It is a story as old as it is familiar. The tides of change compel the political elite to accept, whether grudgingly or enthusiastically, a constitution that places significant constraints upon their power. However, once the new settlement comes into force, they realise quickly that it is much more of an inconvenience than they had bargained for. The People – who were supposed to vanish after their ceremonial invocation in the Preamble – are invoking the constitution to make all sorts of claims against state power. The newly transformed courts are too often upholding these claims, and dealing serious setbacks to the government. The constitution is ‘taming Leviathan’.

Stung into action, the political class – in turn – devises various stratagems to tame the recalcitrant constitution, the contumelious courts, and the impudent People. The simplest method: use parliamentary super-majorities (easiest in countries dominated by a single party, often the party of the independence struggle) to change the constitution, and remove the provisions that are proving to be a thorn in the government's side. In small doses, this is often effective, and the political cost can be borne. Equally often though, the government's vaulting ambition overleaps itself, and it becomes clear that what is dressed up as constitutional change is actually constitutional evisceration.

Introduction

This chapter delves into the ways in which migration contributed to the betterment of local communities in the absence of colonial development initiatives. It sheds light on how the development of one's hometown became a crucial aspect of migrants’ interaction with the concepts of citizenship and belonging. Through the establishment of township associations, migrants served as symbolic intermediaries between the colonial state and local society.

The chapter takes a close look at the pivotal role played by remittances from Ghana and northern Nigeria in fostering local development within select Yoruba towns. Specifically, we focus on two towns, Ogbomoso and Inisa, which witnessed significant waves of mass migration to Ghana and northern Nigeria. Here, we meticulously analyze the developmental endeavors initiated by diaspora organizations, with a special emphasis on areas of human development, including education, infrastructure, and religious institutions.

This exploration reveals the profound impact of migration on local communities, highlighting how it became a catalyst for socio-economic advancement and transformation, particularly in regions where colonial development was lacking. By investigating the role of remittances and the contributions of diaspora organizations, this chapter offers valuable insights into the intricate interplay between migration, citizenship, and local development in colonial Yorubaland.

Yawning Gaps in Colonial Development

Britain recognized that the economic development of its politically dependent territories was a shared responsibility between the metropole and the indigenous colonized peoples. In the case of British colonies in West Africa, they were expected to be self-financing. This meant that funding for public projects and administrative expenses had to come from various sources, including taxes (which stood at 3s. 6d. per head before World War II) levied on the subject population, revenues generated from mining and mono-crop exports, communal or forced labor, and even prison labor.

Many of the Espill's readers and owners from the sixteenth century on were men who belonged to conservative religious communities or to political parties that were aligned with the Church's orthodoxy and antifeminist morality. They left a range of glosses that coincided with their conservative professional, leisure, and political affiliations, demonstrating the compatibility of misogyny and religion, and the general preservation of the status quo. Readers’ annotations upheld the Espill's criticisms of nuns and male clergy, which further sustained antifeminist Christian morality without questioning its tenets, unlike Isabel de Villena's Vita Christi (VCV), which presented a version of Christian morality that supported all women, whether secular or holy, through trinitarian dogma and theology. The VCV was solidly ensconced in Valencia's sixteenthcentury patriarchal religious organization, although the work forges a path for ordinary women's vindication within that patriarchal structure through its treatment of maternity and the body. The ideological and sociohistorical implications of the Espill's annotations come into sharper focus when examined in relation to the larger fifteenth- and sixteenth-century panorama of Villena's VCV and prevailing discourse on women, called the querella de las mujeres.

The Espill's juxtaposition to the VCV starkly illustrates the choice that someone as knowledgeable, educated, and socially integrated as Roig would have had with regard to his representation of women and gender relations.

In 1832 the author, watercolourist and lithographer George Frederick Prosser (1805–82) visited Rookesbury, a large and newly constructed house in Hampshire. While its temple front with Ionic columns could belong to many a Georgian classical house, the interiors reveal that it had been built in the new ‘Grecian’ style. Greek Revival, as it is now described, was as fashionable among wealthy families in Hampshire as it was in London. Prosser made a drawing from the north-west side of the new house, engraving it for his publication in 1833 of Select Illustrations of the County of Hampshire comprising Picturesque Views of the Seats of the Nobility & Gentry, Lodge Entrances &c with descriptions.

