Women and the Public Sphere

In Britain during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the contrast between ‘public’ and ‘private’ worlds drew not on one, but on multiple, contrasts. However, recognising such variations does not necessarily provide us with new analytical tools. This article examines some of the ways in which twentieth-century commentators have attempted to categorise these contrasts. In particular the article critically engages with Habermas's definition of the public sphere and suggests the advantages and disadvantages of using his notion through a discussion of the relationship of the British women's suffrage movement to the debate over citizenship in the 1860s.     

Capitalism,Aristocracy and Empire: Some ‘Classical’ Theories of Imperialism Revisited

The recent revival of interest in the relationship between aristocratic and gentlemanly elites and the evolution of the British empire suggests the need for a revaluation of some of the ‘classical’ theorists of imperialism whom a number of prominent historians of British imperialism have acknowledged as important precursors. The major figures considered here are: Hobson, whose roots in British anti-aristocratic radicalism are being re-examined at present; Joseph Schumpeter whose early essay on imperialism is famous but whose later writings have received scarcely any attention at all; and Thorstein Veblen, the American social scientist. Arguably, the last produced a more complex and multi-layered theory of imperialism than either Hobson or Schumpeter but his work in this field is very little known in Britain. Norman Angell's ideas are also considered, not only because he had an influence upon some of Hobson's later writings but because he is a significant figure in his own right. The article ends with a few reflections on the present relevance of this strain of imperial thought.     

Russia,China, and the universalism of modernity: the “Account of the Reforms of Peter the Great” by Kang Youwei

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes a short essay by Kang Youwei (1858–1927) – one of the intellectual and political protagonists of late imperial and early Republican China. In it, he interpreted the historical experience of Russian modernization under Peter the Great (1672–1725) and used it as a “success story” for the renewal of Chinese monarchical institutions. It was written in 1898 and presented to the Manchu throne under the title “Account of the Reforms of Peter the Great”, and for our purposes will be the departing point for a “global intellectual circuit” through which the following questions will be addressed: Why was seventeenth and eighteenth century Russia considered as a model for China by the author? How did he manage to adapt the historical experience of Russia into a social and political conceptual framework for China? What was Kang’s historiographical method, and what kind of philosophy of history framed his reflections? What does this short essay tell us about Kang’s view on “Westernization”, on the concept of “modernity” itself, and on its use for historiographical purposes?     

FROM ‘ONE OF THE COUNTRY’S GREATEST ASSETS’ TO ALIENATION AND ANGER: VOICES OF THE LOWER WHARFEDALE FARMING COMMUNITY IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

Abstract

The British farming community is rapidly diminishing due to its ageing workforce, the rise of second-home ownership, and the costs involved in running a farming business in the twenty-first century. The private nature of this community, often coupled with a deeply held mistrust of non-farmers has made it difficult to ascertain farmers’ own feelings on their current situation, and how things have reached such a position. This article explores how some of the major twentieth-century events for agriculture have affected a single Yorkshire farming community by tracing the deteriorating relationship between farmers and the government, through changing legislation and reactions to crises, from a point where farmers were held to be vital to Britain’s survival through to one where the agricultural community finds it plausible that their own government would actively try to destroy their livelihoods.     

Defining the nation: Recent historiography and Irish nationalism

This article considers problems raised in recent historical scholarship concerning the definition of Irish national identity. Catholicism's growing importance in this identity is shown by comparing the eighteenth century United Irishmen, who combined secular and sectarian republicanism, the romantic nationalism of the nineteenth century Young Ireland movement, and the almost exclusively Catholic Irish Republican Army of this century. However, this Catholic, Gaelic, separatist identity excluded Protestant, non‐Gaelic and unionist Irish people. The author concludes by rejecting the notion of ‘an immemorial Irish nation, unfolding holistically through the centuries’, to stress discontinuities over time and the wider geographical setting of the British Isles.     

‘As imperialistic as our masters’? Relations between British and Irish communists, 1920–1941

ABSTRACT

Soon after its formation, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was tasked by the Communist International with assisting their Irish comrades to develop their organisation. This article outlines the relations between British and Irish communists from 1920 to 1941 and argues that, notwithstanding the selfless work of some British communists, the CPGB on the whole exhibited a patronising and paternalistic demeanour towards the Irish that failed to consider the latter’s perspective on an equal footing to its own, even in their own affairs. This attitude, combined with its position within the heart of the British Empire, is indicative of ‘cultural imperialism’.     

The Republican Discourse on Religious Liberty during the Exclusion Crisis

Summary

Much recent historiography assumes that republican calls for religious liberty in seventeenth-century England were limited to Protestant dissenters. Nevertheless there is evidence that some radical voices during the Civil War and Interregnum period were willing to extend this toleration even to ‘false religions’, including Catholicism, provided their members promised loyalty and allegiance to the government. Using the case study of the republican Henry Neville, this article will argue that toleration for Catholics was still an option during the Exclusion Crisis of the late seventeenth century despite new fears of a growth of ‘popery and arbitrary government’. Neville's tolerationist approach, it will be shown, was driven by his Civil War and Interregnum experience, as well as by political pragmatism and very personal circumstances which shaped his attitude towards Catholics in his own country and abroad.     

