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George Moore and Charles Villiers Stanford were exact Irish contemporaries: both were born in 1852. In the remorseless annals of reception history, moreover, both invariably defer to their better-known and more generously regarded peers, namely James Joyce and Edward Elgar. No matter how strenuously we might argue otherwise, Moore is unlikely to unseat Joyce's exemplary claim to pre-eminence as an Irish literary modernist who worked in the world at large. Stanford, likewise, will remain in Elgar's shadow. But it seems fruitful nevertheless to consider all four members of this quartet in relation to each other, no matter how unevenly they may have fared as writers and composers in the aftermath of their achievement. This is not only because of the precursory relationship that exists between Moore and Joyce and between Stanford and Elgar, but also, as I wish to argue here, because of the culturally formative differences between Ireland and England in the emergence of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art music in either country.

Systematic incompatibilities between secular and regular clergy required recurrent papal arbitration. Bishops predated renouncers – monks, regular canons and friars. They claimed succession from the apostles and governed dioceses, the principal units of pastoral care above parish level. Monks and friars advanced a different claim to elite status. In addition to sexual renunciation, which bishops and all clerics in major orders shared, they relinquished individual property and personal decision making. These two elite systems were not incompatible in principle, but in practice they frequently were. Popes were regularly asked to broker settlements, yet definitive resolution of the underlying tensions was unattainable, since both systems evolved and the world around them changed as well. New problems and frictions continually emerged, and the papacy was repeatedly called upon for what might be termed technical support to resolve them.

This chapter examines Paul Cullen’s tentative support for, and ultimate estrangment from, the Independent Irish Party. Cullen detected in the party’s leadership, and in particular Charles Gavan Duffy, echoes of the Young Ireland movement and, behind that, a similarity with the ideas of Giuseppe Mazzini. This identification of independent opposition with Young Ireland, and Gavan Duffy with Mazzini, led Cullen to successfully destroy the Independent Irish Party, a result that he had successfully achived by the mid-1850s.

The stakes of representation in the media are high for minority populations since the majority society typically has little personal contact with them. This holds particularly true for people of color owing to the legacy of European colonialism and the racialized images it produced to legitimatize the subjugation of African and Asian nations. The depiction of people of color in film and television has, therefore, a disproportionate impact on their perception by mainstream society. It is not simply a matter of quantitative but qualitative visibility of minority populations in the media. Concerning entertainment formats, the key questions are: “What kinds of roles are people of color given, and what messages do those roles send to audiences?” The experience of the Vietnamese German actor Aaron Le is a case in point: “[A]s an Asian person you are only cast as a cigarette seller or monk.” Echoed by other actors of color, such “migrantisches Casting,” i.e., casting roles according to phenotype and racial cliches, remained prevalent in German film and television well into the twenty-first century. Current stereotypes circulating in the public sphere are part of a representational regime that historically restricted “asiatisch gelesene,” i.e., German actors perceived as “Asian,” not German, because of their phenotype, to playing villains, victims, or dimwitted sidekicks speaking their native German with fake foreign accents.

As popular culture prospered in the mid nineteenth century, it targeted middle-class women as an emerging audience of consumers. It encouraged women to take pleasure in domesticity and nurturing families as women’s appropriate role in society. Modern scholars either castigated or ignored these works until feminism’s rise in the 1970s–1980s, when scholars reevaluated bestseller domestic or sentimental novels for their rightful place in popular culture. They also reclaimed other popular forms of sentimental culture, including Godey’s Lady’s Book magazine (1830–1898) as well as household manuals like Catharine Beecher’s A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841) that offered a middle-class “cult of domesticity.” Sentimental culture also extended to piano sheet music and other parlor entertainments like daguerreotypes, photograph albums, and stereographs that were supposed to be the means for women creating strong family bonding in affectionate leisure time together.

Africa's environmental history has received extensive attention from scholars. This scholarly shift sought to remedy the linear trajectory of narrating the African experience. Before its inception, the historiography of Africa was human-centric in focus and thus unbalanced the existing narrative. It is important to note that this same defect was evident, at a point, in other continental histories. However, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a tremendous shift in historical perspectives on world history. Primacy was also given, among other things, to the agency of ecological features in history. Environmental history is said to have begun in Europe and America through the writings of the French Annales historians. This school of thought evinced a strong environmental determinism to explain history. However, it took the activities of environmentalists in the 1980s to trigger what we now call environmental history. This explains why earlier works on environmental history were more about environmental conservation. For example, pioneering works by scholars such as Donald Worster, Alfred Crosby, and William Cronon focused on the historical background of conservational issues at that period. Their works demonstrate how environmental events such as population increase, disease environment, modern capitalist economy (industrialization), and the scientific revolution (atomic bombs and pollution) have led to environmental changes in world history. In Samuel Hays’ estimation, the need to address these challenges makes the study of environmental history an attempt to conserve nature. It is instructive to note that African environmental history developed around the same “practical” narratives. Here, the practical approach was usually premised on the impact of colonial exploitation of the African environment.

