Working within the field of nineteenth century transatlantic history this thesis takes as its starting point British attempts to engage with the American Civil War. It emphasizes the historiographical oversights within the current scholarship on this topic which have tended to downplay the significance of antebellum British commentators in constructing an image of the United States for their readers which was highly regionalized, and which have failed to recognize the antebellum heritage of the tropes deployed during the Civil War to describe the Union and Confederacy. Drawing on the accounts of over fifty British pre-war commentators and supplemented by the political press, monthly magazines and personal correspondence, in addition to significant amounts of Civil War propaganda this thesis contends that the understanding of the British literate classes of the conflict was part of a continuum. It equally emphasizes that by measuring the reception of texts among the literate public it is possible to ascertain the levels of British understanding of different aspects of the American nation and its sections in this period. It aims to demonstrate that any attempt to understand the conflict in a British context must adequately reflect the long-standing image of the United States as being characterized by discrete regions with particular social, cultural, economic and political identities. At the same time, it makes clear that pre-war discussions of the United States as a nation did not preclude the use of sectional identities; in fact the tropes of the pre-war United States themselves came to be highly sectionalized during the conflict. This thesis, therefore, places the American Civil War in both a transatlantic framework and emphasizes the extensive chronological span of British engagements with American sectionalism in order to explain the occasionally counter-intuitive and often confusing attitude of the British towards the conflict.

This work investigates the development of an environmental consciousness and environmental activism in Britain, 1945-1975. The 1970s have been described as ‘the decade of the environment’ and was the period when the modern environmental movement emerged. In this thesis, the environmental movement is considered to be a broad network of individuals and pressure groups engaging in collective action with shared environmental beliefs. Much of the work on the movement has ignored or played down the importance of the post-war period on its development. This project challenges that, dealing less with the movement itself and more with the developments which led to its emergence: through analysing events like the great London smog of 1952 and the Torrey Canyon oil spill of 1967, as well as through television programmes, this thesis traces the post-war influences of the movement and the growth of environmental awareness. Environmental pressure groups form part of the movement and a number of them are studied here, such as the Newcastle-based group Save Our City from Environmental Mess and the London-based group Commitment, WWF, Friends of the Earth and the National Smoke Abatement Society. From analysing the resources of these groups and the political processes within which they appear (resource mobilisation theory and political process theory) a better understanding is made about their successes, failures and how they fed into a growing environmental awareness. Television programmes from the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s – notably natural history programmes such as Look, Zoo Quest, Doctor Who and Doomwatch – also helped an environmental consciousness develop. In marrying together these different issues, this work provides an original contribution to knowledge, and assesses some of the influences which led to the environmental movement emerging in 1970s Britain.

This is a study of the mercantile organisation of the British fur trade in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The thesis seeks to answer two over-arching questions. Firstly, why did the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) maintain its Charter and acquire a monopoly of the British fur trade during a period of significant trade liberalisation in British overseas commerce? Secondly, why did London remain the European emporium of the North-Atlantic fur trade despite the rise of the provincial outports in other branches of Britain’s colonial and foreign trades? In seeking to answer these questions, the thesis explores each stage of the British fur trade in order to establish the factors that prolonged the continuation of the London mercantilist system in the trade. Underpinning these explorations is a detailed study of the trade statistics contained within the British customs’ records, as well as, from sale, purchase, and employee ledgers, and correspondence contained within the HBC Archives. The thesis presents the argument that developments occurring on both sides of the North-Atlantic World supported the continuation of the mercantilist system in the fur trade, and that the trade was actually a more robust model of that system in 1821 than it had been in 1783. The factors that led the British government to grant the HBC a de facto monopoly of the British fur trade in 1821 were multifaceted and it was not, as much of the existing literature suggests, a simple business merger. Ecological constraints in North America limited the potential for growth in the trade and made the enterprise ever more specialised, which served to discourage new entrants and to increase pressure on existing participants. Limited prospects for expansion and the presence of the rival North West Company (NWC) restrained the critiques of British manufacturers towards the HBC. From 1815, violent confrontations between the HBC and NWC on the frozen frontiers of the British North American Empire increased political scrutiny of the fur trade and led metropolitan interests to conclude that a single company with a monopoly of the fur trade was preferable to the injurious effects of unrestrained free market competition. The continued importance of the re-export trade and the buying preferences of the consumers who purchased the trade’s high-value products kept the trade centred on the metropolitan economy and restricted its proliferation to other British ports. Finally, the role of Cain and Hopkins’ ‘gentlemanly capitalists’ proved crucial, as the total absence of provincial opposition allowed the future of the fur trade to be solely shaped by the hands of London’s commercial elite.

This thesis is the first major study of organised Irish nationalism in the North East of England, set against the wider context of events in Britain and Ireland, from the division that followed Parnell’s fall in 1890 until shortly after the foundation of the Irish Free State and the Irish Civil War. It is a significant contribution to our understanding of the history of the largest ethnic group in Britain before the Second World War – the Irish. It is also an important regional study, revealing the vitality and diversity of the North East’s expression of Irish nationalism that was probably not equalled anywhere else in England and Wales, other than in London. That vitality was manifested in the raising of the Tyneside Irish Brigade for the British Army in 1914. The Tyneside Irish was the crowning achievement of the pre-1918 Irish nationalist organisations in the North East, and arguably in Britain, demonstrating the organisations’ commitment both to John Redmond and to the region, where so many Irish migrants had settled. Irish nationalism’s diversity in the North East was embodied in the Irish Labour Party, which, alone in England, took root on Tyneside, and sought to blend class and ethnic issues at a time of national crisis in Ireland. This organisation casts light on the complex issue of the transference of working-class Irish Catholic allegiance from nationalism to the labour movement in Britain, and, therefore, in the assimilation of that community into the wider British community. Though none of these nationalist organisations has left any extensive archive, this thesis utilises Irish and English manuscript sources, and a wide array of Catholic, labour, and regional newspapers, to demonstrate that these organisations were not only an important part of the history of the Irish in the North East, but also of the North East itself.