This thesis focuses upon the county natural history, a genre of writing unique to England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century which spanned subjects which we might now refer to as genealogy, heraldry, cartography, botany, geology, and mineralogy, among others, while retaining a focus on a single county. It situates the genre firmly as a successor to local antiquarianism and chorography in Tudor and early Stuart England. In focusing on a single genre which spans both historical and natural topics, methodologies of enquiry from several historiographic fields are utilized: particularly heavily drawn upon are historical geography, historical epistemology, as well as cultural histories of both history and religion. The thesis aims to make two specific historiographic contributions. Firstly, it demonstrates the value of integrating cultural histories of natural objects and the landscape with historical epistemology. As well as being an object of philosophical or “scientific” knowledge, nature and the landscape held significant cultural meaning, particularly when located in historical narratives and understood as part of God’s world. This is exposed particularly clearly in chapter four’s discussion of physicotheology’s duality: both biblical and natural study combined to emplace God in the landscape. Secondly the thesis offers a reflection on the meanings of locality, place, and the construction of the landscape utilized in historical geography and the history of science. In this period both the nation and physical landscape were envisaged as constructed from discrete “parts”, counties. This is set in the context of earlier, and better known, ‘nation’ constructions, Camden’s construction of the nation by analogy to the human body around the turn of the seventeenth century, and Defoe’s construction of the nation as a trade network centred upon London in 1724.

This thesis provides a description and analysis of government intervention in the Welsh economy between 1974 and 1997. During this period, Wales underwent rapid and far-reaching economic upheaval on such a massive scale that few avoided its impact. The scale of these changes was dramatic, as was the intensity of attempts to deal with their consequences. Wales acted as a laboratory for the development of approaches to government intervention in the economy. This thesis defines government intervention in the Welsh economy, before identifying activity, expenditure and (where possible) outputs across categories including land reclamation, factory construction, attraction of foreign direct investment, urban renewal, business support and the provision of grants and subsidies. It also places such interventions in their political and economic contexts, highlighting the dynamics that evolved between policies developed in Cardiff and London. By doing this, it asks and answers three questions relating to the changing dynamics of government intervention; namely, what was done, why was it done and was it effective? The thesis draws on primary sources including interviews with politicians and those formerly holding senior positions within governmental organisations, records held by the National Archives, personal and organisational archives held by the National Library of Wales, records held by other archives, newspapers and government publications. Secondary texts are discussed and drawn upon, with this study adding a history of government intervention in the Welsh economy to the literature for the first time.

The study investigates the late seventeenth century origins of the Scottish Enlightenment, and it offers a timely reassessment of both the coherence and concept of the 'early Enlightenment'. Traditionally maligned as the most contemptible chapter in the nation's history, seventeenth-century Scotland has, until very recently, been noted only for its religious fanaticism, political corruption, and intellectual sterility. Most recent work on Scotland during this period represents a revisionist effort to do belated justice to the history of Scotland at that time by stressing its pivotal importance to the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment. While these studies are important and have shed much light on this long misunderstood period, they tend to evaluate it in a progressivist fashion, based on the extent to which it successfully anticipated or contributed to the rational achievements and secularized outlook of the eighteenth century. The aims of this project are twofold: to painstakingly re-contextualise the controversies of the period; and to critique and move to the foreground important questions of tone and the progressivist focus, or orientation of studies of early Enlightenment Scotland. It does this by closely examining two of the trends most commonly linked to the rise of European Enlightenment: (1) the declining significance of demonic agency and the crime of witchcraft, as well as its isomorphic cousin, heresy; and (2) the corresponding rise of scepticism, rationalism and toleration. According to these two measures of Enlightenment, it is argued, Scotland's early transition from a traditional 'persecuting society' to a tolerant 'enlightened' one was not as decisive or as progressive as most revisionist historians claim. Drawing upon evidence from Scotland, England and Continental Europe this study opens new, much needed, lines of debate regarding the late seventeenth-century roots of the Scottish Enlightenment, by demonstrating the important, sophisticated roles conservative and mystical religious opinion played in shaping the intellectual character of early Enlightenment Scotland.

This thesis concerns non-fiction ‘war books’ published in the inter-war period. War books were mostly written by participants in the First World War who contributed to Britain’s memory culture afterwards through the publication of their accounts. The war books catalogue represents diversity in terms of the experiences depicted and the geographic locations represented. Though they went through distinctive periods of popularity, war books were published throughout the inter-war period, and in great numbers. The publishing industry was receptive to martial literature and encouraged its publication. The breadth of the war books catalogue challenges the cultural uniformity of an ‘age of disillusionment’ by demonstrating the different ways that the war was remembered by its participants. War books had widespread interpretative breadth on the meaning of the war to veterans/participants in the years afterwards.

