Showing papers in "Canadian journal of history in 2010"

Cards on the Table: The Middling Sort as Suppliers and Consumers of English Leisure Culture in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract: At a time when the perfidious enemies of our country have rendered all foreign trade precarious and uncertain, to what happier resources can we fly than the commerce of game? By what means is the circulation of money, the life and spirit of trade, more speedily promoted? What other business can boast of such large returns? and ... what debts in any other kind of commerce are more punctually discharged? (1) England's eighteenth century is justifiably famous for its culture of gaming, which pervaded all strata of society and saw vast amounts of money and goods change hands. Beyond the actual value of wagers, gaming did act as a stimulant to the economy, however some moralists might deplore the fact. Card games were an especially popular pastime, and as card play became an indispensable part of the polite sociability of eighteenth-century England, a whole industry grew up around it to supply its wants and to provide its acolytes with every adjunct to comfort and enjoyment. The real "commerce of game" embraced many pastimes and pursuits. Time for play, once thought of as unproductive and wasteful of time, energy, and potential earnings, began to be recognized as an untapped source of profit. (2) Leisure itself became a consumer good, a commodity, and entrepreneurs of the emerging middle classes leapt to explore (and exploit) its many possibilities. Within the context of the eighteenth century's consumer revolution, these innovations formed the basis for a multi-faceted polite leisure culture. (3) The middling ranks of society, as purveyors, manufacturers, and traders, were well placed to supply the wide variety of goods and services that kept this new economic force viable. At the same time, this group found that their new prosperity and changes in their working practices made leisure time available to them. As the economy expanded and hired assistants assumed more of the day-to-day running of businesses, time away from the workplace became an inviting possibility. Having both money and many opportunities to spend it allowed tradesmen, professionals, and their families to experience the full joys of the polite world. From the vantage point of our leisure-saturated modern world, it is startling to realize that for the vast majority of the eighteenth-century middle classes, commercialized leisure time was a relatively new thing. (4) This diverse and expanding group kept abreast of their entertainment options through the many advertisements and newspapers that appeared during this period. (5) From the theatre to the racetrack, from the card-assembly to the promenades of Bath, middling consumers of leisure activities and the goods that went with them became part of a new and agreeable lifestyle. While the market for leisure activities grew and became more specialized, demand and fashions evolved in parallel, and the middling sort played crucial roles on both sides. Card play became a staple of genteel entertainment that could be adapted to many occasions and social situations, and suppliers emerged to feed the leisure market's growing demands and anticipate new trends. Feeding the fascination with card games and their sociable potential, Edmond Hoyle and his successors professed to lay bare the mysteries of whist and, over time, a wide variety of other games as well. Under the aegis of such entrepreneurial writers, these games and their rituals began to acquire a patina of routines and customary practice. In becoming more regulated and more formalized, card play fell neatly within the Enlightenment framework, and suited the structured, orderly thinking celebrated by that age. The makers of playing cards and the tables on which they were dealt also found an eager market in the increasingly wealthy middle classes. One of the strengths of card games as pastimes was their flexibility: from impromptu games over the supper table to large gatherings, cards filled many niches in eighteenth-century entertaining. …

Russia and Eastern Europe

Abstract: Bespreking van: Charles King,The Ghost of Freedom: A History of the Caucasus New York:Oxford University Press ,2010 0-19-539239-6

