Reasons for leaving: The effect of conflict on English landholding in late thirteenth-century Leinster

In 1297 a parliament was convened at Dublin one of the main purposes of which was to defend more effectively the borders of the English lordship of Ireland. The conquest of Ireland had never been complete. Several of the pre-conquest kingdoms survived beyond the effective edge of the English lordship and elsewhere the actions of conquistador and settler had pushed the native Irish up into the hills. Consequently, the settler population in many parts of Ireland lived in close proximity to areas under Gaelic control. This was not a particular problem in the eastern province of Leinster until the 1270s when the Irish of the Wicklow mountains began to raid settler manors. It has recently been suggested that the effects of this ‘Gaelic revival’ and the legislation passed at the Dublin parliament to deal with its effects led several English lords to cut their landholding ties with Ireland. This article questions how important a factor conflict actually was in the decision-making processes of such English lords by examining their withdrawal from Ireland in a wider context. It concludes by pointing out that withdrawals from a landholding community were not necessarily negative in their effect or cause.     

Here be monsters: the Irish Industrial Exhibition of 1853 and the growth of Dublin department stores

This article explores the juxtaposition of the 1853 Irish Industrial Exhibition in Dublin and the dramatic rise of department stores in the city during the same decade. It analyses the aims, structure and reception of the 1853 Exhibition within the context of the Irish industrial movement, the economic modernity of the post-Famine era and the dramatic changes to consumer culture which were occurring during the 1850s. The article takes as its focus the hitherto neglected ‘monster house’ controversy – conducted in pamphlets and public lectures – regarding the growth of Dublin's department stores. Coinciding with the 1853 Exhibition, the controversy rehearsed many of the same concerns regarding economic and social structures in Irish urban society in the wake of the Famine. Consideration of the ‘monster house’ controversy alongside the issues raised by the 1853 Exhibition allows a new perspective on the development of middle-class urban life in Dublin during the mid-nineteenth century.     

The politics of conflict: a constructivist critique of consociational and civil society theories*

ABSTRACT. This article presents a (critical realist) constructivist critique of both consociational and civil society/transformationist approaches and their crude understandings of politics and the prospects for political change. Consociationalism's primordialist or essentialist foundation leads it towards a world‐weary, pessimistic, conservative realism about how far ‘divided societies’ may be transformed. Advocates of the civil society approach, in contrast, take an instrumentalist view of identity and are optimistic that a radical transformation can be achieved by mobilising the people against ‘hard‐line’ political representatives. The constructivist approach can provide a framework in which a more complex and nuanced understanding of identities is possible. This better equips us for understanding the prospects of bringing about desirable political change. The first part of this article is a critique of Nagle and Clancy's consociationalism. The second part provides a brief outline of a constructivist critique of both the consociational and civil society understandings of politics and their contribution to understanding the politics of managing conflict.     

The trauma of war rape: A comparative view on the Bosnian conflict and the Greek civil war

This paper explores the practice and the political context of war rapes in the former Yugoslavia (1992-1995) and in the Greek Civil War (1946-1949). It argues that conceptions about accountability and expected gender roles may lead social actors to commit atrocities that transgress the moral codes of their own society, while condemning their victims to silence. On the other hand, a change in the political context may undermine the impunity enjoyed by the perpetrators and ultimately lead war rape victims to break their silence and bear witness. This argument is illustrated by a detailed analysis of one particular interview, in which a woman raped during the Greek Civil War decided to break her silence fifty years after the event. The interview material offers the opportunity to explore the effects of trauma and the multiple ways in which war rape victims may try to cope with past trauma and give meaning to a shattered life.     

Extra-territorial interventions in conflict spaces: Explaining the geographies of post-Cold War peacekeeping

The period since the end of the Cold War has presided over a dramatic expansion in the number of multilateral peacekeeping operations (PKOs). Yet individual states have varied significantly in their enthusiasm for peacekeeping and, moreover, demonstrated a greater propensity to participate in operations located in certain countries than others. Our contribution in the present paper is to provide new insights into how geography underpins these spatial variations. Uniquely, we make use of a geographically disaggregated dataset of multilateral PKOs, which allows us to capture various dyadic linkages between sending and receiving countries. Our results confirm previous work indicating that more democratic countries are more likely to participate in PKOs, but extend these findings by showing that countries' commitment to human rights has a similar positive influence. We also show that aspects of spatial proximity (physical distance, same region) and relational proximity (colonial ties) between potential sending and receiving states raise the likelihood of participation. Yet we find that two relational variables widely discussed in the literature as possible correlates of peaceful interactions – bilateral trade and joint membership of intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) – have no statistically discernable influence on countries' involvement in particular PKOs.     

