This thesis aims to show, how periodization and race converged vigorously during the nineteenth century. The research focuses mainly on the question of how nineteenth century historians viewed the transformation from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. For many scholars, the year 476 A.D. became associated with the fall of Rome. During the nineteenth century, historians elaborated two main arguments: 1) 'The Roman' emphasized the decline that had occurred after the fall of Rome. 2) 'The Teutonic' signified the rejuvenation which the German tribes had brought about in the decaying Empire. Although I relate to the 'Roman' argument, the heart of the discussion is devoted to the 'Teutonic' school that was supported not only by German but also by British or more accurately English historians. The first part of the dissertation is devoted to the theme of 'Community and Race'. In this part, I engage with the thematic question of how the historians of the second half of the nineteenth century constructed past and present communities through the concept of race. A close community or Gemeinschaft of English and German historians emerged during the middle of the nineteenth century. Based on the concept of Teutonic kinship, this community emphasized the notions of race and historical time, which actually invented a new sense of belonging. The English and the Germans were one, an almost indivisible community founded on a purported notion of race. Despite several national or particularistic inclinations, these nations had a common Teutonic past, which always bonded them together. Therefore, the historians 'imagined' a new ultimate transnational (racial) community of belonging. In the second part I study the theme of 'Time'. The linkage between the two parts is embedded in the idea of the Community as a 'Time Maker'. Namely, in what manner does the construction of a community by the historians defines the division of time. The chapter that links the two themes of 'Community' and 'Time' examines the writings of scholars in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who underlined the Germanic invasions of the 4th and 5th centuries A.D. as the events that symbolized the fall of Rome and the end of Antiquity. This governing observation is connected directly with the racial Teutonic feelings that were prevalent among English and German historians. The discussion of it set the framework for the following chapters, which delve into the distinct periodization's of Edward Augustus Freeman (1823-92) and John Bagnell Bury (1861-1927). These historians, who were in constant and close contact until the death of Freeman in 1892, reveal similarities as well as major differences in their historical writings. The main reason why they were chosen derives from the new periodization which they had adopted. Both of them devised a method that signified a departure from the accepted and almost 'sacred' division between Antiquity and the Middle Ages.

The challenge that faced Edwardian Britain was how to respond to poverty and related social problems. The Victorian ideas on poverty and philanthropy were under attack by the beginning of the twentieth century and had not been replaced by those of the mid to late twentieth century, large-scale state welfare. This meant that the first twenty years of the twentieth century were a time when there was no consensus on how to respond to poverty. The concern about poverty with the lives of the working-class highlighted by Booth, Rowntree and the Boer War led to the development of new responses to poverty. Two groups who attracted attention at this time were working-class women and children whose poverty and related problems were highlighted during the first two decades of the twentieth century. In Bradford there were developments in both the political and philanthropic spheres in response to poverty. This thesis seeks to add to the knowledge of the early twentieth century through focusing on responses to poverty within one English town, Bradford, concentrating on both the philanthropic and political community. No study has investigated the work of both the Guild of Help and the ILP together and examined how their work and their policies impacted on poverty in Bradford. The Guild of Help looked to alleviate the poverty of those best placed to help themselves whereas the ILP aimed to alleviate, if not eliminate problems for all of those in poverty. The working class in Bradford responded to poverty largely through the development of practical strategies that enabled them and their families to survive. They were not able to alleviate their own poverty on a long-term basis and in some cases needed outside assistance in order to survive. The main response of the philanthropic community was the establishment of the Bradford City Guild of Help. It aimed to provide a community wide response to poverty in Bradford and to act as a clearing-house for charity in order to eliminate fraud. This response of the Bradford charitable elite aimed to investigate personal circumstances and provide help in the form of advice rather than money. The Guild of Help looked to alleviate rather than eliminate poverty and helped those in the best position to practice self-help. Although its acceptance of a role of the state in areas that had had been the traditional preserve of charity showed that the Guild of Help had moved on from Victorian charity, it still aimed to preserve the status quo and would not advocate any measures that would change this. The knowledge built up by the Guild of Help in relation to the problems of working-class women and children ensured that it was well placed to deal with these problems. However it preferred to deal with each case on an individual basis by individual Helpers which meant that there was no consistency in dealing with the poverty of working class women and children. The major response from the political community came from the Independent Labour Party. The ILP looked to eliminate poverty and the social ills associated with it and if poverty could not be eliminated without a change in society, then the ILP advocated that society should be fundamentally changed. The ILP lacked a coherent plan to tackle poverty and related problems in Bradford and had little success in responding to problems such as unemployment. However, the ILP did make the issue of education their own and built on the work of Margaret McMillan in Bradford. The ILP did challenge traditional views on responsibility for children and their policies made a difference to the lives of working-class children.

