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The article talks about the Working Paper published by the Modern British Studies (MBS) research centre on new ways of thinking about the transformation of British society, culture, politics and economy between 19th century and 2015. It highlights the cultures of democracy and the rising political, social and cultural change. It states that the paper can be used as a study material for understanding the state of history in present times.

The article refers to a June 1753 letter written by English author Samuel Richardson to British poet Elizabeth Carter, as well as Carter's letter in response, which discuss the British Jewish naturalization Act of 1753. Richardson refers to a "little paper" which he included with his letter to Carter. The article argues that this was a pamphlet attributed to Philip Carteret Webb having the abbreviated title "The Bill, Permitting Jews to be Naturalized by Parliament, Having Been Misrepresented in the London Gazetteer, of Friday the 18th May."

Continental Europeans were not just enemies and competitors of the eighteenth-century British Empire; they were also allies, auxiliaries, and coadjutors in British imperial activity. This paper examines the role of European and particularly German soldiers in the British Empire in the second half of the eighteenth century. In chronological terms, the focus is on the Seven Years War and especially on the War of American Independence. Geographically, the paper concentrates on three British imperial sites: India, North America, and the Mediterranean garrisons of Gibraltar and Minorca. Historians have already looked at aspects of European military service in the British Empire; but the various foreign military units, and the different imperial theatres, are not usually examined together, as parts of the process of the British state’s use of other Europeans to defend and even expand its imperial possessions. One of the main objectives here is to assess the significance of that European contribution.The paper begins by considering why the British state chose European soldiers in preference to other available options, particularly locally raised forces in India and North America, and even British and Irish manpower. The second section attempts to quantify the continental European contribution, both in absolute terms and as compared with British and imperial inputs. The final section endeavours to assess the quality of European military involvement. Some Britons regarded foreign soldiers as inherently unreliable and therefore less valuable than their own troops; however, there is plenty of evidence of positive assessments of the military role of continental Europeans. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the turn toward the small companion animal that occurred in British veterinary medicine in the twentieth century. The change in species emphasis is usually attributed to post-war socioeconomic factors, however this explanation ignores the extensive small animal treatment that was occurring outwith the veterinary profession in the interwar period. The success of this unqualified practice caused the veterinary profession to rethink attitudes to small animals (dogs initially, later cats) upon the decline of horse practice. This paper argues that a shift toward seeing the small animal as a legitimate veterinary patient was necessary before the specialty could become mainstream in the post-war years, and that this occurred between the wars as a result of the activities of British animal welfare charities, especially the People's Dispensary for Sick Animals of the Poor. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

From 1807 onwards, bilateral slave-trade treaties stipulated how naval squadrons would rescue slaves from slave ships, and how states should arrange the settlement and apprenticeship of these slaves, to transform them into 'liberated Africans'. Comparing interactions between the state and liberated Africans at sea along the South African and Brazilian coasts, and in the port towns of Cape Town and Salvador, reveals how the legal status of liberated Africans changed over time. Current scholarship has framed liberated Africans in terms of whether they were attributed rights or suffered re-enslavement, and thus focused on their solidarity through claiming rights, 'ethnic survivals' or creolization. Instead, this paper argues anti-slave-trade legislation ascribed to liberated Africans a set of unguaranteed entitlements – promises regarding status and treatment without obligating states to uphold that status or treatment. By focusing on the precise aspects of legislation that operated at each point in the process of anti-slave-trade activity – rescuing slaves from slave ships, transportation to a port, processing through a court, and apprenticeship – this paper unearths how the law came into force in the encounter between state officials and liberated Africans, as part of the complex transition from slavery to free labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the British Bombing Restriction Committee's efforts in preventing the British Royal Air Force's (RAF's) aerial bombing of civilians in Germany during World War II, from 1941 through 1945, including the committee's pacifist protests. An overview of committee chairperson H. Stanley Jevons' advocating that British aerial bombing be restricted to military targets in Germany is provided. British politician George Bell's perspective on aerial bombing is discussed.

