Central Government and the Modernization of the British Fire Service, 1900-38

At the beginning of the twentieth century, there was no suchnotion of a ‘national and onerous’ fire servicein Britain. Organized fire protection was a purely local functionleft to the discretion of local authorities, voluntary organizations,and private enterprise. By the outbreak of the Second WorldWar, although there remained in excess of 1,450 local brigades,the service had been accepted as of national importance, particularlyin view of the threat posed by aerial bombing and incendiaryfires to British towns and cities. This paper traces the developmentof central government intervention within the fire service duringthe first four decades of the twentieth century, contrastingthe peacetime and wartime impetuses for reform, and locatingreform within wider debates about the nature and practice oflocal government. Although financial, technological, and organizationalfactors were important influences on the professionalizationand modernization of the service, the threats posed to the nation'swartime economic capacity and public morale were, ultimately,decisive factors in compelling local authorities to maintainprofessional fire brigades.     

Women's Public Lives: Navigating the East India Company,Parliament and Courts in Early Modern England

This article traces the strategies that women deployed, and the resources upon which they drew, in order to challenge the East India Company (EIC) and ultimately lay claim to property that they believed was rightfully theirs. It focuses on three women, Elizabeth Dale, Rebecka Duteil and Mary Goodal, who navigated the EIC, parliament and the courts in seventeenth-century London to try to secure their inheritance from husbands and siblings. It offers a fresh perspective on early modern women's public lives by focusing on a wide array of agentic strategies that women employed in their encounters with various institutions. Using a range of sources, including company records, petitions, court depositions and wills, it argues that exploring women's interactions with the EIC, especially in their role as adversaries, enriches understandings of women's agency in early modern England. This article suggests that such a lens can further nuance how we understand the inherent tensions of early modern women's public lives: as inflected by global as well as local contexts and shaped by conflict as well as collaboration.