Research Article
THE FIRST EVANGELICAL TRACT SOCIETY
- ISABEL RIVERS
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- 13 February 2007, pp. 1-22
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The study of how popular religious publishing operated in Britain in the eighteenth century has been neglected. Recent work on such publishing in the nineteenth century ignores the important eighteenth-century tract distribution societies that were the predecessors of the much larger nineteenth-century ones. This article provides a detailed account of the work of a society that is now little known, despite the wealth of surviving evidence: the Society for Promoting Religious Knowledge among the Poor, founded in 1750, which should properly be considered the first of the evangelical tract societies. It was founded by dissenters, but included many Anglicans among its members; its object was to promote experimental religion by distributing Bibles and cheap tracts to the poor. Its surviving records provide unusually detailed evidence of the choice, numbers, distribution, and reception of these books. Analysis of this particular Society throws light more generally on non-commercial popular publishing, the reading experiences of the poor, and the development of evangelical religion in the eighteenth century.
ETIENNE DUMONT, THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION, AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
- RICHARD WHATMORE
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- 13 February 2007, pp. 23-47
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Etienne Dumont became famous in the early nineteenth century for taking Jeremy Bentham's incoherent manuscripts and editing them into readable books which he translated into French. This article focuses on Dumont's earlier life, and specifically his Genevan background, to explain his work for Mirabeau in the first years of the French Revolution and his ultimate sense of the importance of Bentham's system of legislation. The article explains why Dumont's Genevan origins caused him to promote reforms in France intended to establish domestic stability and international peace. Dumont believed that states across Europe needed to combine free government with moral reform, in order to stifle the growth of democracy. The extent of the danger posed by popular government to modern societies was, in Dumont's view, the major lesson of the French Revolution. An alternative reform project to democracy was necessary, but one that did not entail a return to monarchical or aristocratic despotism. The characteristics of Dumont's planned reform became clear by adopting a comparative perspective on events in France. In developing a comparative perspective, Dumont argued that the history of Britain since 1688 needed to be in the foreground. He was perplexed by the French rejection of Britain's political and constitutional model, and explained many major developments at Paris in 1789 by reference to what he considered to be this peculiar fact. After the Terror, Dumont lost his faith in experiments in constitution building as a means of securing the independence of free states like Geneva. Bentham's great achievement was to have provided an alternative system of legislation that would transform national character gradually, making reform politics compatible with domestic and international peace. For Dumont, Bentham established a bulwark against the enthusiasm and democratic excess, and this was the key to utilitarianism as a moral reform project.
THE BRITISH STATE AND THE ANGLO-FRENCH WARS OVER ANTIQUITIES, 1798–1858
- HOLGER HOOCK
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- 13 February 2007, pp. 49-72
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This article seeks to contribute to a revisionist account of the role of the British state and the nation in building the British Museum's early antique collections. Traditionally, there has been a perception that, in contrast especially to France, the British national collections of antiquities were formed primarily by private individuals donating objects, while the state looked on with indifference, or, at best, occasionally bought antiquities on the cheap from enterprising travellers or diplomats. Yet, the scale and quality of the British Museum's collections owe much to the power and reach of the British military and imperial state. The harnessing of political, diplomatic, and military resources to archaeological work, the dovetailing of private and public efforts, and a strong element of international, especially Anglo-French, competition added up to a substantial programme of public patronage. This is easily ignored by approaches that only consider (continental European) ideal types of public patronage, such as Napoleon's Egyptian Commission on the Sciences and Arts. The article sketches the chronological and geographical unfolding of state-supported archaeological activities around the Mediterranean and the Near East, and considers the connections between archaeology and diplomacy, the different modes of collection building, and the origins of debates about preservation and spoliation.
