The recent death of Professor Sir Lewis Namier (19 August 1960) provides an occasion to assess, albeit most tentatively, if not the man (I did not know him well), then at least his contribution to the writing of English history. The need for such an assessment is a little ironic, for Sir Lewis, for all his renown, has left a somewhat indistinct after-image among historians in this country. Ever since the appearance in 1929 of his great work on the Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III, his name has been a fixture in bibliographies and in the knowingness of knowing graduate student and cannier undergraduate. Yet few in this country have read his work through – that is, his monumental works on eighteenth century politics on which most of the estime of his succès d'estime has been built. Many more are familiar with the lectures, reviews and critical works on modern German and diplomatic history to which he devoted much of his productive effort between 1933 and 1953. Though these last are works of some importance, the ultimate reputation of Namier as a scholar must rest on his eighteenth century work — in fact upon his publications of 1929 and 1930. It is this work and some of the methodological questions it raises which are under discussion here.

This paper investigates the properties of plural agreement that is triggered by collective nouns in British English. Both singular and plural agreement are able to appear with these collective nouns, which are shown to be morphologically singular but semantically plural. Plural agreement, however, is systematically more restricted than singular agreement, appearing in a subset of the environments where singular agreement is allowed. Restrictions on plural come from the nature of agreement; semantic agreement features can only enter into agreement when the controller of agreement c-commands the target of agreement, whereas morphologically motivated agreement is not subject to the same structural restriction. This asymmetry between the two types of agreement is shown to arise from the proposal that Agree (Chomsky 2000, 2001) is distributed over the syntactic and post-syntactic components (Arregi & Nevins 2012).

In this article we present a comparative study of pig and cattle morphologies, and stable isotope analysis relating to pig demographic management at Levroux Les Arènes (Indre, France), to evaluate changes in husbandry practices between the Iron Age and the Roman period in Gallic societies. Results indicate the establishment of new production and distribution structures, probably before the second century bc, along with the implementation of a specific size/weight selection for the specialized production of pork. Pig and cattle size evolves progressively from the end of the third century bc. These changes are likely to be the result of an internal evolution within Gallic societies, based on local herds, but possibly they are a response to a broader changing economic climate. Within the Western Roman Empire, each province, and Italy, follows its own evolutionary pattern, which also differs between pig and cattle, suggesting that each region adapted its husbandry strategies according to its agro-pastoral characteristics, capacities, or ambitions.

There is a “black legend” about the climate of tropical countries, that lives on in spite of the knowledge geographers, meteorologists, and specialists in tropical medicine have gained over the past half century. With all the recent publicity given to West Africa, most people in the Western world carry a half-conscious image of “The White Man's Grave”. It is usually elaborated with such elements as “primitive tribes”, burning heat, fever-laden swamps, swarming insects, and miles of trackless jungle. Above all, West Africa is thought of as a place where white men cannot work. Only Africans can work there, and Europeans “go out” for brief periods at a considerable risk to their lives. Most of this image is, of course, quite false. Maximum temperatures on the West African coast would be moderate summer heat in the American mid-West. Insects are generally less annoying than they are in the United States. The forest is by no means trackless, but the home of sedentary agricultural people who have for centuries periodically cut it down to burn a place for their farms. Neither physical capacity for work nor immunity to disease is significantly different between Europeans and Africans on racial grounds.

Still, the image was not made up from imagination alone. In its British version, it was based on facts — facts misunderstood in Africa, reported “at home”, and repeated over several generations. Both the facts and the image have a part in shaping West African relations with Great Britain, and both the facts and the image have changed through time in significant ways. The early nineteenth century represents a crucial phase in these changes. British traders had been on the Guinea coast for two centuries before 1783, but the loss of the American War and the thirteen colonies brought a new phase in Anglo-African relations.

In the sixteenth line of his Essay on Man Alexander Pope announced that his purpose was to “vindicate the ways of God to man.” John Milton waited until the twenty-sixth line of Paradise Lost to state that his aim was to “justify the ways of God to men.” It would be pedantic to inquire why Pope used the singular noun for the human race, Milton the plural. But it might be instructive to investigate why Milton chose to justify the ways of God, and Pope, two generations later, to vindicate them — especially since both words scan equally well. Moreover, even though Pope may have picked his verb to convey a hint of self-parody, Samuel Johnson two generations after Pope misquoted Paradise Lost when he wrote in his “Life of John Milton” that the epic's purpose was “to vindicate the ways of God to man.”

But before one proceeds down any such semantic-theological path he should be aware of two dangers. The first is the general warning that scholars who look for needles in haystacks almost always find them. The second is the specific caution that the word “justify” is a shaky foundation on which to build a case: its designations and connotations were — and still are — many-sided, and Milton may not have used it with any sense of defensiveness, even though today the word “vindicate” has a more positive, more assured ring. Yet despite these dangers, the path is inviting and the destination very possibly significant.

It has often been observed that the agreement underlying British politics today extends beyond the constitution to issues of public policy. To the historic consensus on “the rules of the game” the British have added a stalemate on “the welfare state.” Common sense dictates that electoral demands have shaped the terms of political debate, so that the Conservatives, whose interests obviously are served by lower taxation and less government interference in the affairs of business, have had to bow to the pressures for collectivism built up during World War II and institutionalized by five years of rule under a Labour Government. By the same token the Labour Party has had to re-evaluate its policies of government direction and control of social and economic affairs in the face of decided satisfaction recently with the Conservative operation of the welfare machinery.