His descriptions of the house and its contents have been explored by the author, together with its orientation in the park. One comment by Prosser invites further investigation.

Prosser mentioned a ferme ornee, visible from the main drive: ‘The Park, in extent about 200 acres, is entered by a neat lodge […] The ferme ornee is a pleasing object in the ascent to the mansion.’ This was a puzzle both to scholars and to Garnier descendants. There was no evidence of any earlier building on the current main drive, near to which the old house at Rookesbury had been situated until it was pulled down in the early 1820s.

Sex makes HIV problematic for the institutional Church. That was true when AIDS first emerged in the early 1980s and it remains true today. The Catholic Church is the largest private provider of healthcare for people living with HIV globally today,1 but tensions have always been evident between effective HIV prevention, education and treatment strategies, and the teaching of the Church on matters of sex and sexuality. When it comes to any discussion about the Catholic Church and HIV, this apparent conflict between Church doctrine and widely accepted approaches to public health has dominated public debate for more than forty years now, overshadowing the important contribution the Church has made and continues to make today.

This chapter will argue that the inability of the Catholic Bishops of England and Wales to reconcile this tension explains, in part, why the institutional Church was slow to respond to the reality of AIDS in England and Wales. Without any coordinated response from the Bishops Conference to what eventually became an international health emergency, it fell to lay people to take responsibility for the moral leadership, HIV education and pastoral care required, on behalf of the Catholic Church.

The creation of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles was a vast endeavour over an extended period of time, involving the work of multiple generations of authors, compilers and scribes. Commitment to the annals’ record waxed and waned across more than two-and-a-half centuries, but it is clear from the surviving versions and other witnesses that after the initial circulation of the common stock annals c.892, the Chronicle was included in many libraries in many places, always ready for revisiting by those interested in extending or revising it.

The genesis of the common stock annals in the ninth century is largely hidden from view. However, the two most prominent figures among the early makers of the Chronicle are the first compiler and a later chronicler who revised and continued the annals. The first compiler's work is discernable in the creation of the annals’ anno domini sequence building on two sources: Bede's Epitome and a series of annals derived from Canterbury. The first compiler framed his annals in the time of grace, the last age of the world initiated by the birth of Christ. This chronicler had a great taste for Anglo-Saxon royal pedigrees, and not just those of the house of Wessex. Nevertheless, the kings of the West Saxons were his primary interest, and from the origins of the Cerdicing line in the fifth century down to his own time none of these kings is omitted from the annals’ story. Precisely when this compiler's own time might have been is uncertain.

Following the death of Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart in October 1791, a necrology authored by one of his friends, the theologist Karl Friedrich Stäudlin, was published in Schubart's own Deutsche Chronik. Stäudlin reminisced about a performance he had heard with Schubart reading out loud Klopstock's most celebrated ode, ‘Die Frühlingsfeier’. Stäudlin does not specify the date, but the reading must have taken place c. 1770–76: Schubart had started during that decade to give public readings of his favourite poet, until in January 1777 the Duke of Württemberg, Karl Eugen, ordered Schubart's imprisonment at the fortress of Hohenasperg where he would spend the next ten years before being freed by Friedrich II. In the 1770s, such performances were not yet known as Deklamatoria, but they were already popular, with Schubart's celebrity as a reciter of Klopstock's poetry at its peak.

Trade connects people and places through the exchange of goods. This chapter concerns that which linked the ports of Kent, in the southeast of England, with ‒ to a degree ‒ the rest of the kingdom, but above all across the so-called ‘Narrow Seas’, to the European continent and beyond. It describes the socioeconomic connections generated and sustained by merchants and mariners. Though it will ‒ at times ‒ refer back to the mid-fifteenth century and before, this chapter will concentrate on the mid-sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century: the so-called ‘Tawney's century’ (commonly described as 1540‒1640). In a period about which much scholarly attention has been on market integration and the rise of entrepôts, and large distributive commercial hubs, it explores the role of provincial maritime communities in the English and wider European economy in this period and how this changed.

In this respect, C. W. Chalklin argued, in his seminal work on seventeenthcentury Kent, for the overwhelming importance of London to the county's development, but that ‘the commercial significance of Kent's position as the nearest county to the Continent was comparatively small’. This chapter will re-examine this view and reconsider how Kent's ports engaged in local, translocal, regional or transregional markets. It will evaluate their interactions within broader socioeconomic trends and how they were impacted by England's shifting relationships with other European polities. The precise contribution this period's economic actors made towards the development of modern capitalism and industrialisation may be debatable.