Expanding the Frontiers of Western Jamaica through Minor Atlantic Ports in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract: I. Introduction After the capture of Jamaica from Spain in 1655 by English forces, the development of ports on the island was centred near St. Jago de la Vega or Spanish Town, the former Spanish capital of the island. (1) However, Spanish Town was located inland and did not have direct access to the Caribbean Sea. (2) While English colonists adopted and maintained Spanish Town as Jamaica's capital, they sought to use the enclosed harbour at Port Royal, which had a steep drop off, and allowed ships to anchor alongside the quay. (3) Franklin Knight and Peggy Liss note that "port towns and cities were the most important nodes of the European expansion into the Americas after 1492. This should hardly be surprising since the western Europeans were a maritime people and the expansion was largely achieved with the aid of small sailing ships." (4) The historiography of port activity in Jamaica is centred primarily on studies investigating Kingston. (5) By mid-eighteenth century, Kingston was Jamaica's major port, while Port Royal increasingly faded away as a commercial port, but took on a military role to protect the island's most prized harbour. (6) This article examines three minor ports located in western Jamaica. Map 1 illustrates that two of the ports are located on Jamaica's north coast, specifically Lucca in Hanover parish and Montego Bay in St James parish. Savanna-la-Mar is located on the southwest coast of Jamaica in Westmoreland parish. The three ports under investigation did not achieve the same level of commercial activity as Kingston, and thus qualify as minor ports in the Atlantic world. While some research has been carried out by historians and local residents to assess the scale of port activity of Montego Bay and Savannala-Mar, the eighteenth-century planter-historians Edward Long and Bryan Edwards continue to be a main source about historical ports in Jamaica. (7) This article sheds light on several aspects of how daily life in Jamaica was affected by three minor ports. It argues that the minor ports, as represented by Lucca, Montego Bay, and Savanna-la-Mar, became important places to trade after the passing of the Free Port Act of 1766. (8) The status of "free port" allowed for the further development of three minor Atlantic ports by increasing the level of trade, communication, and migration to western Jamaica. This article highlights observations made by visitors to and inhabitants of Jamaica in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It addresses the transformation of these ports into "slave ports." Finally, the article argues that the three ports were utilized to increase first, both British and West African migration to the island and second, the commercial interactions of western Jamaica with the Caribbean and Atlantic worlds in the eighteenth century. II. Historical Origins of Lucea, Montego Bay, and Savanna-la-Mar In 1766, Britain's Parliament passed the Free Port Act of Jamaica, which declared four ports--Kingston, Lucea, Montego Bay, and Savanna-la-Mar--as "free trade" ports, whereby merchants in Jamaica were legislated to interact without penalty with neighbouring Caribbean and American colonies. In addition, foreign merchants could also bring commodities and produce to sell to Jamaican merchants without penalty, provided that certain items such as sugar and coffee did not compete with Jamaican produce. (9) Jamaica's trade with non-British colonies was deemed as contraband before the passing of the Act. (10) After 1766, legitimate ports in western Jamaica were established with a custom house, naval officers, and increased fortifications. Consequently, the local vestries and British parliament invested funds to maintain forts, because ports had to be protected from foreign invasion. The capturing of Caribbean ports was a concern, for example, in 1762 British forces seized the port of Havana via Jamaica. (11) Administratively, Jamaica was divided into three counties: Cornwall, Surrey, and Middlesex. …

Robespierre's Tail: The Possibilities of Justice after the Terror

Abstract: The defeat of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor year II (27 July 1794) soon posed the problem of how to deal with both the perpetrators and the victims of the "Reign of Terror." Recent experiences of repl...

Manliness in the Life and Posthumous Reputation of Robert Falcon Scott

Abstract: Introduction As Martin Francis points out in a survey of work on the history of British masculinity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, since the 1990s a clear narrative has emerged. It centres on the relationship between masculinity, domesticity, and the empire and can be summed up as follows: by the 1840s, a culture of domesticity was well established among middle-class men, who balanced success in the world of business or the professions with an equal devotion to playing a strong role in the private sphere of the home. However, boys brought up in this culture were increasingly ambivalent about the cozy, feminized, enclosed domestic sphere. Many of them took part in a flight from domesticity, marrying either late in life or not at all. Instead, they sought fulfilment in the homosocial world of the club or in the wider, distinctively masculine realm of imperial adventure. Mid-Victorian figures like Henry Havelock, celebrated in their own time both as family men and as imperial heroes, were now represented purely in terms of their military successes or adventurous exploits. (1) Late-Victorian and Edwardian imperial manliness was allegedly harder and more violent than the manliness of the mid-Victorian decades. In John Tosh's view, it involved "an intensified discourse of sexual difference. Manliness was now redefined as a synonym for the toughest and most exclusive male attributes. It denied men's emotional vulnerability." (2) However, this ideal of masculinity could not survive the experience of the First World War. Shell shock and other psychological traumas shattered the image of the rock-hard hero; as Michael Roper writes, the "conclusion that men could be driven to a point where they were unable to exercise the power of will over fear implied a major revision of nineteenth-century discourses about manliness." In poetry, fiction, drama, and memoirs, there was a new examination of men's emotional suffering, and these new perceptions "differed greatly from Edwardian ideals of manliness, which praised nervous stability and saw heightened sensibility as a sign of effeminacy." During the interwar years, and especially after the Second World War, the ideal of the family man was reborn. (3) Francis suggests that there is a need for a fuller appreciation of how male responses to domesticity remained complex and ambivalent throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.... Men constantly travelled back and forward across the frontier of domesticity, if only in the realm of imagination, attracted by the responsibilities of marriage or fatherhood, but also enchanted by fantasies of the energetic life and homosocial camaraderie of the adventure hero. (4) In a similar vein, Karen Harvey and Alexandra Shepard observe that "exploration of what might be labeled hegemonic codes shows them to be highly complex, fluid, and full of contradictions.... It seems clear that there has been an ongoing negotiation between a soft and a hard masculinity." (5) The life story and posthumous cultural constructions of the Antarctic explorer Robert Falcon Scott provide a useful case study against which the established narrative can be measured. Scott was born in 1868 into a prosperous, close-knit, middle-class family, and his early childhood was to some extent a domestic idyll. However, urged on by his father and by a decline in the family fortunes, he grew up to fit the late-Victorian masculine ideal of great physical strength, resolute character, and adventure in the farthest reaches of the empire. Not only did he marry late, but he did not give up his adventuring after marriage. After his death in 1912 Scott was lauded as a courageous hero who had "touched the imagination of his country as no other man has done during the course of this century." (6) However, there were always disturbing anomalies in both the lived experience and the later representations of Scott's masculinity. …

