This dissertation examines the British Catholic community during the Age of Mercantilism. It opens with John Aylward's trade in the early 1670s and closes with the death of Bishop Richard Challoner in the late eighteenth century. By investigating the economic and financial strategies of these individuals, this work dispels the stereotype of idle Catholicism and shows how the Catholic community played a relevant role in the emerging Atlantic economy. The work starts with an analysis of John Aylward's dealings during outbreaks of international warfare. His papers prove that Catholicism was crucial in his business, allowing the adoption of various strategies and access to diverse markets. As a merchant Aylward defies the stereotype of religious minorities' communality in trade, by moving beyond religious and national borders. Moreover, he challenges the stereotype of Catholicism as estranged from capitalism. The dissertation further continues with an analysis of his widow Helena Aylward, as merchant and financier. Her skills and strategies allow the extension of the narrative of enterprise and Catholicism to women as well, by challenging the prevailing role of Catholic women as patrons or nuns. Finally, the last chapter analyses the business accounts of Bishop Richard Challoner, Vicar Apostolic of the London Mission. His dealings exemplify how Catholicism played a relevant role in finance, both individually and institutionally. In fact, the British Catholic Church fundamentally sustained itself through the stock market. Therefore, this work proves that Catholics were entrepreneurs: they built coherent trading zones and through a broad range of Atlantic connections, moved beyond the borders of the European Empires. They disregarded religious affiliations and nationalities, suggesting that the new economic and financial opportunities of the Age of Mercantilism allowed the Catholic Community to integrate into the British economy and eventually to achieve toleration.

Doctorat en philosophie et lettres / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished

Both modern and contemporary commentators have over the past 140 years written many millions of words on the subject of the abuse of child labour in factories and trades in the first half of the nineteenth century. The subject was highly charged with emotion at that time. The detailed observations of intelligent and perceptive men contrast with the partial accounts of honest and not so honest early Victorians. Together they have blurred the definition between truth and the embellishment of it. This lack of clarity on the issue of child labour has left modern historians great scope for widely differing interpretations and the evidence for believing that conditions were as bad or as good as suited their particular point of view. It is regretted that there is insufficient material in South Africa to enter fully into the often bitter arguments of the, so called, 'optimists' and 'pessimists' in respect of the improvement or deterioration of the standard of living of the labouring classes in the first half of the nineteenth century. Child labour was not one of the inventions of the Industrial Revolution. The labour of children within the domestic economy had, certainly from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, been regarded as socially acceptable. The aim of this work is to trace the conditions of child labour in the early years of the Industrial Revolution as the spread of factories demanded more and more young hands and imposed an alien and sometimes inhuman discipline on the workers. As the numbers of children employed expanded not only in total but also as a proportion of the total labour force, the realisation that the labour of children was presenting a grave social problem gradually dawned upon the governments of the time. This work traces the development of legislation from the first faltering step forward of the Health and Morals of Apprentices Act of 1802 to the passing of the Factory Act of 1847 which provided for a ten hours' working day. This type of legislation was an experiment which developed in efficiency by trial and error. Detailed consideration is given to the arguments of the supporters and the opponents of restrictions being placed on the complete freedom of the manufacturers. This was a battle eventually to be won by the supporters of restriction on the freedom of the masters. Nearly twenty years have passed since detail ed consideration was given to the parallel development of the awareness that the labour of children was a problem and the steps taken to alleviate it. The aim in this work is to consider the most recent publications that deal with particular aspects of the problem. The intention is to penetrate the contradictory claims made in the first half of the nineteenth century, and to attempt to clarify as accurately as possible the realities of the conditions of child labour and to trace their improvement to the middle of the century.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)

No description available.

In 1793, Great Britain embarked on a war against Revolutionary France to reestablish a balance of power in Europe. Traditional assessments among historians consider British war planning at the ministerial level during the First Coalition to be incompetent and haphazard. This work reassesses decision making of the leading strategists in the British Cabinet in the development of a theater in the Mediterranean by examining political, diplomatic, and military influences. William Pitt the Younger and his controlling ministers pursued a conservative strategy in the Mediterranean, reliant on Allies in the region to contain French armies and ideas inside the Alps and the Pyrenees. Dependent on British naval power, the Cabinet sought to weaken the French war effort by targeting trade in the region. Throughout the first half of 1793, the British government remained fixed on this conservative, traditional approach to France. However, with the fall of Toulon in August of 1793, decisions made by Admiral Samuel Hood in command of forces in the Mediterranean radicalized British policy towards the Revolution while undermining the construct of the Coalition. The inconsistencies in strategic thought political decisions created stagnation, wasting the opportunities gained by the Counter-revolutionary movements in southern France. As a result, reinvigorated French forces defeated Allied forces in detail in the fall of 1793.

This study examines the major works of Judith Sargent Murray, Hannah Webster Foster, and Susanna Haswell Rowson, three major writers of the 1790s whose writing responds to the ideologies of the early American Republic. I suggest that Murray, Foster, and Rowson write conduct fiction which responds to the changing attitudes toward women and education after the American Revolution. Using fiction, these authors comment on the republican woman, the need for women’s education, and the necessity for women to gather in communities for support. Despite the prevailing notion that reading too many novels would corrupt young women, Judith Sargent Murray’s novella, The Story of Margaretta (1786), Hannah Webster Foster’s novels, The Coquette (1797) and The Boarding School (1798), and Susanna Rowson’s novels, Charlotte Temple (1794) and Reuben and Rachel; or, Tales of Old Times (1798), were some of the most popular books in the late eighteenth century. If these novels were not meant to be read by young women, who were the authors’ primary audience, why were they so popular? This project situates these questions in the political environment the authors were writing in to show that a relationship exists between what women were reading and how authors of conduct fiction helped facilitate the changing roles of women in the early Republic

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

No description available.

Kant believed that the moral law is a law that the rational will legislates. This thesis examines this claim and its broader implications for Kant’s moral theory. Many are drawn to Kantian ethics because of its emphasis on the dignity and legislative authority of the rational being. The attractiveness of this emphasis on the special standing and capacities of the self grounds a recent tendency to interpret Kantian autonomy as a doctrine according to which individual agents create binding moral norms. Where this line is taken, however, its advocates face deep questions concerning the compatibility of autonomy and the conception of moral requirement to which Kant is also certainly committed – one which conceives of the moral law as a strictly universal and necessary imperative. This thesis has two main aims. In the first half, I offer an interpretation of Kantian autonomy that both accommodates the universality and necessity of moral constraint and takes seriously the notion that the rational will is a legislator of moral law. As a means of developing and securing my preferred view, I argue that recent popular interpretations of Kantian autonomy fail to resolve the tensions that seem at first glance to plague the concept of self-legislation, where what is at stake is the legislation of a categorical imperative. In the second half of this thesis, I examine the connections between my preferred interpretation of self-legislation and Kant’s dichotomisation of reason and our sensuous nature. I argue that some of the more harsh and seemingly unreasonable aspects of Kant’s moral philosophy can be defended by bringing to light the ways in which they are connected to his commitment both to the autonomy of the will and to developing a genuinely normative ethics.