For a full understanding of the effectiveness of craft unions in the shipbuilding industry it is necessary to combine the preceding analysis of structural conditions with an examination of the year-by-year activities of one of the major organisations. The most obvious candidate for such a study is the boilermakers' society, not only because it was the largest of the unions organising groups of workers who were dependent mainly on shipbuilding for their employment, but also because it was widely regarded as one of the most powerful trade unions in the country. As a result, this body has the additional interest of having frequently been taken by critics of craft unionism as a key example of those features of which they most disapproved.

The study highlights the feminine public sphere that represents a locus of middle-class women's public lives and elite women's contribution to a middle-class identity rooted in public service. Notions of women's complementary nature, feminine moral superiority and an evangelical interest in actively pursuing the conversion of others—ideas which might have been mobilised to justify the sexual division of labour and an idealised female domesticity—could have been subverted by middle-class public women to encourage the formation and expansion of women's reforming associations in the 1870 to 1914 period. Furthermore, a belief in the social and moral importance of the maternal and domestic was integral to middle-class women's culture, and the women's temperance movement illustrates the importance of gender and social class to the feminine public sphere. Female temperance reform was further influenced by middle-class women's participation in the public world of voluntary philanthropy, and the movement of women from charity to social reform cross-pollinated women's associations with similar reforming strategies. This study's fresh perspective on women's public lives further emphasises the breadth of the constitutional suffrage movement.

This chapter argues that it is a mistake to construe the War on Terror, the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq that have followed it, and the broader reassertion of American military and strategic power globally, in the simplistic terms of the ‘return’ of a state-fermented form of imperialism. For sure, the 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre did initiate some changes in the organisation of power internationally, but it did not forge a regression. Central to the argument is the continuing and essential role of biopolitical forms of discourse and agency in the twenty-first century. In essence, while the reassertion of the military power of this one particular state, the United States, ought to make us aware of the continuing importance of traditional forms of sovereign power, it remains as, if not more, necessary, to concentrate on the imperial function of biopolitics here in the post-9/11 era. If we want to understand how it is that the United States is able to wage war in the terms that it is doing today, to reassert its capacities as a sovereign state, it is necessary to focus upon the roles of non-state biopolitical forms of agency in constituting and legitimising such violence. Bereft of its biopolitical context, such violence would be meaningless and impossible to sustain. In this sense it is the biopolitical which is the constitutive force within the imperial machine which we see today expanding and intensifying its controls over life globally.

The Annales Mettenses Priores open with an account of Pippin II. Even though he was a secular figure, their treatment of him often resembles the way in which hagiographers portrayed their saintly subjects. Although Charles Martel's early life, and indeed his whole career, are expressly guided by God's will, nowhere is he adorned with the most Christian virtues that Pippin and his holy ancestors had sported. In Annales Mettenses Priores's early pages they treat many of the political events of the late Merovingian age in engaging detail, they were actually written more than half a century after the Carolingians had ursurped the Merovingian throne. Be that as it may, the first section of the Annales Mettenses Priores is clearly far more of an historical justification for the traditional and Frankish system of succession by division than for any idea of united empire.

The political climate in Northern Ireland following Stormont's suspension led to a further greening of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). The relative quiescence of the unionist community after Stormont's suspension misled both Irish nationalists and those in Britain. The SDLP's first published policy document, Towards a New Ireland, revealed how far the party had fallen back on a more conventional nationalism in the aftermath of Stormont's collapse. It also suggested that John Hume and his colleagues still suffered a hangover from the traditional nationalist doctrine fomented by their forebears. In the period that followed Sunningdale's demise, the SDLP showed tremendous resentment towards the British government for its failure to stand against the Ulster Workers' Council strike. The Sunningdale Agreement was the way that the party presented the settlement which so prejudiced unionist opinions, and was premised on the fundamental axiom of revisionist nationalism.

