This dissertation explores the correlation between British colonial experiences in Ireland and India c. 1650 - 1800. While the traditional characterisation of Ireland as a settlement colony and India as primarily a mercantile colony would suggest diverse imperial encounters, a comparative analysis of the two shows significant similarities. Temporal and/or geographical distances notwithstanding, the study's thematic approach reveals recurring patterns regarding the relationships between colonisers and the colonised. The six chapters of this dissertation explore different elements of empire, concluding that comparable socio-political and agrarian principles were consistently implemented in both colonies. The first chapter explores history writing as a tool of historical appropriation and indigenous reconfiguration. The second looks at escalating legal responses to colonial violence and colonial jurisdiction's role in defining social norms; the third considers the evolving forms of punishment dealt to 'deviant' colonial subjects. The fourth chapter looks at similar processes of agrarian reconfiguration that revealed broader imperial attitudes towards landownership and the fifth one elaborates on the use of visual representations of empire as propaganda tools to shape public opinion. In the final chapter, selected experiences of the Irish in India illustrate examples of colonial subjects' collaboration in imperial expansion. By adopting a more heuristic and thematic approach to colonial experiences, this study adds to the growing literature that necessarily complicates the distinctions between metropole and periphery. It challenges the use of single points of reference which have routinely privileged the accounts and experiences of Britons in the scholarly analysis of cross-cultural and imperial interactions. Blending early modern and nineteenth-century experiences with regional and global history, the chapters address the history of emotions, law, material culture, economy, and politics to argue that processes of influence and transformation were indicative of a more layered and evolutionary development in response to colonial challenges. Such experimental approaches provide a more sustained understanding of the processes of continuity and change in Britain's imperial evolution.

This thesis investigates the economic accountability of women in eighteenth-century England, particularly within the informal credit market. In the past few decades, substantial scholarship has demonstrated women's regular involvement in active income generation. At all levels of the economy - from servants to investors - and stages of working life - from training to retirement - women have been shown to have engaged in a far more active manner than was previously appreciated. Older narratives of working opportunities being eroded by capitalism or the industrial revolution have been significantly challenged and the continuity of women's work largely demonstrated, with women whether single or married trading under their name, sometimes with phenomenal success. However, there have been no detailed examinations of how, or even if, women were held accountable when their business was not successful and failed. This thesis examines the extents to which women were held accountable for their own failures, asserting that, to understand female business in this period, it is not merely enough to prove its continued existence. The degree and extent of female business independence must also be determined. To achieve this it focusses on the often underappreciated role that debtors' prisons played in the eighteenth-century economy. Bankruptcy, traditionally the mechanism used to examine failure and insolvency, was artificially restricted during the period to those owing over £100 and who were defined as a 'trader' by a 1571 statute. Therefore principally only the wealthier merchants went bankrupt. Debtors' prisons were much less restrictive. Anyone owing over £2 could be imprisoned indefinitely under the common law on a pre-trial basis with little guarantee that trial would ever take place. However, debtors' prisons have received little scholarly attention due to untested assumptions about their lack of effectiveness. That which exists has focussed upon conditions or reform and has broadly ignored or denied the presence of women as prisoners. Due to the lack of existing knowledge about how prisons functioned, the thesis is split into complementary sections, first exploring the prisons themselves before turning to female prisoners within them. Part One reconfigures eighteenth-century debt imprisonment from a medieval hangover to a fundamental element of the credit market. It posits that, as contemporary sales credit was substantially based upon individual reputation rather than entirely upon financial reality, it was logical that prisons focussed on the confinement of the body behind reputation to enforce informal contracts. The first chapter illustrates the hypothesis fully, demonstrating the importance of debtors' prisons over bankruptcy and court process. It also examines the hierarchy of prisons. Superior court prisons like the King's Bench and the Fleet, catering generally for higher status prisoners, functioned as an obstacle to easy debt recovery by allowing debtors to live outside in relative liberty. Much of the existing scholarship has been skewed by focus on these prisons. The second chapter tests the hypothesis through a quantitative analysis of the surviving commitment registers of the Wood-Street Compter, later the Giltspur-Street Compter (1741-1815). Analysing commitment rates, monthly population estimates, release mechanisms, length of commitment, debt averages, as well as providing indicative data on debtor occupational structure the chapter demonstrates that prisons underlined the credit system by providing the trading classes with a speedy debt recovery mechanism. Chapter Three acts as a caveat to this evidence by demonstrating the fragility of the system of debt imprisonment and that simple reforms, intended to improve the rights of the debtor, undermined the purpose of debtors' prisons by diluting indefinite confinement. It focusses on the 1761 Compulsive Clause and the schedules of debtor estates produced out of it, as well as the qualitative change to imprisonment by the imposition of term limits on those owing less than £2 from 1786. Part Two uses the knowledge that debt imprisonment was an effective and normal facet of the credit market which processed both those who had temporarily found themselves unable to meet the demands of creditors and those whose economic ventures had failed absolutely. Chapter Four, acknowledging that the very existence of female prisoners for debt has been readily denied, investigates how the women within came to be confined through prison records along with memoirs and other personal documents relating to prisoners. It questions the absolute nature of coverture, demonstrating that some married women were confined for their debts, contrary to the letter of the law. It also argues that simply because the majority of female prisoners were either spinsters or widows, this did not mean their confinement was the result of anyone other than themselves. We should see female imprisonment as an action of their being held accountable. Finally, Chapter Five examines the quantitative reality of female debt imprisonment to measure accountability over time. It shows that the female experience was not substantially different from that of men within debtors' prisons, though some degree of separation appeared after 1780 particularly in the size of the debt for which they were committed. Finally, by combining the compter data on female percentages with that of other prisons in London with limited surviving material and with nationwide data drawn from the Insolvency Acts it is able to suggest the female accountability over the long eighteenth century. It posits that female accountability and therefore economic independence, declined across the period as the number of permanent spinsters and the age at first marriage fell. While it does not suggest that the rate of business run by women declined in this period, that more of them were covered by male ownership suggests a significant qualitative change in female business's societal place.

