Temperance and Self-Determination in the British Isles

2021 ◽  
pp. 127-165
Author(s):  
Mark Lawrence Schrad
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
British Isles ◽  
World War ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Temperance Movement ◽  
Alcohol Control

Part II of the book (Chapters 5–8) examines the British Empire, with Chapter 5 focusing on liquor and imperialism within the British Isles, where temperance movement first took hold in the periphery of Scotland and Ireland. The chapter explores the colonizer’s alcohol narrative in Ireland, used to justify the domination of Britain’s “first colony.” In the 1840s, Fr. Theobald Mathew’s wildly popular Irish temperance movement quickly fused with the cause of Irish nationalism, thanks to Daniel O’Connell. With the advent of “Maine Law” prohibitionism, everyone from John Stuart Mill to Karl Marx contributed to debates over alcohol control and prohibition. Intertwined with Irish Home Rule, British prohibitionism crested in 1895 and then gave way to Gothenburg alcohol control and pub reform, especially with World War I. Similar imperial dynamics of alco-colonization are noted in Britain’s other white settler colonies: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Englishness, Empire and Nostalgia: A Heterodox Religious Community's Appeal in the Inter-War Years

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 374-392
Author(s):  
Jane Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Belief Networks ◽  
Healing Ministry ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Sense Of Identity ◽  
The Rich

This article looks at the ways in which the Panacea Society – a heterodox, millenarian group based in Bedford during the inter-war years – spread its ideas: through personal, familial and shared belief networks across the British empire; by building new modes of attracting adherents, in particular a global healing ministry; and by shipping its publications widely. It then examines how the society appealed to its (white) members in the empire in three ways: through its theology, which put Britain at the centre of the world; by presuming the necessity and existence of a ‘Greater Britain’ and the British empire, while in so many other quarters these entities were being questioned in the wake of World War I; and by a deliberately cultivated and nostalgic notion of ‘Englishness’. The Panacea Society continued and developed the idea of the British empire as providential at a time when the idea no longer held currency in most circles. The article draws on the rich resource of letters in the Panacea Society archive to contribute to an emerging area of scholarship on migrants’ experience in the early twentieth-century British empire (especially the dominions) and their sense of identity, in this case both religious and British.

Home Rulers in a New Ireland, 1935–49

2020 ◽  
pp. 169-196
Author(s):  
Martin O'Donoghue
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
World War I ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Social Organisation ◽  
Free State ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
World War ◽  
Border Areas

This chapter examines how such individuals from Irish Party backgrounds coped with the shift from Free State to republic as independent Ireland faced challenges at home and abroad. It charts the struggle of the AOH to reinvent itself as a Catholic social organisation which retained lingering vitality in the border areas while statistical analysis illuminates the home rule legacy in Fine Gael, disclosing that between 30% and 40% of its deputies up to 1949 had traceable Irish Party roots. This chapter analyses responses of such figures to the Spanish Civil War; the introduction of the new constitution, Bunreacht na hÉireann: Irish neutrality during World War II; and the controversial declaration of a republic by Fine Gael Taoiseach John A. Costello — a home ruler in his youth and leader of a government including individuals such as James Dillon, Bridget Redmond, Alfie Byrne, and ex-MP and World War I veteran John Lymbrick Esmonde.

Z. K. Sentongo and the Indian Question in East Africa

1997 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 309-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Twaddle
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
East Africa ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Residential Segregation ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Test Case ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Meetings ◽  
The World

East Africa is really what one may call a ‘test case’ for Great Britain. If Indians cannot be treated as equals in a vacant or almost vacant part of the world where they were the first in occupation—a part of the world which is on the equator—it seems that the so-called freedom of the British Empire is a sham and a delusion.The Indian question in East Africa during the early 1920s can hardly be said to have been neglected by subsequent scholars. There is an abundant literature on it and the purpose here is not simply to run over the ground yet again, resurrecting past passions on the British, white settler and Indian sides. Instead, more will be said about the African side, especially the expatriate educated African side, during the controversy in Kenya immediately after World War I, when residential segregation, legislative rights, access to agricultural land, and future immigration by Indians were hotly debated in parliament, press, private letters, and at public meetings. For not only were educated and expatriate Africans in postwar Kenya by no means wholly “dumb,” as one eminent historian of the British Empire has since suggested, but their comments in newspaper articles at the time can be seen in retrospect to have had a seminal importance in articulating both contemporary fears and subsequent “imagined communities,” to employ Benedict Anderson's felicitous phrase—those nationalisms which were to have such controversial significance during the struggle for independence from British colonialism in Uganda as well as Kenya during the middle years of this century.

scholarly journals New Dominion constitutionalism at the twilight of the British Empire: An introduction

2019 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 1166-1172
Author(s):  
Mara Malagodi ◽  
Luke McDonagh ◽  
Thomas Poole
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
World War ◽  
Halfway House ◽  
Political Transitions ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
British Colonies

Abstract This introduction to the symposium on New Dominion constitutionalism sketches the legal configuration of New Dominion status and the intellectual context from which it emerged. Dominionhood originally represented a halfway house between colonial dependence and postcolonial independence, as developed in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. By contrast, New Dominion constitutionalism refers to the transitional constitutional form developed after World War I in Ireland (1922–1937)—the “Bridge Dominion”—and the post-World War II “New” Dominions of India (1947–1950), Pakistan (1947–1956), and Ceylon (later Sri Lanka, 1948–1972). New Dominion constitutionalism represents the first model designed to manage political transitions on a global scale. Both transitional and transnational, New Dominion constitutions served as a provisional frame of government and the juridical basis for the independent constitution. Although the notion of Dominion fell into disuse, it reemerged as the concept of Commonwealth Realm through which the majority of the remaining British colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean acquired independence.

