Royal Tourists, Colonial Subjects, and the Making of a British World, 1860-1911 examines the ritual space of nineteenth-century royal tours of empire and the diverse array of historical actors who participated in them. The book is a tale of royals who were ambivalent and bored partners in the project of empire; colonial administrators who used royal ceremonies to pursue a multiplicity of projects and interests or to imagine themselves as African chiefs or heirs to the Mughal emperors; local princes and chiefs who were bullied and bruised by the politics of the royal tour, even as some of them used the tour to symbolically appropriate or resist British cultural power; and settlers of European descent and people of colour in the empire who made claims on the rights and responsibilities of imperial citizenship and as co-owners of Britain’s global empire. Royal Tourists, Colonial Subjects, and the Making of a British World suggests that the diverse responses to the royal tours of the nineteenth century demonstrate how a multi-centred British-imperial culture was forged in the empire and was constantly made and remade, appropriated and contested. In this context, subjects of empire provincialized the British Isles, centring the colonies in their political and cultural constructions of empire, Britishness, citizenship, and loyalty.
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Justice and mercy
Moral theology and the exercise of law in twelfth-century England
This book addresses one of the most acute moral and political dilemmas of the twelfth century: how did a judge determine how to punish an offender, and what was the purpose of such punishment? It examines how English judges weighed a choice which, if made wrongly, could endanger both the political community and their own souls. That choice was between two ideas which twelfth-century intellectual and legal thought understood as irreconcilable opposites: justice and mercy. By examining the moral pressures on English judges, Justice and Mercy provides a new way into medieval legal culture: rather than looking at the laws that judges applied, it reconstructs the moral world of the judges themselves. The book offers a fresh synthesis of the disciplines of intellectual history and legal history, examining theological commentaries, moral treatises, letters, sermons and chronicles in order to put the creation of the English common law into its moral context. This broad vision brings to light the shared language of justice and mercy, an idea which dominated twelfth-century discourse and had the potential to polarise political opinion. Justice and Mercy challenges many of the prevailing narratives surrounding the common law, suggesting that judges in church courts and royal courts looked strikingly similar, and that English judges had more in common with their continental counterparts than is often assumed.
‘Justice and Mercy is a remarkable book…the book resounds with the historiographic traditions and conflicts among the different schools of legal history and of intellectual history, both in Britain and on the continent. While the author is obviously well aware of them, she manages to avoid the pitfalls of adding to these ongoing conflicts.
Esther Cohen, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
The Medieval Review
Series: Artes Liberales
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Incest in Sweden, 1680–1940
A history of forbidden relations
This study brings out the norms and culturally dependent values that formed the
basis of the theoretical regulation and the practical handling of incest cases
in Sweden 1680–1940, situating this development in a wider European context. It
discusses a broad variety of general human subjects that are as important today
as they were hundreds of years ago, such as love, death, family relations,
religion, crimes, and punishments.
By analysing criminal-case material and
applications for dispensation, as well as political and legislative sources, the
incest phenomenon is explored from different perspectives over a long time
period. It turns out that although the incest debate has been dominated by
religious, moral, and later medical beliefs, ideas about love, age, and family
hierarchies often influenced the assessment of individual incest cases. These
unspoken values could be decisive – sometimes life-determining – for the outcome
of various incest cases.
The book will interest scholars from several
different fields of historical research, such as cultural history, the history
of crime and of sexuality, family history, history of kinship, and historical
marriage patterns. The long time period also broadens the number of potential
readers. Since the subject concerns general human issues that are as current
today as they were three centuries ago, the topic will also appeal to a
non-academic audience.
The environmental turn in postwar Sweden
A new history of knowledge
This book tells the story of how modern environmentalism emerged in postwar Sweden. It shows that the ‘environmental turn’ in Sweden occurred as early as the autumn of 1967 and that natural scientists led the way. The most influential was the chemist Hans Palmstierna, who was both an active Social Democrat and a regular contributor to the nation’s leading morning paper. Thus, he had a unique platform from which to exert influence. Drawing on his rich and previously untapped personal archive, the book explores how popular environmental engagement developed in Sweden. The book also highlights the journalist Barbro Soller, who in the mid-1960s became Sweden’s – and indeed one of the world’s – first environmental journalists. Moreover, it demonstrates how the pioneering historian Birgitta Odén, in collaboration with the Swedish National Defence Research Institute, sought to launch an interdisciplinary research programme based in the humanities and the social sciences as early as 1967–1968. An important conclusion of the book is that environmentalism emerged in Swedish society before there was an actual environmental movement. However, from 1969 onwards new social movements began to alter the dynamics. Hence, by the time the United Nations arranged the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in June 1972, environmental knowledge had become a source of conflict between rival interests. The environmental turn in postwar Sweden is the first full-length study to emerge from the Lund Centre for the History of Knowledge (LUCK), and demonstrates how its specific take on the history of knowledge enhances historical scholarship.