The Scottish Presbyterian Movement in 1596

Abstract: Divers wickit and malicious personis, invying the quyet estait of the kirk and commoun wealth of this countrey, haifing preissit be leis, calmneis, fais clamouris and misreportis of his majesteis vertewous procedingis, to rais dissentioun betuix his hienes and the ministeris, and divers uther his subjectis; persewerit swa maliciouslie in thair godles practeisis, in the monethis of September, October, November and the beginning of December, in the yeir of God im vc lxxxxvi, to dispose the haertis of the nauchtiest and warst inclynit peopill to miscontentment and rebellioun. (1) Fifteen ninety-six was not only the year in which Andrew Melville called King James VI "God's sillie vassall," a phrase that has been used to symbolize the Scottish presbyterian claim to some kind of power and jurisdiction independent ofthe crown. (2) It was also the year in which the presbyterian movement gathered its forces and took concerted action. The movement did not just pull the king's sleeve as Melville did, but challenged his control of his own government. Its challenge, moreover, had little to do with the much-discussed idea of "two kingdoms" of independent civil and religious jurisdiction--an idea which remained at best an unfulfilled aspiration. When the presbyterian movement took concerted action, this took various forms, but its campaigns were bidding unambiguously for political power. This article is about the structure and aims of the movement. There were dramatic events in 1596, but, as we shall see, these have been discussed elsewhere, and are not my topic here. Instead I want to use the evidence generated by the events of 1596 to analyze a movement that had existed for some years before that date and continued to be active long afterwards. Its nature changed as the issues changed, but we shall not fully grasp either its nature or the issues until an in-depth analysis of its structure has been undertaken. The term "presbyterian" calls for comment. Presbyteries--regional committees of ministers--had arisen gradually in the fifteen or so years before 1596. English presbyterian initiatives had been crushed, but Scottish presbyteries succeeded in eclipsing bishops. As in England, though, this had necessitated political struggle, with the most radical and committed Protestants espousing the presbyterian cause. In England, a movement of radical and committed Protestants would probably be called a "puritan" movement; I shall return to the implications of "puritanism" later. Just now it is sufficient to note that while Scotland's most radical and committed Protestants were presbyterians, their programme of action was a broad one that could well be characterized as puritan. I. Presbyterian Activities in 1596 In investigating the movement's structure and personnel, four collective activities are worth considering: the launch of the "covenant" in March; the "declinature" of privy council jurisdiction by David Black and his supporters in November; the activities of the commission of the general assembly from October to December; and the attempted coup of December. A covenant, launched in March 1596, helped to inspire political action by the movement. The covenant was an agreement with God to renew the sincerity of the participants' piety and godly activism. It was adopted collectively by church courts rather than individually, and the evidence survives only patchily, so one cannot reconstruct the presbyterian movement in full from it. The covenant was launched by the general assembly and adopted by two known synods. (3) This covenant was not a precise form of words, unlike the anti-Catholic "King's Confession" (or "Negative Confession") of 1581 which was later incorporated into the revolutionary National Covenant of 1638. David Mullan has shown that in the one parish in which we know what happened when the 1596 covenant was adopted, it lost any political dimension. …