THE POLITICAL USES OF SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH HISTORY IN BOURBON RESTORATION FRANCE
- GEOFFREY CUBITT
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- 13 February 2007, pp. 73-95
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For French political commentators and polemicists of the Bourbon Restoration period (1814–30), England's history of revolution and of royalist restoration between 1640 and 1688 offered striking and suggestive similarities to the trajectory of France's own political experience since 1789. Elaborated not just in the historical writings of men like Villemain, Guizot, and Carrel, but in a host of political speeches and pamphlets and other forms of ephemeral literature, allusions to Stuart and Cromwellian history carried a potent charge in debates and polemics over France's own political prospects. Drawing on statements by politicians and writers as diverse as François-René de Chateaubriand, Louis de Bonald, and Benjamin Constant, this article explores the meanings that were read into the comparison or juxtaposition of French and English histories, the ways in which these meanings were argued and contested, and the political uses to which they were put, both by critics and by supporters of the Restoration regime. If references to the Stuarts, to Cromwell, or to 1688 were sometimes politically opportunistic, they also sometimes reflected an aspiration to comprehend France's political destiny by relating its present position to broader frameworks of historical understanding – a point which the later parts of the article seek to develop by scrutinizing the ways in which French and English histories are connected in specific writings by Augustin Thierry, Guizot, and Chateaubriand.
CHARLOTTE ELIZABETH TONNA AND THE MOBILIZATION OF TORY WOMEN IN EARLY VICTORIAN ENGLAND
- KATHRYN GLEADLE
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- 13 February 2007, pp. 97-117
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This article addresses the historiographical neglect of tory women in the early Victorian period. The existence of a vibrant culture of female conservative letters, combined with the widespread participation of women in ultra-Protestant pressure-group politics, is suggestive of the neglected contribution women made to the revival of grass-roots toryism during these years. In particular, it is suggested that a consideration of the distinctive features of premillenarian Evangelicalism enables a more discriminating approach to the impact of Evangelicalism upon contemporary women. By focusing upon the career of the prominent premillenarian Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, and her editorship of the Christian Lady's Magazine, it is argued that contemporary attitudes towards ‘female politicians’ were far more flexible, variable, and contingent than is frequently assumed. The associational activities with which many premillenarians were involved, combined with their attention to Old Testament models of publicly active women and the sense of urgency that distinguished their theology, frequently led its adherents to problematize and critique existing formulations of women's roles.
JEWISH POLICE INFORMERS IN THE ATLANTIC WORLD, 1880–1914
- CHARLES VAN ONSELEN
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- 13 February 2007, pp. 119-144
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The great migration from the tsarist empire, sparked by the assassination of Alexander II, in 1881, saw two to three million east European Jews re-settling in the great cities of the Atlantic world before the First World War. Often discriminated against in labour markets, and socially marginalized in new environments, Russo-Polish males either persisted in, or resorted to, organized crime centred on the illicit sale of alcohol, professional gambling, and prostitution to survive. Atlantic states, however, were reluctant to employ Jews as uniformed police or detectives in their fight against syndicated crime. In order to overcome the challenge of ethnicized crime, law-enforcement agencies, like nineteenth-century tsarist administrations before them, employed informers. Jewish informers who, unbeknown to police handlers, were sometimes also psychopaths in an era before the condition was clinically identified, were used to infiltrate underworld structures. By nature, informing offered a short-term, unstable, existence fraught with unintended consequences for police and spies alike – thereby encouraging extraordinary geographical mobility amongst informers. Orthodox histories of law-enforcement agencies tend to focus on structural changes in police forces but a re-examination of the role of informers in organized crime should allow for the development of more subtle insights into the evolution of policing as a dynamic, interactive, social process.
‘THE MAN WITH THE POWDER PUFF’ IN INTERWAR LONDON
- MATT HOULBROOK
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- 13 February 2007, pp. 145-171
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This article explores the historically specific use of cosmetic commodities as evidence in prosecutions for importuning in interwar London. Taking as its point of departure the story of ‘the man with the powder puff’ told in the journal John Bull in 1925, it moves to consider the discrete but intersecting histories within which cosmetics came to function as a material sign of deviant masculinity, illicit sexuality, and de facto criminality. The process through which a powder puff could be deployed as evidence in court depended upon a particular understanding of sexual difference. It was embedded in the emergence of a vibrant consumer beauty culture in the 1920s. It took shape within the operational practices of the Metropolitan Police, particularly the explosive politics of law enforcement after the First World War. It emerged, finally, in response to profound anxieties about the war's disruptive impact on British culture. In understanding the story of ‘the man with the powder puff’, I argue, we might more fully understand the cultural landscape of post-First World War Britain.
