This chapter considers the how the lord lieutenancies covered the costs of the tasks they were entrusted with carrying out. It begins by looking at the overall burden of wartime taxation on the counties, primarily in the form of the lay subsidy, and considering the decline in the yield of the subsidy during the war years. More detailed case studies are then made of the yield of both national and local taxation in Cheshire, Kent and Norfolk, showing that local taxes added significantly to the burden of national taxes. It them discusses local financial management, looking at the procedures put in place in the counties to raise taxes, handle money and account for spending, arguing that the lieutenancies’ financial practices, although rudimentary and informal, tended to work reasonably effectively.

At the end of his long career as engineer with the Scottish Fishery Board, during which he travelled widely in the Highlands, Joseph Mitchell noted the transformation which had occurred in the pattern of landownership in the region since 1820s. The majority of British landowners had to contend with a more difficult economic environment by the 1820s. By the 1850s, the pattern of landownership in the western Highlands and Islands had been revolutionised. Historians of the British landed classes argue that it was exceedingly difficult for landowners to reduce absolute debt levels even through the imposition of strict measures of economy. The expansion of landed debt which occurred in the later eighteenth century Highlands was simply a regional variant of a British phenomenon.

This chapter examines Vietnam through the post-colonial observer, J. M. Coetzee; the colonised, Le Ly Hayslip; and the one-time American soldier, Oliver Stone. Coetzee ensures that the reader is suspicious of suburban mythographer Eugene Dawn's reading of familial psychology. Like Coetzee, Stone was burdened by history and nation, and by gender and family, on public display during the film's making and release as his second marriage broke up. Hayslip's descriptions of the Vietnam War contrast starkly with Dawn's neurotically neat reading, and with Lyndon Johnson's simple image of family that stands behind it. Stone, known for personal engagement with issues in his films, made Heaven and Earth as a soldier, a father and a man, something elliptically recognised in Hayslip's lionising of him. Stone's film exemplifies the problems of responding to a text like Hayslip's, complicated by his own status as a combatant in Vietnam.

This chapter looks at the terrible legacy of the Victorian period and the constant struggle by reformers to produce a more active municipal policy. It examines the practical difficulties facing the local authority and the determination by an active group within the council to impose their vision of a brave new world. Demands for housing reform increasingly permeated civic life. The voluntary sector was hugely influential in highlighting the city's housing problems and in promoting municipal planning and building as the solution to the slums. In making their recommendations, Manchester's housing reformers were convinced that flats were inadequate for most people and that the cottage-style houses were infinitely superior. In 1917, the council established the Housing Special Committee to develop policies for a post-war rebuilding programme. Shena Simon believed that Wythenshawe was the most important example of town planning and of a garden satellite town in the country.

Lord Leverhulme expressed grave concern at various points during the First World War about the disruption to trade. In truth Lever Brothers had done very well out of the war as the company met government and army needs for soap, glycerine and margarine, and it was poised to take advantage of pent-up demand. In the midst of the turbulent post-war years, Lever was devoting a considerable portion of his energy and enthusiasm to his new project in the Outer Hebrides. Amidst his fulminations against the raiders and the Scottish Office, Lever made a rare public concession to underlying economic realities in a speech at the Stornoway Highland Games. It is indeed difficult to imagine that Lever would have pulled the plug on his entire operation on Lewis just because of some small farms that were not essential to his schemes.

In this chapter, the system of nursing is subjected to careful scrutiny, to discover how it worked and what it may have meant for the foundling children's early experiences. The governors of the London Foundling Hospital frequently discussed the recruitment of nurses, the success of their arrangements and their resulting impact on survivorship in different parts of the country. The data presented in the chapter have shown the geographical distribution of the nursing network and the mortality rates it produced. It has already been noted that the hospital followed a policy of near universal wet nursing almost since its establishment. Clearly, a change of nurse was a fairly unusual occurrence, but among the more mobile children a geographical pattern is discernible, of movement from communities in the south-east of the country to Shropshire and Yorkshire.

