Patronage, Paternalism, and Welfare: Masters, Workers, and Magistrates in Eighteenth-Century England

1998 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 27-47 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas Hay

Paternalism is a construct that continues to be used by historians of eighteenth-century English society. As an explanatory or exploratory term it does resonate with some of the inflections in the sources, particularly those dealing with the mediation of class relations by the prototypical country gentleman justice of the peace, that denizen of countless novels, and the subject of much historical research over the last thirty years. Paternalism, in the sense of a putative concern for the welfare of the working poor, provided they kept within bounds, was certainly the announced creed of many better- and lesser-known philanthropic gentlemen of the period, and we can find (apparent) plebeian celebrations of the belief:God bless Lord Dudley WardHe knows as times been hard.He called back the sodgermen,And we'll never riot again,Na boys, no boys, no the brave Dudley boys.

Itinerario ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-128
Author(s):  
A. G. Hopkins

Globalisation is now a fashionable topic of historical research. Books and articles routinely use the term, though often in a loose manner that has yet to realise the full potential of the subject. The question arises as to whether globalisation, as currently applied by historians, is sufficiently robust to resist inevitable changes in historiographical fashion. The fact that globalisation is a process and not a single theory opens the way, not only to over-general applications of the term, but also to rich research possibilities derived in particular from other social sciences. One such prospect, which ought to be at the centre of all historians’ interests, is how to categorise the evolution of the process. This question, which has yet to stimulate the lively debate it needs, is explored here by identifying three successive phases or sequences between the eighteenth century and the present, and joining them to the history of the empires that were their principal agents. These phases, termed proto-globalisation, modern globalisation, and postcolonial globalisation provide the context for reviewing the history of the West, including the United States, and in principle of the wider world too.


Rural History ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joan Kent

A middle class ‘did not begin to discover itself (except perhaps in London) until the last three decades of the [eighteenth] century’. So wrote E. P. Thompson in the 1970s in a now-famous analysis which divided English society into patricians and plebeians, and which, along with J. H. Hexter's ‘The Myth of the Middle Class in Tudor England’, largely eliminated ‘middle class’ from the vocabulary of early modern English historians. During the past decade, however, there has been renewed focus on the middle ranks in early modern England, now commonly labelled ‘the middling sort’, and such studies explicitly or implicitly call into question Thompson's polarized portrayal of English society. A number of earlier works analyzed the middling in the countryside, particularly in the period 1540 to 1640; but recent discussions focus largely on townsmen, and most are concerned with a later period, the second half of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Even in a volume such asThe Middling Sort of People: Culture, Society and Politics in England 1550–1800, a collection of essays presenting recent scholarship on the subject, the rural middling sort receive very little attention (a fact acknowledged by one of the editors). This essay will draw upon detailed evidence from several parishes to consider characteristics of the middling in the countryside during the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.


2018 ◽  
Vol 97 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-11 ◽  
Author(s):  
SangDong Lee

Queen Margaret (1070–93) has been the subject of much historical research. Previous studies of the queen and later saint have been undertaken from several different perspectives, including the biographical, institutional and hagiographical. In addition, some scholars have focused on her piety and later cult. Although a saint's miracles were one of the significant elements affecting the development of a cult, far less interest has been shown in the geopolitical importance of the miracles attributed to St Margaret and the relationship between the miracles and the saint's cult. The intention of this paper is to examine the miracles attributed to St Margaret and to identify their characteristics within the context of their contribution to, and influence in, the development of her cult.


Author(s):  
Vera V. Serdechnaia ◽  

The article is devoted to the analysis of the concept of literary romanticism. The research aims at a refinement of the “romanticism” concept in relation to the history of the literary process. The main research methods include conceptual analysis, textual analysis, comparative historical research. The author analyzes the semantic genesis of the term “romanticism”, various interpretations of the concept, compares the definitions of different periods and cultures. The main results of the study are as follows. The history of the term “romanticism” shows a change in a number of definitions for the same concept in relation to the same literary phenomena. By the end of the 20th century, realizing the existence of significant contradictions in the content of the term “romanticism”, researchers often come to abandon it. At the same time, the steady use of the term “romanticism” testifies to the subject-conceptual component that exists in it, which does not lose its relevance, but just needs a theoretical refinement. Conclusion: one have to revise an approach to romanticism as a theoretical concept, based on the change in the concept of an individual in Europe at the end of the 18th century. It is the newly discovered freedom of an individual predetermines the rethinking for the image of the author as a creator and determines the artistic features of literary romanticism.


