This thesis examines the political role played by the private members' clubs of the St. James's district of London, between the first two Reform Acts. The thesis looks at the institutional history of such establishments and their evolution insofar as it affected their political work. It then analyses the statistical trends in club membership among Members of Parliament, the overwhelming majority of whom belonged to political clubs. The crucial role of clubs in whipping is detailed, including analysis of key divisions. The distinctive political use of space by clubs is then set out, including an overview of the range of meetings and facilities offered to parliamentarians. Finally, the thesis seeks to address the broader impact of clubs on national electoral politics in this period.

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This thesis explores the deaths, funerals and other associated rituals given at the deaths of British monarchs and royals in the late Stuart period (1660-1714) with a focus on those occurring between the death of King Charles II in 1685 and the death of Queen Anne in 1714. This topic has lacked in-depth archival study and the existing historiography has often focused on larger cultural forces. This thesis presents a series of case studies structured around one or two deaths in particular, examining the ritual response as planned by the Royal Household and Privy Councillors within the wider and immediate political context which shaped their decisions. The first chapter reconstructs the process of a royal death at this time by drawing off a large amount of primary material and examples from across the period being studied. Subsequent chapters explore the political motivations and reasons behind the ‘private’ funeral for Charles II in 1685, the opposite decision for a larger heraldic or ‘public’ funeral for Mary II in 1695 and the decision to hold neither a funeral nor a ritual response beyond the familial obligation of mourning for James II in 1701. Another chapter explores the act of court mourning and how its relationship to gendered ideas about monarchy and grief underpinned the political responses to Queen Anne’s two years of mourning after her husband’s death in 1708. The final chapter explores two deaths and their relationship to the Glorious Revolution’s pursuit for a secure and defined Protestant Succession which ultimately overshadowed the rituals performed at their deaths. Together these demonstrate how politics, ritual and culture were interlinked and how immediate circumstances made rituals malleable and thus changes to them occurred, if somewhat inconsistently, over time.

This thesis is designed to be a study if the Liberal Party between 1880 and 1900, undertaken in order to ascertain the reasons for its decline in those year. My attempt is to show that the seeds of the Party's later decay can be found in this period, and that the study of these twenty years is, in fact, essential to an understanding of the crucial changes in the structure of British politics which have subsequently taken place. There were, I feel, several reasons for the Liberal decline. One is to he found in the revolt of many of the middle classes against orthodox liberal utilitarian ideals. Thus, whereas advance bourgeois thinks between 1820 and 1870 had mostly been laissez-faire Radicals of the Manchester School variety, those who followed were socialist, or at least collectivist, in their ideas. A second reason was the revolt of many of the working classes against the misery which was their lot and the gradual adherence to socialism. These two major changes have been taken as background; the major emphasis of this thesis, however, is on the Liberal Party itself. I have studied its leaders, their concepts, their quarrels, and the political events of the twenty years; I have tried to show how Gladstonian Liberalism reacted to the new forces in the late Victorian period and how its failure to do so adequately was in part inherent in its very nature. The Liberal Party was a phenomenon unique to an age which believed in "free enterprise" and a laissez-faire state; once these beliefs were threatened, so too was the party which practised them. Other factors making for Liberal decline included the Home Rule issue, the new Imperialism , and the defection Joseph Chamberlain. None of these, however, was as important as the first; Liberalism, by its very nature, contributed to its own destruction. I have tried to show how this process took place.