This thesis explores divorce and judicial separation as it occurred in nineteenth-century Scotland, between the years 1830 and 1890, predating the phenomenon it came to be in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As Scotland’s history has frequently been incorporated within a general history of Great Britain, this thesis separates it from the widely researched accounts of marriage and marital breakdown in England to highlight the different approach to regulating marriage, divorce and separation under Scots law. Applying Scotland’s distinctive legal, demographic and economic context has provided a social and gender history of marriage breakdown unique to the country, and filled a historiographical gap for the nineteenth century. This research will be presented through separate analyses of divorce for adultery, desertion—both official and unofficial, and marital cruelty in the civil and criminal courts. To present individual experiences inside the courtroom, Court of Session divorce and separation cases are used and supplemented with newspaper accounts of Court of Session trials. To provide context to the related discourses, Parliamentary papers and newspaper articles are used. Lastly, to address the unofficial instances of marital breakdown, criminal court trials of wifebeating and poor relief applications from deserted wives are also analysed. This thesis argues that despite comparably liberal divorce and separation laws established in the sixteenth century, legal, economic, social and cultural factors and discourses imposed on the accessibility of these legal forms of marital breakdown.

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This thesis examines how artists working for the War Artists' Advisory Committee (WAAC) represented aerial warfare. In contrast to the scholarly attention lavished on wartime films and posters, official war art remains a much neglected aspect of the propaganda war. The few studies that do exist, most notably by Brian Foss, survey the collection as a whole and consider it from an art history perspective. By focusing on the single theme of aviation, a central and defining experience of the Second World War, I embed the WAAC within the economic, social, military and cultural histories of the period and locate it within a longer time frame. Through bringing these usually disparate fields of study into dialogue, I am able to use the art to enrich broader understandings of the period, in particular, the ways in which aerial warfare was represented, how this image evolved during the war and how these cultural products related to economic, military and social factors. This thesis highlights the different roles the WAAC was expected to fulfil. Housed within the Ministry of Information, the WAAC was expected to perform a propagandist function. The committee distanced itself from propaganda and insisted that its primary function was to record for posterity the experience of living through the war. I assess exactly what kind of record the WAAC bequeathed by looking thematically at the key aspects of aerial warfare: aircraft production; the Battle of Britain; the Blitz and the bombing of Germany. I argue that whilst there was broad correlation between war art and propaganda, these images registered aspects of experience that were incongruent with and therefore absent from wartime propaganda, such as the fear of aerial bombardment and the true nature of the bombing of Germany. Moreover, propagandist constructions were not entirely separate to lived experience, rather they both reflected experience and shaped the way that individuals understood and made sense of the world around them. Therefore, in producing images that accorded with propagandist portrayals, the WAAC artists were recording a fundamental part of the experience of living through the war.

My thesis argues for the significance of individual spiritual counselling within post-Reformation English Protestantism. In particular, it demonstrates the prevalence of pastoral letter-writing and explores the purpose and dynamics of these networks. This research represents the first large-scale, comparative examination of a frequently neglected topic. It draws on many little-known letter collections and a number of unexplored manuscripts, alongside some more familiar epistolary sources. Chapter one situates my research in relation to existing literature on individual spiritual counselling and confession. As a counterpoint to the scholarly claim that contemporary accounts of the post-Reformation ministry emphasise the centrality of preaching at the expense of almost all other pastoral functions, I demonstrate the importance which many divines attributed to directing individual consciences, as well as highlighting contemporary thought on the role of the laity as providers of religious counselling. Chapter two uses Nehemiah Wallington's manuscript volume of exemplary spiritual correspondence to demonstrate the importance of epistolary counselling in the ministries of several early modern clergymen. The second section of the chapter argues that Wallington's own engagement with epistolary counselling ultimately served to uphold ministerial authority. Chapter three investigates the spiritual letter-writing relationships of early seventeenth-century Protestant ministers and their gentry patrons and demonstrates the significant potential which existed for clergymen to exercise religious agency and influence with pious elites. Chapter four explores the authoritative and spiritually intimate correspondences in which Richard Baxter engaged with laypeople from across the social spectrum during the 1650s. Current knowledge of his counselling of the Derbyshire gentlewoman, Katherine Gell, is extended through an original reflection on the significance of networks of pastoral direction in early modern English Protestantism. Chapter five explores the nature of religious advice-giving amongst the laity and uncovers its pious motivations. This characteristically 'godly' activity is both compared and contrasted with contemporary clerical counselling.