Despite England’s growing international trading wealth, an expanding secondary sector, and more productive agriculture the mid-seventeenth century state with its outdated tax system was politically and militarily weak. Civil war and its aftermath created the urgent and protracted supply need which instigated the creation and honing of radically new effective tax forms and processes which proved indispensable during the Restoration and beyond. Drawing on Kent, London and Bristol case studies this thesis explores how the land tax became a mainstay of an increasingly powerful early modern English state by considering its administration, processes and tax mechanics from its 1643 inception to the excise crisis. Economic development offered fiscal opportunity and whilst the excise exploited product supply chains, the land tax targeted rent and income generated from agricultural, commercial and domestic real estate. Occupiers and landlords shared immediate fiscal burdens. Land taxes exploited cashflows around financial and seasonal production cycles, particularly in the more commercialised South and East, where fresh attempts were made to value and tax land. Effective local governors had for decades bolstered their own authority by delivering national initiatives and now worked in partnership with legislators to nurture the new tax and create resilience. The state’s bargain was that parliament would determine deadlines and fixed tax amounts from each locale, but local governors had immediate process ownership to determine its detailed application. Continued fiscal success required fresh waves of innovation, adaption and involvement including: empowerment, delegation, the deployment of more experienced officials, simplification, and improved stakeholder oversight. As post-Revolutionary conflict drove fiscal burdens higher, land taxes became a permanent fiscal implement of the state, despite regular outbreaks of political angst at the tax’s power. The resulting coordinated collective commitment of tens of thousands of officials, across county, city and country, was the great fiscal achievement of the age; a picture long obscured by institutionalised state narratives.

This thesis investigates facial damage and disfigurement in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, with a primary emphasis upon acquired disfigurement as a result of trauma or disease. It considers facial damage and disfigurement from the perspectives of those whose own faces were affected, those who encountered others with damaged faces, and the medical practitioners who treated and wrote about facial damage. The central research questions addressed here are: what was it like to have, to see, or to treat an atypical face in early modern England? The thesis is structured so that it addresses three main aspects of this subject. The first is the medical and surgical treatment of the face, and the ways in which medical practitioners discussed the facially damaged patients whom they encountered. The second main area of research is the impact that the gendered framework of early modern society had upon responses to facial difference. The third area of research is into the role played by disgust in determining reactions to some facial damage. This section of the thesis investigates the non-visual aspects of some facial damage and the extent to which the fluids and smells produced by the damage caused by conditions such as the pox might have resulted in stigmatisation. Together, these three strands of research form a wide-ranging investigation into the experience of, and responses to, facial damage and disfigurement in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.

