Research into the material culture of the household and the domestic interior has increased rapidly during recent years. It has primarily focused on the appearance and use of domestic space leaving household management and maintenance a neglected area of study. Furthermore the relationship between the ownership of goods, the domestic interior and the use of the home has not been studied in conjunction with the management and maintenance of the household. Additionally, research into the material culture of the household has predominantly focused on quantitative changes experienced during the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth. It has long been established that the ownership of household goods increased in this period, but similar research has not taken place to explore the nature of these goods, nor to extend this work to the subsequent period. This thesis brings these aspects of research together for the first time to create a synthesis between the ownership of goods and the changing nature and use of the home and household maintenance and management. The argument proposed here suggests that the changing nature of the material culture of the household and developments to the use of the home had an impact upon the way that the household was managed and maintained. The complex inter-woven relationship between the material culture of the domestic interior and the ways in which it was maintained and managed reveals that both elements were a part of an emerging middle class culture of domesticity. Therefore, this thesis makes a significant contribution to a holistic understanding of the household by looking at the ownership of goods and the use of domestic space within the context of maintenance and management.

This thesis explores the crowds that attended London's executions, pillories and public whippings during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It aims to reappraise a literature describing the carnivalesque and voyeuristic nature of popular behaviour, and to trace a continuum in the public's active engagement with the criminal justice system between 1783 and 1868. By employing a range of little used sources to examine the biographical, geographical and social texture of punishment audiences, it details the lives and motivations of the men, women and children who assembled to watch these often brutal events. In the process, this thesis significantly revises our received understanding of the troublesome punishment 'mob', the unruliness and low character of which has been frequently assumed on the basis of uncritical reading of contemporary sources inveighing against plebeian behaviour. It reveals a more stable picture of public participation, and argues that this experience was characterized by the remarkable social diversity and relative good order of the crowd. This study in consequence problematizes teleological narratives of social 'improvement' and a putative 'civilizing process', which have traditionally described the fall of public punishments as a product of changing urban sensitivities. In analysing the crowd's structure and responses to public punishments over time, the thesis demonstrates how popular expectations surrounding older forms of public justice remained essentially unchanged, and continued to speak forcefully to the metropolitan conscience. To explain the undoubted changes in punishment policy in the period, in the absence of a clear teleological narrative of attitudes towards public punishment, the thesis in turn argues that the decline of the pillory, whippings and public executions in London was driven by elite fears regarding mass behaviour, particularly in the wake of the Gordon Riots of 1780, and suggests that public punishments disappeared not because of their dwindling moral relevance or failing penal utility, but as a result of the middle class's increasingly nervous perceptions of urban mass phenomena. The thesis argues that the decline of public punishment did not result from 'squeamishness' about judicial murder and corporal punishment, but from anxiety about the authority and power of the crowd.

This thesis is an investigation of the Philanthropic Society (est. 1788) and Refuge for the Destitute (est. 1804), two subscription charities established to prevent crime and reform members of the “criminal underclass” in London, England. This thesis engages the perspectives of both benefactors and beneficiaries, arguing that beneficiaries (or “objects”) were not passive participants in the charitable exchange, but actively sought to manipulate the institutions’ systems to secure their own desires —desires which did not always align with those of their benefactors. The introductory chapter explores the social, economic, and political conditions which led benefactors to create the institutions and which informed their aims and methods. The first chapter examines the strategies used by objects to secure charitable aid on their own terms. The post-institutional conduct of beneficiaries is the focus of the final chapter. Despite the intensive reformatory regimen of the Philanthropic and Refuge, a significant proportion of beneficiaries —at least one third— refused to fulfill benefactors’ expectations that they become law-abiding, industrious, and pious citizens. From the day of their application to the institutions to long after their departure, objects’ actions were informed by their own expectations and desires. / Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC)

Textile manufacture in England had always employed a high proportion of women and this continued to be the case during the period 1760-1850. However, these industries underwent dramatic changes in both the nature and location of production, and women’s employment opportunities altered. Whilst in some cases technological advances reduced the strength required to perform a given process, making women more attractive to employers, this was not always the case. Urbanisation and factory production increased trade union influence, which often acted to the detriment of women’s access to well-paid occupations. The long standardised hours worked away from the home typically required of factory workers made it harder for women to combine textile work with the mothering and domestic responsibilities expected of them. As well as making it harder for women to work throughout their life, this discouraged investment in human capital of females by both themselves and their parents. Ideological resistance to women’s work outside of the home increased as the Industrial Revolution progressed. The more formalised work hierarchy created by factory production meant that resistance to female authority became increasingly important for denying women access to the best paid occupations. Ideology was not merely a response to material factors, but helped determine decisions made by economic actors. This thesis draws on a number of parliamentary reports over the period 1802-67. Not only do these reports provide a wealth of qualitative information, they also contain quantitative information which enables me to track male and female factory earnings over the life-cycle, by region and industry. The information in the parliamentary reports is used in conjunction with business records of various firms, covering both domestic and factory workers, as well as the writings of numerous contemporary observers.