O’Casey, Sean (1880–1964)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emilie Pine
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Close Association ◽  
World War ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Sean O'casey ◽  
Abbey Theatre ◽  
Blood Sacrifice ◽  
Political Essays

Born into Dublin tenement life in 1880, Sean O’Casey (originally John O’Casey) went on to become one of Ireland’s most important playwrights, best known for his realist Dublin Trilogy, which premiered at the Abbey Theatre and included The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926). The four-act Plough and the Stars provoked riots on its second night as protestors objected to the play’s critique of Irish nationalism. O’Casey’s close association with the Abbey ended in 1928 when W. B. Yeats rejected his play about World War I, The Silver Tassie, which combined Realism and Expressionism. O’Casey moved to England in 1926, where he married the actress Eileen Carey, and he continued to write politically focused plays for English and American stages. He also wrote political essays and six volumes of autobiography. O’Casey’s family were working-class Dubliners who struggled financially after his father was seriously injured, and O’Casey started work at the age of fourteen. This first-hand understanding of gruelling poverty informed his life-long Socialism and his involvement in the 1913 Dublin Lockout strike. In The Plough and the Stars, his critique of nationalism centered on the disparity between the rhetoric of freedom through blood sacrifice and the hardships of working-class life.

British Antarctic Policy in the Early 20th Century

Polar Record ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 21 (134) ◽  
pp. 475-483 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter J. Beck
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Land Surface ◽  
World War ◽  
Major Powers ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Antarctic ◽  
Colonial Office

World War I has often been said to mark the end of the ‘Age of Imperialism’—the close of ‘that final surge of land hunger’ (Landes 1969) from 1880 to 1914 when much of the world's land surface, especially in Africa and the Pacific, was acquired by the major powers. Britain's large share was demonstrated by the predominance of red on pre-1914 maps, though in fact the British Empire achieved its greatest area after 1918; ‘… including India’, reported the 1920 Colonial Office List, ‘the Empire now extends over 11 million of square miles, or 91 times the area of the Mother Country’ (Mercer 1920). This study examines one specific part of British imperial policy in the immediate post-war years—one which, had it been fully implemented, would have increased the area by a further 40 per cent. In the view of L. S. Amery, Under-Secretary of State at the Colonial Office and one of Britain's leading politicians of the time, it was desirable that:… the whole of the Antarctic should ultimately be included within the British Empire, and that, while the time has not yet arrived that a claim to all the continental territories should be put forward publicly, a definite and consistent policy should be followed of extending and asserting British control with the object of ultimately making it complete.

scholarly journals French Workers and the Temperance Movement

1980 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. E. Prestwich
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Mental Illness ◽  
World War I ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Temperance Movement ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Academie Francaise ◽  
Social Reformers

In 1852, when the medical discoverer of alcoholism, Magnus Huss, was being honoured by the Académie française, a spokesman for the Académie wrote that “France has many drunkards, but happily, no alcoholics.” Sixty years later, on the eve of World War I, if one is to believe the reports of parliamentary commissions, economists, hygienists and social reformers, France had few drunks but a plethora of alcoholics, from the Breton peasant who fed calvados to his children to the worker of Paris and the Midi who had abandoned wine, that “natural and hygienic drink”, for the evils of mass-produced industrial alcohol, especially absinthe. By 1914, alcoholism was considered one of the three grands fléaux, or great plagues, that had struck France in the late nineteenth century, and it was blamed for all the ills of society, from a rising rate of criminality, suicide and mental illness to depopulation, revolutionary worker movements and even feminism. Alcoholism was, therefore, not just an individual misfortune, but a national tragedy. It had become, in the words of Clemenceau, “the whole social problem” and as such required the mobilized forces of the country to conquer it.

scholarly journals Perception of the Metropolia by the Canadian Political Elite in 1914–1915 (According to the Materials of the Protocols of the Debates of the Canadian Parliament)

2020 ◽  
pp. 145-153
Author(s):  
Mykhailo Zapototskyi
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
British Empire ◽  
First World War ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Main Task ◽  
World War ◽  
Personal Attitude ◽  
Difficult Time ◽  
The First World War ◽  
First World

In modern historical science, an integral component of scientific research is the component of the source base, which also applies to studies in world history. This article is devoted to the analysis of the protocols of the Canadian Parliament’s debates at the initial stage of World War I (1914–1915). The pages of the protocols of the Canadian Parliament’s describe the personal attitude of politicians to Metropolia, the public speeches of Canadian politicians in 1914–1915, the vision of representatives of political elites regarding the entry of the Canadian Confederation into the First World War. Notwithstanding the ideological diversity of Canadian politicians in the early twentieth century, who included both proponents of unity with Metropolia and opponents of the process, it is interesting that the entire political elite at the beginning of the Great War was consolidated in the matter of supporting the British Crown. Even former political opponents – R. Borden and W. Laurier – became ideological partners, who emphasized that Canada should support the British Empire at a difficult time. Importantly, French Canadian politicians, who were in part critical of British imperialism, also took a positive view of Britain. The main ideologue of the French Canadians at this time was considered A. Burassa, who supported Canada’s entry into the First World War. The main issues discussed at this time by parliamentarians were Canada’s military and material support for the armed conflict. Senators J. Bolduk, E. Smith, A. Lougheed, and P. Murphy actively called for the side of the Metropolia. In the article the author draws attention to the fact that politicians were negative about the military conflict itself. Canadian politicians consider German Empire to be the main culprit in the war, which violated Belgium’s sovereignty and started the war. As a result, the UK was forced to go to war, defending the neutrality of the Belgian state. According to most Canadian politicians, Canada’s main task was to support the British Empire.

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