History

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The Catholic threat neutralised
Paul Smith

Apart from military force, the common law was the most powerful instrument of the English administration in the control of Ireland. Sir John Davies was its most articulate advocate and imagined that the common law would pervade almost all aspects of life as it did in England. For Catholics, the common law became of increasing importance in the seventeenth century, particularly in relation to land ownership and the practice of religion. But could a legal system which emanated from a polity founded on Protestantism accommodate a Catholic population? The Irish parliament enacted legislation which had profound and enduring consequences. The administration issued hundreds of proclamations which had pervasive effect. The land settlement, restraints on the practice of religion and periods of persecution ensured that Catholics had particularly intense encounters with the law. Yet references to the role of the law in studies of the Restoration are scant, and few acknowledge its centrality. Since Catholics constituted the largest proportion of the population, there is a major lacuna in the historiography. The object of the book is to explore and illustrate some aspects of how Irish Catholics engaged with and experienced the common law. This is a vast topic and the book endeavours to take up the challenge of an interdisciplinary approach through a series of case studies. It does not aspire to be comprehensive.

in Catholics and the law in Restoration Ireland
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Brad Beaven

This book argues that sailortown was a distinctive and functional working-class community that was self-regulating and self-moderating. This is perhaps even more remarkable given that the sheer size of the international seafaring workforce that stepped ashore on Ratcliffe Highway placed sailortown’s transient nature on a different level to the traditional slum. While the bourgeois observer viewed the district as chaotic and dangerous, to the international sailor, Ratcliffe Highway exhibited the recognisable characteristics of an urban–maritime culture associated with sailortown. This culture infused the locality and informed sailortown’s own micro-economy of the merchant shipping industry, sailor leisure, and boarding facilities. In understanding how sailortown functioned, this book has viewed Ratcliffe Highway through the prism of a contact zone. Pratt’s definition of contact zones as ‘spaces where cultures meet, clash and grapple with each other’ captures the complex cultural exchanges within these waterfront cosmopolitan communities. Sailortown was undoubtedly a transient district and a space of ‘heightened interaction’ that you would struggle to find in any other urban context. Its compact district fostered a space in which differing subaltern cultures met, sometimes negotiating and at other times clashing with one another.

in The devil’s highway
Its reputation and its people in the nineteenth century
Brad Beaven

‘The curse of Ratcliffe Highway’ examines how the Victorians ‘imagined’ the Highway by tracing how the Ratcliffe Highway murders of 1811 left an indelible stain on the district’s reputation. By the mid-nineteenth century, the press and social observers had conflated the bloody murders of 1811 with the perceived vice and violence of sailortown. However, this chapter employs the Census material to uncover a rather different picture of Ratcliffe Highway, one that is more socially heterogeneous than contemporaries imagined. By the 1860s, it was a cosmopolitan contact zone where sailors, the local working class, and tradespeople contributed to, and found support from, cultures and sailortown institutions of Ratcliffe Highway. Sailortown, however, was not only a contact zone for those who lodged, worked, and leisured in the district; it was also a site targeted by a legion of religious evangelists, social explorers, and journalists keen to make contact with and observe the urban poor.

in The devil’s highway
Urban anxieties and subaltern cultures in London’s sailortown, c. 1850–1900.
Author:

Between 1850 and 1900, London’s Ratcliffe Highway was the infamous ‘sailor’s playground’. It was a place where sailors longed for while at sea, and a district where the local population worked and was entertained. However, for social investigators, it was a place of fascination and fear as it haboured ‘exotic’ and heathen communities. Sailortowns featured in most international ports in the nineteenth century and were situated at the interface between urban and maritime communities. They were transient, cosmopolitan, and working class in character, and they provide us with an insight into class, race, and gendered relations within subaltern communities. This book goes beyond conceptualising sailortown as a global economic hub that entangled sailors into vice and exploitation. It will examine how, in the mid-nineteenth century, anxieties relating to urban modernity encouraged Victorians to reimagine Ratcliffe Highway as a chaotic and dangerous urban abyss. Certainly, the sailortown population was mixed and varied and engaged in numerous working-class trades connected with the marine and leisure industries such as dockers, stevedores, sailmakers, sex workers, and international seafarers. Sailortowns were contact zones of heightened interaction where multi-ethnic subaltern cultures met, sometimes negotiated, and at other times clashed with one another. However, the book argues that despite these challenges, sailortown was a distinctive and functional working-class community that was self-regulating and self-moderating. The book uncovers a robust sailortown community in which an urban–maritime culture shaped a sense of themselves and the traditions and conventions that governed subaltern behaviour in the district.

