bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
“A Just and Profitable Commerce”: Moral Economy and the Middle Classes in Eighteenth-Century London
Authors: Brown Susan E. 
Published: February 2004

It has been twenty years since E. P. Thompson introduced the term “moral economy” into the historian's vocabulary. Since then it has exerted a paradigmatic force in explanations of the motivations for, and responses to, various forms of popular action. Pitted against this has been the notion of political economy, most often presented as a subsequent (and eventually triumphant) ideological development that was necessarily antithetical to a moral economy. Together these two models have served as fundamental reference points around which accounts of popular protest and public policy have been constructed. Recent explorations into past assumptions regarding the proper functioning of the marketplace have served to open this conventional schematization to debate. Thompson himself has once again entered the fray with a further refinement and restatement of his original arguments and a spirited riposte to his critics. The purpose of the following essay is to focus and further develop this debate in light of the author's ongoing research into the City of London in the late eighteenth century.In seeking to loosen the constructs through which past economic relations and ideologies have been characterized, this essay will concentrate on two main areas of enquiry. The first follows the work of other historians in attempting to probe more deeply into the diverse and often conflicting understandings of the marketplace articulated in this period, thus revealing alternate possibilities in the interstices of moral economy and political economy. The second as yet remains relatively unexplored and concerns a series of assumptions as to who might be expected to advocate these various conceptions of market relations and why.
Racism, Imperialism, and the Traveler's Gaze in Eighteenth-Century England
Authors: Hunt Margaret 
Published: February 2004

These creative acts compose, within a historical period, a specific community: a community visible in the structure of feeling and demonstrable, above all, in fundamental choices of form.I had become convinced … that the most penetrating analysis would always be of forms, specifically literary forms, where changes of viewpoint, changes of known and knowable relationships, changes of possible and actual resolutions, could be directly demonstrated, as forms of literary organization, and then, just because they involved more than individual solutions, could be reasonably related to a real social history. [Raymond Williams]In the waning years of the seventeenth century Sir William Petty, F.R.S., a talented statistician, champion of trade and commerce, and “projector” of schemes for national betterment, drew up a plan to cope with what he, at least, saw as a major problem. Petty had observed that there were large numbers of English youth from respectable families who had not the leisure, money, nor opportunity to travel to foreign countries. He was concerned that these worthy young men would miss the chance to develop the expansive faculty of mind and commercial acumen that foreign travel provided and national progress demanded. The crux of his scheme was that these youths would repair to London, where they would encounter businessmen around the Royal Exchange “who have fresh concerne & correspondance with all parts of the knowne world & with all the Commodityes growing or made within the same.”
“Middle-Class” Domesticity Goes Public: Gender, Class, and Politics from Queen Caroline to Queen Victoria
Authors: Wahrman Dror 
Published: February 2004

In early 1831, the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton contributed a comparative essay to theEdinburgh Reviewon “the spirit of society” in England and France. A key issue for discussion, of course, was that of fashion. “Our fashion,” stated Bulwer-Lytton, “may indeed be considered the aggregate of the opinions of our women.” The fundamental dichotomy which ran through these pages was that between public and private: “the proper sphere of woman,” Bulwer-Lytton continued, “is private life, and the proper limit to her virtues, the private affections.” And in antithesis to the aggregate opinions of “the domestic class of women”—in his view, the only virtuous kind of women—which constituted fashion, stood “public opinion”; that exclusive masculine realm, that should remain free of “feminine influence.”Some two years later, in his two-volumeEngland and the English, Bulwer-Lytton restated the antithesis between fashion and public opinion, both repeating his earlier formulation and at the same time significantly modifying it. By 1833, his definitions of fashion and opinion ran as follows: “The middle classes interest themselves in grave matters: the aggregate of their sentiments is called OPINION. The great interest themselves in frivolities, and the aggregate oftheirsentiments is termed FASHION.” Here, Bulwer-Lytton no longer designated fashion as the aggregate of the opinions of women but, instead, as the aggregate of the opinions of the upper classes; and public opinion was no longer the domain of men but, instead, the aggregate of the opinions of the “middle class.”
Good Advice and Little Medicine: The Professional Authority of Early Modern English Physicians
Authors: Cook Harold J. 
Published: February 2004

