The Politics of the Osborne Judgment

1982 ◽  
Vol 25 (4) ◽  
pp. 889-909 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Pelling
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Trade Unions ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
The Law ◽  
Liberal Government

The Osborne judgment is always mentioned in political histories of the early twentieth century as one of the two principal judgments affecting the trade unions and the growth of the Labour party-the other being the Taff Vale decision of 1901. In both cases officers of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants were acting upon what they believed to be constitutional lines; in both cases, after lawsuits which went to the highest court in the land, the House of Lords, they were found to be behaving illegally; and in both cases parliament was eventually persuaded, if not precisely to reverse the Lords’ decision, at least to modify the law drastically in the unions’ favour. The repercussions upon the Lords themselves were not insignificant: the ordinary voter found it difficult to distinguish between the judicial and the legislative functions of the Upper House; and so both cases strengthened the willingness of trade unionists to support the Liberal government in its constitutional struggle against the Lords. Such was the outcome of Disraeli's decision in 1875 to retain the final appeal to the Lords, despite Gladstone's attempt, in the Judicature Act of 1873, to abolish it altogether.

“Prosecutions…are Always Risky Business”: Labor, Liberals, and the 1912 “Don't Shoot” Prosecutions

1996 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 251-278 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Christopher Fletcher
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Relative Transparency ◽  
The Law ◽  
Liberal Government ◽  
Political Trials ◽  
To Receive ◽  
Risky Business

In the spring of 1912, the British syndicalist leader Tom Mann was prosecuted under the Incitement to Mutiny Act 1797 for his opposition to the use of troops during the great coal strike. He was convicted and sentenced to six months' imprisonment, but an outcry from socialists, trade unionists, and progressives forced the Liberal government to reduce his sentence and release him early from prison. This much is familiar to historians of early twentieth-century Britain and Ireland. It is often forgotten, however, that Mann was only one of eight syndicalists and socialists who were prosecuted for their involvement in the “don't shoot” agitation. It is likewise forgotten that Mann went on trial just days before the suffragette leaders Emmeline Pankhurst and Frederick and Emmeline Pethick Lawrence shared a similar fate, amid demands that Sir Edward Carson, the leading opponent of Irish home rule, join them in the dock. Indeed, the Nation, a progressive Liberal weekly, complained that “the country is…getting somewhat tired of political trials.” Perhaps because we assume the relative transparency of the law, historians have failed to scrutinize in detail the origins and outcome of the “don't shoot” prosecutions. George Dangerfield devoted one sentence to them, Elie Halévy a few more; although the “don't shoot” episode has been invoked to symbolize the increasingly fragile relations between Liberalism and the working classes, it continues to receive only brief mention in accounts of Edwardian labor and politics. Even Tom Mann's biographers have shed little new light on his case.

Magic, Modernity, and Orientalism: Conjuring representations of Asia

2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (6) ◽  
pp. 1451-1476 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPHER GOTO-JONES
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Technical Competence ◽  
Politics Of Knowledge ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Historical Phenomenon ◽  
Stage Magic ◽  
Magic Circle

AbstractThis article inquires into the cultural and political nexus of secular (stage) magic, modernity, and Orientalism at the turn of the twentieth century. It argues that these three arenas interacted in important and special ways to both shape and reflect the politics of knowledge of the period. In doing so, it draws attention to the ways in which secular magic has been overlooked as a historical phenomenon and highlights its utility in furthering our understanding of the great problematics of modernity and Orientalism; in particular, it suggests that magic actually provides an unusually vibrant and clear lens through which to view the politics of the Other and through which to explore issues of tradition and the modern.Focusing on two historical cases—the ‘Indian Rope Trick’ challenge issued by the Magic Circle in the 1930s and the astonishing ‘duel’ between the ‘Chinese’ magicians Chung Ling Soo and Ching Ling Foo in 1905—this article considers the ways in which discourses of origination, popular ideas about esotericism and the ‘mystic East’, and questions of technical competence interacted and competed in the culture politics of the early twentieth century.

Contract

2005 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Gordley
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Contract Law ◽  
Legal Method ◽  
Legal Problems ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Law

‘Classical’ contract law was built on a substantive premise about contract law and two premises about legal method. The substantive premise was voluntaristic: the business of contract law is to enforce the will or choice of the parties. The first methodological premise was positivistic: the law is found, implicitly or explicitly, in the decisions of common law judges. The second methodological premise was conceptualistic: the law should be stated in general formulas which can be tested by their coherence. Finally, ‘classical’ contract law reflected an attitude about how best to steer a course — as every legal system must — between strict rules and equitable considerations. Since the early twentieth century, classical contract law has been breaking down. Allegiance to its premises has weakened as has the preference for rigor. At the same time, scholars have found classical law to be inconsistent even in its own terms. Nevertheless, much of it has remained in place faute de mieux while contemporary jurists have tried to see what is really at stake in particular legal problems. This article describes their work.

The New Law of Armed Conflict

1978 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 3-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. C. Green
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Intermediate State ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
The Other ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Law Of Armed Conflict ◽  
The Law ◽  
Court Of Appeal

In HisDe Jure Belli ac Paris, Grotius, quoting Cicero, stated that “there is no Middle between War and Peace,” and this sentiment seems to have received general agreement well into the twentieth century. Thus, inJansonv.Driefontein Consolidated Mines, Lord Macnaghten stated: “I think the learned counsel for the respondent was right in saying that the law recognises a state of peace and a state of war, but that it knows nothing of an intermediate state which is neither one thing nor the other — neither peace nor war.” One might have thought that the English courts would have abandoned this view in the light of their own experience during the Manchukuo incident, for by 1939 inKawasaki Kisen Kabushiki Kaisha of Kobev.Bantham S.S. Co.the Court of Appeal was prepared to concede that “war” might exist for some commercial purposes but not in so far as other legal relationships were concerned.

