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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
21

Essex under Cromwell: Security and Local Governance in the Interregnum

McConnell, James Robert 01 January 2012 (has links)
In 1655, Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell's Council of State commissioned a group of army officers for the purpose of "securing the peace of the commonwealth." Under the authority of the Instrument of Government, a written constitution not sanctioned by Parliament, the Council sent army major-generals into the counties to raise new horse militias and to support them financially with a tax on Royalists which the army officers would also collect. In counties such as Essex--the focus of this study--the major-generals were assisted in their work by small groups of commissioners, mostly local men "well-affected" to the Interregnum government. In addition to their militia and tax duties, the men were instructed to see to the implementation and furtherance of a variety of central government policies. Barely a year after its inception, a bill sanctioning the scheme was voted down in January 1657 by a Parliament unconvinced that the work done by the major-generals was in the best interests of the nation. This thesis examines the development and inception of the major-generals initiative by the Council of State, the work the major-generals and their commissioners engaged in, and the nature and cause of the reaction to their efforts in the shires. In the years and centuries following the Stuart Restoration, the major-generals were frequently portrayed as agents of Cromwellian tyranny, and more recently scholars have argued that the officers were primarily concerned with the promulgation of a godly reformation. This study looks at the aims and work of the major-generals largely through an analysis of state papers and Essex administrative records, and it concludes that the Council and officers were preoccupied more with threats to order and stability than with morals. Additionally, by examining the court records and work of the justices of the peace in Essex, this study shows that in regard to improving order the major-generals' work was unremarkable for its efficacy and but little different than previous law- and statute-enforcement activity traditionally carried out by local administrators. Based on this assessment of the major-generals' efforts to improve order as both limited and completely un-revolutionary, this thesis argues that the strongly negative reaction to the major-generals by the parliamentary class was due more to the officers' and government's encroachment on gentry power and local privilege than either the abrogation of the liberties of the people or any modest efforts to foist godliness on the shires. Religion was a major issue during the English Civil Wars, but the demise of one of the Interregnum government's most ambitious attempts to improve security in the localities was rooted not in sectarian distempers but rather in the gentry's preoccupation with keeping central government from meddling in local matters or taxing anyone in their class without parliamentary approval.
22

Robert Searle and the Rise of the English in the Caribbean

Alford, Brandon Wade 01 January 2019 (has links)
This research examines the career of Robert Searle, an English privateer, that conducted state-sponsored attacks against the Spanish and Dutch in the Caribbean from 1655 to 1671. Set within the Buccaneering Period of the Golden Age of Piracy (1650-1680), Robert Searle’s personal actions contributed to the rise of the English in the Caribbean to a position of dominance over Spain, which dominated the region from 1492 until the 1670s. Searle serves as a window into the contributions of thousands of nameless men who journeyed to the Caribbean as a member of Oliver Cromwell’s Western Design Fleet. These men failed in their endeavor to take Hispaniola from the Spanish, successfully invaded Jamaica, and spent the next fifteen years securing England’s largest possession in the region, transitioning Jamaica from a military outpost to a successful plantation colony. These men, including Searle himself, have been overshadowed in the history of English Jamaica by more well-known figures such as Sir Henry Morgan, the famed “Admiral of the Buccaneers.” Searle and his compatriots pursued the objectives of the core in London throughout the contested periphery of the Caribbean region. These goals were first framed as the complete destruction of the Spanish Empire in the Americas and later as achieving trade between Jamaica and Spain’s American colonies. The examination of Robert Searle through the core-periphery relationship between the metropole and the Caribbean illustrates how the totality of his actions contributed to the rising English position in the Caribbean. Ultimately, Searle and his fellow privateers proved vital to Spain conceding to England the rights of trade and formal recognition of their colonies in the region with a series of succeeding Treaties of Madrid.
23

A Pragmatic Standard of Legal Validity

Tyler, John 2012 May 1900 (has links)
American jurisprudence currently applies two incompatible validity standards to determine which laws are enforceable. The natural law tradition evaluates validity by an uncertain standard of divine law, and its methodology relies on contradictory views of human reason. Legal positivism, on the other hand, relies on a methodology that commits the analytic fallacy, separates law from its application, and produces an incomplete model of law. These incompatible standards have created a schism in American jurisprudence that impairs the delivery of justice. This dissertation therefore formulates a new standard for legal validity. This new standard rejects the uncertainties and inconsistencies inherent in natural law theory. It also rejects the narrow linguistic methodology of legal positivism. In their stead, this dissertation adopts a pragmatic methodology that develops a standard for legal validity based on actual legal experience. This approach focuses on the operations of law and its effects upon ongoing human activities, and it evaluates legal principles by applying the experimental method to the social consequences they produce. Because legal history provides a long record of past experimentation with legal principles, legal history is an essential feature of this method. This new validity standard contains three principles. The principle of reason requires legal systems to respect every subject as a rational creature with a free will. The principle of reason also requires procedural due process to protect against the punishment of the innocent and the tyranny of the majority. Legal systems that respect their subjects' status as rational creatures with free wills permit their subjects to orient their own behavior. The principle of reason therefore requires substantive due process to ensure that laws provide dependable guideposts to individuals in orienting their behavior. The principle of consent recognizes that the legitimacy of law derives from the consent of those subject to its power. Common law custom, the doctrine of stare decisis, and legislation sanctioned by the subjects' legitimate representatives all evidence consent. The principle of autonomy establishes the authority of law. Laws must wield supremacy over political rulers, and political rulers must be subject to the same laws as other citizens. Political rulers may not arbitrarily alter the law to accord to their will. Legal history demonstrates that, in the absence of a validity standard based on these principles, legal systems will not treat their subjects as ends in themselves. They will inevitably treat their subjects as mere means to other ends. Once laws do this, men have no rest from evil.

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