Glasgow Necropolis, which opened in 1833, is celebrated as the first garden or ornamental cemetery in Scotland and as a ‘Victorian Valhalla’ that remembers and represents the makers of Glasgow as the so-called Second City of the British Empire. What few studies there have been have repeated the popular version of its genesis provided by the Merchants’ House of Glasgow, and have not looked beneath this tidy encapsulation of the origin of its new cemetery. This thesis uses the unpublished archives of the Merchants’ House, in particular the records of its Necropolis Committee, as well as numerous related sources, to examine and discuss the more complex interactions that lay behind the House’s investment. The thesis begins with a discussion of the physical and intellectual contexts of the origins of the Necropolis: the first chapter examines the new cemetery in the context of civic improvements in Glasgow in the first third of the nineteenth century, and the second discusses it in the context of cemetery development in Great Britain and western Europe. Chapters three and four offer a detailed account of the production of the Necropolis and its early years as an on-going business. The fifth chapter examines the public reception of the Necropolis, using a variety of contemporary sources, including the published accounts of visitors to the city. The sixth chapter discusses the early funerals and monuments of the Necropolis, and examines how these differed form the practices of previous generations. Methodologically, this thesis adopts a cultural historical approach, with a theoretical basis in the work of Ashplant and Smyth, which focuses on three key concepts in the creation of any cultural product: production, signification and reception.

published_or_final_version / History / Master / Master of Philosophy

Feud is a recurrent theme in Scottish history, but it is a subject which has received scant regard in its own right until fairly recently. Sources for an exarrlirwtion of the Scottish blood-feud are also voluminous and accessible, particularly in the early modern period, a period which coincided with the demise of the feud throughout most of the kingdom. The material evidence and course the feud itself took during the reign of James VI are the, principal reasons for concentrating on these years, though in omitting the civil war of 1567-73 one has not entirely covered that long reign. While the title of this thesis dra\-ls attention to the extent and nature of the feud, it is the latter 'lhich receives by far the greater emphasis. In the "Introduction" the place of the Scottish feud in the wider debate on the blood-feud is considered, a debate which involves historians of different centuries and societies" and those like anthropologists and sociologists who have approached the subject from the perspective of other disciplines. Here the extent of the feud in late sixteenth century Scotland is discussed, with questions of typology, origins, geographic and social distribution, length and incidence being included. Following this, the first chapter "Ideals, Violence and Peace" examines the pature of the feud in the context of these thr ee themes. ii. However, the political m. ture of the Scottish feud necessitated that considerable attention be paid to the relationship between politics and the feud. One chapter, therefore, looks at the many issues which caused feuding both in the rural community and in an urban environment. This is followed by a very detailed analysis of the course of one blood-feud in one relatively small locality throughout the entire period, from royal minority to the implementation of a crown policy which uprooted feuding. After discussing politics and the feud in a local context, the focus of attention then moves to the politics of the court ana central government, but without losing sight of the very real connection between events at the centre and in the localities. Again one chapter is devoted to a more general disc!JSsion of court politics and the impact of feuding there, before being followed by another in depth analysis of the major political feud of the reign between the earl of Huntly and his rivals in the north of Scotland. The highland nature of much of this feud, and the lowland envi~onment of the CunninghamMontgomery feud which forms the subject matter of chapter three, made it almost obligatory to also devote some time to a border feud. This is done, therefore, in chapter six, within the context of a discussion of the government of the west march and the international sensitivity of the region. The remaini.ng two chapters attempt to explain how the feud was uprooted from most of Scotland before the end of James' reign. In chapter seven the Jacobean legislation iii. against feuding and the violent environment in which it bred is the principal theme. Here the laws, their enforcernent and their success in reducing feuding, controlling the use of guns, restricting retinues, punishing outlaws, imrpoving the efficiency of the administration of law and order and other areas of related concern to James and his government are detailed and assessed. Finally, the last chapter turns to the question of who initiated and carried through this crack down on feuding and lawlessness. The king himself, the nobility, crown officials and the church are all evaluated and their individual contribution is analysed. A short conclusion simply suggests some possibilities for future research which might be taken up as a continuation of this thesis.

The following pages are devoted to Members of Parliament - Labourites, Liberals, Nationals, Independents - who expressed dissent at the National Government's handling of foreign and defence affairs. Each of these groups was studied separately, but care was taken to view the Opposition in toto, so that similarities of view or approach were ascertained. Any efforts made to effect a united opposition were traced, as were the inter-party movements that originated in these years. Finally, research was undertaken to discover what factors - sociological, economic, electoral - differentiated dissidents from loyalists in the governing coalition or rival factions within the Opposition Parties. It appeared that the Government's opponents, despite divergencies, began to move towards a common goal of limited collective security. Nevertheless, so divided were they by rival creeds and calculations that little co-operation was affected until the outbreak of war. Separately, however the dissidents achieved little, primarily because each group was crippled by a lack of cohesiveness within its own ranks. The end result was that the Government had a freer hand than it would otherwise have had. The counsel offered by the Opposition looked to the fortification of peace to deter the dictators or to overawe them if aggression occurred. Although insufficient thought had been given to how the allies would have fared in the event of war, the grand alliance policy was - and was recognised by the public to be - an alternative to appeasement. As to the flimsy dividing line between both Coalition loyalists and dissidents and groupings within the opposition Parties it would seem that the only significant difference was that of aggregate experience. In effect, dissent or specialism in foreign or defence matters was found to be primarily connected with members being placed in close relations with overseas interests or serving either in the Forces or in a related department.

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