Ninteenth Century Britain

Staceyann Chin published the first memoir of growing up lesbian in Jamaica during the 1980s and 1990s during a period of intense debate surrounding LGBT rights in the region. This analysis of The _Other Side of Paradise makes visible the connections between physical punishments during slavery, with particular reference to “The History of Mary Prince,” (1831) practices of child abuse and homophobic violence in Jamaica, and contemporary modes of recognizing legitimate subjects by the state. In contrast to research focused on homophobia in the Caribbean as largely a product of religious teachings or a relic of the Victorian era, this essay instead suggests that powerful nineteenth-century histories of physical control and discipline influence contemporary beliefs about the “threat” LGBT individuals present to the nation. Chin’s identity as a woman with Chinese and African descent calls into question a unitary identity or origin story for Caribbean subjects and asks which bodies are allowed to be legitimate citizens of the post-independence Caribbean. Chin’s personal experiences are put into context of larger debates within Jamaica about sovereignty in the wake of US and UK announcements linking budgetary aid to compliance with international LGBT rights norms.

During the final quarter of the twentieth century, the democratic peace thesis - the idea that democracies do not fight one another - moved to the centre of scholarly and political debate throughout the Western world. Much of this work traces its origins to the European Enlightenment, and especially on Immanuel Kant. However, this historical narrative misses much of the subsequent discourse about democracy and war. In this essay I focus on some prominent, though now largely forgotten, strands of political thinking in the United States and Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In particular, I dissect fin de siècle debates about democracy, empire, race, and interstate conflict. Section I delineates four popular visions of peace that circulated during the nineteenth century: structural-liberal, radical-liberal, socialist, and republican. Section II introduces what I call the ‘democratic war thesis’ and the ‘democratic empire thesis.’ The former identified the linkages between democratic political structures and inter-state conflict, the latter suggested that vast empires could co-operatively govern the world and abolish war.  Section III anatomises the racial peace thesis, which was propounded by a range of prominent figures,  including Andrew Carnegie, Cecil Rhodes and H. G. Wells. They argued, from different points on the political spectrum, that the 'Anglo-Saxon race' held the key to perpetual peace.

This is a new piece that is published as chapter 2 in Duncan Bell, Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton University Press, 2016). The book collects together a selection of my essays on the history of political thought. This chapter has 4 main sections: (1) Languages of Empire; (2) Intertextual Empire: Writing Liberal Imperialism; (3) On Settler Colonialism; (4) The Tyranny of the Canon.

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10755.html

This paper gives an overview of the development of the republican armed force tradition in Irish politics from the 1790s. It concludes that while Wolfe Tone and Emmet may have been inspirational, it was the experiences in politics and developments in political theory stemming from the 1840s Young Ireland movement that had the greatest impact. Though the 1848 rebellion led by William Smith O’Brien has often been derided by historians, it was a pivotal event which led directly to the foundation of Fenianism, which in turn led directly to the Land League revolution 1879-82 and indeed the 1916 Rising. The influence of James Fintan Lalor is highlighted as it was Lalor who came up an alternative formula to constitutional agitation arguing that England’s treatment of Ireland had given the Irish a moral right to a legal tabula rasa over both land ownership and constitutional claims. Cette étude propose un bilan de la tradition de la force armée républicaine dans la politique irlandaise depu...

Historians have frequently identified the young Winston Churchill as an opponent of the so-called ‘forward policy’, which involved the expansion of British control in the north-west frontier region of India. Yet careful reading of his war journalism reveals that he was strongly in favour of the policy, which he attempted to vindicate in his first book. Contemporary reviews reveal that this was recognized at the time. Later scholars have been misled, however, by Churchill's rhetorical stance, which has brought them to overplay the extent of his (genuine) doubts about how British frontier policy was conducted. Churchill consciously chose a ‘circuitous’ method of defending the forward policy, the continuation of which he presented as unavoidable in the light of decisions taken earlier. His intervention in this heated controversy casts light on the oblique strategies that late Victorian imperial expansionists used to advance their case.