The text found on Figure 3, The Sailor's Description of a Chase and Capture designed by Lt. John Sheringham, reads as follows:

Why d’ye see ‘twas blowing strong, & we were lopping it in forecastle under in Portland roads, when a sail hove in sight in the offing; we saw it with half an eye, she was an enemy's cruiser standing over from Cherbourg, better she couldn't come, so we turned the hands up and drew the splice of the best bower, but she not liking the cut of our jib hove in stays; all hands make sail ahoy; away flew the cable end for end & before you could say pease we had her under double reef’d top sails & top gallant sails, my eye how she walked licking it in whole green seas at the Weather chess tree & canting it over the lee yard arm pigs & live lumber afloat in the lee scuppers but just as we opened the bill standing through the tail of the race, by the holy !

This essay begins with a series of questions, continues with a conundrum, and ends with a whole lot of speculation. Along the way it will touch upon fundamental issues in the political culture of high medieval Europe. How could communities rid themselves of useless, inept or tyrannical rulers? Every society and every generation will have to tackle these questions anew. The answers they give as much as the precise challenges they face reflect a particular moment in time, a distinctive social and political structure, and specific horizons of cultural and religious expectations. They are historically contingent. Nonetheless, exploring how people in the past dealt with these issues enables us to trace continuity and change, to explore both what was peculiar to a particular period, and to define more clearly what might have been distinctive about the experience of modernity.

How contemporary observers imagined and how they justified the deposition of kings raises broader questions about the norms and practice of power in high medieval Latin Europe. We will encounter several lacunae in current scholarship. Notably, there has been limited engagement with concepts of power as part of a general normative framework. It has even been proposed that a functional version – an accountability of office, rather than ethics – emerged only with the development of new accounting techniques around the year 1200.

Berlioz had published an article on Pierre-Joseph Bernard's libretto for Rameau's Castor et Pollux in the RGM on 4 September. Although this work was given at the Opéra no fewer than 254 times between 1737 and 1785, very little Rameau was played in the early nineteenth century, and it is unlikely that Berlioz had heard it, although he had heard extracts from the opéra-ballet Les Indes galantes in 1840.

It seems to me that this study of Rameau's score comes rather late: it should have followed far more closely the analysis I made of the libretto that gives it its name. But the wish to see and the restless spirit carried the day even over the respect every contributor to the Gazette musicale owes to his readers (we all hope we have readers). I travelled to the banks of the Rhine, leaving Castor and Pollux on the threshold of Olympus, on the point of being made gods, without saying a word about the music sung by these two interesting twin heroes.

Let me repair this serious omission. The opera in question is not like the great lyric dramas of today; it has an overture, and that's one of its most undeniable faults. Like 999 operas out of a thousand from that period, we can say that it has an overture, as we can say of a man who's otherwise smart that he has a wart on his eye or a lump on his forehead, or some other deformity.

With negotiated releases, it is important to differentiate between the arrangements for stranded American seamen to be returned to the United States and those made for prisoners of war to be released and returned. A stranded seaman was one who would have arrived in France legally, having worked a vessel permitted to enter, but who did not find a vessel to work for the return voyage. All Ministers Plenipotentiary were able to arrange for ships to be chartered to send stranded seamen home. Only one Minister was able to send home a ship full of released prisoner seamen and he achieved this only because he circumvented the bickering consuls.

The process of trying to obtain a negotiated release was a painstaking one of letters from seamen to consuls, from consuls to the Minister Plenipotentiary, confirmation of documentation by the Americans, then repeated confirmation by Goulhot and his bureau, letters between the French Ministers of War, of the Marine and Colonies and of External Affairs, and finally a report to Napoleon. Then, communication of his decision went back down the line before any action could be taken. The four American ministers during the period of the Napoleonic Wars had very different rates of success in freeing American seamen prisoners. Livingston did little, but the problem was only beginning while he held the office. Barlow also did little for them, and what he did may have been entirely for self-interest, but he was not in office long before he died. Crawford arrived in Paris just as the wars were ending and the prisons were opened. It was John Armstrong who achieved the most, arranging for the release of at least one large number of prisoners to be sent home.