scholarly journals Tremoring transits: railways, the Royal Observatory and the capitalist challenge to Victorian astronomical science

2019 ◽  
Vol 53 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
EDWARD J. GILLIN
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
The State ◽  
Royal Greenwich Observatory ◽  
Time System ◽  
Industrial Economy ◽  
Standard Time ◽  
Private Interests ◽  
Royal Observatory

AbstractBritain's nineteenth-century railway companies traditionally play a central role in histories of the spread of standard Greenwich time. This relationship at once seems to embody a productive relationship between science and capitalism, with regulated time essential to the formation of a disciplined industrial economy. In this narrative, it is not the state, but capitalistic private commerce which fashioned a national time system. However, as this article demonstrates, the collaboration between railway companies and the Royal Greenwich Observatory was far from harmonious. While railways did employ the accurate time the observatory provided, they were also more than happy to compromise the astronomical institution's ability to take the accurate celestial observations that such time depended on. Observing astronomical transits required the use of troughs of mercury to reflect images of stars, but the construction of a railway too near to the observatory threatened to cause vibrations which would make such readings impossible. Through debates over proposed railway lines near the observatory, it becomes clear how important government protection from private interests was to preserving astronomical standards. This article revises our understanding of the role of railway companies in the dissemination of standard time and argues that state intervention was essential to preserving Victorian British astronomical science.

State and Economy at the Stage of Modernization

2006 ◽  
pp. 4-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Yasin
Keyword(s):  
Economic Policy ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
The State ◽  
Structural Policy ◽  
Institutional Reforms ◽  
Industrial Economy ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Post Industrial

While analyzing the role of the state in the economy the author considers functions of the state at the stage of modernization, their priorities in economic policy in relation to the chosen model of modernization. The necessity of active structural policy and institutional reforms is noted. It is argued that during transition to post-industrial economy state intervention is becoming more limited.

‘This Romish business’ - Ritual Innovation and Parish Life in Later Nineteenth-Century Lincolnshire

1999 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 384-395
Author(s):  
R. W. Ambler
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
The State ◽  
Local Context ◽  
Holy Communion ◽  
Parish Church ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Church ◽  
Mixing Water

In February 1889 Edward King, Bishop of Lincoln, appeared before the court of the Archbishop of Canterbury charged with illegal practices in worship. The immediate occasion for these proceedings was the manner in which he celebrated Holy Communion at the Lincoln parish church of St Peter at Gowts on Sunday 4 December 1887. He was cited on six specific charges: the use of lighted candles on the altar; mixing water with the communion wine; adopting an eastward-facing position with his back to the congregation during the consecration; permitting the Agnus Dei to be sung after the consecration; making the sign of the cross at the absolution and benediction, and taking part in ablution by pouring water and wine into the chalice and paten after communion. Two Sundays later King had repeated some of these acts during a service at Lincoln Cathedral. As well as its intrinsic importance in defining the legality of the acts with which he was charged, the Bishop’s trial raised issues of considerable importance relating to the nature and exercise of authority within the Church of England and its relationship with the state. The acts for which King was tried had a further significance since the ways in which these and other innovations in worship were perceived, as well as the spirit in which they were ventured, also reflected the fundamental shifts which were taking place in the role of the Church of England at parish level in the second half of the nineteenth century. Their study in a local context such as Lincolnshire, part of King’s diocese, provides the opportunity to examine the relationship between changes in worship and developments in parish life in the period.

Compensated Motherhood and the State

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine E. Rymph
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Child Welfare ◽  
Foster Parents ◽  
The State ◽  
The Public ◽  
Child Welfare Professionals ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Proper Balance

This chapter examines the role of foster parents as workers, an idea rooted in the nineteenth century role of the “boarding mother.” Child Welfare professionals, foster parents, and the public struggled over the proper balance between paying adequate board to foster parents while ensuring that desire to nurture a child remained the paramount motivation. By the 1960s, foster parents began organizing themselves, culminating in the formation of the National Foster Parents Association in 1971.

THE GALWAY PACKET-BOAT CONTRACT AND THE POLITICS OF PUBLIC EXPENDITURE IN MID-VICTORIAN IRELAND

2016 ◽  
Vol 59 (3) ◽  
pp. 747-774 ◽  
Author(s):  
DOUGLAS KANTER
Keyword(s):  
Public Finance ◽  
Economic Theory ◽  
Economic Development ◽  
Interest Groups ◽  
Regional Development ◽  
Public Expenditure ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
The State ◽  
British Government

AbstractThis article argues that political considerations, economic theory, attitudes toward public finance, and concerns about regional development all influenced contemporary responses to the Galway packet-boat contract of 1859–64. Though historians have conventionally depicted the dispute over the contract as an episode in Victorian high politics, it maintains that the controversy surrounding the agreement between the Galway Company and the state cannot be understood solely in terms of party manoeuvre at Westminster. In the context of the Union between Britain and Ireland, the Galway contract raised important questions about the role of the British government in fostering Irish economic development through public expenditure. Politicians and opinion-makers adopted a variety of ideologically informed positions when addressing this issue, resulting in diverse approaches to state intervention, often across party lines. While political calculation and pressure from interest groups certainly affected policy, the substantive debate on the contract helped to shape the late Victorian Irish policy of both British parties by clarifying contemporary ideas about the economic functions appropriate to the Union state.

