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7 Class and ethnicity The theme of perfection resonates throughout the nineteenth-century writings of and about women religious. Catherine McAuley reminded the Sisters of Mercy that ‘Religion refines and elevates the character. A perfect Religious is a perfect lady.’1 Thomas Marshall, one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools, saw women religious as: belonging to a higher grade of society – this is almost universally the case in female communities – yet in the previous cultivation of their minds, the possession of more ample attainments, and a far more careful
attracted the attention of historians of Roman Catholicism. The Canadian Catholic Church’s efforts to attach itself to organisations such as the St Patrick’s Society and the Hibernian Society in 1850s Toronto have been seen as an example of a Catholic attempt to fuse Roman Catholicism to an Irish ethnic consciousness. 4 Historians of Anglicanism have so far said little about the Church of
This exploration of one of the most concentrated immigrant communities in Britain combines a new narrative history, a theoretical analysis of the evolving relationship between progressive left politics and ethnic minorities, and a critique of political multiculturalism. Its central concern is the perennial question of how to propagate an effective radical politics in a multicultural society: how to promote greater equality that benefits both ethnic minorities and the wider population, and why so little has been achieved. It charts how the Bengali Muslims in London’s East End have responded to the pulls of class, ethnicity and religion; and how these have been differently reinforced by wider political movements. Drawing on extensive recorded interviews, ethnographic observation, and long sorties into the local archives, it recounts and analyses the experiences of many of those who took part in over six decades of political history that range over secular nationalism, trade unionism, black radicalism, mainstream local politics, Islamism, and the rise and fall of the Respect Coalition. Through this Bengali case study and examples from wider immigrant politics, it traces the development and adoption of the concepts of popular frontism and revolutionary stages theory and of the identity politics that these ideas made possible. It demonstrates how these theories and tactics have cut across class-based organisation and acted as an impediment to tackling cross-cultural inequality; and it argues instead for a left alternative that addresses fundamental socio-economic divisions.
This book examines the changing nature of Catholicism in modern Scotland by placing a significant emphasis on women religious. It highlights the defining role they played in the transformation and modernisation of the Catholic Church as it struggled to cope with unprecedented levels of Irish migration. The institutions and care-networks that these women established represented a new age in social welfare that served to connect the church with Scotland's emerging civil society. The book examines how the church reacted to liberalism, legislative reform, the rise of evangelicalism and the continued growth of Irish migration between the late 1820s and the late 1850s. A mutual aversion to the Irish and a loyalty to nation and state inspired a recusant and ultramontane laity to invest heavily in a programme of church transformation and development. The recruitment of the Ursulines of Jesus, the first community of nuns to return to Scotland since the Reformation, is highlighted as a significant step towards legitimising Catholic respectability. The book focuses on the recruitment and influence of women religious. It also focuses on the issue of identity by considering how gender and ethnicity influenced the development of these religious communities and how this was connected with the broader campaign to transform Catholic culture in Scotland. The book also examines the development of Catholic education in Scotland between the late 1840s and 1900 and prioritises the role played by women religious in this process.
, where German speakers in the nineteenth century formed minorities but where, it was claimed, Germans had played historic leading roles. Germans, they said, should continue to be the leading linguistic-cum-ethnic group here, since they excelled when judged by the standards of educational and economic attainments. Other groups would no longer accept this. By the late 1860s, opposition was growing among the Slavic peoples of Cisleithania and, in particular, the Czech political classes. This generated much concern among the German liberals of Bohemia, where voting
featured elected members of the City Council, teachers, Baron Albin Spinette in his capacity as general secretary of the Catholic Central Organisation and a priest, Augustin Count Galen, of the Order of St Benedict. Father Galen set the tone in a talk entitled ‘The Jewish-Freemason Struggle against the Schools.’ The meeting heard of a conspiracy by a coalition of ‘ethnic-religious’ and ideological enemies. Father Galen described the enemies of the Church as being responsible for attacks ‘on political, social and religious grounds,’ aiming to ‘tear our people away from
Democratic Party. 89 This discrimination had effects on the capacity of ordinary people to earn a living, to care for their families, to lead decent lives. But it also erected significant civic and ethnic barriers between people, and spelled out who belonged in this state and who did not. 90 An open, formal programme by the state against Jews was not needed. It was happening all the time. New international relations By 1936, violence and unrest were frequent presences, in varying degrees, in Vienna and across Austria. Both Dollfuss and Schuschnigg had tried to
Turner for pointing out this parallel. 42 Swayne, Parson’s Pleasure , p. 240. 43 Steven Fielding, Class and Ethnicity: Irish Catholics in England 1880–1939 (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1993), p. 75; for the importance of the Catholic ceremony, see Charlotte Wildman, ‘Religious Selfhoods and the City in Inter-War Manchester’, Urban History 38 (2011), pp. 103–23; see also Charlotte Wildman, ‘The Spectacle of the City in
that tradition, although focused more specifically on the nature of theology as a civil and public discourse. 111 Another direction of engagement was that of race and interfaith relations. Like some other northern and Midlands cathedrals at the end of the twentieth century, Manchester began to make a name for itself as a focus of discussion and reflection, and of worship and action, on the relationship between different ethnic and faith groups in the city. Though no one could accuse him of being a one
, regional identities, and alternative and overlapping identities. Britishness, she says, as opposed to Englishness, ‘is a synthetic and capacious concept with no necessary ethnic or cultural overtones’ (Colley, 1999). This clearly has implications for Western liberal democracies and the treatment of migrants and minorities. Who decides when to close borders and when to open up citizenship from beyond the nation-state? Whose interests are paramount? While liberal theorists of citizenship place culture at the heart of liberal democracy and citizenship, other political