Sole emphasis on electioneering, however, can overlook simultaneous and related developments on the ideological plane. For the community this can be observed in the gradual acceptance of Keynesian economics. The fact that government action can achieve and maintain full employment helped broaden and define the area of effective policy for both parties in Britain. More important for our purposes here is the inherent collectivism of British Conservatism — its “Toryness” — which permitted its adaptation to modern welfare policy and helped build the framework for that policy in the in ter-war years. It is my contention that British Conservatism exhibits its doctrinal element through its Tory tradition and that it is this tradition of the organic society, paternalism and authority, that served to interpret the demands of Conservative interests. The Tory tradition helps explain not only the collectivist similarity of the two main parties, it also contributes to an understanding of the endurance of Conservatism.

Once upon a time men who read and wrote about Sir Thomas More, the author of Utopia and Henry VIII's Lord Chancellor, were convinced that he was a modern man, by which in some measure they seem to have meant their kind of man. This conviction became fully standardized in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Those, however, who saw him as a modern man — Lord Acton, Bishop Creighton, Principal Lindsay, Sir Sidney Lee — could not help but view More with impatience. For in their eyes he reneged on his modernity. He did not in the end stand firm for free thought, or for toleration, or for emancipation from the bondage of medieval bigotry and superstition. And although Karl Kautsky was sure that at the horizon Sir Thomas had seen the red light of the Marxist dawn, More did not even throw himself into the struggle for socialism. Instead he approved of the execution of men who were burnt at the stake because they rejected the spiritual control of the medieval church; and in the end he died a martyr for the unity which through the centuries that orthodox and persecuting Church had imposed on Europe.

Trials of complex fraud cases have raised numerous contentious issues in terms of procedural fairness and public resources expenditure. This paper examines the management of complex fraud trials through the lens of managerialism in the criminal justice system, analysing its effects upon procedural efficiency of the trial. The paper draws on qualitative data gathered from observations of insider-dealing trials, and interviews with prosecuting and defence lawyers and a trial judge. The findings reveal that, in practice, although dangers to procedural efficiency are constantly present throughout the trial, its successful management depends on a combination of factors vested in the actors involved and the strategies used. Whilst the increased efficiency of the trials is a reflection of managerial approaches in case management, this does not necessarily indicate a negative development in the area of the control of business misconduct, and managerialism may not be necessarily entirely undesirable in the criminal justice system.

This article analyzes the political context of industrialization in Tokugawa Japan through an analysis of merchandising policies for porcelains. With a comparison of the regions where the major sites of porcelain production were located, the study examines the processes by which arrangements for porcelain distribution were organized in the domains of Saga and Owari, and the district of Mino. The analysis shows contrasting types of arrangements in terms of the objectives and major agents who were responsible for making these policies and regulations. These policies and arrangements reflected the relationships between political authorities and those who were engaged in porcelain production and distribution in each region. The relationships varied significantly from each other, ranging from direct control by the regional authority, to relatively equal bargaining power, to extensive merchant autonomy. Comparative analysis of power relations illustrates the various ways of organizing resources that shaped the regional diversities and dynamics of industrialization in Japan. The relationships strongly influenced the ways in which resources, access, and opportunities for creating and accumulating resources for porcelain production and distribution were organized. An analysis of the merchandising policies for porcelains demonstrates the impacts that the relationships between the political authorities and those who were engaged in the production and distribution of porcelains had on industrialization in nineteenth-century Tokugawa Japan.

Although the Second Sino-Japanese War (the “War”) ended many decades ago, hostilities between China and Japan are still raw in the memory of many Chinese people, even though most of them did not directly experience the War. In particular, the Great Bombing of Chongqing—the indiscriminate, sustained bombing of the Nationalist provisional capital by Japanese warplanes from 1938 to 1943—has been retrieved from the archives as a significant event. Subsumed under the narrative of the Great Bombing, Chongqing's Great Tunnel Disaster (the “Disaster”), following a prolonged Japanese air raid on June 5, 1941, resulted in some of Nationalist China's heaviest civilian casualties. This article discusses the Disaster in detail, suggesting that at the time, it was viewed more as a human-induced “stampede” than as a Japanese “war atrocity” when the Chinese public took to the press and condemned the Nationalist government for its inability to prevent, manage, and mitigate the Disaster's effects. Chinese civilians were attempting to renew and revise a traditional social contract of disaster, according to which the state was responsible for providing adequate relief to victims, by accusing the Nationalist government of callousness, incompetence, and negligence.

Notoriously, natural law means many things to many people. Natural law is discussed quite differently in the fields of ethics, law, and theology; it is employed quite differently in the spheres of political rhetoric, churches, and academia; it has been used quite differently in the eras of ancient Rome, medieval Europe, the Enlightenment, and the postmodern West; and something akin to natural law appears, with quite different associations, in the religious traditions of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism. In some contexts natural law refers to God's moral law. In other contexts natural law consists of norms that can be discerned solely through human reason. In still other contexts natural law describes rules that are naturally embedded in the physical world.