The dissolution of the monasteries (1536-40) was one of the most critical transformations wrought by the English Reformation. It was also perhaps the most visible manifestation of the idea that Henry VIII’s break with Rome was also a break with the medieval past. Yet despite this, historians have paid little attention to how the dissolution was remembered by those who experienced it or to the evolution of this memory in later generations. This thesis probes the nature of the diverse afterlives of the dissolution between 1536 and c. 1700. On one hand, it seeks to account for the persistence of the narratives of monastic corruption and the expediency of suppression propagated by the Henrician regime in the 1530s, which have continued insidiously to shape its modern historiography. On the other, it examines the development of alternative traditions which challenged and interacted with this orthodoxy, highlighting the multivocal and polyvalent character of a memory culture that was dynamic rather than static. The first chapter examines the attempts of the Henrician government to shape the memory of the dissolution in the 1530s and 1540s, and undertakes a re-assessment of the sources that have conventionally been used by historians of the dissolution. It highlights a triumphant Henrician narrative of monastic corruption and iniquity that the remainder of the thesis sets out to test, complicate, and unravel. The second chapter explores the relationship between the dissolution and early modern senses of time, chronology, and history. It asks both how perceptions of the dissolution shifted over time and how the protracted and complicated four-year long process of suppression came to be remembered as the historical event that we know as ‘the Dissolution of the Monasteries’. The third chapter turns away from the temporal dimensions of the memory of the dissolution to explore its material, visual, and spatial aspects. It argues that historians have been preoccupied with an emergent ‘nostalgia’ for the monasteries at the expense of a gentry antiquarian culture that instead promoted a powerful culture of amnesia. It focuses particularly on the neglected subject of converted religious houses, which quite literally embodied efforts to forget the dissolution and the monastic past. The final chapter focuses on local traditions of memory. It deploys evidence of oral culture mediated through antiquarian writing to question previous work on a purely secular, socio-economic memory of the dissolution. It argues that the concept of sacrilege and the emergence of a folklore of the dissolution are key to recovering the religious dimension of local memory cultures. If the thesis begins with an account of Henrician attempts to shape the legacies of the dissolution, it concludes by demonstrating how, by 1700, these memory-making processes were starting to be exposed. This thesis thereby demonstrates the value of exploring the dissolution in terms of its long afterlives. It also argues that the dissolution is a powerful case study of historical memory, raising larger questions about the relationship between contemporary memorialising practices and the models of periodisation inherited by modern scholarship, as well as making a significant contribution to the emergent interest in the memory of the English Reformation.

This thesis examines how biblical typology was used in early modern Scotland. It focuses on the works of the Aberdonian minister and theologian, William Guild (1586–1657), who was one of the most prominent seventeenth-­‐century typological exegetes. His handbook, Moses Unvailed (1620), has been repeatedly noted as one of the key works in the development of Protestant typology. Yet his typological exegesis has not been properly explored. Indeed, detailed analysis of Guild’s life and works has been lacking. This study seeks to address those issues. Chapter One offers an updated biography of Guild, focusing on his intellectual development and religious involvement. Chapter Two provides the first detailed study of the theological influences on, and beliefs undergirding, Moses Unvailed, showing that Guild’s typological exegesis became more Christocentric in the period between 1608 and 1620. Chapters Three and Four explore the varied uses of typology in Guild’s sermons, biblical study aids, polemical works, and political treatises, drawing comparisons with his Scottish contemporaries. Chapter Three examines how typology was used in works addressed to godly audiences, while Chapter Four focuses on how typology was used in works aimed at theological opponents and political authorities. These chapters suggest that typology was consistently used – either directly or indirectly – to edify Reformed Protestants. Chapter Five turns to Guild’s commentaries to consider how typology related to allegorical, moral, and prophetic exegesis. This chapter argues that while typology was rarely Guild’s primary interpretative approach it still served vital functions in allowing him to reinforce, clarify, and expand his expositions. This thesis provides the first study of early modern typology in a Scottish context and also represents the most detailed engagement with Guild’s works to date. It challenges the divisions that have been drawn by scholars between different applications of typology and argues that Guild’s distinction between types and comparisons offers a more helpful way of understanding the varied uses of typology in early modern Scotland. From this analysis a clearer understanding of the functions of typology for early modern exegetes emerges. This thesis argues that while, for Guild and his contemporaries, typology served to demonstrate how the Old Testament reveals Christ, they were frequently drawn to this approach because it also gave them a biblically and providentially grounded means of articulating their vision of Protestant godliness.

