scholarly journals The Irish Railway Commission (1836–39) aiming to reform railways in the United Kingdom and to improve the governance of Ireland

2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-140
Author(s):  
Philip Lloyd

This article uses a range of primary and secondary sources to analyse the work of the Irish Railway Commission 1836–39 and its challenge to the predominantly laissez-faire approach to railway development in Britain. The commission produced a model for developing railways with the state and public interest at its heart, and it advocated railways as a system that was planned to deliver specific political and economic objectives. It thereby threatened railway interests in Britain and mobilised senior political advocates of laissez-faire to defeat the commission. Nonetheless, its work was a substantial contribution to understanding Ireland and the weaknesses of nineteenth-century railway regulation that deserves a more prominent place in the history of the relationship between technology and politics.

Author(s):  
Paul Huddie

This chapter will show that the Russian conflict was a distinct period in Ireland’s economic history, being a catalyst for Ireland’s post-Famine agricultural recovery. It will be shown that this was caused by the increase in prices and demand which in turn encouraged farmers to alter the distribution of their tillage, export more livestock, hire more labourers and increase the latter’s wages. It will also include various (largely neglected) aspects of industry; showing Irish shipping companies’ comparable astuteness in relation to government contracts, which many entrepreneurs and merchants also eagerly sought, but also the inflexibility of the linen sector and the consequent problems experienced. Finally this chapter will show that the war was, much like the 1850s as a whole, a distinct period in the history of Irish taxation and Irish society’s relationship with its government in London in the nineteenth century and its relationship, or place within, the wider society of the United Kingdom.


1990 ◽  
Vol 122 (2) ◽  
pp. 359-369
Author(s):  
S. Gunasingam

Since the time South Asia, together with other Asian and African countries, became an integral part of the British Empire, the significance of manuscripts, published works and other artefacts, relating to those regions has stimulated continued appreciation in the United Kingdom, albeit with varying degrees of interest. It is interesting to note that the factors which have contributed in one way or another to the collecting of South Asian I material for British institutions vary in their nature, and thus illuminate the attitudes of different periods. During the entire nineteenth century, the collectors were primarily administrators; for most of the first half of the twentieth century, it was the interest and the needs of British universities that led to the accumulation of substantial holdings in many academic or specialist libraries.


2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 623-642 ◽  
Author(s):  
UGANDA SZE PUI KWAN

AbstractThe University of London was the first institution in the United Kingdom to establish a professorship in Chinese. Within a decade of the first half of the nineteenth century, two professorships in Chinese were created at its two colleges: the first at University College in 1837 and the second at King's College in 1847. Previous studies of British sinology have devoted sufficient attention to the establishment of the programme and the first Chinese professorship. However, despite the latter professorship being established by the same patron (Sir George Thomas Staunton; 1781–1859) during the same era as the former, the institutionalisation of the Chinese programme at King's College London seems to have been completely overlooked. If we consider British colonial policy and the mission of the Empire in the early nineteenth century, we are able to understand the strategic purpose served by the Chinese studies programme at King's and the special reason for its establishment at a crucial moment in the history of Sino-British relations. Examining it from this perspective, we reveal unresolved doubts concerning the selection and appointment of King's first Chinese professor. Unlike other inaugural Chinese professors appointed during the nineteenth century at other universities in the United Kingdom, the first Chinese professor at King’s, Samuel Turner Fearon (1819–1854), was not a sinophile. He did not translate any Chinese classics or other works. His inaugural lecture has not even survived. This is why sinologists have failed to conduct an in-depth study on Fearon and the genealogy of the Chinese programme at King’s. Nevertheless, Samuel Fearon did indeed play a very significant role in Sino-British relations due to his ability as an interpreter and his knowledge of China. He was not only an interpreter in the first Opium War (1839–1842) but was also a colonial civil servant and senior government official in British Hong Kong when the colonial government started to take shape after the war. This paper both re-examines his contribution during this “period of conflict and difficulty” in Sino-British relations and demonstrates the very nature of British sinology.


2020 ◽  
pp. 203-221
Author(s):  
Jonah Siegel

The consolidation of the fields of art history and archeology in the nineteenth century was characterized by a number of fundamental revisions that were bound to track unevenly with developments in taste. Shifts in aesthetic values and in the history of art itself presented unavoidable challenges to the status of major collections. And yet, some collections were so esteemed that it was difficult for public interest in them to shift along with the vicissitudes of advanced taste. This chapter analyzes the place of the Vatican museum in two distinct but characteristic works of the later part of the nineteenth century in which the intersection of the history of taste and individual aesthetic response is made a matter of deep affective significance: Vernon Lee’s essay, “The Child in the Vatican” and George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Whether the experience of the sculpture collection at the Vatican becomes an occasion to represent an unresolvable emotional crisis framed around a formal issue, or an opportunity to address a formal issue given force by its manifestation as a profound emotional turning point, both texts register fundamental shifts in taste that were bound to affect the objects around which that taste had developed. By registering the limits of powerful concepts that had attempted to establish the relationship of subjects to admired objects, George Eliot and Vernon Lee reveal the emotional determinants and uncertainties accompanying and helping to shape the emergence of formal concerns out of material concepts.