Adjustment and Integration: The Scottish Representation in the British House of Commons, 1707–14*

The small minority of Scots who entered the house of commons in 1707 were slow to make their mark. Besides lack of numbers, they suffered several significant disadvantages. The Westminster scene was strange, and the style and tone of debate more vigorous and informal. Moreover, the aristocracy had dominated the unicameral Scottish parliament, and commoners found it difficult to emancipate themselves from noble tutelage. Most importantly, Scottish politics did not yet reflect the two‐party system dominant in England. Thus in the first sessions the Scots were unable to make headway in the essential business of parliament, legislation. Scotland suffered in comparison with the English provinces, and even the Irish, who were able to muster a more effective lobby. Soon, however, a new generation of debaters appeared, able to use their wit to discomfit English antagonists, and a new class of ‘men of business’ who grasped the rules of the legislative game. The fortuitous deaths of leading magnates and the polarisation of sectarian antagonisms in Scotland permitted the coalescence of the Scottish representation into two broad factions allied with the English parties. It was with English tory support that bills were passed to benefit the sectional concerns of Scottish episcopalians, accompanied by other measures of a more general nature. The combined attempt by Scottish peers and MPs in 1713 to secure the repeal of the union does not point to a lasting breakdown in Anglo‐Scottish relations, since it was also a manifestation of political opportunism by English whigs and discontented tories, and their Scottish allies. But the dawn of a party system in Scotland was dispelled by the death of Queen Anne and the ensuing jacobite rebellion. The complicity of tories in the Fifteen resulted in the destruction of the party in Scotland, and the construction of a whig hegemony.     

异质思维的历史误区——对延安时期政治与文艺冲突现象的几点看法

艺与政治二间思维的异质,是使延安时期“启蒙”与“救亡”相互误读,以至步入艺发展误区的主要历史动因。本通过政治家与艺家对“艺”、“政治”以及自身责任与使命的认识差异,来揭示这一时期艺与政治相冲突的表现特征,并对中国现当代学历史上的独特现象——由于艺主张的分歧而进行的政治批判运动。进行了一定程度的探讨。     

The 1908 Pankhurst Medal: Remembering the Campaign for Votes for Women in Parliament

The house of commons has recently acquired the medal awarded to Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928), founder of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). This acquisition provides a timely reminder in 2008 that it is only 90 and 80 years respectively since women in Britain were granted the vote as well as marking the centenary of the ‘rush’ on the house of commons for which the medal was awarded. The ‘rush’ was just one of many occasions when members of the WSPU brought their campaign and protests to the Palace of Westminster. The palace was a site, both physically and ideologically, of suffragette protest, evidence of which remains on the building itself and, increasingly, as the acquisition of the medal suggests, in gestures of marking and remembrance of women's fight for the vote by parliament.     

The Franciscans and the Scottish Wars of Independence: an Irish perspective

The intention of this paper is to examine the role of the Franciscans in the Scottish Wars of Independence. Many of the studies relating to this period have been confined to either the political or ecclesiastical arena. They also choose to treat the individual countries of the British Isles in an unconnected fashion. This paper is intended to redress the balance, using the involvement of the Franciscan friars in Ireland and Scotland to study political events on either side of the Irish Sea. By examining the actions of diverse nationalities belonging to a single order I hope to establish why the Franciscans saw fit to involve themselves in either the nativist or royalist causes and to determine it was purely race that dictated their actions when their countrymen went to war.     