Historians have long been drawn to the story of Barbados and the tales of sugar, slavery, empire, and wealth that defined the colonial history of this small West Indian island lying on the southeastern margins of the Caribbean Sea. First settled by the English in 1627, it quickly developed into ‘one of the richest Spotes of ground in the wordell’ after the introduction of sugar cane agriculture in the early 1640s and, by 1660, had become one of the most valuable and influential colonial possessions in the western hemisphere. Barbados was famous in its own time, especially after Richard Ligon, a three year resident on the island from 1647 to 1650, wrote his popular A True and Exact History of the Iland of Barbados in 1657. In this work, he vividly described a range of topics that included the island’s exotic flora and fauna, the methods used to convert cane into sugar, the trials many experienced in adjusting to life in the tropics, and the arrival of enslaved Africans for a public eager to receive such information on the distant domains of a growing empire. Contemporary scholars followed Ligon with other works in which Barbados figured prominently, such as John Oldmixon’s The British Empire in America (1708) and two important natural histories by Hans Sloane (1708) and Griffith Hughes (1750). It also served as the setting for many popular works, including a brief poem by the well-known English bard Richard Flecknoe and Richard Steele’s famous newspaper serial ‘Inkle and Yariko. Academic interest in the island’s past has also remained high since the eighteenth-century, with historians consistently drawn to Barbados’ integral role in the development of sugarcane agriculture based on enslaved African labour and the influence this had on England’s imperial mission. As B.W. Higman explains: the colonial history of the Caribbean is commonly characterized by the intimate relationship of sugar and slavery…and the defining moment of that relationship is located in the sugar revolution, beginning in Barbados in the middle of the seventeenth century. It is the sugar revolution above all which has come to represent the vital watershed, starkly separating the history of the islands from that of the mainland, not merely in terms of agricultural economy, but in almost every area of life, from demography, to social structure, wealth, settlement patterns, culture, and politics. Higman’s quotation highlights the important work on the island’s past that has already been completed by modern historians, especially in regard to sugar, slavery, and their combined effects upon the economic and political relationships that dominated the planters’ lives. Richard Dunn, for example, notes that ‘we have detailed political and institutional histories of the several Caribbean colonies in the seventeenth centuries and excellent studies of Stuart colonial policy in the West Indies.’ Books such as those written by Dunn, Vincent Harlow, Gary Puckrein, Larry Gragg, Noel Deerr, Richard Pares, Carl and Roberta Bridenbaugh, Richard Sheridan, Russell Menard, and Hilary Beckles have successfully highlighted the importance of Barbados’ place within the sugar-producing Caribbean and have helped to contribute to the further understanding of the relationship between the development of the plantation complex, the growing power of the West Indian planter, and the forced enslavement of a large African population. Combined, these authors adequately cover most of the important events in Barbadian history, ranging from the early settlement period and the emergence of sugar to the emancipation of the enslaved in 1834. Nevertheless, gaps in the historiography still exist, leaving several significant periods of the island’s history under-analyzed and misunderstood. One such lacuna exists for the twenty-year period between 1680 and 1700, a vital two decades that represented great tragedy, violence, and change throughout the English empire from an ugly combination of rebellion, revolution, and war. These events profoundly influenced and altered the lives of the 66,000 people living on Barbados. Yet, many historians gloss over this period in favor of either the island’s early settlement period or later emancipation era. They often avoid the 1680s and 1690s by hastily contending that the two decades were a period of relative decline defined by a combination of low prices, limited supply, infertile soil, war, and disease. Historians often attempt to justify these assertions by pointing to two contemporary documents that, when read in tandem, appear to paint a dismal picture of island conditions during this era. The first of these is the 1680 census, a compilation of demographic statistics collected by each parish vestry at the request of Governor Sir Jonathon Atkins in 1679. Under intense suspicion from the Lords of Trade and Plantations for not following the proper protocol concerning colonial laws and for refusing to send requested information back to England, Atkins demanded the name, location, acreage, and labor force of every landowner living on the island. He also collected specific accounts of the militia, island fortifications, and emigration, while receiving tallies of the Anglican baptisms, deaths, and marriages that occurred in each parish. Many historians use these demographic statistics to draw important conclusions about Barbados, including the continuing consolidation of the island’s limited acreage by the elite, the wealthy’s dominance of politics and the military, the lopsided burial to baptism rate, the high number of white emigrants, and the near-complete replacement of indentured servants by enslaved Africans.

