History
The introduction presents an overview of the architecture of the nineteenth-century women’s movement. It provides a discussion of the context of its emergence and development. It analyses the intellectual heritage at the basis of women’s claims, and the influence of radical religious and political milieus in the fertilization of the emancipation movement.
Historians have approached Jacobitism in many different ways, and here they are divided up into three groups: the optimists, who assume that the Jacobites were an important political movement that could have succeeded; the pessimists, who accept they were important but doubt they could have succeeded; and the rejectionists, who regard time spent studying Jacobitism as time wasted. The chapter then outlines the historiography of the subject and describes new developments in the field, most notably the explosion of work on Irish Jacobitism, the role of women in the movement and Jacobitism in America and the empire.
There were two forms of Jacobite exile: a physical one overseas and a spiritual one at home. In the aftermath of defeat in the British Isles waves of Jacobites fled into exile in Europe and the wider world and had there to make new lives for themselves. Some did so by becoming pirates who made a living by attacking the British merchant marine, but mainly the exiles became soldiers, entrepreneurs and merchants in the service of other European great powers. Tens of thousands of young men also chose voluntarily to leave Ireland (and to a lesser extent Scotland) to enlist in the Irish brigades in France and Spain. These multi-layered ethnic and geographic constituencies created an overseas Jacobite community that was loyal to the exiled Stuarts and sought to sustain and further the Jacobite cause through their networks and influence on the Continent and elsewhere. Back in the British Isles, the waning of the Jacobite community and the final collapse of the cause after 1759 dispersed the movement politically, but the hostility to the prevailing order the cause had engendered among them was transmitted by old Jacobites into new causes and further opposition to the Whig regime.
The Jacobites were part and parcel of the regular social hierarchy and social order within the British Isles, and the social dynamics of eighteenth-century society in the British Isles are accordingly sketched here. The Jacobites, however, developed a strong subculture which separated the core elements of the movement from the mainstream. In effect the key constituencies: the Catholics, the Nonjurors and the Tory/Anglicans within this subculture then became part of a distinct milieu that sustained a deep, generation on generation opposition to the prevailing order even to the point of death.
The product of forty years of research by one of the foremost historians of Jacobitism, this book is a comprehensive revision of Professor Szechi’s popular 1994 survey of the Jacobite movement in the British Isles and Europe. Like the first edition, it is undergraduate-friendly, providing an enhanced chronology, a convenient introduction to the historiography and a narrative of the history of Jacobitism, alongside topics specifically designed to engage student interest. This includes Jacobitism as a uniting force among the pirates of the Caribbean and as a key element in sustaining Irish peasant resistance to English imperial rule. As the only comprehensive introduction to the field, the book will be essential reading for all those interested in early modern British and European politics.
The three kingdoms were at war for nineteen of the twenty-five years that followed the Revolution of 1688 and it was in this context that the Jacobites developed an underground movement in each of the three kingdoms and a shadow-government-in-exile. These sought to undermine the new order by political and propaganda subversion and to overthrow it by violent uprisings. But the Jacobite shadow-government and the Jacobite movement in each kingdom faced different problems and was presented with different opportunities. The Jacobite court was the site of a prolonged struggle between the movement’s Protestant and Catholic parties, while each kingdom’s Jacobites responded to the opportunities and problems they faced in different ways and with different levels of success. Hence the creation of a pragmatic government-in-exile, the decline of Jacobitism in England, the consolidation of the Jacobite base in Ireland and the development there of a culture of resistance, and the rise of Jacobitism in Scotland as a consequence of the constitutional Union of England and Scotland in 1707.
The period after the Hanoverian succession in 1714 presented the Jacobites with new opportunities which they attempted to exploit by a major uprising in 1715. Despite widespread support for the Jacobite cause (particularly in Scotland because of the Union) George I and the Whig Ascendancy that came in with him were able to hold on to power and comprehensively defeat their Jacobite enemies. In the aftermath the Jacobites had to reconstruct the movement in England and Scotland and find a way to overthrow the Hanoverian kings and their Whig ministers. This led to the English Jacobites’ Atterbury plot in 1720–2, the discovery of which, and the arrests that followed, shattered the movement there for a generation. Meanwhile the Irish Jacobites waged their own cultural struggle against the English-controlled government of Ireland with considerably more success, and Scots Jacobitism steadily revived as a consequence of the Whig regime’s continued failure to deal effectively with Scotland’s grievances as a consequence of the Union.
Following recent historiography, the chapter calls into question the overlapping of the foundation of the Red Cross and the origins of humanitarianism. At the same time it explains why the birth of the ICRC marked a turning point: it led to the completion of acts that were already in progress, it catalysed the different forces in action and it intercepted shared opinions and feelings. In the first instance the new organisation directed aid and treatment work towards war victims, marking for a long time the main boundaries of humanitarian action. As well as this, the initiatives promoted by the Genevan committee as early as the beginning of the 1860s for soldiers struck down by enemy fire or illness encouraged an interpenetration between humanitarianism and warfare. This took a leap forward in the Franco-Prussian War and then again in the First World War. At the same time, Europe became the centre-stage for humanitarian operations.
In the feminist Pantheon John Stuart Mill and William Thompson have always featured high, somewhat screening the constellation of progressive literati, men of thought, letters and action who also vindicated and promoted women’s rights. It is the purpose of this book that these men’s voices can be heard. Male voices on women’s rights brings together a unique collection of original nineteenth-century texts, mixing seminal, little-known, or forgotten writings ranging from 1809 to 1913. It comes as a timely complement to the rare scholarly studies undertaken in recent years on men’s roles in the history of feminism, and will be welcomed by anyone interested in its intellectual sources.
The documents, drawn from diaries, essays, parliamentary speeches, pamphlets, newspaper articles, or sermons, testify to the part played by the radical tradition, liberal political culture, religious dissent, and economic criticism in the development of women’s politics in nineteenth–century Britain. They also give some useful insight in the (often emotional) tensions, contradictions, or ambiguities of positions provoked by shifting patterns of masculinity and re-definitions of femininity, and will help revise common assumptions and misconceptions regarding male attitudes to sex equality. This text collection provides more than just source reading: Its substantial historical introduction adds value to the interpretative framework preceding all selected extracts, thus rendered immediately exploitable by students and teachers alike.
A short introduction offers an overview on the first part of the book, which opens with the earthquake of Lisbon (1755) and it analyses a long time frame (until the end of the nineteenth century). The different chapters reconstruct the emergence of a new ‘culture of sensibility’, the establishment of the anti-slavery movement and the development of relief activities in the colonial territories, at the will as much of the missionaries as of the administrators sent from the metropolises. Through these events and processes, the practices, knowledge and experience accumulated in Western societies that later encouraged the setting up of the contemporary humanitarian system. The first part of the volume examines the ‘archaeological’ phase (in Foucault’s sense of the term) of the development of that system.