This study examines the social, cultural and political significance and utility of the livery collar during the fifteenth century, in particular 1450 to 1500, the period associated with the Wars of the Roses in England. References to the item abound in government records, in contemporary chronicles and gentry correspondence, in illuminated manuscripts and, not least, on church monuments. From the fifteenth century the collar was regarded as a potent symbol of royal power and dignity, the artefact associating the recipient with the king. The thesis argues that the collar was a significant aspect of late-medieval visual and material culture, and played a significant function in the construction and articulation of political and other group identities during the period. The thesis seeks to draw out the nuances involved in this process. It explores the not infrequently juxtaposed motives which lay behind the king distributing livery collars, and the motives behind recipients choosing to depict them on their church monuments, and proposes that its interpretation as a symbol of political or dynastic conviction should be re-appraised. After addressing the principal functions and meanings bestowed on the collar, the thesis moves on to examine the item in its various political contexts. It then places the collar within the sphere of medieval identity construction. In the final two chapters collars on church monuments are used as a starting point for conducting prosopographical studies of groups of linked individuals, in order to explore political and other types of shared identities at both a national and local level. It is argued that livery collars were used on church monuments as a manifestation, and indeed perpetuation, of the collective identity of the deceased and their kin. The inclusion of collars on church monuments could be used, as it were, differently, depending on local social, geographical and tenurial contexts. The author's original contribution to research centres on his findings regarding the nature of political affiliation and political life in the fifteenth century. In addition, the thesis offers a fresh methodology with which to analyse local history and networks. The collar is used as a vehicle through which to analyse and appraise wider themes of late-medieval politics and culture, and to explore the nature and understanding of royal power in the fifteenth century. Original conclusions are developed regarding the nature and extent of political thinking and conviction during the period - indeed the very meaning of politics to contemporaries at the centre and on the periphery of the polity - and its visual manifestation.

This thesis deals with the struggles of two groups of skilled workers in late 19th century Britain, engineers and compositors, to defend their position in the division of labour in the face of pressures towards technical and organisational change. Its principal concern is to trace and explain the divergent long-run experiences of these two occupational groups, focusing particularly on the period 1890-1914. The thesis opens with a critical review of the dominant theoretical approaches to the division of labour. Their tendency to deduce the evolution of the division of labour from a unilinear model of capitalist development, it is argued, renders them incapable of providing an adequate account of such central phenomena as the ongoing complexity of the distribution of skills in the labour force and the impact of industrial conflict on the division of labour itself. Elements of an alternative approach offering a more satisfactory relationship between theory and empirical cases are sketched out; their practical fecundity is explored in the body of the thesis. The body of the thesis is divided into three parts. Part I focuses on the relations between skilled workers and employers in engineering and printing before major waves of mechanisation in the 1890s, highlighting those structural features which conditioned both the forms and outcomes of conflicts over technical change in each case. Accordingly, the characteristics of market structure, the division of labour, and trade union and employer organisation are analysed for both industries. The principal conclusion of this section is that craft regulation had been eroded to a considerable extent in both industries by employers' attempts to cheapen and intensify skilled labour within the framework of the existing division of labour. Part II presents a primarily narrative account of the conflicts sparked off by a major wave of technical and organisational change in the two industries during the 1890s, together with the extent of their resolution up to 1914. The early success of compositors in capturing control of mechanical typesetting is contrasted with the employers' victory over similar issues in the 1897-8 engineering lockout. These variations in craftsmen's ability to capture new technology placed the two trades on divergent paths in relation to their future position in the division of labour. The remainder of this section examines engineering employers' failure fully to transform the division of labour before 1914, together with the progressive consolidation of craft regulation by the typographical unions. Part III explores the long-term outcomes for the position of skilled workers in the division of labour, taking account of developments in the inter-war years, which it is argued confirm the divergent fates of the two groups. The concluding chapter attempts to identify the central structural forces conditioning the differences in the outcomes in the two cases, and to balance their importance against that of the strategic choices of the historical actors. The thesis as a whole highlights the role of conflict between skilled workers and employers in determining the consequences of technical and organisational change for the position of craftsmen in the division of labour within the limits set by market forces and technology. The outcomes of industrial conflict are in turn traced back to Variations in the balance of forces between skilled workers and employers, emphasising the impact of market structure and the preexisting division of labour for the bargaining power and solidarity of each group. At the same time, it is argued that structural factors conditioned but did not determine the actual pattern of alliances formed by workers and employers, which depended in large measure on an essentially political process influenced by specific historical conjunctures, past experiences of conflict and cooperation, and the strategic choices of each group of actors.

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.