Clement Attlee is most famous for being the Labour prime minister of the UK after the Second World War. It is less well known that he was a social worker and a social work lecturer on either side of the First World War, before he was elected to parliament in 1922. He had even written a book about it: The Social Worker, published in 1920. This paper describes Attlee's time as a social worker and social work lecturer, setting his experiences and the book in the context of the times, especially the tensions and overlaps between 'individualist' and 'collectivist' understandings of society. It outlines Attlee's vision of social work, and considers the ongoing relevance of his understandings of social work and society. In particular, the paper highlights Attlee's notion of 'the social service idea'. This brings together four essential elements of social work--that it should be radical, relationship-based, realistic and reciprocal. Attlee's social service idea, and his individual example, still offer guidance and inspiration for social work today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the introduction to Britain of the Gräfenberg ring, an early version of what later became known as an intrauterine device (IUD). The struggle during the interwar years to establish the value of the ring provides an opportunity for a case study of the evaluation and acceptance of a new medical device. With the professionalization of the birth control movement and the expansion of birth control clinics in interwar Britain, efforts to develop better scientific means for contraception grew rapidly. At the end of the nineteenth century, methods for controlling fertility ranged from coitus interruptus and abstinence, to diverse substances ingested or placed into the vagina, to barrier methods. The first decades of the twentieth century brought early work on chemical contraceptives as well as a number of new intrauterine devices, among them the Gräfenberg ring. Developing a cheap, reliable, and widely acceptable contraceptive became a pressing goal for activists in the voluntary birth control movement in Britain between the wars. Yet, tensions developed over the best form of contraception to prescribe. By situating the Gräfenberg ring within the context of the debates and competition among British medical and birth control professionals, this paper reveals broader issues of power relationships and expertise in the assessment of a new medical technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyses the attitudes expressed by consular and embassy officials to a new type of traveller they encountered in the mid-1960s. Their observations are contextualised within wider debates concerning 'youth' in the late 1950s and 1960s. Officials distinguished sharply between 'overlanders' (who could be tolerated or accommodated) and 'beatniks' whose behaviour was characterized as illegal and/or unacceptable. Smoking cannabis was identified as a key marker of beatnik behaviour. Officials' observations are contrasted with four accounts by new travellers from the period. The paper concludes with a proposal for an 'antinominian' approach to the study of youth cultures: researchers should be more sensitive to the constructed nature of the labels used to identify the various strands of youth identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent interpretations of religious change in modern Britain have stressed the importance of a sudden and abrupt 'sexual revolution' during the 1960s. The role the Churches played in bringing about their own demise remains a point of debate, particularly in the case of the Catholic Church. This article attempts to move beyond existing historical disputes over a 'religious crisis' and whether it was rooted in 'internal' causes (problems within the Church) or 'external', secular developments. It explores the way sexual knowledge was discussed and disseminated by Catholic authorities during this decade of perceived cultural transition, drawing on the previously unpublished papers of the Papal Commission for Birth Control 1963-5 and the training manuals of the Catholic Marriage Advisory Council (CMAC). These sources offer a unique insight into the often problematic task of reconciling Catholic thought with the discourses of 'sexual liberation'. While the central hierarchy's continued opposition to women's contraceptive autonomy has understandably dominated historical attention, the material presented here suggests that Catholic understandings of female sexuality were not universally at odds with the intellectual infrastructure of a 'sexual revolution'. On the question of female sexual pleasure, progressive Catholic authorities in both the Papal Commission and the CMAC made fervent efforts to engage with contemporary scientific modes of understanding. Perversely, this approach served to neglect certain aspects of corporeal and emotional experience, thereby limiting the case for meaningful doctrinal change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The traditional assumption that 'war is good for medicine' has generally been debated by examining specific medical innovations of the war years 1914-18.This paper focuses rather on the ways in which war affected the medical careers of those working in British microbiology before and after the Great War. Using a survey of the lives of medical scientists associated with The Lister Institute for Preventive Medicine, the British Pathological Society, and the Pathological Laboratory of St Bartholomew's Hospital, this paper argues the case for war-related medical research of 1914-19 as a driver both for the creation of a knowledge base for future research and for changes in career trajectory of a number of individuals who were subsequently important for the scientific development of different areas of epidemiology, microbiology, and nutrition science after 1920. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The last two hundred years or so have seen the transformation of medical practice from a clinical art to the application of science to the diagnosis and treatment of disease. There has been a historical debate about how the use of technology and discoveries of the laboratory have become integrated within medical practice. In trying to understand the evolution of “scientific medicine,” this has generally focused on the tensions between the differing cultures, persons, and professions of the “laboratory” and “clinic” and sought to explain how they were resolved within specific institutions. This paper looks again at the “Glasgow School” (the subject of a number of seminal papers on this subject) and the forces that shaped it, by exploring the career of Leonard Findlay, whose training in Glasgow, and in Berlin (where he worked in a department in which science and medicine were integrated), defined a style of clinical medicine that formed the model for a new sort of university department of medicine in which clinicians and scientists worked side by side, albeit under the leadership of the former. As a clinician exposed in Berlin to the emerging new sciences of nutrition, microbiology, and immunology, which were particularly relevant to the care of sick children, Findlay created in Glasgow a department of medical pediatrics, which owed less to local factors, figures, and forces and more to his experience in Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As mid Victorian newspapers spoke of their ever more important role as educators and representatives of the ‘people’, the rise of a free and independent press seemed central to notions of an age of ‘improvement’. However, for many politicians, the press remained simply a tool to be exploited in order to advance their political agendas. By examining the relationship between politicians and metropolitan journalism in the mid nineteenth century, this article contrasts the claims of a press growing in confidence with those of an increasingly media-literate political class and argues that the press was in practice far more the instrument of politicians than the rhetoric suggests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the development of occupational mental health in the United Kingdom. It looks at the increasing involvement of occupational health staff in this aspect of the workplace and the role played by organizational psychologists in exploring the relationship between work and mental well-being. It provides a background for the reviews of current knowledge described in the other papers in this issue of Occupational Medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the condition of American communities in Great Britain, particulary in London and Liverpool, England, to recast U.S. foreign relations as expatriate foreign relations during the Civil War in 1861-1865 and to extend historians' knowledge of the war's transnational dimensions. It examines the transnational origins of Civil War diplomacy through a case study of the U.S. Sanitary Commission's (USSC) London branch. It also exlores how these communities maintained the networks of trade, migration and investment that structured U.S. foreign relations.

This paper explores the advice for fertility and health care contained in a late fifteenth-century manuscript: London, British Library MS Lansdowne 380. This study has chosen to engage with the larger theme of whether women had access to medical writings in the vernaculars of later-medieval England and whether this enabled them to control their own fertility. The paper shows that many women did have direct access to written knowledge, and that this knowledge combined theoretical and practical understanding for use in a domestic setting. Rather than being disenfranchised from responsibility for their own fertility, women collaborated with their husbands to ensure offspring and the future of their families. By refining the understanding of the use of manuscripts, the source of the knowledge they contained, and the question of ownership, the paper adds to our awareness of the scope and practice of fertility medicine in the later Middle Ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers a theory of military retrenchment by states in relative decline. I argue that a declining state will choose to withdraw foreign military deployments and security commitments when there exists a suitable regional 'successor' to which it can devolve its current responsibilities. The degree of a successor's suitability and the strategic importance of the region to the declining state interact to determine when and how rapidly retrenchment will occur. Importantly, this devolutionary model of retrenchment predicts significant variations in retrenchment patterns across a declining state's multiple regional commitments. It advances the literature by producing nuanced predictions of precisely where, when, and how quickly retrenchment will occur. This paper assesses the theory empirically through an examination of Great Britain's varying regional retrenchment strategies prior to World War I. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a response to the recent paper in this Journal by Ray Jones entitled 'The best of times, the worst of times: Social work and it's moment'. Jones' paper is welcomed for its use of history to inform the current debates a bout expertise and identity. The objective of this response is to address a perceived gap in Jones' paper with regard to the insufficient and over-simplified approach to the purpose of social work as a dual activity of mediation between care and control. The paper begins by summarising Jones' main points about what is 'special' about social work. This leads on to a critical commentary on the discussion on expertise and identity in social work. The need for a more nuanced and critical appraisal of our history, with explicit attention to the regulatory role of social work is emphasised. A less passive relationship between social work and its history is promoted and critical questions are raised in particular to his consideration of 'What now?'