Transfers ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan E. Bell ◽  
Kathy Davis

Translocation – Transformation is an ambitious contribution to the subject of mobility. Materially, it interlinks seemingly disparate objects into a surprisingly unified exhibition on mobile histories and heritages: twelve bronze zodiac heads, silk and bamboo creatures, worn life vests, pressed Pu-erh tea, thousands of broken antique teapot spouts, and an ancestral wooden temple from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) used by a tea-trading family. Historically and politically, the exhibition engages Chinese stories from the third century BCE, empires in eighteenth-century Austria and China, the Second Opium War in the nineteenth century, the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the mid-twentieth century, and today’s global refugee crisis.


2019 ◽  
pp. 53-68
Author(s):  
Dave Postles

During the 'long eighteenth century', a novel practice of naming was introduced into England which had a long precedent in some parts of continental Europe. Associated at first with aristocratic status, two 'forenames' were selectively adopted at various levels of English society. How that process occurred is illustrated here through a selective sample of Leicestershire parishes as it varied by the intersections of gender and class.


Author(s):  
Pamela Barmash

The Laws of Hammurabi is one of the earliest law codes, dating from the eighteenth century BCE Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq). It is the culmination of a tradition in which scribes would demonstrate their legal flair by composing statutes on a repertoire of traditional cases, articulating what they deemed just and fair. The book describes how the scribe of the Laws of Hammurabi advanced beyond earlier scribes in composing statutes that manifest systematization and implicit legal principles. The scribe inserted the statutes into the structure of a royal inscription, skillfully reshaping the genre. This approach allowed the king to use the law code to demonstrate that Hammurabi had fulfilled the mandate to guarantee justice enjoined upon him by the gods, affirming his authority as king. This tradition of scribal improvisation on a set of traditional cases continued outside of Mesopotamia, influencing biblical law and the law of the Hittite Empire and perhaps shaping Greek and Roman law. The Laws of Hammurabi is also a witness to the start of another stream of intellectual tradition. It became a classic text and the subject of formal commentaries, marking a Copernican revolution in intellectual culture.


Author(s):  
Sibylle Scheipers

Clausewitz was an ardent analyst of partisan warfare. In 1810 and 1811, he lectured at the Berlin Kriegsschule, the war academy, on the subject of small wars. Clausewitz’s lectures focused on the tactical nature of small wars. However, the eighteenth-century context was by no means irrelevant for Clausewitz’s further intellectual development. On the contrary, he extrapolated from his analysis of the tactical nature of small wars their strategic potential, as well as their exemplary nature for the study of war as such. The partisan, in Clausewitz’s eyes, possessed exemplary qualities in that he acted autonomously and, in doing so, had to draw upon all his human faculties. As such, he was the paradigmatic antagonist to the regular soldier who displayed a ‘cog mentality’ fostered by the Frederickian military system.


Author(s):  
Patrick Chura

This chapter looks at the effects of capitalism and social stratification on notions of class identity in two groups of American realist novels. First, it analyzes a pair of literary responses by William Dean Howells to the 1886 Chicago Haymarket bombing as the lead-in to a discussion of realist works about voluntary downward class mobility or “vital contact.” With Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes as a reference point and paradigm, the chapter also explores the ideologies implicit in several novels about upward social mobility, noting how both groups of texts are ultimately guided by a genteel perspective positioned between dominant and subordinate classes. In similar ways, the novels treated in the chapter balance middle-class loyalties against identities from higher and lower on the social scale while sending messages of both complicity and subversion on the subject of capitalist class relations.


2007 ◽  
Vol 91 (522) ◽  
pp. 453-461 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Shiu

Individuals who excel in mathematics have always enjoyed a well deserved high reputation. Nevertheless, a few hundred years back, as an honourable occupation with means to social advancement, such an individual would need a patron in order to sustain the creative activities over a long period. Leonhard Euler (1707-1783) had the fortune of being supported successively by Peter the Great (1672-1725), Frederich the Great (1712-1786) and the Great Empress Catherine (1729-1791), enabling him to become the leading mathematician who dominated much of the eighteenth century. In this note celebrating his tercentenary, I shall mention his work in number theory which extended over some fifty years. Although it makes up only a small part of his immense scientific output (it occupies only four volumes out of more than seventy of his complete work) it is mostly through his research in number theory that he will be remembered as a mathematician, and it is clear that arithmetic gave him the most satisfaction and also much frustration. Gazette readers will be familiar with many of his results which are very well explained in H. Davenport's famous text [1], and those who want to know more about the historic background, together with the rest of the subject matter itself, should consult A. Weil's definitive scholarly work [2], on which much of what I write is based. Some of the topics being mentioned here are also set out in Euler's own Introductio in analysin infinitorum (1748), which has now been translated into English [3].


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