This thesis examines the reciprocity of literary and legal cultures, and seeks to enhance understanding of cultural and socio-legal constructions of morality in early modern England. Identifying the tensions in an institutional legality in which both secular pragmatism and moral idealism act as formulating principals, it interrogates the sense of disjuncture that arises between imaginative concepts of moral justice and their translation into the formal structures of law. Chapter 1 investigates representations of rape in light of the legislative changes of the 1570s, and addresses the question of how literature shapes the legal imaginary of immorality. Literary models, notably Shakespeare's The Rape Of Lucrece (1594), and George Peele's Tale of Troy (1589), are examined together with the texts of Edward Coke and Thomas Edgar to argue that lawyers' mythopoeic interpretative strategies produce a form of legal fiction in relation to sexual crime. These strategies are contextualised in Chapter 2 in relation to the education and literary-legal culture at the Inns of Court, and the thesis progresses to an examination of the inns' literary and dramatic output – notably that of Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville's Gorbuduc, and Arthur Broke's contemporaneous revels' masque, Desire and Lady Bewty (1561-2) – to establish how the legal fraternity wielded significant authority over Tudor sexual politics, moral signification, and interpretative practices. Chapters 3 and 4 explore legal and ethical challenges heralded by the Jacobean accession, particularly those posed by the Somerset scandal. Analysis of histories, letters, and court satire, together with Thomas Campion's The Lord Hay's Masque (1607), and George Chapman's Andromeda Liberata (1614) and The Tragedy of Chabot (1639), illuminates the period's textual negotiations of legal, political, and personal ethics, and offers a revealing picture of the moral paradoxes produced by the opacity of the parameters between the personal and political lives of the ruling elite.

The Scottish perspective of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 has received limited scholarly attention. The opposite is true of the Union of 1707 and this defining moment, which resulted in the loss of Scottish independence, continues to stimulate debate. The lives of Scottish noblewomen in the years from Revolution to Union have generally been disregarded. This thesis will demonstrate that acknowledging and exploring the experiences of noblewomen augments understanding of this momentous era. Investigating the lives of Scottish noblewomen using their letters to explore how they lived through the Revolution, the ‘ill years’ of King William’s reign, the Darien venture, European war and ultimately the negotiation of Union provides fresh perspectives on the social, economic and political life of Scotland. Recovering the experience of noblewomen engages with a wider process in Scottish history which has transformed understanding in some areas of historical study but has by no means permeated all. Redefining female political activity has illuminated the influence of elite English women in the later eighteenth century. Scottish noblewomen require similar extensive study. The research presented here supports the argument that political analysis alone cannot provide the fullest assessment of this period. Women are revealed as a vital element within social aspects of political manoeuvring and both created and maintained family networks. This research challenges the constricting framework of the public and private dichotomy. It aims to reveal and redefine the responsibilities of noblewomen within an expanded sphere of activity and suggests a much more inclusive role for women than has previously been considered. The formation of a British parliament in 1707 reduced the number of Scots parliamentarians and changed the role of the governing elite in Scotland but did not diminish Scottish women’s influence and participation. This thesis argues that Scottish noblewomen operated with autonomy within patriarchal parameters to support menfolk, exert authority and in some cases wield influence. Demonstrating their roles, abilities and a new form of social politics at work in Scotland is a vital part of understanding the post Union period and the development of British politics.

No description available.