Benjamin Vaughan and the consequences of anonymity: an introduction to Kenneth E. Carpenter’s Benjamin Vaughan’s Contributions Unveiled: A Bibliography

Benjamin Vaughan had a passion for anonymity and Kenneth E. Carpenter’s is the first attempt to provide a full list of his many and significant contributions to intellectual life and letters in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, up to his emigration to North America in 1797. This is an introduction to Carpenter’s important research.     

Internationalism between national questions and imperial considerations: Henry Noel Brailsford and the transformations of Central and Eastern Europe (1898–1919)

The article recovers Henry Brailsford’s reflections on south-eastern and east-central Europe in a transformative period in international politics. Although the British journalist has been considered as key influence in the development of international relations in Britain, his commentary on the national questions in eastern Europe has remained relatively unexplored. The article argues that in response to the international politics of the Eastern Question and to concurrent imperial questions in Britain, Brailsford articulated an imperial anti-imperialist vision of international order based on the support for local autonomy and self-government across eastern Europe and the colonial world. It then proceeds to chart his gradual distancing from the politics of self-determination during the Great War and argues that Brailsford’s international thought was influenced by a series of pragmatic considerations regarding the future of central and eastern Europe. The intricacies of Brailsford’s international thought offer an informative case-study of the symbiosis of liberal and socialist varieties of internationalism in early twentieth century Britain.     

The Queen’s Dolls’ House within the British Empire Exhibition: encapsulating the British imperial world

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on Queen Mary’s Dolls’ House, designed by Edwin Landseer Lutyens and unveiled to the public in 1924 at the British Empire Exhibition. The Dolls’ House epitomised the characteristics of Britain as a nation and an empire through its English exterior and British world objects within. Marginalised in academic discourses and regarded as a plaything, this article brings the Dolls’ House back to discourses of British material and visual culture as well as Lutyens scholarship. To this end, it analyses how the design and contents of the House encapsulated the British imperial world and materialised Britain’s position in the postwar world.     

Hidden footnotes: J.A. Smith,R.G. Collingwood and Croce’s conception of history

This article examines the role J.A. Smith played in introducing Croce’s conception of history into British philosophy. In particular, it examines his influence on R.G. Collingwood’s incorporation of the Italian idealist conception of history into his own philosophy. The contentions that Smith was a key popularizer of Italian idealist ideas into Britain and that he helped to shape Collingwood’s intellectual developed is not new. Yet these interrelated topics have not been explored in any great depth. Collingwood’s own reticence over his intellectual debt to Smith, a lack of interest in Smith and an unfamiliarity with his philosophy have all contributed to this neglect. This article seeks to redress this neglect through analysing how Smith nurtured Collingwood’s adoption of a Crocean conception of history. To achieve its aim, this article first analyses Smith’s own reception of Croce’s conception of history. From this, it presents a contextualist analysis of Collingwood’s development of a Crocean conception of history and the role Smith played in its adoption. Finally, this article examines why, despite Smith’s influence over his intellectual development, Collingwood failed to acknowledge the intellectual debt he owed to Smith.     

Intellectual property and national security: the case of the hardcastle superheater, 1905–1927

ABSTRACT

This article explores the complex and changing relationship between technological development, intellectual property, and national security in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Its specific case study concerns an important invention developed by a naval officer. Technological innovations not only were vital to British security but also embodied commercially valuable intellectual property. The state’s interest in acquiring control of the intellectual property to maintain Britain’s naval supremacy was not automatically aligned with the interests of inventors. The alignment was especially fraught in the case of service inventors—that is, inventors in government service, rather than in the private sector. Service inventors, who played a crucial role in maintaining Britain’s naval-technological edge, were governed by special regulations, and they invariably utilized state resources for their inventive work. Exploring these issues sheds important light on the attitude of the British state toward innovation and technological development from the 1850s through the 1920s.     

Politischer moralismus—Der triumph der gesinnung über die urteilskraft

Scholarship on race in the eighteenth century continues to treat the concept as somewhat foreign to Britain itself. This essay, which reviews two new works that contribute to the ‘domestication’ of eighteenth-century ideas of race, suggests one way in which race was interwoven with the fabric of British culture in the period.     