LOVE AND COURTSHIP IN MID-TWENTIETH-CENTURY ENGLAND
- CLAIRE LANGHAMER
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- 13 February 2007, pp. 173-196
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This article contributes to the on-going study of modern affective life by exploring the ways in which love was understood, invoked, and deployed within heterosexual courtships. ‘Love’ itself is approached as a highly mutable and flexible concept whose meanings and uses are contingent upon historical moment, gender, status, and generation. Whilst the article does not claim to offer a comprehensive history of love across the central years of the twentieth century, it suggests that some of the everyday meanings and uses of that emotion can be illuminated through consideration of this particular aspect of social life. Rather than placing discursive constructions centre stage, the article uses life history material to effect an analysis embedded in everyday practices. Courtship itself is understood as a transitional stage between youth and adulthood: a life stage during which the meanings and uses of ‘love’ were implicitly or explicitly confronted, where gender relationships were potentially unstable, and where aspiration and desire could conflict in the making of the self. Courtship therefore constituted an important rite of passage which could provide an opportunity to perform, reject, and refine new roles and responsibilities, whilst negotiating future status and identity. The article explores the power dynamics which underlined romantic encounters, but argues that through their everyday practice young women exercised real, if bounded, agency within this sphere of social life.
Historiographical Reviews
SOUTHERN IRISH NATIONALISM AS A HISTORICAL PROBLEM
- JOHN M. REGAN
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- 13 February 2007, pp. 197-223
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To what extent has the recent war in Northern Ireland influenced Irish historiography? Examining the nomenclature, periodization, and the use of democracy and state legitimization as interpretative tools in the historicization of the Irish Civil War (1922–3), the influence of a southern nationalist ideology is apparent. A dominating southern nationalist interest represented the revolutionary political elite's realpolitik after 1920, though its pan-nationalist rhetoric obscured this. Ignoring southern nationalism as a cogent influence has led to the misrepresentation of nationalism as ethnically homogeneous in twentieth-century Ireland. Once this is identified, historiographical and methodological problems are illuminated, which may be demonstrated in historians' work on the revolutionary period (c. 1912–23). Following the northern crisis's emergence in the late 1960s, the Republic's Irish governments required a revised public history that could reconcile the state's violent and revolutionary origins with its counterinsurgency against militarist-republicanism. At the same time many historians adopted constitutional, later democratic, state formation narratives for the south at the expense of historical precision. This facilitated a broader state-centred and statist historiography, mirroring the Republic's desire to re-orientate its nationalism away from irredentism, toward the conscious accommodation of partition. Reconciliation of southern nationalist identities with its state represents a singular political achievement, as well as a concomitant historiographical problem.
THE CURRENT STATE OF MILITARY HISTORY
- MARK MOYAR
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- 13 February 2007, pp. 225-240
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Military history is often misconstrued as a field requiring little intellectual skill, in which the historian provides little more than a chronology of generals and battles. Analysis of one hundred of the twenty-first century's best military histories reveals that military history today goes well beyond such subject matter, incorporating social, cultural, and political history. Common areas of inquiry for contemporary historians include the impact of society, culture, and politics on a country's ability to wage war; the social, cultural, and political after-effects of war; the society and culture of military organizations; and the relationship between military organizations and the communities from which they spring. While historians continue to devote considerable attention to the conventional militaries of Europe and the United States, many also are studying small armies, irregular forces, non-state actors, civil wars, and non-Western armed forces. Within the military realm, historians frequently tackle subjects of much greater complexity than the generals-and-battles stereotype would suggest, to include the relationship between technological and human factors, the interdependency of land and naval warfare, and the influence of political direction on the military.
