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The poor laws were a fundamental component of nineteenth-century government throughout the United Kingdom. Ratepayer, pauper, poor law guardian or functionary, almost everyone had an interest in the poor law system. This book presents a study of the nature and operation of the Irish poor law system in the post-famine period. It traces the expansion of the system to encompass a wide range of welfare services, and explains the ideological and political context in which the expansion took place. After a general survey of the poor law system in the nineteenth century, the book analyses the poor law system in Ireland and the role of central government in overseeing the system's operation. It explores the impact of board nationalisation both on poor law administration and on the relationship between central and local administrators. Nationalist guardians were quick to realise that their powers under the Evicted Poor Protection Act could be used to support participants in the land campaign. The government's approach to distress in 1879-1880 was intended to avoid the mistakes made during the Great Famine. A more nuanced analysis of the labourers acts is provided here encompassing their origin, reception and operation. The poor law system catered predominantly for women, but was administered and staffed predominantly by men. The strength of Irish nationalism lay in its ability to construct a cohesive political community that cut across gender and class boundaries. By redefining criteria for relief, nationalist guardians helped to introduce a greater degree of flexibility into the relief system.
mortal sins such as homicide), distributive justice was important to welfare (as different people needed maintaining in different conditions in society according to their status). The provision of welfare was important to sovereignty and the stability of the political community before the development of the welfare state (and the comunero revolt had taught Charles V that this was more than rhetorical). The Crown provided welfare in a variety of ways. One of these we have met before, the merced
history from the writing of annals or chronicles.3 These consequences – and the debate they triggered – are best approached by examining the respective relationships between truth and utility, truth and opinion, truth and ‘fiction’ and, finally, between truth and lies. Rhetoric itself possesses utility or advantage in that, according to Quintilian, it was essential both to the origins of human association in political communities (when founders of cities used learned speech in order to bring wandering multitudes together and unite them into peoples) and to the
beyond the individual judge’s probity and virtue, and into concerns about how judicial persuasion and the inappropriate application of pardon or punishment could damage the political community. In this chapter, the earthly stakes are high. Mercy: politic, political and rhetorical choices As seen in the previous chapter, in the letters of Gilbert Foliot and Adam Marsh, mercy was a thing to be asked for, to be considered by the judge, but not always a thing to be given. Argument and persuasion could be used to advance justice
1951 by founding the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC). After attempts to set up a European Defence Community and a European Political Community failed in 1954, negotiations between the ‘Six’ (belonging to the overall successful ECSC) in 1957 led to the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC). However, West European integration projects and Central and Eastern European adaptation to Soviet communism were overshadowed (and intensified) by pronounced East–West tensions, as expressed in the 1950–53 Korean War, the formal division of Germany into two
with the wider political community. It is therefore worth asking what kind of understanding of the institution readers might have gained through their encounter with chronicles. Elizabethan MPs undoubtedly had a powerful sense of the importance of history.2 Thomas Norton, the archetypal man of business, declared that, through the study of history, a man ‘learneth the state of times past, the doyngs of men, their counsels, their gouernance, and lastly their successes. By beholdyng of those, as in a glasse, he discerneth and iudgeth rightly of thinges present, and
On 25 January 1474, in Dijon, Charles the bold, robed in silk, gold and precious jewels, wearing a headpiece giving the illusion of a crown, expressed cryptically in front of his subjects his desire to become a king. Three years later, the battle of Nancy, taking Charles to his death, plunged the Great Principality of Burgundy into the drama of its split. This book, innovative and essential, not only explores Burgundian historiography and history but offers a complete synthesis about the nature of politics in this space considered from both the north and the south. Focusing on political ideologies, the book’s scope is wide-ranging and raises a number of important issues about the nature of the medieval state, the signification of the nation under the Ancien Regime, the role of warfare in the creation of political power, the impact of political loyalties in the exercise of government and even the place of symbolic communication and geographical knowledge in a wide territory lying from northern county of Holland to the southern grapevines of Mâcon. In examining all these issues, the book challenges a number of existing ideas about the Burgundian state. Questioning the means to create a viable political community, it offers a completely new interpretation of Burgundian history in the later Middle Ages, and new ideas also relevant to the historians of other European states in the later Middle Ages.
In the twenty years between the end of the First World War and the start of the Second, the French empire reached its greatest physical extent. At the end of the First World War, the priority of the French political community was to consolidate and expand the French empire for, inter alia, industrial mobilisation and global competition for strategic resources. The book revisits debates over 'associationism' and 'assimilationism' in French colonial administration in Morocco and Indochina, and discusses the Jonnart Law in Algeria and the role of tribal elites in the West African colonies. On the economy front, the empire was tied to France's monetary system, and most colonies were reliant on the French market. The book highlights three generic socio-economic issues that affected all strata of colonial society: taxation and labour supply, and urban development with regard to North Africa. Women in the inter-war empire were systematically marginalised, and gender was as important as colour and creed in determining the educational opportunities open to children in the empire. With imperialist geographical societies and missionary groups promoting France's colonial connection, cinema films and the popular press brought popular imperialism into the mass media age. The book discusses the four rebellions that shook the French empire during the inter-war years: the Rif War of Morocco, the Syrian revolt, the Yen Bay mutiny in Indochina, and the Kongo Wara. It also traces the origins of decolonisation in the rise of colonial nationalism and anti-colonial movements.
In 1660 the four nations of the British Isles were governed by one imperial crown but by three parliaments. The abolition of the Scottish and Irish Parliaments in 1707 and 1800 created a United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland centred upon the Westminster legislature. This book takes state formation. A number of important points emerge, however, the book deals with three. The first and most obvious point is that the unions were limited in scope and were palpably not incorporating . The second point is that, depending upon the issue, parliament required or encouraged not only different arguments but different voices. The final conclusion to emerge from these essays is that utility of 'national identity' as a way of understanding how people in the period conceived of themselves and their relationship to the state is not as clear and certain as might be first thought. National identity was one amongst a number of geo-political communities people might belong to, albeit a very important one. Inasmuch as the Westminster parliament provided a forum in which debates about how to legislate for three kingdoms took place, in its own way it helped to reinforce awareness of that difference. Liverpool petitions allow us to explore the intersection between policy debate and imperial identity during a pivotal era in the evolution of the British Empire. After 1832, virtual representation, though it survived in many different ways, became associated in the colonial context with nabobs and planters, the very demons of 'old Corruption'.
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.