Much Ado about Mutton

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca J. H. Woods
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Relative Influence ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sheep Breeding ◽  
Merino Sheep ◽  
Merino Wool ◽  
Commercial Value ◽  
Anthropogenic Selection

This chapter examines the fraught attempts to acclimatize Spanish merino sheep in Britain in the early nineteenth century. Proponents of the merino were motivated by the commercial value of merino wool, which is and was exceptionally fine, but the debate over the merino’s place in Britain ultimately came down to its flesh. The breed’s opponents argued that merino mutton was inferior to that of British breeds like the New Leicester, and further that the fineness of merino wool was dependent upon Spain’s climate and environment. The long and acrimonious controversy which attended the merino’s attempted naturalization in Great Britain revealed the degree to which competing understandings of the relative influence of climate or environment and anthropogenic selection in sheep-breeding unsettled the very category of breed itself. Ultimately, attempts to acclimatize merino sheep in Britain failed, as its wool (although finer than that of “native” British breeds) grew coarser under Britain’s damper climate, and its leaner carcass offended the proud palates of British diners.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Bill Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Evolutionary Theories ◽  
Evolutionary Thought ◽  
History Of

The introduction sets the scene by exploring the role of Edinburgh as a centre for the development and propagation of pre-Darwinian evolutionary theories. It gives essential background on natural history in the Scottish capital in early nineteenth century and the history of evolutionary thought and outlines the aims and objectives of the book. In addition, it explores some of the historiographical issues raised by earlier historians of science who have discussed the role of Edinburgh in the development of evolutionary thought in Great Britain.

“The Foreign Element”: Newcomers and the Rhetoric of Race, Nation, and Empire in “Oxbridge” Undergraduate Culture, 1850–1920

1998 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 54-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul R. Deslandes
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
University Students ◽  
Individual Student ◽  
Student Life ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Popular Interest ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Literature And Film ◽  
Apparent Level

The Oxford and Cambridge man has long inspired fascination both in Great Britain and abroad. Many have, in fact, acquired an illusory understanding of these enigmatic university students through various caricatures and representations created in literature and film. Yet, despite an apparent level of popular interest, relatively few attempts have been made to understand the culture of male undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge in a systematic and scholarly way. With the exception of Sheldon Rothblatt's work on student life in the early nineteenth century, J. A. Mangan's skillful exploration of the cult of athleticism's impact on the ancient universities, and some select studies of individual student societies and organizations, we know very little about the ways in which undergraduates lived their lives, saw their worlds, and viewed those who were traditionally excluded from these milieus. We know even less perhaps, despite the existence of Richard Symonds's examination of the relationship between Oxford and empire, about the ways “Oxbridge” undergraduates saw themselves as Britons and leaders of an imperial and “superior” English race. The conflation of English and British is intentional here. Applying English attributes to Britons did not generally present many problems for university men, even those from Scottish, Welsh, and Anglo-Irish backgrounds. “Britishness” and “Englishness” were often applied interchangeably by Oxford and Cambridge undergraduates although, as others have observed, uses of the term “English” tended most often to refer to the admired attributes or “personal” and “communal” traits of Britons, particularly those among the elite.

Conclusion

2019 ◽  
pp. 196-201
Author(s):  
Bill Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Selection ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Theory Of Evolution ◽  
Evolutionary Theories

In this final chapter the various threads of the argument for the importance of Edinburgh as a centre for the elaboration and transmission of evolutionary theories in the early nineteenth century are drawn together. It argues for the importance of Edinburgh as a conduit for the transmission of evolutionary ideas into Great Britain, where they would influence both the development and the reception of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution by means of natural selection.