. This leads to a conclusion that offers alternative suggestions that can ensure a more critically oriented approach to use of history to inform our complex and necessarily contradictory present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the circulation of news that daily arrived in the ports of late Elizabethan Devon concerning the Spanish fleet. It utilizes the state and Cecil papers, as well as other centrally and locally held manuscript collections, to probe the nature of provincial news networks through the prism of a county-based case study. Previous scholarly research has tended to focus on the single 'hub' of London. However, as this article reveals, there existed much more complex sets of news networks that operated in the first instance at a local level, but which also had connections with the capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early twentieth century, death rates from typhoid in European cities reached an all time low. By contrast, death rates in America were six times as high, and the American public health community began a crusade against the disease in 1912. In the 1920s, hopes for greater control of the disease focused not just on sewers and drinking water supplies, but on the newly established scientific means of immunization, the supervision of food-related pathways of infection, and the management of healthy carriers. The management of carriers, which lay at the core of any typhoid control program, proved an intractable problem, and typhoid remained a public health concern. America and England both struggled with control of the disease during the interwar period. Coming from different starting points, however, their approaches to the problem differed. This paper compares and contrasts these different public health strategies, considers the variable quality of support provided by bacteriological laboratories, and demonstrates that “accidental” typhoid outbreaks continued to happen up to the outbreak of World War II. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores health care in one Lancashire working-class community during the golden age of biomedicine. Both the biomedical and alternative medical services available in the town are examined. The services provided by one community ‘wisewoman’; ranging from the respectable, such as midwifery, to the illegal, including abortion are a key focus. This case study is used as a way to engage with a larger theme in the history of medicine, namely, the tension between orthodox biomedical science and more traditional and alternative approaches to health care. The ways in which during the early twentieth century, traditional healing networks found ways to survive despite the increasing power and reach of biomedicine are demonstrated. This evidence points to the complexity of working-class attitudes to medical authority and practice during the period in question. In Rochdale, the working-class community remained slow to accept the orthodox challenge to traditional beliefs concerning health and healing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines debates about the design and provision of post-war housing within the papers and report of the Parker Morris committee. It does so to show how the models of citizens' rights and expectations which underpinned post-war welfare provision were transformed by mass affluence and the dynamic sphere of commercial consumption. Parker Morris's deliberations demonstrate that, as early as the 1950s, the citizen-subject was reimagined as a consuming individual, with requirements based on their expressive needs and consuming desires, and that this had far-reaching consequences for social democratic systems of universal welfare provision. The introduction of consumerist imperatives into publicly defined models of citizens' needs enhanced the political and cultural authority of the commercial domain, prompted a heightened role for commercial experts and market logics within public governance, and served to devalue socialized forms of provision in favour of consumer choice in the private market. The article thus engages with the growing scholarship on the politics of mass consumerism by showing how the material and emotional comforts of post-war affluence came to be constructed as critical to social democratic citizenship and selfhood. Situating this uneasy entanglement of social democratic rights with consumer satisfaction as part of a wider trajectory of political change, the piece suggests that Parker Morris marks an early but significant moment in the transition from post-war welfarism and social democracy to the consumer- and market-oriented forms of governance which came to dominate British politics and society in the latter part of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores an aspect of medical history that has been overlooked in existing academic studies of commercial air travel, and advances a new historiography of airline passenger health and commercial aviation medicine. The introduction of jet-powered passenger aircraft by British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) in 1952 presented a new set of epidemiological, chronobiological and physiological passenger health concerns. These resulted from the increased size, speed, range and cruising altitude of commercial jet aircraft. Drawing on extensive archival research, this paper explores the nature of these ‘new’ aeromedical challenges. It places them within the context of much earlier concerns about healthy travel, including military interest in the influence of flight on the human body. Focusing on BOAC, the paper examines the ways in which one major airline responded to the passenger health challenges jet air travel posed, and assesses the extent to which BOAC's responses transformed practices of aviation medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The First World War career of R.H. Brand, 1st Baron Brand of Eydon, provides an important insight into a number of issues. An important financier (with Lazard Brothers) and an ardent Imperialist (a founding member of The Round Table), in 1915 Brand helped establish the Imperial Munitions Board (IMB), the Canadian branch of the Ministry of Munitions. After that time, until 1917, Brand served as the Representative of the IMB in London, acting as the key link between that body and the Ministry of Munitions. As such, he was at the centre of intra-Imperial relations and wartime finance and supply. In addition, Brand’s work involved him in Anglo-American relations, as Washington became an important aspect of finance and supply. Brand’s activities illuminate the difficulties involved in the attempt to coordinate the interests of Britain with the embryonic nationalist desires of Canada. They also underline the significance of the Dominion for the British war effort, both financially and in the production of munitions. In addition, Brand’s work makes evident the close ties between the Canadian war economy and the United States, making clear the need to look at both Ottawa and Washington when attempting to understand Britain’s North American economic and financial activities during the First World War. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The first attempt, in the nineteen-thirties, to organize and produce a collaborative, multi-volume History of Parliament, researched and written from public funds, was the brainchild of the maverick Labour backbencher Josiah Wedgwood, who invested his scheme with an ideological as well as a scholarly purpose. Described from Wedgwood's viewpoint, the history of his History appears as a crusade in defence of democracy in the age of the dictators, and his bitter disagreements with the 'trades union' of academic historians a conflict between breadth and narrowness of vision. However, the records of the project, and the correspondence of the leading figures, demonstrate the role played by historians like A. F. Pollard, J. E. Neale and L. B. Namier in the framing of the scope and method of the History, and the vital importance of personality in determining the course of its development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creation of this Association stands out as one of the most important landmarks in the history of British medicine. To appreciate its importance and significance we have to remember the state of affairs previous to its conception. The great hospitals and medical schools scattered throughout the country lived largely isolated existences. Even in the large cities there was a minimum of contact between the staff of one hospital and another. An isolation which is now hard to appreciate. Even in the metropolis, the great teaching hospitals tended to live unto themselves, a kind of glorified independence … The Association changed all that.1 [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In today's intelligence community, elaborate background checks yield mounds of details about a prospect's life and history, but in the formative years of British intelligence between 1909-1919, these procedures were only just emerging. As with diplomatic personnel, intelligence workers needed to be "known" entities, whose discretion and background could be assured. This process of subjecting prospects to an examination in order to separate likely candidates from unsuitable ones is known today as "vetting." This paper explores the cultural practice of vetting and the ways in which twentieth-century British intelligence not only depended upon and exploited familial connections in order to gain recommendations for personnel, but more importantly, used the notion of family loyalty to shape the assumptions and realities of such intelligence work. Certainly intelligence workers were not without considerable skills, often in languages, yet other considerations such as class background, family connections, gender, and nationality were the real filters used to vet personnel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies the rising use of commercial medical assistance in early modern England. We measure individual consumption of medical and nursing services using a new dataset of debts at death between ca. 1670 and ca. 1790. Levels of consumption of medical services were high and stable in London from the 1680s. However, we find rapid growth in the provinces, in both the likelihood of using medical assistance and the sums spent on it. The structure of medical services also shifted, with an increase in "general practice," particularly by apothecaries. The expansion in medical services diffused from London and was motivated by changing preferences, not wealth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) was defined in 1969 and incorporated intothe International Classification of Diseases a decade later. To advocates of SIDS as a diagnosis, medical interest in sudden infant death was long overdue. However, the definition of SIDS lacked positive diagnostic criteria, provoking some to view it as a 'diagnostic dustbin' for the disposal of problematic cases where cause of death was unclear. This paper examines the development of medical interest in sudden infant death in Britain during the middle decades of the twentieth century. It highlights the importance of recognising the historicity of SIDS as a diagnosis facilitated by changes in law and medicine over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It suggests that SIDS provides a definitive case study of the medicalisation of life and death, and a un ique example of an officially recognised disease that had no symptoms, signs, pathology or patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article seeks to examine a frequently overlooked aspect of William Laud's career: his role in the house of lords. Attempting to move away from simplistic views of Laud as a fusty cleric, it uses official parliamentary records and relevant state papers, as well as Laud's own diary and sermons, in order to show that he was an assiduous and effective parliamentarian, relied upon by both the king and the duke of Buckingham for political advice and as a writer of speeches and political memoranda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this paper is to present a legal theory of agency selection. The theory posits why certain legal forms of agency are chosen when agencies are created by the executive branch of government. At the core of the theory is the idea that the executive branch chooses agency forms that strike a politically optimal balance between maximising its control while minimising its legal and political accountability for agency activities. This optimal balance is determined on an issue by issue basis. As such, the rise of the regulatory state has provided a means by which the executive branch of government has been able to strategically choose to divest itself of and minimise its legal accountability for the administration of government while, at the same time, maintaining effective political control of the administrative arm of government. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the letters between 20th century the scholar R.W. (Richard William) Hunt and the British historian Beryl Smalley concerning Hunt's efforts to publish his thesis paper on the English scholar Alexander Peckham titled "Alexander Neckham."