The Introduction sets out the historiographical debates, theoretical approaches and arguments of this study into enslaved people’s emotional lives. Enslaved people’s testimony often includes deeply emotional content, yet slavery historians have been reluctant to utilise emotion as a category of analysis when analysing slavery’s impact. The Introduction outlines how this book brings together methods from the history of emotions, slavery studies, memory studies and oral history to analyse enslaved people’s emotional ideologies, experiences, practices and expressions in the antebellum US South. Applying these methods to a range of testimony by enslaved and formerly enslaved people, the Introduction outlines this book’s key argument: that enslaved people created their own affective value system to refuse, resist and survive the system of slavery.

This is a study of coastal administration and coastal policing in eighteenth- century Britain. Its argument is twofold: with the rise of the British fiscal-military state during the seventeenth century, the political significance of the coast changed dramatically. Driven by economic and political concerns, the coast became, for the first time, a politically distinct space complete with designated legislation and unique bureaucratic structures. The study shows both why and in response to what circumstances the necessity for coastal enforcement first arose, and how this political interest in coastal policies fluctuated in relation to political events and economic policies across the century. In mapping these fluctuations the book argues, secondly, that satisfactory solutions to the problem of coastal enforcement remained forever elusive. Endless debates could not solve the political riddle that the coast presented, namely that the apparent ineffectiveness of coastal policies was a result, not of bureaucratic failures or the criminal ingenuity of the smuggler, but of the inherent contradictions of the fiscal-military rationale itself. This failure was twofold: an exclusively fiscal focus on coastal enforcement fell forever short of its administrative complexity. And economic policies of protectionism combined with political interventionism in imperial and European affairs ensured both the necessity for stricter coastal policing and rendered its execution more difficult. Taken together, these arguments aim to bring the well-established conceptual findings about the ambiguity of the coast to bear on the domestic setting. By placing the political awareness of the coast and the instruments of coastal administration into the context of the eighteenth-century British state, the study exposes important limitations of the fiscal-military state, ultimately arguing that it was precisely on the domestic coasts that the process of state-building remained, in many ways, inconclusive.

INTRODUCTION

Jean Craig lived in the parish of Tranent in Haddingtonshire. She was married to William Steill, a coal-miner; she herself also worked in a coal-pit, probably as a coal-bearer. Her mother was Beigis (Margaret) Wallace, who had been burned as a witch in 1629, during the panic of 1628–31. Wallace had named her daughter as a witch shortly before her execution. Family relations among women came to the fore in this trial, as one of the witnesses against Craig was her sister-in-law. The voices of the witnesses, the accused and the judiciary come to the fore.

Craig's investigation and trial took place in March and April of 1649, which was another period of panic over witchcraft. Our earliest dated evidence, from 17 March, is a letter from James Baillie, brother of the politician Sir William Baillie of Lamington who was a member of the committee of estates that then governed Scotland. Lamington was in Lanarkshire, but Sir William Baillie also owned a coal-mining estate at Penston in Haddingtonshire, which James Baillie seems to have managed. Craig had worked at Penston when she had allegedly bewitched Beatrix Sandilands; James Baillie's letter outlined this incident, which would soon be investigated in much more detail. He also mentioned Craig's association with the witches of the 1620s. He wrote his letter, to the minister of Tranent, in response to an enquiry from the parish elders; we do not know what prompted these elders to open the investigation.

By 28 March, Craig had been arrested and imprisoned in the tolbooth of Tranent. This was by warrant from the chancellor, according to the presbytery record. Local secular authority, in the form of the baron bailie of Seton and Tranent, was also operating in co-operation with the ministers.

INTRODUCTION

This case is about much more than ‘witchcraft’. It is one of the most spectacular instances of necromancy and elite magic ever to have occurred in Scotland. It involved political conspiracy at high levels of government, the ritual summoning of spirits using a book of learned magic, and prophecies by witches in Scotland and Norway. The central figure in the conspiracy was Sir William Stewart.

