From 1747 to 1750, Charles Lennox, the 2nd Duke of Richmond, pursued one of the severest anti-smuggling campaigns in English history. It led to the execution of over forty individuals. And it was triggered by a particularly heinous crime. In 1747, a gang of smugglers had broken into the Customhouse at Poole to rescue a seizure previously taken by the Customs. When an informer attested to the identity of the offenders, he, along with a Customs officer, was abducted, tortured, and killed by the gang. The episode is one of the best-known smuggling stories of the eighteenth century. In large part, this is due to Richmond seeking to publicise the events to garner support for his campaign. Historiography, too, has paid close attention to the campaign and it has since been a central theme in the discussion of eighteenth-century smuggling and the debate on the “crime wave” of the 1740s.

Much as we know about the campaign, there remain gaps in how it has been studied. Traditional accounts have depicted the events as a confrontation between agents acting for the common good – the duke, the magistrates, the Customs men – and the villains – the smugglers and murderers. In a recent discussion, the events are seen as a “classic confrontation between public terror on the one hand and a Christian conscience with its wish for law and order, and justice, on the other”.

9 June is also the date given for the inauguration itself. The statue was by Antoine Etex (1808–88), whom Berlioz had known in Rome in 1831–2. The concert consisted of the following, all by Rossini: the overtures to Il barbiere di Siviglia and Guillaume Tell, the Stabat Mater, act 2 of Guillaume Tell, an aria from Maometto II (the Italian opera revised as Le Siège de Corinthe for Paris), a cavatina and a duet from Il barbiere, the final aria from La Cenerentola, the prayer from Moïse, and the ‘divertissement’ from act 3 of Guillaume Tell.

Arguments about the statue had been going on for two years. Decades later, they were reactivated with respect to the plan in 1907 to erect a statue of Saint- Saëns in Dieppe. ‘There were some satirical comments by those who thought a statue to the living composer premature. The monument to Gounod had only recently been put up in St Cloud. In spite of, or perhaps because of the erection of one to Marshal Macmahon in his lifetime, a law forbade the inauguration of statues to the living. But significantly, government intervention enabled the ceremony to take place in the foyer of the Dieppe Theatre. “Since one only puts up statues to the dead, it follows that I am now counted among their number” [Saint-Saëns] remarked. “You will excuse me therefore from making a speech.”

There's been much discussion about the expediency of this homage being made to a man who is still alive; the majority are against it. We accept as tolerable statues to men who are dead, while the other arrangement is generally rejected. I confess this is a matter beyond my capacity.

A week later they were back in Vienna.

On the same day as his conversation with Judith, the count had announced his decision to travel ahead of the others as quartermaster, to look after things in the mansion, where a suite of new rooms had been prepared. The truth, though, was that he just wanted to avoid sharing a railway compartment with Egon. He felt distinctly that he would fail to strike the right note, and might be unable to resist his tendency to sarcasm which, if unjustified, would seem simply insulting, and if justified, would make his questioning appear like that of an old gossip. He wished to remove the possibility of both the one and the other. In Vienna, encounters between them could be kept within limits, even assuming, which seemed doubtful, that such encounters were desirable. In any case the diversions of the metropolis were the best means of granting him a clearer view and restoring his unbiased judgment.

These diversions did indeed have an effect on him; all the more easily since his powers of observation, keenly acute despite an outward casualness, met with nothing which might feed the suspicions in his mind. Egon, when he appeared in the evenings in the old countess's salon, was more serious and taciturn than usual, but in his conduct toward Franziska there was neither any special reserve nor special intimacy. And so it was no wonder that the old uncle regained, if not a sense of complete trust, then a certain mid-ground of feeling, with just enough hopefulness to justify his marking the start of the season with a musical soiree, followed by a festive ball.