In the 1870s Mary Braddon sought to break free from her reputation as ‘the author of Lady Audley’s Secret’ - a writer of bigamy, incarceration and murder. While still focusing on crime fiction - a genre balanced between breaking and regulating order - Braddon expanded her literary horizons by engaging with developments in business practice, but still with a focus on gender and genre (her two consistent topics). She had two strategies to achieve this. Firstly, she updated her representations of the position of women and criminal activities in line with her changing historical context. 1870 saw the passing of the first Married Women’s Property Act, which gave women more financial freedom, but also increased the potential for women, as well as men, to be the victim of ‘white-collar’ business crime, such as forgery, fraud and embezzlement. As Heather Worthington notes: ‘by the mid-century, fear of fraud had apparently overtaken fear of murder or robbery,’ (68, 98) and Braddon engaged with these fears in her post-1860s fictions as her criminal narratives expanded to include coining (‘Mr and Mrs de Fontenoy’ [1870]), embezzlement (Taken at the Flood [1874]), forged wills (‘Dr Carrick’ [1878]) and identity theft (The Cloven Foot [1879]). Braddon’s second strategy was a change in publication style: she began syndicating her work in provincial newspapers, rather than publishing in her London-based journal Belgravia. This freedom from the London literary marketplace gave Braddon a wider geographical and social readership, meaning her warnings about white-collar crime and its effects on both men and women became far reaching. By combining her brand of ‘sensation’ with the changing context of criminal behaviour and the continuing agitation for women’s rights, Braddon continued to establish herself as reputable 'popular' author/celebrity.

Surveying the many figures of local, regional, and national importance – ranging across medical, legal, business, military, religious, political, and academic spheres – who have contributed to the work of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society during the past thirteen decades, this summary offers the first complete listing (since 1943) of the Society’s officers and Council Members.

This paper gives an overview of the development of the republican armed force tradition in Irish politics from the 1790s. It concludes that while Wolfe Tone and Emmet may have been inspirational, it was the experiences in politics and developments in political theory stemming from the 1840s Young Ireland movement that had the greatest impact. Though the 1848 rebellion led by William Smith O’Brien has often been derided by historians, it was a pivotal event which led directly to the foundation of Fenianism, which in turn led directly to the Land League revolution 1879-82 and indeed the 1916 Rising. The influence of James Fintan Lalor is highlighted as it was Lalor who came up an alternative formula to constitutional agitation arguing that England’s treatment of Ireland had given the Irish a moral right to a legal tabula rasa over both land ownership and constitutional claims.

Cette étude propose un bilan de la tradition de la force armée républicaine dans la politique irlandaise depuis les années 1790. Elle conclut que même si Wolfe Tone et Emmet furent des sources d’inspiration indéniables, ce sont les expériences politiques et les développements des théories politiques à partir du mouvement de la Jeune Irlande des années 1840 qui ont eu l’impact le plus important. Alors que la révolution de 1848 dirigée par William Smith O’Brien a souvent été minimisée par les historiens, ce fut en réalité un événement charnière qui eut pour conséquence directe la création du fenianisme qui a à son tour mené directement à la révolution de la Land League de 1879-1882 et par la suite à l’insurrection de 1916. L’influence de James Fintan Lalor est soulignée car celui-ci proposa une alternative à l’agitation constitutionnelle en affirmant que le traitement de l’Irlande par l’Angleterre avait donné aux Irlandais un droit moral à repartir sur de nouvelles bases juridiques, à la fois du point de vue de la propriété de la terre et des revendications constitutionnels.

... As Quentin Skinner has argued with respect to the history of ideas, an author's text cannot be 'a self-sufficient object of understanding ... He enclosed with the letter a tribeswoman's amulet, and commented sarcastically that although it was neither valuable nor pretty it was at least ...