The practice of popularization formed an integral part of eighteenth-century urban culture and illustrates one instance of how individuals could gain access to science. The growth of popular science also drew inspiration from the more general development of a culture of scientific practice. The period from 1650 to 1750 saw the creation of numerous state-sponsored professional organizations, both in France and around Europe, and the establishment of various publications, which encouraged the consumption of science by the general public. Popularizers put forward a broad spectrum of ideas within their courses. Some disseminators dealt strictly with Newtonianism or Cartesianism. Disseminators marketed popular science on the basis of its theoretical importance, entertainment value, and utility. The perceived utility of science ensured that even producers and disseminators of scientific knowledge who worked outside the state system would be valued.

This chapter considers the role of expatriate British liberals, radicals and socialists in India over the long term, while also briefly considering comparable figures in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. There are many studies of the development of anti-colonial thought amongst domestic British political theorists, such as J.S. Mill and Herbert Spencer. But the focus of this discussion lies on British and Eurasian public figures who lived in subject territories for some time and engaged in a constructive dialogue with Asian anti-colonialists. The chapter moves from the 1820s and 1830s, when radicals opposed the “despotism” of the East India Company, along with the first generation of Indian liberal spokesmen, through the age of the early Indian National Congress, which was supported by figures such as A.O. Hume and William Wedderburn, to the role of socialist and even revolutionary British radicals in the 1930s and 1840s. No clear line of political and economic thought united these men and women. For example, in the early days, many British radicals supported free-trade and European colonization; a century later, their successors vehemently opposed both. Instead, the chapter suggests that it was their religious, aesthetic and even sexual unorthodoxy, which characterized activists in this tradition. Their significance lies in the manner in which they helped both to perpetuate empire by empowering modest reforms in government and used imperial infrastructures to advance their critique of colonial rule, a critique they came to co-author with both Asian nationalists and liberal economists.

Gaelic society and clanship were in decay long before the later eighteenth century. However, in the 1760s and 1770s there was a marked acceleration in the rate of social change and, in subsequent decades, material, cultural and demographic forces combined to produce a dramatic revolution in the Highland way of life. The cultural distinction was vital in understanding the impact of clearance on the psyche of the Gael. There were echoes of the dramatic transition in the wave of clearances and land improvements which swept across the Scottish Highlands from the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The depth and extent of the markets for all that the Highlands could export was transformed and the commercial forces were so powerful that social change in Gaeldom became irresistible.

In 1871, G. T. Robinson, the Manchester Guardian's special correspondent, published a book on his experiences of the Franco-Prussian War. The French experience of the war was painful, traumatic, and humiliating. The war militarized urban centres and their hinterlands, including Paris, which held out against Prussia and its allies until the conclusion of the war in January 1871. The war's geographical aspects and the relationship between terrain and tactics fascinated non-combatant military observers. During the siege of Paris, Prussian troops feared that the freezing weather would render useless their flooding of the countryside. Animals inhabited the war as symbols. Military culture and experience shaped how the different armies mobilized the same animal species. By the end of January 1871 the French army was demoralized and depleted after a series of military defeats in the provinces.

Paul Cohen-Portheim produced the most damning and incisive account of barbed wire disease. His narrative stresses the frustrations of a middle-class internee interned for years without trial in an all-male environment with little personal space. Military camps had a more structured routine, which helped to prevent the type of disillusionment, frustration and development of barbed wire disease described by Cohen-Portheim and Rudolf Rocker. Despite the depressing nature of internment and the evolution of the concept of barbed wire disease by the end of the First World War, statistics point to a generally sound mental and physical condition among the prisoners. Crime represented part of everyday life in an internment camp, especially in an artificial situation with numerous rules and regulations. Complaints about housing emerged in numerous other camps throughout the country during the course of the war as well as in official German publications at the end of the war.

The term 'graphic surface' relates to the face of any page of printed text. The general appearance of any specific page will be largely dependent on the design and technology of the day in which it is printed (or re-printed). Literary texts repeatedly problematise the conventional use of language for their readers, defamiliarising the image or object described, but there are bounds within which this happens; the device of defamiliarisation can work only in a situation which is 'familiar'. Levels operate as an alternative to a naive response that equates textual reality with external reality, or which, put another way, translates text on the principle of perceptual economy. The chapter outlines a particular critical account of the stylistic armoury of postmodernism which includes an influential but inadequate response to the use of graphic devices.

This chapter introduces the women who form the subject of this study – tracing their class and denominational backgrounds, examining their lives in the context of wider female involvement in the Secularist movement, and identifying areas of continuity and change in the role of ‘Freethinking feminists’ between 1830 and 1914. Leading female Freethinkers were on the whole from the upper-working and lower-middle class, and for them, a commitment to Freethought often entailed financial insecurity. They were united in their firm rejection of all forms of orthodox religion, especially Christianity.

This concluding chapter draws out some of the shared patterns and themes that have emerged in the book and presents its overarching finding that Irish families have been characterized by extraordinary resilience. In the face of significant macro-social, economic and life-course changes Irish people have adapted their behaviour and life plans relationally, in the context of an enduring commitment to family ties. The chapter asserts the unique power of the kind of qualitative longitudinal analysis that has been championed throughout the book to capture people’s moral reasoning in everyday life practices, together with its capacity to uncover some of the less familiar aspects of Irish family life that are often hidden in census and survey data. The authors argue that this approach makes an essential contribution to social scientific analysis and public policy, first because it yields a more complex understanding of the process of inter and intra-generational change over time and second, because it provides distinctive insights on the changing meanings and interpretations that govern peoples’ understandings and practices.