Together with the Revd Daniel Tyerman, George Bennet formed part of a deputation sent out in 1821 by the London Missionary Society with the aim of undertaking a global inspection of the state of the mission. This paper aims to map the collection that Bennet assembled in Central Polynesia during that journey and to ask what the parties involved in the collecting encounters understood to be embodied in the material forms that were collected. By paying attention to how the various agents involved in the collecting process played a role, the Bennet collection offers an appropriate case-study to query the view of missionary collecting as merely trophy collecting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Twopenny libraries first appeared in North London in 1930 and quickly spread throughout urban Britain. Their innovation was to dispense with subscription fees and charge per loan. Unlike older commercial libraries such as Mudie’s, twopenny libraries served a working-class clientele. Some twopenny libraries were standalone businesses. Many more were sidelines to existing businesses such as tobacconists’ and newsagents’ shops. Library services could be profitable in their own right, but often their main value to their proprietors was to bring customers into the shop more regularly. Established players in the book trade initially responded to twopenny libraries with alarm, but the threat they posed was limited. Their market was not the same as those of booksellers. Some public librarians made arguments along these lines about the twopenny libraries’ impact on public libraries; certainly, the two types of institution coexisted. Twopenny libraries carried a lot of so-called light fiction, but they also lent working-class readers the ‘middlebrow’ bestsellers of the 1920s and 1930s. The wider significance of the twopenny library lies in the way it problematizes the distinction commonly made between a middle-class public for new hardcover novels and a working-class readership of fiction that appeared in cheap papers and magazines. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the collection of artefacts from British excavations in Egypt and their dispersal to institutions across the world between 1880 and 1915. The scope, scale and complexity of these distributions is reviewed with a view to highlighting the complex, symbiotic relationship between British organizations that mounted such excavations on the one hand and museums on the other, and also to providing a basis from which to argue that both field and museum collecting practices were enmeshed within the same processes of ‘artefaction’. These shared processes together created a new form of museum object, here referred to as the ‘excavated artefact’. It is further suggested that the collection of artefacts for museums was one of the primary motivating factors in the establishment of a scientific archaeology in Egypt. Case-studies of the activities of the Egypt Exploration Fund and Flinders Petrie’s work are presented in order to throw these arguments into relief. An online Appendix tabulates the original distribution of objects from eef excavations to other institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Administrative and financial corruption was a central preoccupation of eighteenth-century Britain, and effective audit supposedly the sine qua non of an efficient fiscal-military state, yet no studies exist of its true extent or why audit mechanisms could prove so ineffective. Through a close study of the papers of James Brydges, Paymaster of the Forces between 1705 and 1713 and ‘a byword for corruption’, this article argues that a variety of inventive means were used to bypass the Exchequer audit, including outright falsification and forgery. Yet the Exchequer was not ineffective, and ultimately political standing determined how far corruption was detected or deterred. Where Brydges could mobilise personal and political connections with the Exchequer and other bodies such as the Comptrollers of Army Accounts, he had more success at evading scrutiny. By contrast, although the parliamentary Commissioners of Public Accounts used arbitrary and relatively unsystematic audit procedures and were motivated mainly by partisan interests, this lent them political power and motivation and thereby increased the credibility of their investigations. Less assured of political protection, Brydges therefore ceased most of his activities. Thus effective audit was not primarily the product of more impartial, rational or bureaucratic administrative structures, as most historians have suggested, but of the relative political standing of auditors versus their opponents. This has profound implications for studies of corruption and auditing during the eighteenth century and its continuities with earlier practices, and for understanding the decisive changes that occured during the nineteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The two surviving inventories of the library of the Fitzgerald Earls of Kildare bear witness to a particularly large and diverse collection of books in the Earls' castle at Maynooth, Co. Kildare. Between them, the lists record well over one hundred separate items in four languages: Latin, French, English and Irish. This paper traces the history of the library and analyses the Fitzgeralds' particular interests as book collectors and as readers. It provides the first full published set of suggested identifications and bibliographical details for the books at Maynooth. It also includes a fresh transcription of the library lists and a discussion of the manuscript context in which they are preserved. Sources like the Kildare library lists provide valuable evidence for the potential circulation of a wide range of non-native manuscripts and prints in late-medieval Ireland. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