This thesis compares criminal defences of insanity and idiocy between 1660 and 1830 in northern England and southern Scotland, regions which have been neglected by the historiographies of British crime and "insanity defences". It is explained how and why English and Scottish theoretical principles differed or converged. In practice, however, courtroom participants could obtain to alternative conceptions of accountability and mental distraction. Quantitative and qualitative analyses are employed to reveal contemporary conceptions of mental afflictions and criminal responsibility, which provide inverse reflections of "normal" behaviour, speech and appearance. It is argued that the judiciary did not dictate the evaluation of prisoners' mental capacities at the circuit courts, as some historians have contended. Legal processes were determined by subtle, yet complex, interactions between "decision-makers". Jurors could reach conclusions independent from judicial coercion. Before 1830, verdicts of insanity could represent discord between bench and jury, rather than the concord emphasised by some scholars. The activities of counsel, testifiers and prisoners also impinged upon the assessment of a prisoner's mental condition and restricted the bench's dominance. Despite important evidentiary evolutions, the courtroom authentication of insanity and idiocy was not dominated by Britain's evolving medical professions (including "psychiatrists") before 1830. Lay, communal understandings of mental afflictions and criminal responsibility continued to inform and underpin the assessment of a prisoner's mental condition. Such decisions were affected by social dynamics, such as the social and economic status, gender, age and legal experience of key courtroom participants. Verdicts of insanity and the development of Britain's legal practices could both be shaped by micro- and macro-political considerations. This thesis opens new avenues of research for British "insanity defences", whilst offering comparisons to contemporary Continental legal procedures.

“Race in a Godless World” examines the racial thought of atheists in Britain and the United States from about 1850 to 1914. While there have been no comprehensive studies of atheists' views on race, there is a trend in the historiography on racial thought, which I have described as the “Race-Secularization Thesis,” that suggests a link between the secularization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and an increase in nineteenth-century racialism – that is, racial essentialism and determinism – as well as resulting racial prejudice and discrimination. Through a study of both leading and lesser-known atheists and freethinkers, I argue that the “Race-Secularization Thesis” needs to be reconsidered. A simple link between secularization and racialism is misleading. This is not to suggest that the “Race-Secularization Thesis” contains no truth, only that secularization did not inevitably lead to racialism. This dissertation helps to tell a more complex and nuanced story about the relationship between atheism and racial thought. While in some cases, nineteenth-century atheists and freethinkers were among the leading exponents of racialist views, there is an alternative story in which the atheist worldview – through its emphasis on rationality and skepticism – provided the tools with which to critique ideas of racial prejudice, racial superiority, and even the concept of race itself.

The emigration of the Scots from the 18th to the 20th century has produced a diaspora. The thesis outlines how many diasporas are involved in the nationalist projects of their homeland. However, over the chronology of this study and beyond, whilst there were active movements to amend or end the Union of 1707, it has been found that the Scots were not. The thesis then proposes some explanations for this. Chapters one and two introduce methods, research material and context; they describe the Union, the emigrations and diasporas. The study uses for comparison purposes the Irish and Norwegian diasporas. Lines of enquiry such as nationalism, the use of soft power and gatekeeping behaviour are presented, with a discussion of Scottish nationalism. The study examines the approach to involving the diaspora of five groups; both SHRAs, the International Scots Home Rule League, the National Convention and the NPS/SNP. The response of Scottish MPs in the diaspora in England to the many attempts to legislate for home rule is also examined. The approach to the diaspora was found to be badly executed and targeted. Few visits were made, and only to the US and Canada. Communication was unfocussed and spasmodic. The Scottish associational clubs were frequently used as a conduit. A small part of the whole diaspora, these acted as gatekeepers, selectively mobilising for themselves as an elite which had no need of nationalism as they could succeed without it. Comparing the Irish, whose diaspora successfully supported its nationalist causes at home, is instructive. The study concludes that the spasmodic and amateurish nature of contact, the nature of the Associations and that of the diaspora itself were the main culprits in this case of a diaspora indifferent to the fate of nationalism in its home land.

This thesis examines the ideas which underpinned early nineteenth century Toryism and their development in the late eighteenth century. It argues that a distinct, coherent, refined Tory identity emerged from the Tory splits between 1827 and 1830. This was preceded by a process of renegotiation and consolidation in Tory ideology and identity from 1760 onwards. The period between the accession of George III, in 1760, and the passage of the First Reform Act, in 1832, witnessed consistent and sustained crises regarding the constitution established in Church and state. The outbreak of revolutions in America and France reinvigorated debates regarding the nature and location of political sovereignty as well as the relationship between the crown and parliament. Lengthy wars against each nation were followed by severe economic depressions, the apparent proliferation of domestic political radicalism, and intermittent, but determined, demands for parliamentary reform. In addition, there were persistent attempts to alter the religious basis of the constitution to accommodate both Protestant pluralism and, from 1801, predominantly Catholic Ireland. This thesis contends that the debates surrounding these issues contributed to the rehabilitation and renegotiation of late-seventeenth-century and early-eighteenth-century Tory ideas. It also contends that, in moments of crisis and reaction, old Toryism converged with the conservative elements of an increasingly fractured Whig tradition in defence of the constitutional status quo. This convergence, apparent in the opening decades of George III’s reign, was consolidated in the context of the French Revolution. Consequently, after 1812, a broad, but loose, ideological consensus emerged, labelled as Tory, underpinned by anti-populism, commitment to the preservation of Christian orthodoxy, and the establishment of the Church of England. However, below this broad ideological umbrella, differences persisted which created tensions, contributing to the divisions between 1827 and 1830, and, through them, the refinement of Tory identity.