What Did It Mean to be a French Diplomat in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries

Abstract: "Never have we seen ... so many studies and writings on a public carreer," wrote J. Jusserand, an early-twentieth-century French ambassador, referring to his profession. (1) The large quantity of texts on the ideal ambassador written between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries might easily trouble historians. Do these various descriptions accurately reflect the reality of the French diplomatic world? What did it mean to be a French diplomat in this period? The following article will demonstrate that, contrary to the initial impressions conveyed by these character studies, their authors were not utopian idealists: their arguments were generally based on the reality of their times. A close look into the reign of Louis XIV reveals that the Sun King selected his diplomats, for the most part, on the basis of the degree of confidence he had in these men. That confidence was based on various criteria, many of which seem to be reflected in the conclusions offered by authors of those many treaties on the "perfect ambassador." The roots of these texts on the "perfect ambassador" reach back to the Middle Ages, when many authors strove to describe ideal social and professional types. One of the most famous examples of this genre is Castiglione's The Book of the Courtier, of which P. Burke offers an excellent analysis. (2) Such works, elucidating noble ideals and mores, affected perceptions of diplomats. As early as 1436, with the publication of Ambaxiotorum brevilogus, by Bernard de Rosier, descriptions of diplomats and later the "perfect diplomat," began to evolve, and these early treatises presented many characteristics previously associated with the ideal Renaissance courtier. (3) These treatises, stresses Lucien Be1y, were also manuals of conduct, of savoir-faire, not only for the diplomat, but for the monarch and, eventually, a readership drawn from the upper echelons of society. (4) Ideas such as Be1y's have recently pushed historians to suggest the beginning of the presence of a society of diplomats in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Therefore, this literature represents one of the main sources, along with diplomatic correspondence, available to understand better the early modern diplomatic institution. Before turning to that most recent trend of historiography, several older means of studying early modern diplomacy should be considered. From the nineteenth- to the late twentieth-century, scholars preferred to look at diplomacy as a national endeavour, studying foreign policy as the work of governments and viewing diplomats as agents of those policies. (5) Many studies focused on important peace conferences and their impacts on power relationships. (6) Influenced, perhaps, by debates in the fields of politics and international relations, historians also tried to explain the development and history of diplomacy itself, offering various hypotheses about when it became "modern," with dates ranging from the Treaties of Westphalia (1648), according to Mattingly, to the outbreak of World War I (1914), in Anderson's view. (7) In order to better grasp the men behind the titles, some historians have applied a methodology inspired by the prosopographic approach to understand better professional diplomacy. (8) This allows for a more complete view of the diplomat's identity, personality, and professional capacity, as well as his selection, characteristics, relationship to the foreign policies professed by his government, and his official actions. (9) Since the 1990s, a new way of looking at diplomacy has begun to emerge from a fusion of the ideas of Leopold yon Ranke and Tim Blanning. This involves an analysis of diplomacy viewed through the dual perspectives of the rise of great powers in Europe and the early developments of a public sphere and diplomatic culture. (10) These dual perspectives offer us an opportunity to work with different source types and yet have the two perspectives speak to each other. …

Russian Compassion: The Russian Society for the Protection of Animals-Founding and Contexts, 1865-75