The Origins of Tunnage and Poundage: Parliament and the Estate of Merchants in the 14th Century

By establishing the dates and political context of all early grants of the subsidy of tunnage and poundage, this study provides new evidence for the relationship between parliament and the so-called 'estate of merchants' during the third quarter of the 14th century. Until the 1370s, tunnage and poundage was granted by the king's council with the assent of groups of merchants; it was only at the end of Edward III's reign that grants of the tax began to be made in parliament, and only from the mid 1380s that it became fully integrated into the customs system. Throughout the period of experimentation, the subsidy was intended for a specific purpose: the defence of the coasts and of English shipping. This partly explains why the crown chose to discuss it with groups of mariners and merchants rather than with the Lords and Commons in parliament. The chronology therefore calls into question assumptions about the collapse of the estate of merchants in the 1350s and the take-over of its fiscal and political agenda by the burgesses in the parliamentary Commons. Through an analysis of petitions made in the name of the 'merchants of England', it can be shown that crown and parliament alike continued to recognize this group as a distinct political entity for the rest of Edward III's reign. The decisive shift came not in the 1350s but in 1382, when the merchants themselves acknowledged that the appropriate place to determine the crown's financial policies was, indeed, in parliament.     

The role of the Irish boundary commission in the entrenchment of the Irish border: from tactical panacea to political liability

The abortive saga of the Irish Boundary Commission has largely been dismissed as a minor footnote that warrants little elaboration in the discussion of Ireland's partition. This is unsurprising considering that its final report was hastily suppressed so as to prevent the destabilisation of the nascent regimes in Northern Ireland and the then Irish Free State. However, the concept of the Commission derives from the intensifying controversies of Irish Home Rule and partition, and the consequent difficulties in establishing how and where a boundary was eventually drawn as well as to the status of the entities it would be dividing. The Commission was legally conceived in Article 12 of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty but confusion over its wording protracted a sequence of events that ensured that it was almost three years before it actually met. Article 12 was eventually interpreted in a restrictive manner, which exposed inherent flaws that were either ignored or naively underestimated when it was originally adapted from part of the post-World War I Treaty of Versailles. Furthermore, the complexities of evidence were inadequately scrutinised by a small and under-resourced panel that operated under considerable political pressure to delimit a precise line that satisfied subjective terms of reference. Nevertheless, the revoked Commission served as a crucial catalyst in defining the Irish Free State's relationship with the British State and in entrenching the territorial framework of Northern Ireland's six counties that exists to this day.     

Turning Stone into Bread: The Millstone Quarries of Medieval and Post-medieval Ireland

This article has two components; a discussion of an Ireland-wide inventory of millstone quarries and a detailed regional case study in order to study the development of the millstone industry at both micro and macro levels. The first component highlights the use of certain stone types used in Ireland and also uniformity in methods to extract each specific type of bedrock. Factors determining the commercialisation of millstones are also addressed. This is followed by intensive field-based investigation focusing on millstone quarries in Waterford Harbour in the south-east of the country. Research questions concerning geology, transport, typology, what techniques were used to transform a ‘rough-out’ piece, and the role individual quarries and local people played in the overall industrialisation of millstone production are addressed.     

Reaching across: institutional barriers to cross‐ethnic parties in post‐conflict societies and the case of Northern Ireland

This paper investigates the paradox in post‐conflict societies of continued marginality of cross‐ethnic parties despite significant convergence in public attitudes and identities. In so doing, it examines the argument that parties that attempt to reach across the divide are constrained by consocational institutions designed to accommodate rival identities in such environments. The paper explores this puzzle in the context of Northern Ireland, drawing upon qualitative evidence from elite interviews and focus groups collected in 2012 and 2013. It concludes that cross‐community parties operating in the region do encounter formal institutional barriers, but that such barriers only partially explain the phenomenon and an interplay between formal and informal constraints underlies their position of relatively limited electoral success.     

Climate change,conflict, and cooperation: Global analysis of the effectiveness of international river treaties in addressing water variability

Climate-driven water variability is a natural phenomenon that is observed across river basins, but one that is predicted to increase due to climate change. Environmental change of this kind may aggravate political tensions, especially in regions which are not equipped with an appropriate institutional apparatus. Increased variability is also likely to challenge regions with existing institutional capacity. We argue that our best attempts to assess the ability of states to deal with variability in the future rest with considering how agreements have fared in the past. In this paper, we explore treaty effectiveness, or treaty resilience, by investigating whether particular water allocation and institutional mechanisms help mitigate inter-country tensions over shared water. We use water-related events from the Basins at Risk events database as a dependent variable to test particular hypotheses regarding the impact of treaty design on conflict and cooperation over time. A broad set of climatic, geographic, political, and economic variables are used as controls. The analysis is conducted for the years 1948–2001 using the country dyad as the level of observation. Findings pertaining to our primary explanatory variables suggest that country dyads governed by treaties with water allocation mechanisms exhibiting both flexibility and specificity evince more cooperative behavior. Country dyads governed by treaties with a larger sum of institutional mechanisms likewise evince a higher level of cooperation, although certain institutional mechanisms appear to be more important than others.     