Introduction

This chapter turns to a very different case in north-western Zimbabwe which has a different ecology, one not full of charismatic species or landscape nor great commercial potential, but with a forest location that offers conservation for hydrological purposes further downstream. This unique ecological setting creates enduring liminality for the state as it is caught in between ceding the forest to surrounding communities or retaining it under state control. This is de facto what happened over the last two decades following invasions into the forest as a result of Zimbabwe's Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) in 2000. The case is a site of collaborative management arrangements from 1993 to the mid-2000s which the state abandoned once external support was no longer forthcoming, as well as the prevailing political environment of the FTLRP. The case also represents a site where the extreme violent side of the state (Peluso & Watts, 2001; Büscher and Ramutsindela, 2016; Ramutsindela et al., 2022) was unleashed for the second time in early 2019 on forest settlers. The use of brutal state force against land claimants left local people in a liminal situation about what course of action to take next as not all avenues have resulted in restoration of their rights to forest land. The technical state (the FC) has equally been befuddled with the back and forth between the central state and neighbouring forest claimants.

[1] [f. 157r]

[English]

It is to wit that in the year of King Henry V, William Sevenoke, mayor of London, John Perneys and Ralph Barton, sheriffs, William atte Wode, William Ederich, John Reyner and William Ferrour the Elder [were] Masters of this craft and of the fraternity of Brewers of London in the said year, and only for one year [above the line: and no more] at that time, as it is written before in the beginning of this book.

And in that year clothing was made and given to the freemen and brothers of the said craft. And also there was made a dinner called our Feast and on this manner it was used for many years before that time, in each year, to give clothing and make a dinner called our Feast, and to choose new Masters for the next year [above the line: following]. And also for as much as the craft perceived it was a great charge to give clothing each year, the aforesaid Masters and the worthy persons of the craft made an ordinance that the Masters who were next chosen should stand (still) for 2 years and then give clothing, and (to) make a feast and choose new Masters for the next 2 years.

And in the beginning of this aforesaid [scored: Masters] ordinance, the Masters chosen at that time to stand for 2 years were Thomas Grene, Robert Hilton, John Pyken and Robert Carpenter.

To end the story with 1822 is, to some extent, an arbitrary decision. In many ways, the history told here continues rather seamlessly. The shifting of coastal responsibilities between the Customs administration and the Admiralty, for instance, features quite prominently in the post-1822 history of the preventive service, or rather, the coastguard. Neither is the administrative rupture as stark as modern histories of the coastguard will have us believe. Its nineteenth-century history, moreover, is almost as neglected as the one that has been the subject of this study. At the same time, there are certain factors that change the shape of that history. Some of these are external. The ultimate dominance of the Royal Navy over European waters finally achieved the aspiration of a blue-water defence of the domestic scene and greatly facilitated naval operations against coastal threats. The firm integration of Ireland, in 1800, ultimately also removed many of the loopholes afforded by the previous indirect means of domination. And the demise of mercantilist protectionism, perhaps best exemplified, in the present context, with the end of the wool ban in 1824, obliterated many of the incentives previously afforded to the illicit trader. A more professional intelligence service, both abroad and at home, and the relative professionalization of dealing with aliens in the context of the Home Office bureaucracy eliminated another matter that had previously lent urgency to the preventive efforts of the Customs. Some of these things, in fact, had already happened by the 1780s and 1790s, and only the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars had kept the old rationales alive.

In the autumn of 1940 the British Broadcasting Corporation approached me with a request to broadcast regularly short messages over their system to my compatriots, commenting on the events of the war, with the purpose of endeavoring to influence the German public in the direction of the convictions that I have often uttered. I believed that I should not miss the opportunity of making contact, however loose and precarious, with the German people and also with the inhabitants of the subjugated territories, behind the back of the Nazi Government, which had deprived me of all means of exerting intellectual influence in Germany as soon as it had the power to do so. The suggestion was particularly attractive because my words were not to be broadcast from America by short wave, but from London by long or medium wave, and thus could be heard on the only type of radio the German people were permitted to have. It was also enticing to write German once again in the knowledge that the written words would be allowed to fulfill their purpose in the form in which they were conceived—in German. I agreed to send monthly messages, and after a few trials I asked for a prolongation of my speaking-time from five to eight minutes.

The broadcasts at first were transmitted in this way: I cabled my texts to London, where they were read by a German-speaking employee of the BBC. At my suggestion, a more complicated but more direct and therefore more attractive method was soon adopted.