William Stewart was a herald, one of the ceremonial messengers of the crown. This did not give him great political power, but he moved in elite circles and was involved in international diplomacy. He was probably the son of Alexander Stewart of Dalswinton, in Dumfriesshire, and may have been born around 1540. He married a Norwegian woman, Dorothea Christoffersdatter Thronsden (or Tronds). His father, knighted in 1565, was a kinsman and ally of the earl of Lennox, and Stewart himself may have owed his initial advancement to this Lennox connection during the personal reign of Mary Queen of Scots. He first appears as Ross herald in 1566. He had connections with the Protestant church, contributing a prefatory ‘Table for the shyneing of the Mone’, and a sonnet, to Scotland's new Protestant prayer book in 1565. The table shows him to have had an interest in astronomy and numbers which must have fed into the astrological activities revealed at his trial. Also in 1565, he published a Scots translation of a French Calvinist tract, displaying a learned acquaintance with theology and etymology.

Stewart was also connected with the queen's illegitimate half-brother, James Stewart, earl of Moray, who became regent of Scotland in August 1567 after Mary's deposition. We are told that William Stewart had been ‘brocht up witht the regent’.

Key to popular theatre were animal performances that provided amusement when mechanical power was eclipsing animal power and that illustrated science’s new hierarchies of human and animal bodies. Hybrid theatre-circus presentations regularly included horseback riding and display as well as dangerous animal stunts. For example, Mazeppa (1831) highlighted the lead character tied bareback to a horse that stampeded across the stage. The best-known Mazeppa (1861–1868) starred Adah Isaacs Menken who sensationalized the role by cross-dressing and carrying out the dangerous bareback ride. Menken became a star – a striking counterexample to Victorian femininity. After the Civil War, the transcontinental railroad expanded touring possibilities for these large-scale shows while Manhattan theatres built larger venues and more elaborate productions. The 1905 opening of Times Square’s Hippodrome was unparalleled for audience capacity (5,200), underground facilities for housing animals, and stage apparatus for supporting an entire circus and special effects.

Introduction

This chapter explores the radical, evangelical vision of improvement developed by the British labouring-class writer James Woodhouse (1735–1820) across his extensive literary career. Considering his early 1760s poetry and the 28,013-line verse autobiography that he produced as a London bookseller in the 1790s, The Life and Lucubrations of Crispinus Scriblerus (hereafter Crispinus Scriblerus), this chapter illuminates Woodhouse's increasingly overt communitarian understanding of improvement in the context of changing attitudes towards estate management. It begins by re-considering Woodhouse's fractious relationship with Elizabeth Montagu, by whom he was employed as land steward of Sandleford estate in 1767, before being dismissed – first in 1778 and again, after several years as Montagu's majordomo, in 1788. Montagu was not only a well-connected woman of letters but, increasingly across this period, a ‘Bluestocking businesswoman’, who transformed her late husband's (d. 1776) fledgling coal-mining operation in Northumberland and was eager to increase the agricultural productivity and profitability of Sandleford. Focusing on this period in Woodhouse's life, the chapter explores how a divergent, classbased conception of improvement was a central feature of his disagreement with Montagu, and how his experience as farmer and land steward at Sandleford led him to further develop his sense of the injustice of land improvements then increasingly practised, as a means of enhancing one's private property rather than the collective good.

In the previous chapter, we examined the role of the People as an external counterbalance to Presidential power, and as a check upon the Imperial Presidency. Classical constitutional theory, on the other hand, has always focused on what Gargarella labels a system of internal checks and balances: that is, the different institutions of the State checking and constraining each other. This is the ‘separation of powers’: originally between the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary, and, in recent times, a more complex distribution of public power involving fourth branch institutions such as independent commissions, and other bodies.

The separation of powers has always been more ideal than reality. To start with, in parliamentary systems, there is no clean-cut separation between the legislature and the executive. The latter is drawn from the former and while, in theory, is meant to be answerable to it, in practice, often dominates it. Besides, the complexity of modern governance can no longer sustain (if it ever could) the bright-line division between law-making (the legislature), implementation (the executive), and adjudication (the judiciary). This complexity has, in turn, seen a mid-twentieth-century drift towards greater executive power, whether in parliamentary systems (beyond their inherent tendency of executive domination), or presidential ones. Courts have grappled with doctrines such as ‘excessive delegation’ (where the legislature passes vague laws, giving the executive so much discretion that the line between implementation and law-making dissolves), the executive abuse of temporary rule-by-decree powers, and so on.

Appendix: List of Works by Allen Shawn