Search results
In 1841, the Welsh sent their first missionary, Thomas Jones, to evangelise the tribal peoples of the Khasi Hills of north-east India. This book follows Jones from rural Wales to Cherrapunji, the wettest place on earth and now one of the most Christianised parts of India. It is about the piety and practices, the perceptions and prejudices of people in early nineteenth century Wales. The book is also about the ways in which the religious ambitions of those same people operated upon the lives and ideas of indigenous societies of the distant Khasi Hills of north-eastern India. It foregrounds broader political, scientific, racial and military ideologies that mobilised the Khasi Hills into an interconnected network of imperial control. Its themes are universal: crises of authority, the loneliness of geographical isolation, sexual scandal, greed and exploitation, personal and institutional dogma, individual and group morality. In analysing the individual lives that flash in and out of this history, the book is a performance within the effort to break down the many dimensions of distance that the imperial scene prescribes. It pays attention to a 'networked conception of imperial interconnection'. The book discusses Jones's evangelising among the Khasis as well as his conflicts with church and state authority. It also discusses some aspects of the micro-politics of mission and state in the two decades immediately following Thomas Jones's death. While the Welsh missionary impact was significant, its 'success' or indeed its novelty, needs to be measured against the pre-existing activities of British imperialists.
Roman Catholic women's congregations are an enigma of nineteenth century social history. Over 10,000 women, establishing and managing significant Catholic educational, health care and social welfare institutions in England and Wales, have virtually disappeared from history. In nineteenth-century England, representations of women religious were ambiguous and contested from both within and without the convent. This book places women religious in the centre of nineteenth-century social history and reveals how religious activism shaped the identity of Catholic women religious. It is devoted to evolution of religious life and the early monastic life of the women. Catholic women were not pushed into becoming women religious. On the basis of their available options, they chose a path that best suited their personal, spiritual, economic and vocational needs. The postulancy and novitiate period formed a rite of passage that tested the vocation of each aspirant. The book explores the religious activism of women religious through their missionary identity and professional identity. The labour of these women was linked to their role as evangelisers. The book deals with the development of a congregation's corporate identity which brought together a disparate group of women under the banner of religious life. It looks specifically at class and ethnicity and the women who entered religious life, and identifies the source of authority for the congregation and the individual sister.
’ suspect. She was twenty-six years of age, the average age of infant murder and concealment of birth suspects during this period. This figure reflects trends observed outside Ireland. Lynn Abrams and Tim Siddons also calculated that the average age of suspects of newborn child murder in Shetland from 1699 to 1920 and in Scotland from 1812 to 1930 respectively was twenty-six years.51 In nineteenth-century Wales, infanticide suspects were, typically, twentyseven years of age.52 In south-west Germany in the early modern period, the mean age was twenty-five years.53 Jonathan
and the British, 1919–39 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 University Press, 1993); Jeff Hill and Jack Williams, Sport and identity in the North of England (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996). An idea developed further by R. J. Moore-Colyer, ‘Gentlemen, horses and the turf in nineteenth century Wales’, Welsh history review, 16 (1992), 308–23. For a good overview see Peter Bailey, ‘The politics and poetics of modern British leisure’, Rethinking history, 3:2 (1999), 131–75. Geoffrey Best, Mid-Victorian Britain 1851–1875 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1971); F. M. L
History: A Guide to Research (Birmingham: Genealogical Pub. Co., 2nd edn 1998). 2 Geraint H. Jenkins, A Concise History of Wales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 191–2. 3 David W. Howell, Land and People in Nineteenth-Century Wales (London: Routledge, 1977), chap. 2, pp. 95–7 and also Howell, The Rural Poor in Eighteenth-Century Wales (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2000), p. 120, which documents cases of leaseholders emigrating just prior to the expiration of their leases in Caernarfonshire in1793, anticipating rising rents and renewed pressure
Marxian Model of Enclosures’, Journal of Development Economics, 1 (1975), 287–336. Cohen and Weitzman, ‘A Marxian Model’, p. 316. D. W. Howell, Land and People in Nineteenth-Century Wales (London, 1978). C. Hann, ‘A New Double Movement? Anthropological Perspectives on Property in the Age of Neoliberalism’, Socio-economic Review, 5:2 (2007), 287–318. R. S. Eckaus, ‘The Market Structure and Performance in Traditional Agriculture’ (unpublished). E. R. Wolf, Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1969). 06_Fergus_Ch-3.indd 79 8/1/2013 9:13:53 PM
intense engagement with the major imaginative writers of the age. To remove him early in this decade, before the full panoply of his bardic vision could take hold, might just be enough to rescue nineteenth-century Wales from much of its colourful absurdity and spare later scholars his obsessive tampering with crucial medieval texts. A counterfactual assassination must be thoroughly plausible. Shooting is clumsy (and surprisingly hard to organise), but various other opportunities do present themselves. It is not hard to imagine Williams actually setting off, as he
portions of the South Wales coalfield for exploitation. Steam locomotion didn’t just provide access to markets; rail locomotives and steam navigation were core users of the renowned steam coal of the Cynon and Rhondda valleys. Welsh coal and the key transport innovations of the nineteenth century were locked together in a mutually r einforcing growth spiral. Integrating Atlantic slavery into such a drawn-out and idiosyncratic development path is challenging. Yet there is merit in doing so. After all, the industries that flourished in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
. Miskell, ‘“The heroic Irish doctor”? Irish immigrants in the medical profession in nineteenth century Wales’, in O. Walsh (ed.), Ireland Abroad: Politics and Professions in the Nineteenth Century (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2003), p. 82. 41 L. Kelly, Irish Women in Medicine, c.1880s–1920s: Origins, Education and Careers (Manchester University Press: Manchester, 2013). 42 G. Jones, ‘“Strike out boldly for the prizes that are available to you”’, 55. 43 Greta Jones has made this assertion as regards the destination of Irish doctors in her article ‘“A mysterious
the nineteenth century Wales and, in particular, Snowdonia could be and were represented in terms of elevation – the emphasis being on its distinctive peak. This is, as I show, in marked contrast to the so-called mountains of New South Wales. We shift now from Wales to focus on New South Wales (NSW) and the representations of mountainous landscape there in relation both to external colonialism and the