During the long eighteenth century, an apparently minor and ephemeral object proliferated in Britain: the ticket. A significant and increasing proportion of the population encountered tickets of admission, lottery tickets, and pay tickets. Novel types emerged, including pawn tickets and Tyburn tickets; philanthropists discovered their potential for investigating and relieving poverty. Historians have not brought different instances together, but new applications of the term "ticket," and, more importantly, processes of elaboration and consolidation, suggest a variety of uses that bridged different registers and social settings. This extended early-modern capacities to express contractual obligation, affection, or allegiance through material objects and gave new form to techniques of identification. Crucial was the ticket's potential to flow, to encapsulate and then release information, access, possession, or chance. Study of charitable activities, plebeian experiences, and Methodist practices suggests how people learned to recognize and use tickets. Lower-class women and men were proficient agents as tickets intensified and shaped social interactions. These histories cast fresh light on eighteenth-century modes of social existence and the broader historical narratives constructed around them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationship between suicide and insanity in the eyes of both legal and medical professionals in nineteenth century Britain and Ireland. Both jurisdictions had a similar historical legacy in relation to the treatment of suicide, punishing sane suicides, those found felo de se, by ignominious burial and forfeiture. Legal changes between 1823 and 1882 negated the need for a verdict of temporary insanity as suicide essentially became a crime without legal punishment. Nevertheless, the rise of forensic psychiatry within the legal system meant that definitions of the temporary insanity of suicides became a controversial question for medical professionals. Similarly, the retention of distinctions of sanity and insanity for religious and insurance purposes ensured that there were spiritual and practical ramifications to a verdict of felo de se even if there were no legal consequences. The debate among doctors and legal professionals suggests that the process of "medicalization" of suicide was not, as MacDonald has suggested, driven by these elite professional groups, but rather by public opinion. While legal punishments for attempted suicide remained in force and in use, by the end of the nineteenth century medicine was seen as the main actor in the fight against this "social disease." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses former British Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel's conservative political strategy from 1832 to 1841, focusing on his efforts to pass the Controverted Elections Act of 1839, which was aimed at ensuring Great Britain's House of Commons' privileges in terms of adjudicating cases involving alleged breaches of electoral law. The author highlights controversy over Peel's proposal, including discussions of the Great Reform Act of 1832, partisanship in the British parliament, and parliamentary election committees. Special attention is paid to Peel's response to the legal case of Stockdale v. Hansard, which involved the publication of parliamentary papers.

Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, religious books proportionally lost popularity while travel books became more popular. This paper examines a hybrid of these two genres, Protestant missionary monographs, through a detailed analysis of David Cranz's 1767 History of Greenland, including the rationale behind publishing the book; its translation from German into English; how it was used as a political tool to influence British foreign policy; and how the book was received by British literary critics and scientists. This analysis demonstrates how authorial intentions that the religious and secular components of Protestant Missionary literature be considered as parts of a whole produced confusion and tension in the secular reception of such books. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper counters the tendency to retrospectively viralise the 1918–19 pandemic and to gloss the important historiographical point that, in Britain, such knowledge was in-the-making between 1918 and 1933. It traces the genesis of influenza's virus identity to British efforts in 1918–19 to specify the cause of the pandemic and it examines how, in the 1920s, the British Medical Research Council used the connection between a virus and the pandemic to justify the development of virus research and to make influenza a core problem around which it was organised. It shows that the organisation of medical virus research was inextricably linked to the pandemic before the actual discovery of flu virus in 1933. Recognising that the relationship between the virus and the disease itself has a history demands we rethink the pandemic's medical scientific legacy and the crucial role of virus research in shaping its history. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 1902 Midwives Act introduced training and supervision for midwives in England and Wales, outlawing uncertified-and-untrained midwives (handywomen) and phasing out certified-but-untrained (bona fide) midwives. This paper compares the numbers and practices of these two different types of birth attendant with each other, with qualified and certified midwives and with doctors in early twentieth-century Derbyshire during this period of change, and examines the spatial and social factors influencing women's choice of birth attendant. It finds that the new legislation did not entirely eliminate continuity in traditional practices and allegiance, and that both social and spatial factors governed the choice of delivery attendant, with fewer midwives available in rural areas and a surviving network of untrained bona fide midwives in mining communities. Within this spatial pattern, however, although wealthier women were more likely to have chosen a doctor or a qualified midwife, familiarity and loyalty allowed bona fide midwives to maintain their case loads. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In the 1930s, Labour-dominated boroughs in central London embarked on an experiment in health and social transformation, at the centre of which was the construction of new health centres. The ‘all-in’ state-run health centres in Bermondsey, Finsbury, Southwark and Woolwich attempted to provide a comprehensive array of primary and preventive health services to working people and families, close to home or work. The centres shared a model of health with several principles in common: a notion of health improvement as linked to broader social transformation through the enhancement of urban space; a seamless integration of preventive and curative health services; care delivered by multidisciplinary teams; accessibility (spatially and economically); didactic education in self-care; and democratic local governance. This paper argues that these Labour borough councils, with the support of the London County Council after 1934, played a key role in ‘making real’ what had been an amorphous health centre ideal. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses and presents a reprint of the document "Notes From Discourses Touching Religion," by Samuel Pepys, a client of England's King James II and president of the Royal Society. It examines Pepys' religious views, commenting on his religious allegiance, biblical criticism, and church history. The author considers the patron-client relationship between James II and Pepys and reflects on James II's efforts to promote Catholicism. Pepys' views on the Church of England are also addressed.

This article challenges the notion that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is incompatible with neo-liberalism. It argues that CSR is not a countervailing force that follows neo-liberal market exposure. Instead of re-embedding global liberalism, CSR complements liberalization and substitutes for institutionalized social solidarity. Evidence from the UK, one of the world's leading jurisdictions for responsible business, supports these claims. In Britain during the past 30 years, neo-liberalism and CSR have co-evolved. CSR has been a quid pro quo for lighter regulation; it has compensated for some of the social dislocations that result from unfettering markets, thereby legitimating business during the ‘unleashing’ of capitalism, and it appeals to moral sensibilities, justifying and legitimating business leaders in a way that instrumental rationality alone cannot. The paper draws on original sources to shed light on the origins and growth of Business in the Community, one of the world's leading business-led CSR coalitions, since the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the views of philosopher John Locke concerning the franchise in Great Britain in the late seventeenth century. It examines a draft of an election bill found in the papers of English politician Edward Clarke that was annotated by Locke. The author comments on election regulation and concern about corruption and bribery. He also reflects on Locke's Whiggism, examining what is referred to as Court Whiggery and Country Whiggery. The relationship between population, wealth, and representation is considered.

The post-devolution settlement in 1999 created the environment for major national policy and legislative reform across all dimensions of Scottish life. This paper seeks to understand better the place of child and family-oriented social work in post-devolution Scotland. Scottish social work policy in general and children's services policy in particular are analysed to consider where policy makers appear to locate social work resources. An alternative reading of these post-devolution policies suggests that a policy ‘effect’ is being produced that appears to lock social work out of early intervention and prevention. Ambiguities and hidden elements reveal an identity for social work in policy that primarily aligns it with control functions where balancing care and control and the use of involuntary measures is to the fore—the ‘hard cases’. This analysis points to the importance of social work taking a critical distance to policy formation and what it may mean for its identity and contribution to meeting the needs of the most vulnerable children growing up in Scotland today. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the connection between the army, the press and the Unionist party during the so-called ‘Curragh incident’ of March 1914 in which certain army officers expressed their unwillingness to impose Home Rule on Ireland. Although there is much scholarship on this aspect of Irish history, there has been no study of the crucial role played by the press and the army’s attempts to use it for political purposes. This article centres upon a thorough examination of a broad range of newspapers and other supporting material in order to provide a fresh perspective on the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the education of tuberculous children in Northern Ireland from 1921 to 1955. It shows that there were regional differences and deficiencies in the extent of provision in Northern Ireland. Although rates of tuberculosis were higher for Irish children than their English counterparts, the Irish School Medical Service was not developed until at least 16 years later than in England and Wales. Other regional differences are revealed in the paucity of open-air education. This was considered the ideal but places were available for comparatively few children. Many continued to attend the same school as before their diagnosis whilst others were nursed at home and did not receive any schooling. We can obtain a much deeper picture of the impact of these deficiencies on tuberculous children and their families by supplementing the documentary sources with evidence obtained from oral interviews. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]