Abstract: I. Introduction This essay explores the 1865 founding and subsequent first few years of operation of the Saint Petersburg-based Rossiiskoe obshchestvo pokrovitel'stva zhivotnym: the Russian Society for the Protection of Animals (hereafter, the ROPZh or "the Society"). (1) Unlike its many western counterparts--especially the British Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), which are well known and have been much studied--the ROPZh remains obscure. (2) It will thus be of use to narrate the broad outlines of its foundation and early history. Beyond this, however, this essay seeks to understand the ROPZh in multiple and overlapping contexts: from the wider international movement of the Victorian era for the prevention of cruelty to animals to the specific domestic circumstances of Russia and Saint Petersburg during the 1860s. In the first case, comparisons will be made to the RSPCA and ASPCA, along with some attention to interactions. The Russian context, however, is particularly complicated and Will be given greater emphasis. The ROPZh was connected intimately and in various ways to the Great Reforms of Alexander II; to state and elite concerns about the need to "civilize," "discipline," and "uplift" the "dark masses" of peasants whom Alexander had liberated in 1861 from centuries of serfdom; to the legal reforms of 1864 that created a platform upon which anti-cruelty legislation could be established and cases could be tried; and to the emergence and flowering of public opinion and voluntary associations in a country that had seen little of either beforehand. Regarding this last topic, the ROPZh makes a good case study: it was a relatively early and large Russian voluntary association (the voluntary associational movements peaked in the early 1900s), and quite active. More specifically, the ROPZh will be investigated here in the context of prevailing and emerging notions about animals and animal cruelty in late imperial Russia, especially among educated elites in Saint Petersburg. Domestic and international contexts cannot be entirely separated, of course. This is nowhere clearer than when assessing the place of the ROPZh in the much wider program of nineteenth-century Russian selective cultural internationalization known as "Westernization"--a term describing the varied efforts of a subset of the Russian elite to "improve" their country by bringing it firmly into the western family of nations and out of centuries of on-again, off-again isolation. (3) As will be shown, the ROPZh represents a fairly paradigmatic Westernizing organization, which is to say that, while trying in many ways to link to and even mimic western counterparts and culture, it was also distinctively Russian. Working within these multiple contexts this article asks some rather general questions. Why was such an organization founded at this time? How ready was Russia for concepts of animal welfare? How did Russians, at least in Saint Petersburg, treat or think about animals--especially domesticated ones--prior to 1865? (4) In what ways was the ROPZh like or unlike its better-known western counterparts? II. The Animal Welfare Agenda outside Russia: Origins and Connections The origins of the movement for animal welfare are traditionally traced to nineteenth-century Britain and therein to a web of specific social and cultural changes associated with industrialization and urbanization. Britain passed the first significant national animal welfare legislation ("Martin's Law" of 1822, amended and expanded in 1835, 1849, and 1854) and created the first and still the best-known animal advocacy group: the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in 1824. (5) Following this lead, the animal welfare movement subsequently expanded on the Continent. SPCAs were founded in major cities across Europe during mid-century. …

Geography is Better than Divinity: The Bible and Medieval Geographical Thought

Abstract: This article examines the role of the Christian Bible in forging a distinctly medieval geographical consciousness. Though the sacred text had little explicit to say about basic issues of cosmograph...

The Politics of Diffuse Authority in an Early Modern Small Town

Abstract: I. Introduction The reinsertion of the "political" into early modern English history exhorted by Patrick Collinson has resulted in fascinating discussions of the nature of political cultures, political authority, political participation, and the experience of the governed, whether as citizens or subjects, in early modern England. (1) Attention has been directed not only to the highest level, the state and state formation, but to how the processes worked through the whole of political society. The relationship between centre and locality has been explored again through "points of contact" and "brokerage," in the former case particularly through urban authorities and in the latter through officeholders more generally. (2) Our understanding of political culture has thus been much enriched, but it has also been demonstrated that discussion of political authority and culture should examine various levels of social organization. One of the salient points of contact through which the formative state communicated with society was urban authority, in this context usually cities and boroughs which had a well-defined political and constitutional structure. The urban sector also included, however, small towns without the formal constitutional apparatus and organization associated with boroughs. While boroughs had at their apex a conciliar political authority of mayor, aldermen, and burgesses organized in a single council or bicamerally, the other urban places lacked that incorporated political authority. While we know a considerable amount about the political culture of incorporated urban authority, less is understood of the character of political authority and culture in the lesser urban centres, despite more attention having been recently devoted to small towns as a genus. (3) The intention here then is to consider in more detail the nature of political culture and authority in this less formal urban context, through an examination of a particular urban locality, Loughborough. What follows below is first some reflection on the political culture and civic society of incorporated boroughs as it has recently been adumbrated. Then follow some ruminations on aspects of difference and convergence between country and town, since these smaller urban places such as Loughborough were usually small urban enclaves which had developed organically within larger parishes, making it impossible to discuss the urban separate from the rural. The substantive sections on Loughborough contain an explanation of what constituted the diffuse authority of governance of the town and parish: the different organizations with an interest in regulating the affairs of the town and parish: manor, parish, and trust. (4) Despite the dispersal and fragmentation of authority through these different institutions, social distinction and political differentiation defined officeholding, coalescing around the politics of finance and the control of resources which occasioned intermittent local disputes. The politics of this particular place are then reconnected to the wider notions of political authority and culture. II. Urban Civic Culture Increasingly it is being demonstrated that incorporated boroughs in early modern England experienced something of a cultural transmutation. While not attaining the Renaissance civic culture of some southern European cities, the largest English boroughs promoted an urban civic culture. The origins of this ethos may date from the later middle ages. The transformation of the freedom of the borough from principally an economic to predominantly a civic privilege was one endogenous influence of the later middle ages, but the most formative development of a civic culture might have occurred later. (5) The acquisition of the urban property of dissolved religious institutions, it has moreover been suggested, promoted more self-conscious civic administration and precipitated a revival of interest in obtaining confirmation of incorporation or new incorporations. …