The Challenge to ‘Informal’ Empire: Argentina,Chile and British Policy-Makers in the Immediate Aftermath of the First World War

From the late nineteenth century, both Argentina and Chile were integral parts of Britain’s ‘informal’ empire in Latin America. It has been suggested by historians that this ‘informal empire’ came to an end around the mid-twentieth century. By analysing contemporary sources from within the British government and the findings of later economic historians, it is the purpose of this article to contest this viewpoint. It will instead argue that the end of ‘informal’ empire in these countries was a direct consequence of the First World War, and that the decline in British influence in the region was registered by British policy-makers much earlier than has previously been argued.     

Importing fascism: reappraising the British fascisti, 1923–1926

This article re-evaluates the ideology and significance of Britain’s first self-proclaimed fascist party, the British Fascisti (BF) between 1923 and 1926. It challenges the dominant scholarly perception of BF ideology as a virulent form of conservatism or ‘Conservatism with Knobs On’ by demonstrating that they represent a hybrid movement consisting of both domestic conservative and continental fascist ideas. Thus, the chief purpose of this article is to demonstrate the dynamics of what scholars refer to as ‘fascistisation’ – the adoption and re-contextualisation of fascist features by non-fascist political movements and regimes. The BF’s ideology represents an, at times, contradictory attempt to replicate the Italian Fascist movement and repackage it for a British audience – they were a ‘fascistized’ right-wing pressure group seeking a new, authoritarian state. Abstract notions of the ‘success’ of Mussolini’s fascist experiment in stemming a Bolshevik revolution and his achievements in bringing order and a new sense of patriotism were re-adapted to the British context. These ideas were manacled to British conservative ideas of Christianity, anti-Socialism and imperialism typically associated with Edwardian Die Hards. Ultimately, the BF’s ideology will be proved to be far more complex than scholars have been prepared to acknowledge during a period in which fascism was ill-defined.     

Colonial Rule,Cultural Relations and the British Council in Cyprus, 1935–55

ABSTRACT

This article offers an examination of the British Council’s early stages of expansion in Cyprus under British rule, from 1935 to 1955, before the start of the Greek Cypriot anti-colonial struggle (1955–59). It argues that the British Council’s development and quality of activities in the British colony were affected by various factors such as the peculiar political difficulties encountered in the island due to the rise of Greek nationalism and the growing influence of the Church of Cyprus over the local public; the mismanagement of the local British Institutes by some of the Council’s representatives; and the financial stringencies hindering the Council’s ambitions. Through the investigation of primary material, accessed at the Cyprus State Archive in Nicosia (Cyprus) and at the National Archives in London (UK), the article traces and critically analyses for the first time the Council’s early steps in colonial cultural policy-making, using Cyprus as a case study. During the 20-year period under examination, British experiments in culture attempted to attract the Cypriots’ interest and convince them of the importance of the British connection. The British and colonial governments envisaged that through cultural influence they could safeguard the consent of the governed. In this way, British presence in Cyprus could be retained and Britain would be able to protect its strategic, political and economic interests in the region. However, research reveals that the Council’s efforts in the colony were more often than not misguided, its activities proving ineffective, its hopes misplaced. Although the aspiration was that the British Council should be a powerful instrument of Britain’s foreign policy in the colonies, this article shows that in Cyprus it had a tumultuous childhood. Caught up in the realities of the Second World War, the rise of nationalism, the thread of communism, and amid the climate of Cold War, the British Empire was coming at an end, while the British Council was fighting to survive.     

‘Seeing in the Dark’: Franz Joseph Thun and his Encyclopedia

Abstract

In the late 1790s the extravagant Bohemian aristocrat Franz Joseph Thun (1734–1801) composed a massive encyclopedia containing his wide-ranging and esoteric knowledge, which was not discovered until 2009. In this article I discuss the contents of his encyclopedia and investigate Thun’s place within the broader intellectual climate in Central Europe. I argue that Thun was an exceptional case in the Habsburg context, where scientists generally rejected outright the sort of excesses his encyclopedia contains. None the less, he became famous for his experiments with a spirit named ‘Gablidon’ and for his sessions in Mesmerism. His encyclopedia focuses on three topics: human ethics, man’s place in nature, and the sins of the French Revolution. He saw man as the middle link in the ‘great chain of being’, whose morality must be based on submission to God. Although he distanced himself from the Catholic Church, he rejected the French Revolution as an attempt to establish a state without religious basis.     

Imperial Rome and Britain's Language of Empire 1600–1837

Britain's pre-Victorian overseas expansion stimulated Roman comparisons. But imperial Rome was a warning as much as an inspiration to future empires, a harsh and uncomfortable model for Britain as a former Roman colony. Roman dignity was claimed for British monarchs and achievements by Dryden and others. But there were mixed feelings about identifying expanding Britain as a second Roman Empire. In the eighteenth century the British freedom-fighter Caractacus, defeated by the Romans, appealed far more to popular taste than Virgil's Aeneas or the Emperor Augustus. Sustained unease about imperial Rome, going right back to Tacitus, anticipated the liberal critique of imperialism of some Victorian and Edwardian commentators.