The depictions of sailors and women in a nineteenth-century sailortown
Brad Beaven

‘From Jolly Jack and Moll to proletarian Jack and Jill’ explores how Victorians turned to the apparent moral failings of the sailors and women in Ratcliffe Highway to explain the district's perceived slide into depravity and violence. On making contact with the populace of the sailortown district, social explorers searched in vain for Charles Dibdin's ‘Jolly Jack and Lusty Moll', characters who had been celebrated in the age of sail. Social explorers were instead confronted with a modern, urbanised, waterfront people who were at the forefront of the transition from sail to steam in the maritime industry. The chapter interrogates the nostalgic texts from a range of social commentators who recast the sailors and the women they met from benign eighteenth-century caricatures to a dangerous urban proletariat immersed in crime and immorality.

in The devil’s highway
Brad Beaven

This chapter argues that while social explorers imbued many similarities to the traditional slum tourists of the nineteenth century, Ratcliffe Highway’s ‘sailortown’ status unsettled researchers in very different ways from the ‘orthodox’ land-locked slum. For the nineteenth-century social explorer, the district’s remoteness and isolation from ‘civilisation’ had allowed sailortown to evolve unchecked by religious and civic intervention. Indeed, it was believed that sailortown’s seclusion had fostered a malign and degenerate maritime culture that was ingrained in its geography, buildings, commerce, and people. The chapter will proceed to explore how these lofty assessments of the people and the environs of Ratcliffe Highway clashed with the realities of a robust and confident working-class community. This community, along with a notable number of local business people, challenged the dominant narrative of sailortown that stigmatised the people and the district.

in The devil’s highway
Brad Beaven

Another pillar in sailortown's distinct urban–maritime culture was the seamen’s boarding house. ‘The inner world of the seafaring boarding house’ argues that these institutions provided a familiar and welcoming maritime environment for the international sailor and an important contact zone in the heart of Ratcliffe Highway. Contrary to the enduring stories of boarding houses being run by exploitative crimps, established keepers were often important and trusted members of the onshore maritime community. They held vital information on the locality and the latest news on shipping voyages. Moreover, as this chapter demonstrates, foreign seamen’s boarding houses were ethnically diverse and afforded spaces where cultural negotiation was learned and exercised. However, this urban–maritime culture did not embrace all seafarers. By the late nineteenth century, there had developed a racist stereotype of Chinese and Indian sailors that condemned their seamanship skills, morality, and hygiene. The prejudice was replicated in the boarding house culture ashore, ensuring that Chinese sailors settled in their community further east in Limehouse.

in The devil’s highway
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The centrality of law
Paul Smith

This chapter provides the context for the themes explored in the book. It outlines how Catholics aspired to religious freedom and recovery of estates in the Restoration period, after 20 years of turmoil and oppression in the 1640s and 1650s. It also defines the scope of this book. It marks an important distinction. Legal history – the history of the law as it evolved – is not explored here. Rather the concern of this book is to show how the law actually operated for the majority Catholic population dominated by a Protestant administration. The origins and nature of the imposition of English common law in Ireland, most eloquently articulated by Sir John Davies, are explained against the background of the intractable problem of religion. The chapter also contextualises the Irish experience in the light of contemporary developments in the other Stuart kingdoms, England and Scotland. It contrasts the treatment of Dutch Catholics, a significant minority in an officially Protestant state. It examines how historians in Ireland have approached law in the Restoration period. Much of the work has been biographical, frequently studying the careers of Catholic lawyers, or the profession more generally. This book takes a wider perspective but does not attempt to be comprehensive. Rather it addresses some key aspects of a vast topic through a series of case studies, and this chapter sets out the key themes addressed and the sources used in exploring each topic.

in Catholics and the law in Restoration Ireland
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Seaports and sailortowns
Brad Beaven

This chapter discusses the historiography of ports, and maritime and urban history. It explores the concept of the ‘contact zone’ and how this helps us understand the cultural dynamics of sailortown. The introduction concludes by explaining the rationale and structure of the book and identifies the parameters and sources employed.

in The devil’s highway
Brad Beaven

This chapter advances discussion from the cultural anxieties that sailortown triggered to embark on the exploration of the subaltern communities that lived, worked, and were entertained on Ratcliffe Highway. In this chapter it will be argued that leisure institutions were important contact zones that fostered an international maritime–urban culture. Leisure institutions enabled both visiting and returning sailors a space in which maritime traditions and cultures were shared, transmitted, and reproduced. Thus, we will explore how the pubs and the dance and entertainment rooms fostered a maritime leisure culture that was a recognisable marker for international seafarers and local working people alike. Indeed, while acknowledging the dangers that lurked in sailortown, the chapter demonstrates that subaltern maritime communities could function effectively to equip sailors with the navigational skills to avoid entanglement with a criminal fraternity.

in The devil’s highway