Henry:Then you perceive the body of our kingdom, How foul it is;What rank diseases grow, and with what danger, near the heart of it.Warwick:It is but body, yet distempered, Which to his formerStrength may be restored with good advise and little medicine.[Shakespeare,Henry IV]Shakespeare's words remind us that in the learned traditions of Renaissance Europe, good advice remained more important than potent medicines for restoring both physical and political states to their previous strengths. As the lord advised the king, so a physician advised his patient, or lawyer his client, or minister his flock: preventing troubles was worth far more than cure, and the best remedy even when matters went wrong was good advice on how to return to a state of harmony. Still, plenty of quacks in politics and medicine, law and church, advocated strong measures, not helping people to live in accordance with their world but attempting to alter the conditions under which they lived. Bad advice and powerful remedies seemed to be everywhere, trampling good council and temperate behavior. The connections between learning and authority that lay behind claims to authority in general are especially well illuminated by the ways in which the physicians argued for possessing, maintaining, and extending their professional privileges.Among all the number and variety of medical practitioners in early modern England, one small group self-consciously considered itself to be professional: the physicians. As one of the three learned professions surviving from the Middle Ages, the “medical profession” has been a crucial test case for various definitions of what a profession is or was.
Laborers of the Nineteenth-Century Theater: The Economies of Gender and Industrial Organization
Authors: Davis Tracy C. 
Published: February 2004

In the purview of theater history, as on the theatrical stage itself, performers' and writers' command on attention is almost complete. Ancient Greek gave a word to its mask builders (skeuopoio), but apart from distinct vocabulary, history leaves few traces of theatrical laborers. A glance through any number of theatrical books, periodicals, bibliographies, biographical guides, and encyclopedias reveals the predominance of performers in the public eye, though managers, directors, designers, and critics occasionally attract scholarly studies. Even among novels, journalism, and theatrical guidebooks—genres that venture behind the scenes—the personnel that dress, light, paint, and build shows are rarely present. Their identity and labor is marginalized in the annals because it is marginalized in the conceptualization of what is important in theater production. Susan Todd takes unusual measures to challenge this tradition by documenting the experience of women stage managers in the contemporary theater, but in the historical realm this has not been attempted. Writers devote attention to how the stage actually worked (how stage effects were achieved and how the creative chain of command functioned), but to date no one has examined the structures and traditions of backstage labor by asking basic questions about the sociopolitical organization of the work.Only in highly esoteric treatises or the lightest of literature do theatrica jewelers, armorers, weavers, hosiers, basket makers, shoemakers, furnishers, cosmeticians, perruquiers, costumiers, seamsters, dressers, property makers, carpenters, gas fitters, printers, or ticket takers usually appear. These are all specialized trades and occupations indispensable to the building and running of nineteenth-century theatrical entertainment.
The Construction of Racial Difference in Twentieth-Century Britain: The Special Restriction (Coloured Alien Seamen) Order, 1925
Authors: Tabili Laura 
Published: February 2004

In the course of the past several decades, scholars have exposed Black people's long history of life and work in Britain, but their approaches to racial conflict have slighted the historical contingency of racial difference itself. Black workers have been presented as logical, visible scapegoats in an otherwise homogeneous working class, and interracial hostility as an ineluctable product of economic or sexual competition between two mutually exclusive and naturally antagonistic groups of working men. Scholars examining Black people's experience in Britain under the rubric “immigrants and minorities” have placed particular emphasis on racial conflicts, xenophobia, and prejudice, which they see as evidence of “traditions of intolerance” widespread in British society. Such interpretations leave unchallenged the assumption that racial or ethnic hostility is latent in social relations, resurfacing in any crisis. Whatever the intentions of their authors, such assumptions can all too easily be used to justify rather than to combat conflict and exclusion.Intolerance, bigotry, prejudice, moreover, are not explanations for racial or ethnic conflict: in themselves they require explanation. In focusing on “attitudes,” and behaviors, these works neglect to examine the structural underpinnings of popular racism and xenophobia—in particular the ways that Black and white working people were positioned in relation to each other within a system also riven by class, gender, skill, and other power dynamics. What many scholars have taken for granted, indeed, is the objective or fixed quality of racial difference itself and its inexorably divisive effects.
Did Ministers Matter? War and Religion in England, 1642–1649
Authors: Donagan Barbara 
Published: February 2004

When the Scots advanced on England in August 1640, reports of their formidable progress quickly reached London. Their march wasvery solemn and sad much after the heavy form shewed in funerals. In the first place do march after the trumpets (which carry mourning ribbons & c.) a hundred ministers, whereof one in the middle carrieth the Bible covered with a mourning cover. There follow a great number of old men with petitions in their hands, and then the lords that are commanders wearing black ribbons or some sign of mourning, and in the last place the soldiers trailing their pikes with black ribbons on them, and the drums beating a sad march, such as they say is used in the funerals of officers of war.It would be hard to find a more vivid example of the integration of war and religion, of assent by military laymen to clerical authority, or of manipulation of ritual to impart a message: the presence of ministers and the Bible even more than the sobriety of the troops asserted that this army was the agent of God, to the comfort of its soldiers and the terror of its enemies.Could England achieve comparable godliness, order, and confidence in execution of divine purpose in the conduct of its own war? Parliamentary clergy lived in hope of similar recognition and achievement. Yet at best ritual must be distinguished from accompanying practice, as the conduct of Scottish soldiers in Newcastle and its environs was to demonstrate; at worst the clerical message was derided and ignored.
Palmerston and Radicalism, 1847–1865
Authors: Taylor Antony 
Published: February 2004

