‘The Clach’: Alexander Mackenzie and the Land Question in the Late-Nineteenth Century Highlands and Islands

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ben Thomas

This article uses the career and writings of the Highland land reformer Alexander Mackenzie, to shed new light on the evolution of Highland land reform in the years leading up to the Crofters' Act of 1886. Mackenzie's output as a writer and journalist shows that his early experiences of living and working on the land are vital to understanding his approach to the land question, and led him to focus not on abstract or ideal principles but on building popular consensus to secure the most pressing reforms. This moderate and pragmatic approach was not universally popular though, especially among Mackenzie's more radical reformist contemporaries. The tensions these disagreements created are symptomatic of the problems that beset the ‘Crofting Community’ in the 1880s and ‘90s: problems that would eventually cause the land reform movement to split. Nevertheless, Mackenzie's influence on the Crofters’ War was huge, and deserves greater scholarly recognition.

Author(s):  
Eagle Glassheim

Although fascism has often been considered a plebeian, even radically egalitarian ideology, many of its outspoken proponents were members of the old European elite: nobles, clericalists and representatives of the haute bourgeoisie. Historians of Nazi Germany have puzzled over the affinity of German conservatives such as Paul von Hindenburg and Franz von Papen to Adolf Hitler's National Socialist version of fascism. A small but extremely wealthy noble elite struggled to maintain its long-standing social, economic and political influence in Bohemia. By the late nineteenth century, the Bohemian nobility was a self-consciously traditional social group with a decidedly modern economic relationship to agrarian and industrial capitalism. This chapter examines the response of the Bohemian aristocracy to the new state of Czechoslovakia. This restricted caste of cosmopolitan latifundist families was more German than Czech in sentiment, and further alienated by land reform. The aristocrats entertained divergent assessments of Nazism and responded in different ways to the crisis of the state by 1938.


1969 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-14
Author(s):  
Richard C. Howard

Many of us who have studied the modern history of China first learned of the late nineteenth-century reform movement in texts with chapters or sections entitled, “The Hundred Days of Reform,” or “The Reform Movement of 1898.” In such works our attention was directed to that group of politically inexperienced idealists who sought to impose upon a recalcitrant bureaucracy and apathetic populace a series of reforms designed to rescue the empire from impending dismemberment at the hands of foreign powers. The main emphasis of these standard accounts was upon the events of 1898 and their significance in China's political history. During the past twenty years, however, scholarly interest in the reformers has shifted from a preoccupation with their activities in 1898 to a more general consideration of their intellectual antecedents and the ideological content of their reform programs. Studies along these lines have placed the events of 1898 in a broader historical perspective—as the climax of a movement that was more than a decade in the making. This recent trend in scholarship is reflected in the four papers of this symposium. Separately and collectively, these papers confirm what earlier studies have suggested, that the reformers' objectives in 1898 can best be understood in the context of an intellectual movement that assumed its distinctive characteristics during the decade of the 1890's.


2002 ◽  
Vol 33 (130) ◽  
pp. 191-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fintan Lane

In the late nineteenth century Irish rural labourers had few consistent advocates willing to pursue their social and economic claims at a national level. Those that did exist, such as P.F. Johnson of Kanturk, have generally managed to elude the scrutiny of historians. A number of studies on the Irish land question have referred to Johnson, but he has remained a shadowy figure despite his role as the leading labourers’ advocate between 1869 and 1882. Rural agitation during this period is most often associated with tenant farmers and their perturbations with regard to the prevailing land-tenure system and its administration. The rural working class, especially before 1885, had limited political influence, and neither the British government nor the Irish Parliamentary Party treated its claims with the seriousness that they accorded to the perceived needs of tenant farmers. Nonetheless, many commentators remarked on the wretched condition of the rural labouring population in Ireland, and it was undoubtedly the greatest demographic and socio-economic casualty of the Famine. Wages, working conditions, unemployment and underemployment, housing and access to land were all issues that agitated labourers in the late nineteenth century.


2016 ◽  
Vol 40 (158) ◽  
pp. 247-276 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Gordon

AbstractThis article examines the memoirs written by Henry Howard Molyneux Herbert, fourth earl of Carnarvon, concerning his period as lord lieutenant of Ireland between June 1885 and January 1886, in the brief Salisbury administration. Carnarvon inherited many of the problems of his Liberal predecessor, fifth Earl Spencer, telling Salisbury ‘the day of reckoning in this case will come very rapidly if any unwise promises are made or implied’. Nevertheless he was sympathetic to reform in many different fields, notably home rule, land reform, education and religion. A sensitive politician, Carnarvon penned this memorandum shortly after leaving office in an attempt to uphold his reputation. The memorandum gives a number of insights into Carnarvon’s manoeuvrings in cabinet, and demonstrates the workings of high politics in the late-nineteenth century. It was never published.


2002 ◽  
pp. 106-110
Author(s):  
Liudmyla O. Fylypovych

Sociology of religion in the West is a field of knowledge with at least 100 years of history. As a science and as a discipline, the sociology of religion has been developing in most Western universities since the late nineteenth century, having established traditions, forming well-known schools, areas related to the names of famous scholars. The total number of researchers of religion abroad has never been counted, but there are more than a thousand different centers, universities, colleges where religion is taught and studied. If we assume that each of them has an average of 10 religious scholars, theologians, then the army of scholars of religion is amazing. Most of them are united in representative associations of researchers of religion, which have a clear sociological color. Among them are the most famous International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR) and the Society for Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR).


2006 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Dewi Jones

John Lloyd Williams was an authority on the arctic-alpine flora of Snowdonia during the late nineteenth century when plant collecting was at its height, but unlike other botanists and plant collectors he did not fully pursue the fashionable trend of forming a complete herbarium. His diligent plant-hunting in a comparatively little explored part of Snowdonia led to his discovering a new site for the rare Killarney fern (Trichomanes speciosum), a feat which was considered a major achievement at the time. For most part of the nineteenth century plant distribution, classification and forming herbaria, had been paramount in the learning of botany in Britain resulting in little attention being made to other aspects of the subject. However, towards the end of the century many botanists turned their attention to studying plant physiology, a subject which had advanced significantly in German laboratories. Rivalry between botanists working on similar projects became inevitable in the race to be first in print as Lloyd Williams soon realized when undertaking his major study on the cytology of marine algae.


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