Old Dominions and Industrial Commonwealths: The Political Economy of Coal in Virginia and Pennsylvania, 1810–1875

2000 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 675-682 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean Patrick Adams
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Bituminous Coal ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
James River ◽  
Anthracite Coal ◽  
Allegheny Mountains ◽  
Coal Reserves

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Great Britain utilized its extensive coal reserves to emerge as the world's leading industrial power. “If a patch of a few square miles has done so much for central England,” one British writer pondered in 1856, “what may fields containing many hundred square leagues do for the United States?” In the story of American coal, the two most important states on the eve of the nineteenth century were Virginia and Pennsylvania. Virginia was endowed with bituminous coal reserves in both the James River Basin and its western counties, while Pennsylvania enjoyed a virtual monopoly on American anthracite coal as well as a massive bituminous region west of the Allegheny Mountains.

The Atlantic Voyage and Black Radicalism

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Radicalism ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Black Abolitionists ◽  
American Racism

Chapter 5 looks at the Atlantic crossing from the United States to Great Britain, where colored travelers shifted their protest strategies at sea. Black abolitionists made this journey between the 1830s and the 1860s, and they found that even British-owned steamship companies practiced segregation. Interestingly, however, black activists did not take on Atlantic captains and ship proprietors with the same ferocity that they had conductors back home. In part, this was because the ocean voyage, which lasted between nine and fourteen days, was too confining and dangerous to defy white vigilantes. Yet, more importantly, colored travelers also knew that desegregating Atlantic steamships was hardly the endgame. Rather, colored travelers relaxed their protest strategies while on board and remained focused on the significance of the trip itself. They wanted to reach foreign shores, connect with British abolitionists, and most of all see if the promises were true that abroad African Americans could experience true freedom of mobility, a right that eluded them at home. This is not to suggest that activists did not protest segregation on British steamships. They did, but without the physical assertiveness they adopted in the fight against the Jim Crow car. The story of Frederick Douglass’s harrowing transatlantic voyage in 1845 shows this. An analysis of early nineteenth- century shipboard culture and the British-owned Cunard steamship line illustrates how, for colored travelers, the transatlantic voyage emerged as a liminal phase between American racism and their perceptions of British and European egalitarianism.

“Supreme Nation”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John T. P. Lai
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
World Order ◽  
The Other ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Reconstruction Process ◽  
Model Image ◽  
The One ◽  
Different Cultures

This chapter explores how Karl F. A. Gützlaff, a leading Protestant missionary to China in the early nineteenth century, consciously created an idealistic image of Great Britain in his novels Shifei lüelun (1835) and Dayingguo tongzhi (1834). Through intentional reinterpretations of two sharply different cultures, Gützlaff challenged the Sinocentric world order on the one hand and presented Britain as the “Supreme Nation” on the other. Moreover, the author reveals that Gützlaff’s narrative of the model image of Britain involved conscious appropriation of certain popular Chinese terms and thinking. The Anglo-Chinese intercourse therefore exhibited a complex destruction–reconstruction process, in which the two-way flow of words and ideas gave shape to one imagined in-between reality.

The Millerite Adventists in Great Britain, 1840–1850

1967 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 191-212 ◽  
Author(s):  
Louis Billington
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Evangelical Christianity ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Bible ◽  
Missionary Societies ◽  
Second Coming

Millenarianism was an important element in early nineteenth-century Evangelical Christianity. The majority of British and American Evangelicals favoured a post-millennial Advent, and looked forward to a thousand years of heaven on earth which were to precede Christ's Second Coming. The great religious and benevolent societies—tract and Bible societies, foreign and domestic missionary societies and the like, whose progress in Britain and America was closely linked—were sustained by the hope that their work and even their very existence were signs of the approaching Millennium. Within the major Evangelical denominations as well as the smaller sects, there were also ‘students of prophecy’, who took a closer interest in the allegorical and prophetic books of the Bible than the majority of their contemporaries, but this interest was by no means limited to the fanatical or eccentric. These ‘students’ read their Bibles with the extreme literalism common to Evangelicals at this time, and in their exegeses disputed the time and circumstances of the Second Advent. Many supported the idea of a post-millennial Advent, while others argued that Christ's return had already taken place at the destruction of Jerusalem. Some favoured a pre-millennial Advent; that is, that Christ would return before the thousand years of heaven on earth.

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