Lord Palmerston's constituency of support within the nineteenth-century Liberal party has received relatively little attention from historians. In many ways, however, his strong plebeian following provided the major popular current within Liberalism prior to the emergence of the cult of Gladstone in the mid-1860s. Even after Palmerston's death in 1865, his legacy continued to exercise a powerful influence, and William Ewart Gladstone, Viscount Hartington, Lord Rosebery, and others vied with one another for possession of his mantle and the role as his successor.Historians have shown themselves baffled by this phenomenon of Palmerston's popular appeal. Conservative historians have sought to annex Palmerston for the Tory interest. Themes like “the nation,” the sanctity of British citizenship, and defense of British interests abroad they see as presaging the appeal of Benjamin Disraeli's “imperialism.” Most have combined in portraying Palmerston as a profoundly “illiberal” figure, more Tory than the Tories, whose views sat uneasily alongside such canons of Liberalism as free-trade noninterventionism and Gladstone's graduated program of parliamentary and civil-service reforms. His contribution to the midcentury Liberal consensus was, however, a major one, and must be seen as carrying equal weight with that of such figures as Richard Cobden, John Bright, and J. S. Mill.Recent reappraisals of Liberalism have challenged the notion of a uniform, popular Liberalism in the 1850s and 1860s. In their research Patrick Joyce and James Vernon have emphasized the degree to which Liberalism at a popular level was a fusion of older and newer political forms, incorporating long-standing radical memories of the mass platform, traditional styles of leadership, and established methods of political communication.
Post-Anti-Colonial Histories: Representing the Other in Imperial Britain
Authors: Barkan Elazar 
Published: February 2004

New Aliens. By not being Others we define ourselves. We have always done so. In bad times the barbarians were at our gates; on more fortunate occasions we were at theirs. As we changed, so did our alter ego. A hundred-plus years ago in England, “we” were the upper classes, perhaps the middling lot aspiring upward. Primarily men. The Others populated the Empire, the East End of London, and even many social and geographic quarters closer to home. And if we were not men, we mostly pretended we wished we were. We wrote our history, as well as theirs. In time, growing familiarity transformed many strange aliens into us, an acquaintancy which led to multiculturalism, gender assertiveness, and subjectivism. In the process we found new aliens—the DWEM (dead white European males).Some of us have maintained our moral righteousness throughout, whereas others have been skeptical all along. Having gone through a generation of a strong antipatriarchal/anticolonial writing, writers of different persuasions have come to reevaluate and pose challenges to the new edifice. Suspended between conflicting incredulous postmodernist sensibilities and a pragmatic sense that communication is maintained despite its announced demise, it seems an opportune moment to examine the new attitudes to writing (imperial) history in light of such questions as the role of agency within and against a dominant discourse, the place of morality in the writing of history, and the process of alienation mediated among competing victimizations.
The Political Culture and Political Rhetoric of County Feasts and Feast Sermons, 1654–1714
Authors: Key Newton E. 
Published: February 2004

In December 1655, four stewards for the Worcestershire feast wrote to the eminent divine Richard Baxter regarding possible worthy charities for money collected at their recent London feast. Baxter, elated by their offer, suggested that they set up a public lecture in a dark corner of their native county. He later recalled how well the charitable concerns of this first Worcestershire feast tied in with his concurrent actions to establish a clerical association in the county. Almost thirty years later, in 1682, Roger L'Estrange noted the same phenomenon of annual county feasts in London. Like Baxter, L'Estrange defended what he termed the “innocent county feasts,” and hisObservatoradvertised both tickets and published sermons for more than a dozen county or city feasts during its brief run between 1681 and 1687. Such common cause between Baxter and L'Estrange is remarkable. Moreover, the “innocent” county feasts, which flourished for fifty years from the late 1650s, were often controversial and were the setting for feast sermons which often heaped vitriol on “parties,” whether religious or political. This article examines the rise of the county feasts in the 1650s and their peak in the 1680s in order to assess their significance in the development of late Stuart society, culture, and politics.The county feast was in fact an urban phenomenon: natives of a county met annually, usually in London, for a sermon, dinner, and a subscription to a charity. The phenomenon has long been noted, though rarely analyzed.
Civilizing Punishment: The End of the Public Execution in England
Authors: McGowen Randall 
Published: February 2004

