The Swedish ‘military state’, 1560–1720

Erik Ringmar, Identity, Interest and Action. A Cultural Explanation of Sweden's Intervention in the Thirty Tears’ War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 236 pp. ISBN 0–521–56314–3.     

Heather moorland in the Scottish Highlands: the history of a cultural landscape, 1600–1880

The heather moorland of the Scottish Highlands represents a highly symbolic habitat for the region. Significantly, recent work by ecologists and palaeobotanists has stressed the strong anthropogenic role in its development. Indeed, so vital is the role played by human interference, heather moorland is now seen as a cultural landscape. Yet despite being seen as a cultural landscape, there has hitherto been no attempt to use available documentary evidence to understand how this human interference may have affected its development over recent centuries. This paper examines such evidence, paying particular attention to how human activity contributed to its expansion over the early modern period and to its decline from ca. 1800 onwards, exploring such themes as moor burning, the harvesting of young tree growth, and grazing levels and practices, both before and after the clearances. Particular attention is paid to how the spread of sheep after the clearances contributed to the decline of heather moor and the role that heavy sheep grazing may have played in the deterioration in the quality of Highlands pastures during the mid-nineteenth century.     

Postal Service on a Lease Contract: the privatization and outsourcing of the Swedish postal service, 1662–1668

This article deals with the privatization of the Swedish postal service in the 1660s. In 1663 the Swedish state signed a lease contract for the management of the kingdom's postal service, handing over the leadership of the post to the nobleman Johan von Beijer. The purpose of this article is to show how the early modern Swedish state used private alternatives in executing its undertakings. An analysis of Johan von Beijer's lease contract will serve as an illuminating example of what such a private alternative might be. In order to answer the question of what influenced the choice of organization form, transaction cost theory is applied. Based on the analysis of the contract, and the negotiations between Beijer and the state, this article is able to complement and show the nuances of how the early modern Swedish state functioned in practice.     

Parnassus of the Evangelical Empire: Orientalism and the English Universities, 1800–50

Challenging the fundamental assumption of Edward Said that orientalism was a product of the secular Enlightenment, this article explores the state of oriental learning at England's most prestigious sites of intellectual and discursive production in the first half of the nineteenth century. By tracing the definitively Christian approach to empire propounded by the leading university orientalists of the period, the essay excavates an important era of orientalism overlooked by modern scholarship. From the most senior positions in the universities there spread a distinctly anti-secular and ‘providentialist’ reading of empire. Unlike the secular orientalism of the eighteenth and later nineteenth century, this new ‘evangelical orientalism’ formed the major institutionalised means of understanding Britain's Asian empire during the decades in which it was chiefly acquired. In place of the collusion of extractive imperialism and secular knowledge forms delineated by Edward Said, the article therefore outlines a relationship between orientalism and empire that was more fraught and contested.     

Coroners' Inquests in an English County, 1600–1800: A Preliminary Survey

Abstract

This article is a preliminary investigation of the work of county coroners in Cheshire during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, drawing on the coroners' inquests found in the records of the Court of Great Sessions at Chester. It provides a brief guide to the overall work of the coroners, focusing on the categories of murder, manslaughter, infanticide, accidental death and death by visitation of God. It then goes on to discuss the decision-making processes which coroners and inquest juries were involved in, raising questions about how verdicts finding various categories of death were arrived at. It also includes a brief discussion of the social background of the Cheshire coroners, and also of their possible involvement in county politics, and the possibility that the office enjoyed an enhanced reputation over the later eighteenth century. It adds to a growing body of work on the history of the coroner, but is based on unusually rich archival sources. These sources demonstrate that coroners' inquests and related documentation often provide unexpected evidence on the broader themes of social and cultural history.     

Under construction: material integration of the Netherlands 1800–2000

This article investigates the material integration in the Netherlands. Section 1 maps the proliferation of network technologies during the last two centuries. Sections 2 and 3 scrutinize the complex dynamics of network development for selected cases. The case of the electricity supply network reveals how institutional frameworks stabilized network development despite conflicts and contingencies, and how competing (gas supply) networks affected network development. The cases of the Rotterdam harbour, Amsterdam Airport Schiphol and the city address innovation and professonalization processes at the level of network nodes, which tie different networks together and heavily affect overall network morphologies and flows. Section 4 addresses the ‘vulnerability paradox’ as a specific characteristic of the networked nation.