The question of the successor to William III occupied the minds of many during the early years of the eighteenth century. As per the Act of Settlement, Queen Anne, daughter of James II, came to the throne. John Toland joined the debate early in 1701 with his Anglia Libera, in which he supported the passing of the crown to the House of Hanover. His Hanoverian enthusiasm and pro-Whig arguments made him the topic of political gossip abroad and the target of many High Church Tories at home. Tindal's involvement in debates regarding the requirements for fellows reflects the great extent to which deism and national politics were intertwined. This college matter demonstrated how fragile the religious peace in England was. The deists sought to help England chart a course into smoother political and theological waters, which avoided the waves caused by High Church policies. Other deists too attempted to find a place within the fast-moving events of the day through their political writings.

This chapter examines the formal and thematic (dis)continuities between the earlier and later Quartet novels. It studies the prism of Byatt's involvement with modern notions of the breakdown and fragmentation of language in Babel Tower and her fictional considerations of the narratives of science in A Whistling Woman. This chapter determines that her later fictions usually study the conceptual pitfalls and possibilities of ways of world-making across the ‘Two Cultures’ divide.

This introductory chapter discusses the theme of this book, which is about Black Bartholomew's Day, the mass ejection of Puritan ministers from the Church of England in 1662, and which uses political language and the historic meaning of the farewell sermons of the departing ministers. The book considers these sermons in the context of Restoration nonconformity, the public circulation of the Bartholomean texts and the polemical responses to Bartholomean preaching.

The English tried to stir up religious controversies within Scotland, on the grounds that a Protestant party would be a pro-English party. This was a period when a different kind of Scottish Reformation beckoned, or threatened: an imperial Reformation, imposed on the country from outside as it was 'liberated' from the French and Catholic yoke. This chapter considers why the part of England's war effort failed, and explores what lasting impact it had on Scotland's religious and political life. The Rough Wooings inescapably belong to the story of the Scottish Reformation's origins. Two substantial pieces of anti-English polemic penned by Scots survive from the period of the Rough Wooings, which take very different approaches to the religious issues. John Hooper looked forward to the appearance of a creature he called 'the good Scottish Englishman'.

This chapter discusses the ‘greed’ for reading and the notion of co-creative reading. It studies Byatt's engagement with realism, the premises, possibilities, pitfalls and puzzlement that are explored by the first two Quartet novels in terms of highly original fictional inquiries. This chapter determines that Byatt's fictional probings of realism's problems are informed by the notion that an acknowledgement of the constructed nature of human thought does not necessarily come before the existence of objective realities.

This chapter reviews Morgan's work, which incorporated and anticipated contemporary views of Newton. A material aether received considerable attention in the years after the publication of Physico-theology. Newton suggested that all of nature may be nothing but various contextures of some certain aetherial spirits of vapours condensed by precipitation. He then advised that aether might cause gravity because bodies will ‘get out and give way to the finer parts of aether below, which cannot be without the bodies descending to make room above for it to go out into’. Thus aether seemed a key component of the operation of nature. In this regard, Robinson also argued that the phenomena of nature were caused by a spiritual aether, which filled the universe and had both ‘Activity and Power’. This position bears striking resemblance to that advanced by Morgan, though Robinson's aether was spirit and Morgan's was the material light of the Opticks. Eighteenth-century Newtonianism was shaped by appeals to aethers and material fluids and predicated upon the materiality of light.

This chapter aims to decode the rhetorical content of the farewell sermons of the Bartholomean clergy, describing how political comment was skilfully embedded in the exegesis and how the apocalyptic epistemology that underpinned so many texts could hardly fail to produce highly charged political polemic. The analysis reveals that most of the extant farewell sermons rely heavily on the New Testament. A number of themes featured consistently in the farewell sermons, including the eschatological significance of the ejection, memories of armed conflict, imminent persecution and the implications of civil death.

John Hume was deeply influenced by the actual ideology of European integration. His pro-Europeanism, and the questions that his critics have raised about this, both have relevance to nationalism. The Good Friday Agreement (GFA) provides a political framework within which nationalists in both parts of Ireland can co-operate with unionists and, through this, gradually build more positive relations. Hume was using the European model to try to move the thinking of all parties to the conflict away from absolutist notions of political sovereignty, to encourage thoughts of constitutional compromise, and thus to aid the infant peace process. The GFA does provide the basis for the development of a society that is more tolerant and plural, and, ultimately, where national identity need not be a cause of conflict. In his contribution to the GFA, Hume has helped to create a situation in which such an Ireland can emerge.