Ex Unitate Vires: Elite Consolidation and the Union of South Africa, 1902-10

Abstract: Between 1902 and 1910, a political and social transformation occurred among elite South Africans. In 1902, few could have imagined that South Africa would unite as a country within eight years. (1) Bittereinder Afrikaner generals such as Louis Botha, Jan Smuts, M.T. Steyn, and J.B.M. Hertzog had just given up their fight against the British forces. Important British elites, such as the politician Leander Starr Jameson, supported the work of the famously jingoist High Commissioner of Cape Town, Alfred Milner. Others of British descent, such as Jameson's colleague J.X. Merriman, opposed Milner and the war. Merriman particularly disliked the young group of Oxford educated men, the "Kindergarten," that Milner had brought to South Africa for reconstruction. (2) Yet by 1908, all of these men met in Durban with the objective of uniting South Africa. How were these previously oppositional forces able to come together in agreement about the political future of South Africa within a decade? This article examines the crucial period between 1902 and 1910 in South Africa's political history and focuses on the particular roles of Generals Smuts, Botha and Steyn, J.X. Merriman, and Milner's Kindergarten in the pursuit of unification. This small political elite undertook an imaginative process that resulted in the political construction of the Union of South Africa. They came to believe in a pan-South African ideal that would unify white English- and Afrikaans-speaking South Africans. They also stood to gain politically and/or ideologically from its creation. Indeed, by the time Union was achieved, it was difficult to distinguish the political positions of those politicians that had been involved in its creation. Their goal was an independent state with political control over the territories of Southern Africa and an amicable relationship with the British Empire. They pursued this goal in order to consolidate white power, create a new white nation, and strengthen South Africa politically and economically. In the process, they also hoped to maintain control over what was perceived to be an inferior and encroaching black majority. This article challenges some of the prevailing interpretations of the unification of South Africa, which have generally emphasized the political, ethnic, and ideological divisions between the elites of South Africa, or see unification as a matter of failure or success for the British Empire. Following a trend emerging from postcolonial and imperial studies, it emphasizes the shared ideologies, related to common understandings of "race," imperialism, and nationalism during that era. Benedict Anderson argues that all nations are the product of an "imagined political community," but the South Africa that formed was hOt the community these leaders had imagined. (3) In the minds of the politicians that created Union, the modern state of South Africa was to become a unified state that included a single nation of British and Afrikaners. The years between 1902 and 1910 have been shortchanged in the historiography of South Africa. Of the many fascinating aspects of South African history, the creation of the modern state of South Africa itself has not attracted much attention from historians; Leonard Thompson's seminal The Unification of South Africa (1960) is the most recent monograph dedicated to the subject. Perhaps this is not surprising given that since Thompson's book was published, a prevailing interest in social history shifted the attention of many historians away from political history. Also, the subject of the South African War has dominated the historiography of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century South Africa. The Union of South Africa is often included in the narrative of the South African War as the consequence of British dominance or failure. Thompson writes the story of unification as one of imperialists and anti-imperialists working toward the same goal, but nonetheless ideologically and politically divided. …

Italy in the Twilight of the Empire: The Decline of Roman Law and Culture under Theoderic the Great (c. 493-526)

Abstract: The goal of this study is to contribute to the understanding of how Roman law continued to survive and evolve in Italy to reflect changes — social, political, and cultural — taking place in the pen...