Nesta investigação será analisada a reconfiguração político-territorial do Vice-Reino do Novo Reino de Granada, no final do século XVIII e nas duas primeiras décadas do século XIX. Em primeiro lugar, examinar-se-á a organização político-territorial do Vice-Reino, estabelecida pela monarquia espanhola. Em segundo lugar, analisar-se-á a formação de juntas de governo, congressos, Estados provinciais e confederações, que, após a dissolução da monarquia, em 1808, foram legitimadas por meio de atas, constituições de tipo moderno e guerras. Esses acontecimentos modificaram a organização política e territorial do antigo Vice-Reino, entre 1809 e 1816. / This research analyzes the political and territorial reconfiguration of the Viceroyalty of New Kingdom of Granada, in the late eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth century. In the first place, the political and territorial organization of the Viceroyalty established by the Spanish monarchy will be examined. Secondly, the formation of governments juntas, congress, provincial States and confederations after the dissolution of the monarchy in 1808 will to be analyzed, as well as how they were legitimated by actas, constitutions of modern type and wars that changed political and territorial organization of the former Viceroyalty, between 1809 and 1816.

Nesta investigação será analisada a reconfiguração político-territorial do Vice-Reino do Novo Reino de Granada, no final do século XVIII e nas duas primeiras décadas do século XIX. Em primeiro lugar, examinar-se-á a organização político-territorial do Vice-Reino, estabelecida pela monarquia espanhola. Em segundo lugar, analisar-se-á a formação de juntas de governo, congressos, Estados provinciais e confederações, que, após a dissolução da monarquia, em 1808, foram legitimadas por meio de atas, constituições de tipo moderno e guerras. Esses acontecimentos modificaram a organização política e territorial do antigo Vice-Reino, entre 1809 e 1816. / This research analyzes the political and territorial reconfiguration of the Viceroyalty of New Kingdom of Granada, in the late eighteenth century and the first two decades of the nineteenth century. In the first place, the political and territorial organization of the Viceroyalty established by the Spanish monarchy will be examined. Secondly, the formation of governments juntas, congress, provincial States and confederations after the dissolution of the monarchy in 1808 will to be analyzed, as well as how they were legitimated by actas, constitutions of modern type and wars that changed political and territorial organization of the former Viceroyalty, between 1809 and 1816.

This thesis examines the role of national defence in British parliamentary politics between 1794 and 1812. It suggests that previous analyses of the late eighteenth-century political milieu insufficiently explore the impact of war on the structure of the state. Work by J.E. Cookson, Linda Colley, J.C.D. Clark, and Paul Langford depicts a decentralised state that had little direct involvement in developing a popular “British” patriotism. Here I argue that the threat of a potential French invasion during the wars against Revolutionary and Napoleonic France provoked a drive for centralisation. Nearly all the defence measures enacted during the period gave the government a much greater degree of control over British manpower and resources. The readiness of successive governments to involve large sections of the nation in the war effort through military service, financial contributions, and appeals to the British “spirit”, resulted in a much more inclusive sense of citizenship in which questions of national participation and political franchise were unlinked. National identity was also affected, and the focus on military defence of the British Isles influenced political attitudes towards the regular army. By 1810, however, the nation was disillusioned by the lengthy struggle with France. The result of lingering political weakness was that attention shifted from national defence onto domestic corruption and venality. The aftermath of the Irish Act of Union, too, demonstrated the limits of attempts to centralise the policy of the whole United Kingdom. Significantly, however, the debates over the relationship between the centre and the localities in the 1830s and 1840s, and the response to a new French invasion threat in the 1850s and 1860s, revived themes addressed during the 1790s and 1800s. The political reaction to the invasion threats between 1794 and 1812 ultimately had more in common with a Victorian state bureaucracy than an eighteenth-century ancien régime.

On account of their supposed link to nature, women in post-revolutionary France were pigeonholed into a very restrictive sphere that centred around domesticity and submission to their male counterparts. Yet this thesis shows how a number of women writers – Cottin, Genlis, Krüdener, Souza and Staël – re-appropriate nature in order to reclaim the voice denied to them and to their sex by the society in which they lived. The five chapters of this thesis are structured to follow a number of critical junctures in the life of an adult woman: marriage, authorship, motherhood, madness and mortality. The opening sections to each chapter show why these areas of life generated particular problems for women at this time. Then, through in-depth analysis of primary texts, the chapters function in two ways. They examine how female novelists craft natural landscapes to expose and comment on the problems male-dominant society causes women to experience in France at this time. In addition, they show how female novelists employ descriptions of nature to highlight women's responses to the pain and frustration that social issues provoke for them. Scholars have thus far overlooked the natural settings within the works of female novelists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet, a re-evaluation of these natural settings, as suggested by this thesis, brings a new dimension to our appreciation of the works of these women writers and of their position as critics of contemporary society. Ultimately, an escape into nature on the part of female protagonists in these novels becomes the means by which their creators confront the everyday reality faced by women in the turbulent socio-historical era which followed the Revolution.