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[No abstract available] / Arts, Faculty of / Classical, Near Eastern and Religious Studies, Department of / Graduate

The Seven Years’ War represented a period of great mobilization of British sailors and soldiers. Not only did men need to be found to man the ships and garrison the forts in the Western Squadron and North America, but they also needed to be fed and kept healthy during the conflict. Due to poor living conditions aboard Royal Navy ships, expeditions to North America were met with disease that would drastically reduce the numbers of able seamen. This was compounded by demobilization that followed the War of the Austrian Succession, forcing the British forces to rely on impressment to augment their troop numbers. Though there was a concerted effort to take healthy men with seafaring knowledge, local magistrates and constabularies saw this as an opportunity to rid their towns of the unwanted, and the demands of manning an ever growing Navy forced the Admiralty to take the sick and infirm. British prisons during this time were rife with typhus and smallpox, and the guardships that the impressed men would travel to were also areas of infections. The Royal Navy vessels were typically overfilled with men, and the tight living conditions encouraged the diseases to spread, creating ships that were not a wartime asset, but a liability to arrive in friendly ports in North America. There, the infection would spread to the local population, causing continued manning problems for the British during the conflict, and strained relations between the Admiralty and local governors. The infected troops limited British military effectiveness, and threatened the success of operations, as seen in the delay of the siege of Louisbourg in 1757, and the defeat of the British forces outside Quebec City in 1760. The experience with disease within a wartime context allowed Britain’s emerging medical class to publish important research, leading to positive changes to shipboard hygiene and medicine by the end of the eighteenth century.

During the middle third of the nineteenth century, the British Government appointed an average of over six royal commissions annually. These commissions examined issues ranging from the use of child labour in factories to Malta and the Civil List. They played a significant role in what is now known as the 'Age of Reform', and during this period they developed a reputation for presenting reports which were both illuminating and useful. Unfortunately, since that time royal commissions have inspired only a very few of the more significant social and constitutional reforms. Used but infrequently, commissions have lost their reputation for constructive inquiry and are now known less for what they have accomplished than for what they have not. This study examines the British royal commission as it is used at the present time, and concludes that it is still a viable method of Government inquiry. The royal commission retains a significant role within the framework of the British Constitution and, used properly, can be an effective means of promoting consensus between the Government and the governed. There has, however, been a distinct tendency for Governments to misuse the royal commission -- to appoint them when they were unnecessary or to appoint them to forestall reform -- with the result that a number of recent investigations have been unsatisfactory. Of the thirty-seven commissions which have reported since 1935, sixteen were completely successful and fulfilled their constitutional role effectively. Seven presented worthwhile reports on which no action was taken. Seven submitted inadequate reports which, although their recommendations were carried out, failed to deal effectively with the problems they were studying. And seven did not complete their investigations or did so in such a fashion that their reports must be considered inferior and their recommendations unusable. Analysis of thirty-five of those commissions indicates that there is a significant correlation between some of the characteristics of royal commissions and commission success. From this analysis and from general consideration of recent commissions, the conclusion seems inescapable that unless the Government sets up a commission with the intention of acting on the basis of its report, the commission's chances of success are very slight. If, however, the Government intends to act on the problem under consideration, takes adequate care to appoint the most appropriate type of commission, and provides that commission with adequate funds and advice, the royal commission can fulfill its constitutional role successfully. Because the royal commission remains a viable -- albeit intermittent -- part of the British Governmental system, this study concludes that the Government, commissioners themselves, and Parliament should make every effort possible to prevent its falling into disuse. The increasing complexity of society makes it unlikely that the commission will ever again have the opportunity to initiate the number of reforms with which it has been credited during the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, used effectively it may be able to retain its position within the British constitutional framework and to regain its reputation for constructive inquiry. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

