The Military and Edinburgh Society, 1660–1760

Abstract

The most terrible words in all writing used to be ‘There they crucified Him’, but there is a sadder sentence now—‘I know not where they have laid Him’…Surely ‘missing’ is the cruelest word in the language. (Anonymous, To My Unknown Warrior, 1920.)     

Abolition and Imperial Law, 1790–1820

Historians have represented the movement for the abolition of the slave trade as a turning point in international law, either characterising the formation of mixed commissions to adjudicate slave ship captures as elements of early human rights law or interpreting the treaty regime supporting the ban on the slave trade as marking a decisive shift towards positivism in international law. A closer look at the legal history of abolition suggests that such perspectives omit an important dimension: the ties between abolition and imperial legal consolidation. In exploring such ties, the article first examines prize law and its direct and indirect influence on calls for intra-imperial regulation of the slave trade, especially its effective criminalisation. Across the empire, efforts to ban the slave trade reflected and reinforced pressures to strengthen imperial legal authority by regulating and restricting planter legal prerogatives.     

The Poor Law,the Parish Apprentice,and the Textile Industries in the North of England, 1780–1830

Abstract

This article combines evidence from a variety of Poor Law sources, including apprenticeship registers and indentures, and minutes of discussions of parish officials, and information from business records, to assess the relationship between textile entrepreneurs and Poor Law officialdom in the development of the early textile factory labour force in the North of England, of which parish children formed an important component. It reveals the distribution of parish apprentices over long and short distances to the early northern textile mills. The impact of such labour on textile manufacturing in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries will be considered; and finally the experience of parish children as they became accustomed to novel working conditions will be explored. The analysis of Poor Law and business documentation reveals a meticulous record-keeping process, and a formality of procedure not previously acknowledged. It has been possible to trace apprentice children, both individually and in groups, from their parish of origin through their years of apprenticeship to adult employment. Reports of factory visits and correspondence between parish officials and employers are examined to analyse the relationship between parish and employer through the course of the apprenticeship term. It concludes that parish children were more important to the formation of the early textile factory workforce than conventionally believed, and that their apprenticeship enhanced their longer term employability.