Moon Lake’s Orphans and “The Other Way to Live”

2019 ◽  
pp. 79-102
Author(s):  
Jean C. Griffith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Child Welfare ◽  
Welfare Policy ◽  
The Other ◽  
American Democracy ◽  
Child Welfare Policy ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Rank One ◽  
Poor Children ◽  
Moon Lake

This essay examines the roles the character Easter in “Moon Lake” plays in the context of early-twentieth-century debates about the roots of poverty and society’s level of responsibility to poor children. By placing the focus of the story not on Easter but on the genteel Morgana girls’ shifting attitudes about her, Welty illustrates the ways child welfare policy was shaped by conflicting attitudes, whereby sympathy for innocent children coexisted with scorn for their parents. Assuming that Easter lives outside the boundaries that mark their own places in Morgana’s gendered, class-bound, and racially-segregated society, Jinny Love Stark and Nina Carmichael imagine the “orphan” to embody a womanhood untethered by race or rank, one, perhaps, more representative of American democracy. Ultimately, though, the girls come to see that Easter’s status as an orphan makes her more marked by and vulnerable to the violence and oppression that shape the South’s racial patriarchy.

Epilogue

2021 ◽  
pp. 223-240
Author(s):  
Mark A. Allison
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Institutions ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
World State ◽  
Collective Ownership ◽  
Political Tradition ◽  
Socialist Movement ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The One

This Epilogue sets the waning of British socialist anti-political aspiration in the context of the literary career of H. G. Wells, on the one hand, and the coalescence of the Parliamentary Labour Party, on the other. In their respective spheres, both Wells and the Labour Party represent a decisive turn toward a statist—and forthrightly political—conception of socialism in the early decades of the twentieth century. Wells, the new century’s most prolific and influential socialist writing in English, shares with his antecedents an abiding preoccupation with the aesthetic dimension of socialism. In stark contrast to his predecessors, however, he self-consciously subordinates this aesthetic impulse to his overmastering vision of an emerging socialist world state. Concurrently, the fledgling Labour Party became a locus for the longstanding debates about how socialism was to be made and what posture the socialist movement should adopt to Britain’s existing political institutions and traditions. These debates were foreclosed by the party’s adoption of a new constitution and party program in 1918, which were drafted by the Fabian socialist Sidney Webb. The constitution includes the famous Clause IV, which affirms the party’s commitment to the collective ownership of the means of production. Labour’s reorganization effectively confirmed that in Britain, socialism would be pursued via the parliamentary road—and that state socialism would be its ultimate institutional goal. Consequently, 1918 provides a symbolic end to the anti-political tradition Imagining Socialism delineates—and of the socialist century that it surveys.

New Asian Races, New Mixtures, and the “Mexican” Race

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Schor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Racial Classification ◽  
Racial Categorization ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Us ◽  
European Immigrants ◽  
The One ◽  
Us Census

This chapter discusses changes in racial categorization in the early twentieth century with respect to the US census. Whenever there was a question of the racial classification of new populations, whether in the continental United States or in the territories acquired since 1867, the census always relied on the principles and techniques developed since 1850 to distinguish blacks from whites. Chief among these was the principle of hypodescent, in more or less rigid forms. However, the early twentieth century saw change occurring in two directions: on the one hand, the racialization of a growing number of non-European immigrants and their descendants; on the other, the weakening of the distinctions between the descendants of European immigrants. The remainder of the chapter details the disappearance of the “mulatto” category and the introduction and forcible elimination of the “Mexican” category.

The Seavoyage Controversy and the Kayasthas of North India, 1901—1909

1979 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 265-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucy Carroll
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Social Conflict ◽  
North India ◽  
One Dimensional ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Law ◽  
Ancient Texts

Seavoyage was a social reform issue of some concern to the Hindus of Upper India in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. Clearly there were compelling incentives for seavoyage; equally clearly there was a convention which prohibited such travel in the belief that it contravened the law laid down in ancient texts. But social conflict is seldom as one-dimensional as these statements imply.

Trade Unions and Their Members

1956 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-79
Author(s):  
T. C. Thomas
Keyword(s):  
Trade Unions ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Living Body ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
The Dead ◽  
The Law

In commenting on a decision of the House of Lords, given some fifty years ago, concerning the law relating to unincorporated associations as it affected the Free Church of Scotland, Maitland was provoked to say, “I cannot think that it was a brilliant day in our legal annals when the affairs of the Free Church of Scotland were brought before the House of Lords and the dead hand fell with a resounding slap upon the living body.” It was with a much revitalised hand, however, that the same tribunal, in Bonsor v. Musicians' Union, disturbed the slumbers of that self-same branch of our law, but this time in its application to trade unions. On this occasion, the slap has been described as a blow struck for freedom, and though the ultimate decision is in itself of the first importance, it is perhaps in a consideration of the diverse means employed in reaching that result that the student will find the greatest interest.

Macrofractures on bone-tipped arrows: analysis of hunter-gatherer arrows in the Fourie collection from Namibia

Antiquity ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 86 (334) ◽  
pp. 1179-1191 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin Bradfield
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Other ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The One ◽  
Similar Kind

Bone points of two types, the one thin and poisoned and the other robust and not poisoned, are examined in this study of impact fractures. The bone points seem to have had similar experiences to stone points, producing fractures of a similar kind. Most of the fractures in the historical collection examined were caused by impacts. However, this early twentieth-century collection is not thought to be representative of contemporary fracture frequencies that occurred in hunting.

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