Decolonization gave the French Cold War-era militarized environments a particular twist. Through a focus on militarized environments this chapter sketches out some of its environmental dimensions. France's humiliating and rapid defeat in 1940 underscored the need for military reform in the postwar era. As it battled against civilian opposition in metropolitan France, the army engaged in bloody and morale-sapping wars against decolonization as the Fourth Republic struggled to hold onto France's colonies. Forged within the context of Cold War geopolitics, Gaullist foreign policy and the development of ever more powerful weaponry prompted the military to seek new and larger territories. Alongside strengthening France's conventional forces, Gaullist foreign policy placed the possession of a nuclear strike force as a central pillar of French national security and a technological guarantee of French autonomy.

With the culmination of the West Indian emancipation movement in 1838, politicians and anti-slavery leaders turned their attention increasingly to slave-trade suppression. Having criticised slavery in the USA in American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit, in the early 1850s Charles Dickens's attention was turned to Britain's anti-slave-trade actions. The British Royal Navy's mission to eliminate the Atlantic slave trade helped to keep alive a culture of anti-slavery in nineteenth-century Britain. In nineteenth-century Britain, the Africa Squadron's part in prolonging the culture of anti-slavery seemed at its most apparent in retrospect. For Elizabeth Melville, naval suppression enabled nationalistic pride as it affirmed her belief in the heathenism of the peoples of West Africa. Christianised liberated Africans similarly conceived of their rescue as a spiritual release from heathenism. As with Michael Scott's nautical novels, the spectacle of mass murder at sea is offered up reproachfully as evidence of the uselessness of naval suppression.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book. The book sketches out the life of William Hesketh Lever, 1st Lord Leverhulme and the founder of the Lever Brothers' Sunlight Soap empire. It illustrates the rise and triumphs of his business, his homes, his gardens and his collections. It also contains essays on Lever in the context of the history of advertising, of factory paternalism and town planning and of colonial encounters. Using Lever as a case study is particularly strange, given that his legacy, the huge manufacturing and retailing concern of Unilever, counts as one of British industry's great, continuing success stories. The book concludes by resuming something of the narrative and summary format and looking at Lever's extraordinary activity in his final years.

The key to this chapter lies in the twin themes of challenge and response. The attempted secession of Eastern Nigeria (Biafra; 1968–70) and the civil war it precipitated marked the first challenge to the doctrine of self-determination in post-colonial Africa. How the ‘fire brigade’ states responded – by translating their support for decolonisation and international law into respect for African sovereignty and a commitment to peaceful, negotiated change – said much about their efforts to adapt to a rapidly crystallising post-colonial international system. But challenge also came in a different form. The public attention afforded to the Biafran cause by the sizeable Irish missionary community based there forced a radical shift in the government's relationship with the media and public opinion. This chapter concludes by arguing that the clash between old- and new-style diplomacy these debates engendered represented a blurring of state boundaries and the growing power of transnational phenomena in shaping government policy.

This chapter outlines the massive extensions to Manchester's urban waterfront in the first half of the nineteenth century, analysing the development of Manchester's canal and river basins, and their associated investments in warehouses and wharves. It offers a detailed analysis of the basins developed by Manchester's leading water navigation companies, as well as facilities developed on private canal branches, a hitherto little-explored aspect of the urban development of Cottonopolis. Warehouses stored and transhipped the canals' high-value, inter-regional commodity trades. In canal company basins, priority was given to the public carriers. The chapter analyses the wharf as an economic and urban space in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Manchester. Wharves were central to the operations of all of Manchester's canal company basins although the commodity composition of wharf trade varied significantly by canal.

In this chapter, Levine focuses on a single person because his career seemingly coheres civil society in South Korea. Lawyer Park and many of his colleagues treated his career from student activist to mayor of Seoul as if it were the past and future of civil society in South Korea and in so doing, the progressive temporality of Park’s career and civil society reinforce one another. Park has maintained a pragmatic disposition and effectively set the agenda before, during and after Roh Moo Hyun’s administration.