Review Articles
REASSESSING THE RADICALS
- TIM COOPER
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- 13 February 2007, pp. 241-252
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The precisianist strain: disciplinary religion and antinomian backlash in puritanism to 1638. By Theodore Dwight Bozeman. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. xv+349. ISBN 0-8078-2850-5. $49.95.
Making heretics: militant Protestantism and free grace in Massachusetts, 1636–1641. By Michael P. Winship. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Pp. xv+322. ISBN 0-691-08943-4. $33.95.
Blown by the spirit: puritanism and the emergence of an antinomian underground in pre-civil-war England. By David R. Como. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Pp. ix+513. ISBN 0-8047-4443-2. $70.00.
The English radical imagination: culture, religion, and revolution, 1630–1660. By Nicholas McDowell. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003. Pp. 219. ISBN 0-19-926051-6. £49.00.
There has only been one historical monograph on the English antinomians and that was published in 1951. They are long overdue for reassessment. Fortunately, that task is well underway. Taken together, three recent books – cumulatively amounting to well over one thousand pages of text – advance our understanding in substantial and significant ways. Of course, the antinomians have not been absent from the historiography over the last five decades. Their involvement in the ‘antinomian controversy’ that wracked the early New England colony during the mid-1630s has been well-worked ground, whilst they are much too colourful a feature of the mid-seventeenth-century English ferment and upheaval to be overlooked. But they have, more often than not, been background figures, tangential characters in a bigger story. By contrast, in these works, they are in the foreground, with an elaborate and illuminating background within which to understand them in fresh and important ways. The result is a welcome reappraisal that is helpful, insightful, and comprehensive.
A CULTURAL HISTORY OF VICTORIAN PHYSICAL SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
- MYLES W. JACKSON
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- 13 February 2007, pp. 253-264
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Making modern science: a historical survey. By Peter J. Bowler and Iwan Rhys Morus. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. viii+528. ISBN 0-226-06861-7. $25.00.
The morals of measurement: accuracy, irony and trust in late Victorian electrical practice. By Graeme J. N. Gooday. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xxv+285. ISBN 0-521-43098-4. L40.
Victorian relativity: radical thought and scientific discovery. By Christopher Herbert. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Pp. xv+302. ISBN 0-226-32733-7. $21.00.
Engineering empires: a cultural history of technology in nineteenth-century Britain. By Ben Marsden and Crosbie Smith. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave and Macmillan, 2005. Pp. xi+351. ISBN 0-333-77278-4. L58.
The electric vehicle: technology and expectations in the automobile age. By Gijs Mom. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Pp. xiii+423. $54.95.
When physics became king. By Iwan Rhys Morus. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Pp. xii+303. ISBN 0-226-54202-5. $25.00.
Masters of theory: Cambridge and the rise of mathematical physics. By Andrew Warwick. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Pp. xiv+572. ISBN 0-226-87374-9. $95.00.
Over the past three decades, a growing number of historians of science and (to a lesser extent) historians of technology have offered compelling cultural histories that depict the inextricable links between the content of scientific and technological knowledge and the context in which it was created. Rather than assuming at face value that science is a trans-temporal body of knowledge, these historians describe the scientific enterprise as being culturally contingent. Most of the socio-cultural histories of science of the 1980s and 1990s were synchronic, focusing on various aspects of science and culture during a relatively short span of time. As important and successful as those studies were, a number of historians feared that the discipline was losing sight of the longue durée. Precisely because scientific theories and practices can be successful over long periods of time and throughout different cultures, micro-histories with a penchant for contextualizing, while necessary, seemed insufficient. The question was then raised: could the analytical tools and historiographies offered by these earlier microanalyses be applied diachronically? A number of recent works discussed in this review article have answered this question with a resounding ‘yes.’ By focusing on macro-historical themes, such as pedagogy, standardization, imperialism, credibility, and trustworthiness, these works detail the importance of science and technology to Victorian society, and illustrate how the social relations typical of the period shaped physical and technical knowledge.