Here is a concise, recent and thoroughly orthodox historical judgment on the Nyon Arrangements of 1937:

Here is another judgment, this one by a Soviet historian, which offers a somewhat different view of this episode:

Australians recognize distance and isolation as a mold which shaped their history. Geoffrey Blainey observes this in his brilliantly provocative book, The Tyranny of Distance, and points out the consequences of Australia's geographic situation. Australia is at least 12,000 miles from England, and her continental perimeter is another 12,000 miles. Because of slow and uncertain communications between Australia and Whitehall from 1788 to 1850, the governor was really “the man on the spot”; he had often to act more independently than his instructions intended, and at times he defied both Whitehall and the colonists, sometimes at the same time. Although his link with the Colonial Office was direct, the secretaries of state to whom he was responsible changed frequently; yet much of our information comes from the dispatches between these officials.

The colony of New South Wales comprised nearly all of eastern continental Australia until 1850. It was founded as a penal colony in 1788. The commission of the first governor, Arthur Phillip, gave him almost complete autocratic powers over the colony, prompting a military attaché to observe: “I never heard of any one single person having so great power vested in him as the Governor.” This commission stood, with some slight exceptions, for more than thirty years.

Because of these extraordinary powers, the early governors were called autocrats. Although the British government decided how many convicts were to be sent and the colonial secretaries in London issued frequent instructions, the distance and slow mails — three to six-month voyages en route each way — placed the governor in complete control of the colony's expansion. Thus, the disposal of land, labor, and capital depended on each governor's individual discretion. After 1824, when George Arthur became lieutenant governor, Tasmania became independent from New South Wales. Eventually, these two autocratically ruled prison farms became prosperous self-governing colonies after 1850. Meanwhile, Western Australia and South Australia were founded sans convicts in 1829 and 1836, respectively. This paper will deal first with New South Wales, and more briefly with Tasmania, Western Australia, and South Australia.

Irish political activity diminished in the early 1850s from previously more intensive levels. The tenant-right movement, established to secure economic justice for tenant farmers whose numbers dominated the ranks of Irish cultivators, continued to elicit a sympathetic response. But by the middle of the nineteeth century, it had deteriorated to a shadow of its former strength. The enthusiasm of the rural Irish for political causes had seemingly been drained by the traumatic experience of the Potato Famine of the late 1840s. The potato blight, with the failure of a crop upon which many were heavily dependent, resulted in the death of over a half million persons. The flow of emigrants accelerated in the famine and immediate post-famine period. The population of Ireland was reduced from over eight million in 1841 to about six and one-half million in 1851. Landlords engaged in widespread tenant eviction during the famine episode. The established trend of the shift of agricultural land from crop to livestock production was accelerated.

Rural assistance programmes initiated in the famine and immediate post-famine years were primarily intended to benefit landlords and large farm operators with measures for soil improvement and drainage control. Recovery from the famine was slow and tortuous: the real value of agricultural output was still ten percent lower in the early 1860s than in the early 1850s. The reduction of the value of crop output by about one-third was largely compensated by the rise of value of livestock output. It proved to be a hostile environment for those tenant farmers surviving the famine. The tenant farmers — all but three percent of the total number of farm operators — were defeated and submissive. They offered slight resistance to measures introduced for the consolidation of estates and for the transfer of title from indebted to more commercially oriented owners.

In the last hundred years the British initiators of the Industrial Revolution have fallen behind one after another of their imitators. As a consequence, the issue of “modernization” has moved to the head of the political agenda in a nation that was for the nineteenth century world the very model of “modernity.” Much of this change in world position was inevitable — yet not all of it. Why, historians have recently been asking, did Britain between 1870 and 1900 lose the economic dynamism that had been her hallmark? Why, further, did the British fail to recover this lost dynamism in the twentieth century?

The British experience ought to be of particular interest to Americans today, for recently we have become aware of the costs as well as the benefits of economic growth. Our faith in material progress is dimming. At the same time, our former economic dynamism seems now in question. Indeed, we may be repeating the experience of Britain.

To understand the change in British economic behavior, we must look at more than solely economic history. As Max Weber argued as far back as 1904, economic activity takes place in a wider social context. Attitudes and values play a vital role in shaping economic behavior. Development economists have discovered in the last two decades that economic change is not produced solely by economic means — by introducing technology and capital alone. To some degree at least, societies “choose” their economic futures by the values they hold. Because of this, intellectual and social history may tell us much about the difficulties of continuing modernization in twentieth century Britain.

Recent historical literature has posed certain standard questions about the economic problems of the church. They cluster around the specific issues of impropriation, simony, valuation of benefices, and the income of the clergy. What proportion of benefices were impropriated and to whom? What kind of consequences resulted from impropriation? What was an acceptable income? How did a clergyman obtain a living?

These questions, which are usually raised about the Church of England as a whole, are now being asked in the specific context of the diocese of Bath and Wells. The diocese is, with only minor exceptions, coterminous with the county of Somerset. In the seventeenth century it had something over 400 parishes. Camden gave the number as 385. An eighteenth century county history gives 482. Given the casual attitude of the seventeenth century toward statistics, it is impossible to be any more precise.

These parishes were divided principally between rectories and vicarages. Rectories were differentiated from vicarages on the basis of the tithes they received. A rector received all tithes, great and small, but a vicar might receive only small tithes or none at all. If he received none, he was dependent on the generosity of the rector who did receive them. One writer of a handbook on tithes attempted to comfort vicars by informing them that the generous custom of England allowed them small tithes not allowed vicars on the Continent. He was at that point discussing hops and woad, but the income from hops and woad would scarcely have allowed the vicar of Mudford, annual income £30, to compete with the rector of North Cadbury, annual income £300, especially since Somerset has never been noted for its production of either hops or woad.