On August 14, 1868, Thomas Wells was executed behind prison walls in Maidstone. According to the The Times, the event passed off so quietly that the public perhaps failed to note the significance of the occasion. With his death the drama of the public execution came to an end. “It is,” the newspaper explained, “emphatically one of those reforms which are hard to realize before they are made, but which, once made, seem so simple and unobjectionable that they are treated almost as a matter of course.” On the face of it, this passage seems to capture the salient features of the episode. In the decades leading up to abolition, opinion was deeply divided about the value of the death penalty and the wisdom of public executions. The Times itself, almost to the last moment, resisted the change. But once the issue was resolved in favor of privacy, no voice demanded their return. There were no demonstrations protesting the reform. Even the arguments once used to defend the publicity of punishment disappeared from view.But The Times meant something more by the phrase “one of those reforms.” It indicated a belief that the abolition belonged to a special category of measures, those that contributed to the progress of civilization in England. The idea that civilization demanded the end of the public execution figured prominently in reform arguments, and occupied just as important a place in later interpretations of the change. A liberal member of Parliament, John Hibbert, in pointing to an execution in 1866, explained that “no one anxious to promote civilization could wish to see the recurrence of a scene of that kind.”
The Unloved State: Twentieth-Century Politics in the Writing of Nineteenth-Century History
Authors: Wiener Martin J. 
Published: February 2004

“Who loves the state these days?” Frances Cairncross rhetorically asked inThe Times Literary Supplementat the height of the Thatcher era. “People have become more cynical,” she went on, “about the central tenet of socialism: the concept of a wise and beneficent State, representing the best interests of the community at large.” The skepticism about the state as a provider of national well-being which Cairncross was referring to was of course not confined to Britain. Nor was it, in Britain, simply to be identified with “Thatcherism.” Rather, such disillusion developed over a period of several decades and across the political spectrum. As significant in this development as the thunderings of Thatcherites were the reconsiderations of those further left; David Marquand spoke for many when he declared his own tradition of Croslandite social democracy virtually bankrupt, flawed to the root by its statism, through which “civil society was seen, all too often, not as an agent, but as a patient.” The deep shift of opinion embodied in such observations has made its mark in a variety of realms, one of which is the subject of this essay: an alteration in the interpretation of British history, in particular of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the era in which this newly problematical state began to grow into its modern form.It has become something of a truism that historical writing is a part of the wider field of social discourse.
Gentry and Community in Medieval England
Authors: Carpenter Christine 
Published: February 2004

There is now a strong case for banning the word “community” from all academic writing and an even stronger one for banning it from the vocabulary of politics. As one early modern historian has put it, the word is becoming a “shibboleth.” It is employed where “group” or “society,” for example, would be more appropriate, and, worst of all, its use is often not just a matter of slack thought but expresses an implicit hankering for some mythical past when there were “communities.” The increasing overworking of the word by politicians and other public figures can be related to an uneasy feeling that the sense of belonging and of mutual obligation implicit in the idea of “community” are disappearing. Accordingly, if they call things “communities” often enough, that will somehow create them. This prelapsarian attitude to communities is, as we shall see, quite as fundamental to historical use of the term. It is the purpose of this article to examine critically how the word has been applied in relation to the medieval English gentry, to ask whether there can be any legitimate use in this context, and to look at the types of identity, whether communitarian or not, that may have obtained among this important group within medieval society.Historiographically, the “gentry community,” as is well-known, first appeared in the seventeenth century, specifically in the work of Alan Everitt.
Social Welfare and Mutual Aid in the Medieval Countryside
Authors: Clark Elaine 
Published: February 2004

Almost every social problem that troubles the conscience of a community has a history. Poverty, hunger, homelessness, the consequences of crime and epidemic disease—all are familiar topics of contemporary discourse that also mattered in the medieval past. Then, as now, questions about social welfare provoked debate and thoughtful comment in courts, churches, and political councils. The parameters of discussion naturally shifted with the ebb and flow of economic circumstance, but seldom more so than in the fourteenth century, when famine, recurrent plague, and labor unrest disrupted English society. In the villages and little market towns of the countryside, where most of the population lived, the threat of economic insecurity raised ethical and legal dilemmas about begging, vagrancy, and alms for the poor. All posed hard questions for people living in small groups, for they understood, better than solitary folk, how the ideals and practices of social welfare were grounded in communal life. Its conventions and norms reflected the shared values of neighbors and kin, as well as the social boundaries and inequalities of medieval society. How, then, did people who lived by the labor of their hands view the poor and disabled? Were the aged, the unemployed, the infirm, and chronically ill a part of the community, or did disability and want set them apart?These questions pose the problem of how social cohesion and a sense of belonging were maintained by people of diverse sorts and conditions in the medieval countryside. To ignore or hurriedly dismiss their interest in the subject of community life would be a mistake.