scholarly journals INDIAN RIVERS, ‘PRODUCTIVE WORKS’, AND THE EMERGENCE OF LARGE DAMS IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY MADRAS

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
ADITYA RAMESH
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
The State ◽  
Public Works ◽  
Definitive Answer ◽  
Large Dams ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Fundamental Relationship ◽  
Indian Rivers

Abstract The nineteenth century witnessed a major expansion in the construction of public works including canals, roads, and railways across the British empire. The question that colonial governments faced during the nineteenth century was on how to finance public works. Focusing specifically on irrigation works and the rivers of southern India, this article shows how different experiments were attempted, including raising capital and labour from local communities as well as corporate investment in irrigation works through London capital markets. The article argues that by the latter part of the nineteenth century, a definitive answer had emerged, i.e. irrigation projects on rivers would be financed through state debt. An enormous body of scholarship in Britain and India debated the relationship between public works and public debt. This article rethinks this scholarship as a technological and environmental history. The article argues that colonial modes of raising capital were dependent on speculating on Indian rivers. Historiography wise, in contrast to scholarship which takes for granted the role of the state in building large dams, it suggests that the emergence of the state as the builder of large dams was part of a more fundamental relationship between rivers, technology, and colonial capital that emerged in the nineteenth century.

scholarly journals Afterlives of the Republic of Letters: Learned Journals and Scholarly Community in the Early Nineteenth Century

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 82-116
Author(s):  
Floris Solleveld
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Scholarly Community ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Changing Role

Abstract What happened to the Republic of Letters? Its history seems to stop at the end of the eighteenth century. And yet, in the nineteenth century, there still existed a community gathered in scholarly societies, maintaining a transnational correspondence network and filling learned journals. The term indeed becomes less frequent, but does not go entirely out of use. This article traces the afterlives of the Republic of Letters in the early nineteenth century. Specifically, it investigates texts that attempt to (re)define the Republic of Letters or a cognate, the wider diffusion of the term, and the changing role of learned journals in that period. While most attempts to reinvent the Republic of Letters failed miserably, they indicate a diagnosis of the state of learning and the position of scholars in a period of transition, and in doing so they contradict an ‘unpolitical’ conception of the Republic of Letters.

scholarly journals The Attitudes of Friendly Societies towards the Movement in Great Britain for State Pensions, 1878—1908

1970 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 266-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
James H. Treble
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Social History ◽  
Social Services ◽  
Old Age ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
State Intervention ◽  
The State ◽  
Friendly Societies ◽  
The Individual

The last three decades of the nineteenth century were marked in British social history by a vigorous and far-reaching debate about the causes and incidence of poverty amongst the elderly. By the early 1890s this controversy had produced a sharp cleavage of opinion between those commentators who held that old-age pauperism was largely a product of character defects and those who attributed it to certain social and economic ills which the individual, acting alone, could never hope to remedy. Social thinkers who subscribed to this latter view – the loosely labelled collectivist school of thought – were not content, however, merely with the work of analysis; they were equally anxious to find a panacea for one of the main social problems of the day. In the end the solution they most widely canvassed was the introduction of an old age pensions scheme in which the state would have a vital rle to play. But perhaps of more significance for the development of social services in Great Britain, three of the leading advocates of state intervention endeavoured, in their own distinctive styles, to translate this general declaration of intent into detailed programmes of action.

The Economy

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Tomlinson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Economy ◽  
Role Of The State ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This chapter falls into two unequal parts. The first charts, broadly chronologically, the shifting understandings, historical and historiographical, of the role of the state in economic life. The second focuses on debates about the performance of the economy, especially notions of ‘decline’ which have been central to those debates since the late nineteenth century. Variegated but overlapping senses of ‘decline’, originating in very specific historical circumstances, have overshadowed much writing on the modern British economy, with, it will be argued, often detrimental effects on our understanding. Such notions need to be historicized—placed firmly in the intellectual, ideological, and above all political contexts within which they arose.

Military Orders in Nineteenth-Century Brazil: Portuguese Tradition, the Holy See, and the Independent Nation

2014 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Camila Borges Da Silva
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The State ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Local Elites ◽  
Holy See ◽  
Pedro I ◽  
Military Orders ◽  
Shed Light

This article is a study of the controversial role of Portuguese military orders in Brazil, starting from that nation’s independence in 1822 and continuing through the nineteenth century, under both the first Emperor of Brazil, Dom Pedro I, and his son, Dom Pedro II. The debates around the presence of the orders, whose mission was rooted in both Portuguese colonial power and the authority of the Holy See, on Brazilian soil are important because they shed light on the process and nature of the growth of that nation’s independence. The government’s struggle to maintain the orders in Brazil, in spite of ongoing criticism, and only with the exertion of great diplomatic effort, demonstrates how necessary they were to the functioning of the state. The orders constituted an important source of income, yes, but they were valuable even more as ways of granting honor and prestige. Their presence allowed Dom Pedro I to unite the empire of Brazil by decorating local elites, thus securing their services and loyalty.

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