Jean Grier and Mary Bownes, Private Giving, Public Good: The Impact of Philanthropy at the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), vi+218pp. ISBN: 9780748699575

Author(s):  
Robert Anderson

This chapter reviews the book Private Giving, Public Good: The Impact of Philanthropy at the University of Edinburgh (2014), by Jean Grier and Mary Bownes. The book offers an account of ‘private giving’, focusing primarily on recent gifts and drawing on the case of the University of Edinburgh. It shows that Scottish universities lacked the inherited wealth of Oxford and Cambridge. In the nineteenth century they received significant support from the state, but from the 1860s also made serious efforts to appeal to private donors and build up endowments. There is a chapter devoted to ‘research and scholarship’, which illustrates some of the problems of relying on private philanthropy. Another chapter deals with ‘bursaries, scholarships, and prizes’—once a favourite field for individual legacies and donations, and for the Carnegie Trust.

Author(s):  
Bill Jenkins

Paris was the most important centre for evolutionary speculations in Europe in the early nineteenth century. Two of its most influential evolutionary thinkers, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire both worked there in the city’s Museum of Natural History. This chapter explores the impact of these French thinkers’ theories in Edinburgh and the close connections that existed between natural history circles in the two cities. It was common for students and graduates of the medical school of the University of Edinburgh to spend time studying in Paris, where they imbibed many of the exciting new ideas being discussed there. Two of the key figures discussed in this book, Robert Grant and Robert Knox, had both spent time in Paris and were deeply influenced by the theories they encountered there. The chapter also examines the impact of the key writings of Lamarck and Geoffroy in Edinburgh.


2000 ◽  
pp. 20-25
Author(s):  
O. O. Romanovsky

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the nature of the national policy of Russia is significantly changing. After the events of 1863 in Poland (the Second Polish uprising), the government of Alexander II gradually abandoned the dominant idea of ​​anathematizing, whose essence is expressed in the domination of the principle of serving the state, the greatness of the empire. The tsar-reformer deliberately changes the policy of etatamism into the policy of state ethnocentrism. The manifestation of such a change is a ban on teaching in Polish (1869) and the temporary closure of the University of Warsaw. At the end of the 60s, the state's policy towards a five million Russian Jewry was radically revised. The process of abolition of restrictions on travel, education, place of residence initiated by Nicholas I, was provided reverse.


1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Rodger

This article is the revised text of the first W A Wilson Memorial Lecture, given in the Playfair Library, Old College, in the University of Edinburgh, on 17 May 1995. It considers various visions of Scots law as a whole, arguing that it is now a system based as much upon case law and precedent as upon principle, and that its departure from the Civilian tradition in the nineteenth century was part of a general European trend. An additional factor shaping the attitudes of Scots lawyers from the later nineteenth century on was a tendency to see themselves as part of a larger Englishspeaking family of lawyers within the British Empire and the United States of America.


2008 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 133-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Konstantin Timoshenko

The last few decades have witnessed substantial efforts to reinvent the state worldwide. The Russian state is no exception to this global trend. At the outset of a new millennium, the need for renewal of the post‐Soviet model of the state has been acknowledged, and an up‐to‐date reform package has been promoted by the central government. This has encompassed the reconstruction of public sector accounting. Given the paucity of consistent research efforts on the topic, this article seeks to describe and analyze, and by so doing, contribute to knowledge about Russian public sector accounting in times of change. To tackle the general purpose, two levels are incorporated in this study to link reform initiatives for the government as a whole with those endeavours to implement them in one state‐sponsored university of Russian tertiary education. The major questions to be addressed are of whether, why, and how changes at the central government level have penetrated down to the university and extended to its accounting system. The evidence gathered in this paper reveals that a new Russian public sector ideology has markedly been affected by overseas developments in the shape of large international organizations. However, no compelling evidence has been documented in this research as unveiling that changes at the macro‐level have penetrated down to the university to any significant extent. This study concludes that launching a new version of accounting by the Russian state can be regarded as more of a symbol of legitimacy for the university rather than of an actual financial management tool.


1991 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 415-445 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gwyn Campbell

This paper analyses the demography of nineteenth-century Madagascar in the light of the debate generated by the demographic transition theory. Both supporters and critics of the theory hold to an intrinsic opposition between human and ‘natural’ factors, such as climate, famine and disease, influencing demography. They also suppose a sharp chronological divide between the pre-colonial and colonial eras, arguing that whereas ‘natural’ demographic influences were of greater importance in the former period, human factors predominated thereafter. This paper argues that in the case of nineteenth-century Madagascar the human factor, in the form of the Merina state, was the predominant demographic influence. However, the impact of the state was felt through natural forces, and it varied over time. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Merina state policies stimulated agricultural production, which helped to create a larger and healthier population and laid the foundation for Merina military and economic expansion within Madagascar. From the 1820, the cost of such expansionism led the state to increase its exploitation of forced labour at the expense of agricultural production and thus transformed it into a negative demographic force. Infertility and infant mortality, which were probably more significant influences on overall population levels than the adult mortality rate, increased from 1820 due to disease, malnutrition and stress, all of which stemmed from state forced labour policies. Available estimates indicate little if any population growth for Madagascar between 1820 and 1895. The demographic ‘crisis’ in Africa, ascribed by critics of the demographic transition theory to the colonial era, stemmed in Madagascar from the policies of the imperial Merina regime which in this sense formed a link to the French regime of the colonial era. In sum, this paper questions the underlying assumptions governing the debate about historical demography in Africa and suggests that the demographic impact of political forces be re-evaluated in terms of their changing interaction with ‘natural’ demographic influences.


Author(s):  
David Goodman

In the great nineteenth-century British world cycle of gold rushes, individualist wealth seeking became associated with democratic politics, and views about the public rather than private benefits of gold became increasingly the preserve of conservatives. In Georgia, governor George Gilmer declared in 1830 that the gold diggers were “appropriating riches to themselves, which of right equally belong to every other citizen of the state,” but he soon suffered electoral defeat. In 1850s California and Australia, individual miners were rapidly associated with a democratic and egalitarian future, even with the public good. This helps explain the oddly uncontested decisions to allow mining on public—and, in many places, private—land and use of public resources such as timber and water. This chapter is by David Goodman.


2009 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 86-109
Author(s):  
Mohammed Hassen

Before I embark on the main subject, three caveats are in order. First, this article deals with two themes that are indirectly related, but necessary, to understanding why the Oromo, who have had contact with Islam since at least the fourteenth century, embraced it mainly during the nineteenth century. Notwithstanding their recent conversion, today the Oromo are the single largest Muslim community in Ethiopia. The article will explore their rapid conversion during the second half of the nineteenth century in conjunction with Emperor Menilek II’s conquest and occupation of their land and its impact upon every aspect of their existence. Second, in this paper I have heavily drawn on a paper I presented at a conference held at the University of Edinburgh in 1999 and another one published in 1992. Third, the paper is divided into seven unequal parts, preceded by a short introduction.


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