Andrew Marvell and the Dutch fifth column: new evidence from a copy of Mr Smirke with authorial annotations

ABSTRACT

This essay discusses a previously unknown copy of Andrew Marvell’s Mr Smirke, which features annotations in his hand. We argue that the recipient of the volume was the Anglo-Dutch agent “William Freeman”, who was closely involved with a Dutch fifth column, set up by William of Orange and his spymaster Pierre Du Moulin, which lobbied Parliament during the Third Anglo-Dutch War. The essay discusses further archival evidence of Marvell’s links to Freeman and argues that their connection persisted after the end of the Third Anglo-Dutch war. Finally, the essay argues that these links throw new light onto the development of Marvell’s late prose work, An Account of the Growth of Popery and Arbitrary Government, which is more closely influenced by other pamphlets associated with William’s propaganda efforts in England in the 1670s than has been hitherto realised.     

Palaeoecological research in the Department of Geography and Environment,University of Aberdeen

ABSTRACT

Palaeoecological research in the Department of Geography and Environment at the University of Aberdeen can be traced back to pollen-analytical (palynological) and geomorphological collaborations in the early 1970s. The research has generally been nested within Quaternary science and it features strong interdisciplinary links with archaeology, chronostratigraphy, climate change and ecology more generally. The pollen-based emphasis has been augmented by multi-proxy approaches including plant macro- and microfossils, geochemistry and pedology. There has always been techniques- and methodologically-orientated output and the chronological focus has spanned especially the period from the Lateglacial through to the present. With an emphasis upon research since the year 2000, the account is structured around such themes as environmental change in Scotland and the rest of the British Isles, human-environment interactions in the North Atlantic region, Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego, atmospheric pollution and metals in prehistory, and carbon sequestration and chronologies. A final section looks briefly and selectively at future research.     

Regional urbanization and the selective growth of towns in North American regions

Despite the extensive discussion of urbanization in the North American past, the processes of selective growth among the various towns and cities, which comprise a regional urban system, remain obscured by the use of oversimplified explanations that neglect either functional and locational variations among the centres or the changing conditions of regional development. A generalized model of selective urban growth in newly settling regions is proposed which distinguishes three periods of development by characteristics of circulation and export activity. It emphasizes the changing implications of town locations (their nodality) as settlement expands and the bases of urban growth shift from commercial and local services to increasingly manufacturing. Discussion of the literature on regional urbanization, organized under five categories of traditional and more recent explanations of selective growth, not only points to the temporal and locational deficiencies which the model addresses, but also reveals the need for closer examination within a developmental framework of both the interdependencies of central place and mercantile bases of urban growth and the relationships between the emergence of manufacturing and city sizes.