laudian period by pointing to the mid-Jacobean period. W. H. Clark concurred: lax ecclesiastical administration under Abbot made it possible for Puritans to re-group, starting from about 1614. Both men assumed that there had been effective enforcement of the new Canons of 1604, and of the official policy enunciated at the Hampton Court Conference, until Abbot came on the scene. Analysis of the Church court records indicates that this was simply not so. The number of Puritans continued to rise while vigorous enforcement was spasmodic.Ironically, the years to which Usher and Clark attributed the origins of Caroline Puritanism were in fact the period when enforcement was possible. First, the Pamphlet War aroused by the new settlement had died down. Second, only two bishops, John King and George Mountain, held the See of London between 1611 and 1628.
Post-Restoration Landownership: The Impact of the Abolition of Wardship
Authors: Roebuck Peter 
Published: February 2004

Major emphasis has been placed on the political significance of the final abolition of the Court of Wards and Liveries in 1660. Not only did it remove a substantial source of grievance against the crown but, as part of a wider settlement whereby Charles II surrendered ancient dues in return for revenue granted by parliament, it formed a major signpost on the road from a feudal to a constitutional monarchy. Historians have also stressed the importance of abolition to developments in landownership and agriculture. To Blackstone writing in the eighteenth century, abolition was “a greater acquisition to the civil property of this kingdom than even Magna Carta itself.” A century later G. C. Brodrick felt it “at least possible” that “this great reform” had provided England with “an advantage in agriculture over her foreign rivals which has not yet been fully exhausted.” David Ogg went so far as to suggest that abolition “was possibly the most important single event in the history of English landholding.” While most recently, in analysing the economic causes of the English revolution, Lawrence Stone has argued that “it is surely significant that among those [things[ whch were not [restored in 1660] were feudal tenures.”It has been suggested that the more substantial landowners benefited in three respects from abolition: fiscally; collectively, in relation to other groups in rural society; and managerially, insofar as the reform increased their capacity to conduct their affairs effectively. Their financial position improved with the disappearance of the feudal exactions associated with wardship to which the majority of them had previously been liable.
Bishops and Scottish Representative Peers in the House of Lords, 1760-1775
Authors: Lowe William C. 
Published: February 2004

Despite all the attention lavished on the mid-eighteenth-century parliament, the House of Lords has been largely ignored by historians. The Whig historians of the nineteenth century were concerned with tracing the development of the House of Commons as the principal vehicle of constitutional progress, and in this century Namierites and neo-Whigs have alternately challenged and defended the Whig position, basing their arguments almost entirely on their views of proceedings in the lower chamber. The House of Lords was easy to neglect, one suspects, because most historians assumed that the upper House could be conveniently explained away as an appendage of the crown where an institutionalized majority of bishops, Scottish representative peers, placeholders, and newly-created peers could easily maintain a ministry. This, in turn, has led to a tendency to explain events in the House of Lords at any point in the century in terms of a static political structure, largely without regard to current issues or changes in the “structure of politics” at the national level.The two most conspicuous segments of the “Party of the Crown” in the Lords (and the two most abused for their alleged political servility) were the bishops and representative Scottish peers. The second Earl of Effingham expressed the conventional political wisdom of the eighteenth century when he told the House in 1780 that “those two descriptions threw a great weight into the scale of the Crown,” and historians have generally echoed this view. In the past two decades scholarship has begun to modify this picture for both ends of the century, though the old clichés still hold sway for the decades from Walpole to North.
Authority and Rebellion in Victorian Autobiography
Authors: Krenis Lee 
Published: February 2004

It has been a literary (if not strictly historical) commonplace that the later nineteenth century was a time of pervasive rebellion of sons against fathers. For example, Butler'sThe Way of All Fleshand Gosse'sFather and Sonare texts often cited as indicative of a broader social phenomenon. “As Irish life runs to secret societies,” observed V. S. Pritchett, “so English life seems to run naturally to parricide movements. We are a nation of father haters.” Yet father-hating did not become conspicuous until the Victorian period, when, in contrast to the reputed submissiveness of the eighteenth-century son, a “growing self-consciousness by the son of his role as liberator” surfaced in fictional and biographical writing. Whether such a rebellion actually took place on any large scale is impossible to determine. Few men record such things, and when they do their real feelings tend to remain concealed or not fully understood. The premise of this study, based on selected examples of autobiography, is that the peculiar desperation of many Victorians to buttress eroding forms of traditional patriarchal authority had its first and perhaps most crucial effects within the family itself, intensifying ordinary generational conflict and its usual quota of rebellion, guilt, and neurosis. Amidst the conventional catalogues of accomplishment, there is a striking pattern of childhood experience within the family that incubated some version of future rebellion and profoundly affected the writers' emotional lives.Open warfare between generations is uncommon; most often rebellion instead employs a disguised language and context for its articulation.
The Moral Economy of the Crowd: Some Twentieth-Century Food Riots
Authors: Coles Anthony James 
Published: February 2004

But often in the world's most crowded streetsAnd often, in the din of strife,There rises an unspeakable desireAfter the knowledge of our buried life ….The Buried Life, Matthew ArnoldAny comparison between historical phenomena is fraught with many dangers, particularly where a century separates their occurrence. Nevertheless, it is proposed to compare certain aspects of social protest in 1916-17 with the disturbances more closely associated with the final decade of the eighteenth century — the form of protest in question being taxation populaire. For, while examples of such riots can be found from the late seventeenth century to the mid-nineteenth century, as R. B. Rose has written, “… we shall be justified in regarding taxation populaire as primarily and typically an eighteenth century phenomenon.” E. P. Thompson, moreover, considers that “… the final years of the eighteenth century saw a last desperate effort by the people to reimpose the older moral economy as against the economy of the free market.” In both periods the country was suffering from wartime inflation, and food shortages caused by failures in domestic harvests and interruptions in imported supplies, threatened to cause breaches in social harmony. And in both cases the two national governments that emerged were fully prepared to repress the threat to national security posed by outbreaks of working-class unrest. Besides such central parallels, others of a more trivial nature spring to mind. Not too much imagination is needed to see the spirit of the Church and King Mobs marching amongst the ranks of those who attacked pacifist meetings and the property of those with German names; though it may be considered outrageously fancilful to see the devilry of Arthur Thistlewood behind Mrs. Wheeldon's plot to poison Arthur Henderson and Lloyd George.