Masshouses and Meetinghouses: The Archaeology of the Penal Laws in Early Modern Ireland

Archaeology has demonstrated that it can provide added insight into the study of early modern Ireland, although there has been a notable tendency for research to concentrate on secular aspects of society. Investigations into the period, however, would benefit from a greater awareness of contemporary religion, since this was a factor that played a major role in political, social, and economic life. An example of this is the introduction of Penal legislation by the Protestant-dominated Irish parliament in the early eighteenth century, directed at those whose religious outlook did not correspond to that of the Established Church.     

The minor rural aristocracy and great lords in thirteenth-century Tuscany: three cases from the entourage of the Guidi counts

This article examines relations in thirteenth-century Tuscany between the minor rural aristocracy and great rural lords, that is, those based outside cities. The subject is approached through a study based on three families, with special emphasis on the way they were bound to the extended family of the Guidi counts, who were prominent at the highest level in the thirteenth-century kingdom of Italy. In the thirteenth century, attendance on the counts was not attractive to families of the minor aristocracy: it was universally acknowledged that the great rural lords of Tuscany had little to offer their adherents in terms of wealth, power and prestige, incentives which could be obtained from the cities of the region. Minor aristocrats who chose to live as professional soldiers were particularly attracted to the cities, which were always in need of soldiers for their armies.     

English towns in the late middle ages: the case of Great Yarmouth

Historians are divided over the economic fortunes of English towns in the late middle ages. Many argue for a ‘general crisis’ while others emphasize the variety of urban experience. Great Yarmouth is a striking example of a town facing protracted difficulties. Its decline in relation to other English towns between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries is particularly marked. Fourth among provincial towns in the 1334 tax return, Yarmouth ranked eighteenth in 1377 and twentieth in the subsidies of the 1520s.Yarmouth's problems become apparent soon after 1350, but while the Black Death may have killed one-third of its inhabitants, it is not the main cause of the town's misfortunes. Yarmouth depended heavily on two industries: shipping and fishing. The former was undermined by the early stages of the Hundred Years War, and the latter by competition from the Low Countries. A silting harbour which drove away trade and the high cost of building and repairing the town walls added to Yarmouth's difficulties.Whether economic decline is measured in terms of totals, for example total volume of trade, or in terms of individual production or wealth, Yarmouth fared badly. In the second half of the fourteenth century, Yarmouth's trade was much reduced and the town's leading burgesses seem much poorer than their counterparts before 1350. While Yarmouth clearly was in decline from about 1350 onwards, the town's experiences cannot be used to prove the case for a ‘general crisis’. They have to be seen in the context of the continuing prosperity of Norwich and the revival of Ipswich.     

The minor rural aristocracy and great lords in thirteenth-century Tuscany: three cases from the entourage of the Guidi counts

This article examines relations in thirteenth-century Tuscany between the minor rural aristocracy and great rural lords, that is, those based outside cities. The subject is approached through a study based on three families, with special emphasis on the way they were bound to the extended family of the Guidi counts, who were prominent at the highest level in the thirteenth-century kingdom of Italy. In the thirteenth century, attendance on the counts was not attractive to families of the minor aristocracy: it was universally acknowledged that the great rural lords of Tuscany had little to offer their adherents in terms of wealth, power and prestige, incentives which could be obtained from the cities of the region. Minor aristocrats who chose to live as professional soldiers were particularly attracted to the cities, which were always in need of soldiers for their armies.     

The Achill Yawl: vernacular boats in historical context on Achill Island,Ireland

Achill yawls, originally introduced to Ireland as ships' boats aboard Norwegian merchantmen, developed into distinct working vessels along Achill Island's shores during the 19th century. These boats were subsequently modified for recreational racing in the mid‐20th century. Despite changes to their design, they are often nostalgically viewed as traditional symbols of an Achill islander identity, though their popularity may have been prompted by late‐19th‐century British legislation. The authors take an ethnographic approach in interpreting Achill yawls over time, contextualizing their social functions through an exploration of primary historical and photographic archives, extant vessels, and interviews with Achill islanders. © 2010 The Authors