2021 ◽  
pp. 397-422
Author(s):  
Nigel Foster

The history of the relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union from its beginning has been, if nothing else, a very vacillating one, and even at the beginning, the UK was a ‘reluctant’ partner in the European project. This chapter will outline the changing legal and political relationship before, during, and after ‘Brexit’, as the negotiations for the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union (EU) came to be known. The departure, on 31 January 2020, and complete separation on 31 December 2020, placed the UK as a third country to the EU as regards its new trading relationship, is also considered.


Author(s):  
Andrew R. Holmes

This chapter explores the relationship between literature and union among Presbyterian writers in nineteenth-century Ulster. It examines the work of the poet William McComb and the journalist James McKnight, who together were responsible for the publication of The Repealer Repulsed (1841), a collection of reportage and literary fancy written in response to Daniel O’Connell’s campaign to repeal the 1800 Act of Union. Their various publications employed a shared Ulster–Scottish Presbyterian heritage to express opposition to the imposition of English Protestant forms and principles, and to highlight the importance and distinctiveness of Presbyterian Scots and Ulster-Scots within the United Kingdom. It demonstrates that Presbyterian writers saw Robert Burns as only one part of a broader literary culture that they shared with Britain and that was usually expressed in standard English, included prose as well as poetry, employed a number of literary genres, and sometimes drew upon a shared Gaelic heritage.


2000 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 288-316 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Gambles

It is striking that historians of the early nineteenth century have been relatively reluctant to consider relationships between economic policy and the consolidation of the British state. In today's context, the economic and political challenges posed by both European integration and resurgent nationalism have generated hotly contested controversies on the political economy of state formation. From the perspective of the United Kingdom, the prospect of political and administrative devolution has forced us to address the implications of political decentralization for regional economic development (and vice versa) and to consider in turn the impact of these dynamics on the political integrity of a multinational state. For Britain, the period between circa 1780 and 1850 was characterized by unprecedented economic growth, imperial crisis and acquisition, and political consolidation. In a metropolitan sense the most dramatic feature of this process was, of course, the creation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800. Insofar as historians of early nineteenth-century Britain have examined the relationship between “state formation” and economic policy, however, they have tended to focus on the ideas, politics, and pressures surrounding the retreat of the state from economic intervention. Thus in more general accounts it became axiomatic that the nineteenth-century state shrank progressively from social and economic intervention, liberating commerce, and resting the fiscal system on secure but modest direct taxation.More recently, the relationship between the concept of “laissez-faire” and British state formation has been dramatically revised and refined by Philip Harling and Peter Mandler.


1931 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 197-224
Author(s):  
K. A. Walpole

There are few more remarkable developments during the nineteenth century than the movement overseas from the United Kingdom, which was to people first the backwoods of Canada and later the other Dominions. The history of this great exodus has been written only in part and one aspect has been practically neglected—the story of the Atlantic passage. Not only does this form a most important chapter in the history of emigration, but it also reveals an aspect of the humanitarian movement which has never been emphasized. It is therefore proposed in the following pages to trace the efforts made to secure the enactment of laws enforcing humane conditions on the passage to America, to follow the steps taken to secure the efficient administration of these laws, and to consider whether these efforts led to any radical improvement.


1887 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 302-315
Author(s):  
Cornelius Walford

The state of the law in respect to Joint-Stock Companies, and associations for business purposes generally, remained in the same unsatisfactory condition which I have described in the previous section down to this time. Those great Insurance Associations, with millions of capital subscribed, in many cases, by the merchant princes of the land, for purposes admittedly the most beneficent, were simple partnerships, almost without legal recognition, except for purposes tending to their detriment or destruction. They could be attacked or pulled down by legal process readily enough; but they could only protect themselves against fraud, or recover their just debts by the most cumbersome of processes. What they had a right to expect, as institutions designed to aid largely in the accumulation of national wealth, was protection in carrying out their laudable designs; but of this they had not a vestige. Not only was every holder of stock in a proprietary company primarily and personally liable to his last shilling for the engagements of the partnership, but every policy-holder in a mutual society, being a member of, and therefore a partner in such society, was equally liable for all its engagements.


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