It is probably too late to redeem Edward Martyn from his eccentricities: his most recent biographer describes him as ‘little more than a footnote in the annals of Irish history’. This seems unfair, even if Martyn's wilfulness, rebarbative misogyny, patrician contempt and obsequiousness in the matter of religious orthodoxy collectively account in fair measure for the general neglect that has befallen his achievements since his death in 1923. Yeats swiftly disavowed these achievements in the aftermath of his own success; Joyce identified his ‘incorrigible style’ as a fatal impediment to his reception, and George Moore, once upon a time his friend and companion, made him the Don Quixote of the Irish revival. ‘Dear Edward’, as Moore persistently calls him in Hail and Farewell, was not destined to be taken altogether seriously.

To distinguish between Martyn's difficult personality – his first biographer, Denis Gwynn, termed him ‘an uncloistered monk’ – and the preoccupations that animated his exceptionally versatile interest in the prospect of Irish cultural revival is nevertheless a worthwhile enterprise. If we recall that Martyn was a co-founder of the Irish Literary Theatre (with Yeats and Lady Gregory), a prominent member of the Gaelic League almost from its inception, the first president of Sinn Fein, an ardent supporter and vice president of the Dublin Feis Ceoil (from 1899), founder of the Palestrina Choir, an inveterate correspondent and essayist who prolifically contributed to several Irish periodicals, most notably D. P. Moran's The Leader, and a writer who championed the cause of Irish music for much of his working life, his eccentricities may at least begin to recede.

In 1766, Elizabeth Montagu – salon hostess, landowner, literary critic and letter-writer – wrote a series of letters recounting her experiences of a leisure trip to Scotland taken in the August of that year. She effuses over the view of Loch Lomond, the mountains of the Western Highlands and the hospitality that she received from the Edinburgh literati Henry Home, Lord Kames (1696–1782), Hugh Blair (1718–1800), William Robertson (1721–93) and John Gregory (1724–73). In her representation of the Scottish landscape, conveyed in letters to her husband, sister and friends, the same sets of phrases recur. She consistently praises the landscape for its ‘cultivation’, combined with its ‘noble prospects’ and ‘sublime beauties’. The use of repetition as a device, and the occurrence of these phrases in combination with other creative moments of epistolary expression – contrasting clauses, and more complex patterns of replication, revision and circulation – signals Montagu's use of the letter's formal characteristics in expressing her approach to cultivation and agricultural improvement. As this chapter will address, through such representations, Montagu uses her epistolary landscapes to participate in the debates raised by Scotland's mid-century rational agricultural reform – debates on improvement practices, the notion of progress, and the role of literature in each. Montagu's engagement with Scottish improvement by these means reveals, first, her deep intellectual and methodical involvement in Enlightenment improvement in Scotland as a textual and material process, and second, it illuminates her innovative use of the formal qualities of the letter to engage with issues of improvement.

Behind every great endeavour, there is a dream, but where do dreams come from? In the previous chapter, I introduced the context surrounding the aspirations of Alfonso X to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. An almost torturous path enlightened by the conviction, which some would call obstinacy, of the Learned King to achieve a position that he considered rightfully his. But beyond this obstinacy lay an idea of empire that transcended the Pisan proposal of 1256.

The Fecho del Imperio was one of the most remarkable passages in the life of Alfonso X, and his attempts at achieving this ambition would even be remembered as stubborn and financially damaging to the kingdom by his successors. Alfonso X relentlessly pushed for his dream to come true, but in the end he seemed to be alone in this endeavour. However, the rule of Alfonso X had not been one of constant failure; there was progress in the conquest of the Muslim territory of the Iberian Peninsula, and, above all, in the intellectual achievements of his reign, materialised in the creation of a vast cultural and legislative corpus that, effectively, achieved some sort of royal centralisation and peninsular hegemony. As witnessed by his epithet of ‘the Learned’, his military, cultural and legislative successes begin to explain the king's tenacity but do not quite justify why he became almost obsessed with obtaining the crown of the Holy Roman Empire.