Search

Seven British income tax disputes over depreciation (1875–1897) are analyzed in this contextual study. The legal cases reveal how uncertainty over meanings for “depreciation,” “profits,” and “capital” reflected social and political tensions which had commercial accounting implications. Case analysis yields evidence of how judicial support reinforced the Inland Revenue's technical authority over a competing tax administration institution and enabled its modern regulatory control over taxpayers to be constructed. The British example illustrates the ways in which technical and administrative practices may emerge from the contestation of meanings that takes place both in a wide political context and within particular institutional settings.

In 1855 Jane Carlyle, wife of historian Thomas Carlyle, appeared before the General Commissioners of Income Tax to appeal against her husband's assessment. Moulded around her memoire of the appeal, this paper explores the process of and social context for mid-nineteenth century English income taxation of profits, and the associated accountings and processes of accountability. It reveals how local tax authorities employed sovereign powers as the basis for regulatory control. The paper outlines conditions of possibility for the emergence of modern Inland Revenue powers based on disciplinary technologies.

The hopes at the end of the First World War for a new era in international relations and an end to war had been based on the concept of ‘collective security’, of which the twin pillars were disarmament and the League of Nations. The developments of the first few years of the 1930s seriously undermined these hopes. The long-awaited Disarmament Conference had failed to reach an agreement on land armaments limitation. Despite the Washington and London conferences, agreement on naval limitation was by no means complete. Germany was firmly under the control of a regime which had openly expansionist aims and was blatantly rearming. The messages emanating from the other major fascist state, Italy, were somewhat confusing, but Mussolini’s constant incitement of the Italians to warlike attitudes, his glorying in the instruments of war, the savage nature of the Italian reprisals on the rebels against their rule in Libya and their fomenting of discord in Yugoslavia led some foreign diplomats to see Mussolini as ‘one of the chief existing dangers to European peace’.1 While the hopes for disarmament and for a growing commitment to peace were disappointed in Europe, the League had also failed to curb Japanese aggression in Manchuria.

The statesmen who met in Paris in 1919 to draw up a peace settlement faced a daunting task. Lloyd George, the leader of the British delegation, claimed that ‘it is not one continent that is engaged — every continent is affected’.1 The collapse of the four empires of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia and Turkey and the demands of previously subject national groups necessitated a major redrawing of the map in Europe and the Middle East. In Africa, China and the Pacific, the future of Germany’s former possessions had to be considered. Many diverse and often conflicting hopes and aspirations depended on the outcome of the negotiations. Some were inevitably disappointed and those disappointments fuelled the criticism of contemporaries and have influenced the judgement of historians. The fact that the settlement was followed twenty years later by another major war has led to the assumption that it must have been fatally flawed. There has been less agreement on the nature of the flaws. Its treatment of Germany has been criticised both as too harsh and as not severe enough. The peacemakers have been accused of failing to appreciate the full strength of nationalist aspirations but they have also been blamed for too easily acquiescing in the break-up of the multinational Austro-Hungarian empire. Most frequently the settlement has been criticised for failing to fulfil expectations that it would be the first major act of the new open diplomacy of which Wilson had been the advocate.

'the policy of Russia has long been impregnated with the spirit of deadly hostility to England' asserted the leader writer in the Morning Herald in October 1838.1 Similar comments about Russia were a regular feature of the editorials of almost all of the major daily and periodical publications in England at that time. From small indications of suspicion and antipathy in the 1 820s, a nearly universally expressed fear and hatred of Russia had emerged ten years later. So intense was this feeling that less convinced contemporaries, recognizing that it was much more than the usual dislike of all that was strange and foreign, referred to it as Russophobia.2 Historians have studied this phenomenon in various ways. They have sought to investigate its effect upon the formulation of British foreign policy; they have tried to explain its origins and what fed and stimulated it during the 1830s and at subsequent periods during the nineteenth century. Some have put great emphasis upon the conflicting economic policies of the two states, others on the growing rivalry in the Near East and Central Asia, and others on the different internal political systems.3 On one point, however, there has been widespread agreement, that in the 1830s one man and his collaborators were largely responsible for the initial surge of Russophobia. That man was David Urquhart. One of the few contemporaries who tried to stem the tide of Urquhart's influence, Richard Cobden, wrote in 1836: 'One active mind [i.e.

After Hugh got sick and went back to England, Amy was content to live without a man. It was partly that the afterglow lasted, in remembered scenes that replayed ceaselessly, illuminating resignation. And then, the old friendly-fun-sophisticated love affair had always ended wretchedly for her: half-love, not enough to marry on, too much to break off, dwindling in half-life for ages. When friends reported their romantic syndromes"Amy, I fucked it up the same way again!" -she listened with the swamp closing over her head. How could people manufacture the causes of their suffering ? She rarely spoke of Hugh, and her pride increased in isolation. She promised herself: no man until he's right. "You can do it, lead a chaste life," she told herself. "You've had the disadvantages of being Irish Catholic, might as well get the good of it too." No more squandering Sunday on a walk in the park with some nice guy, when she could be writing. No more staring at the big black telephone. Then she met Francis. It was the graduate Shakespeare class, no hey nonny no, but a tired collection of Ph.D. commuters. One night a tall young man with redgold hair and beard livened it by describing Olivier's Othello in an enthusiastic rush of words, big gestures. Afterwards, waiting for the elevator, the young man was doing a slow heel-to-toe dance, his blue eyes abstracted. Amy spoke to him. He went into more detail. He spoke well. Amy tried to imagine the long powerful line of a great performance, like the path of a night plane shot in time delay.