The plight of the impecunious unmarried gentlewoman is a familiar theme in Victorian social history. Historians have ransacked literary sources to demonstrate the misery of the Victorian governess and the depth of a dilemma that was sufficiently serious to generate the feminist movement. Yet there has been no systematic study of the changing fate of the Victorian "distressed gentlewoman" in the face of all the attempts by reformers and philanthropists to improve her position during the nineteenth century. The problem of writing a social history of the Victorian middle-class spinster has been aggravated by the paucity of appropriate sources. This study is based on the records of contemporary female emigration societies and Colonial Office emigration projects, and on the personal correspondence of some emigrants. It investigates the position of distressed gentlewomen from 1830 to 1914, and explains the results of one popular remedy for their dilemma: emigration. Only in the latter half of the nineteenth century did voluntary organizations establish facilities expressly for the emigration of middle-class women. Yet some early-Victorian gentlewomen were sufficiently hard pressed to use the facilities of working-class organizations to escape from difficult circumstances in Britain. The emigration records permit a closer analysis of the social backgrounds and careers of some Victorian gentlewomen than has hitherto been possible. Throughout the nineteenth century in Britain there was an increasing surplus of women of marriageable age. This intensified the problems of middle-class women who were without any means of financial support. The Victorian social code stressed marriage as the most respectable career for women, and for those unable to achieve that status the employment field was confined, in large measure, to the overcrowded and exploited occupation of the governess. For women with only mediocre qualifications for teaching who were accustomed to the relative leisure of the middle-class home the need to find employment could come as a rude shock, and usually involved a certain loss of caste. The economic problems of distressed gentlewomen are familiar, but it is not generally recognized that many of them suffered from what we today call alienation. Emigration, more than any possible occupation in Britain, was able to alleviate this sense of alienation by providing remunerative work in combination with secure social relations, a combination rarely enjoyed by the working gentlewoman in Britain. In the British colonies a gentlewoman could safely become a domestic servant without losing social rank and the companionship of her employers. Yet several factors prevented large numbers of distressed gentlewomen from taking advantage of emigration. The early-Victorian prejudice against female emigration, the preference of the colonists for working-class women, the rigid principles of the feminists and the insistence of British emigration organizations on expensive preliminary domestic training raised formidable barriers against the emigration of most impecunious gentlewomen. When, in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, voluntary organizations used the rhetoric of the Victorian feminine civilizing mission to encourage large numbers of educated women to emigrate, it was well-trained lower-middle-class women seeking professional work who benefited most, and not the less qualified distressed gentlewomen. The latter had not profited from the late-Victorian advances in female education; rather, the resulting competition worsened their relative position in the search for employment. Neither emigration nor the achievements of the feminists could solve the problem of the distressed gentlewoman, a problem which remained acute while the Victorian social code survived. Only the decline of that social code and the mass-mobilization of the female labour force during the First World War eliminated the existence of distressed gentlewomen as an important social problem. / Arts, Faculty of / History, Department of / Graduate

This thesis examines the evidence of long swings in British house-building from 1860 to 1914. The central issue of the present inquiry concerns the existence of cyclical fluctuations in residential construction and the nature of the causal mechanisms by which these phenomena might be explained. A general analysis of the structure of the housing market and the institutional peculiarities which give rise to the lagged adjustment process by which changes in demand are translated into changes in the supply of housing accommodation suggests that the appropriate level at which to analyze the behavior of house-building is the regional or local level. The importance of specifying relationships whose underlying behavioral implications are consistent with the level of aggregation, is stressed. With this in mind, a general regional model of housebuilding activity is developed and its theoretical solutions explored. This provides a conceptual analytical framework used subsequently to study the regional (and local) housebuilding experience of South Wales and South-east Lancashire. These disaggregated regional studies show local patterns of residential construction to exhibit a wide range of variation. Operative causal mechanisms found to exist at this level of analysis disclose significant regional differences which seriously question the validity of the macro-causal relationships which have been offered to explain fluctuations in British house-building. The limits of the present analysis and the tentative nature of our conclusions are emphasized. With this in mind, there are suggested a number of areas which require far more intensive study than they have received in the past. Only when we learn more about the inter-relationships in the pattern of regional development will we be able to more fully understand the mechanisms of the long swings. / Arts, Faculty of / Vancouver School of Economics / Graduate

Islam and the Reflection in Multiculturalism in Great Britain

Many studies of the British Labour Party have emphasised disputes within the Parliamentary Labour Party and attempted to explain them. There has, however, been no attempt to apply the concept of factionalism, with criteria detailing how a faction might be identified, to a study of the Parliamentary Labour Party over a period of time. It is the aim of this paper to succinctly define the term faction; to establish criteria for the purpose of identifying factions, and to determine to what extent parties to Parliamentary Labour Party disputes could be identified as factions. Prom the definition of a faction employed, six criteria were established, against which to assess a group as a faction. Employing histories of the Labour Party, biographies and autobiographies of contemporary Labour politicians and contemporary newspapers and journals, major disputes during the years 1945-1970 were isolated and examined. It was found that there were four periods of intense Parliamentary Labour Party dispute. Application of the six criteria to groups involved in each dispute showed that four factions could be clearly identified. The policies expounded by three of these factions were identified as left-wing. One faction was identified as of the right-wing of the Labour Party. A number of implications of factionalism in the Parliamentary Labour Party were drawn. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

The affair of the Ukase of September, 1821, evokes such questions as these: What was its real purpose? Was Alexander guilty of aggression in North America or was he only attempting to solve a domestic problem, viz., smuggling in the Alaskan colony? Why did George Canning negotiate separately with Russia after he had expressed a desire to cooperate with the United States? Did he really believe that Russia would be more impressed by separate negotiations, as Harold Temperley has suggested? Did the tsar deliberately appease Britain in the hope of securing her aid in a Russo- Turkish war, as S. B. Okun and Hector Chevigny have contended, or did he follow a policy of expediency?