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38627 results in Cambridge Textbooks

Page 1320 of 1932

  • 16 - Health and Welfare, 1750–2000

  • from PART II - People, Culture and Communities
  • Edited by Eugenio F. Biagini, University of Cambridge, Mary E. Daly, University College Dublin
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland
    Published online:
    09 August 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 261-281

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Ireland's history of health and welfare is intimately linked to its history of poverty and charity, and to conflicting intellectual and philosophical outlooks that repeatedly redefined the state's responsibility for the health, welfare and ‘well-being’ of its population in the modern period. Research into Ireland's social history developed relatively late with most welfare and medical histories privileging governmental policies and institutional histories. This work revealed the main legislative and policy innovations and delineated official and philanthropic conceptualisations of, and attitudes towards, Irish poverty in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In Ireland, the institutional model remained central to the delivery of health and welfare supports throughout the modern period. The poor, especially the sick poor, and the institutions established to provide for and manage them have attracted the majority of scholarly inquiry. Histories interrogating the health and welfare of other classes and alternative mechanisms of relief are less familiar to us. Reflecting current scholarship, this chapter is concerned with the development of official policy, the pursuit of health and the avoidance of poverty, diseases and ‘ill health’.

    The Rise of the Institution

    In post-Reformation Europe attitudes towards poverty and modes of assisting the poor altered significantly, reflecting a general reluctance to support what was regarded as indiscriminate charity. In England, these changes, coupled with increasing poverty, prompted the introduction of the Elizabethan Poor Law (1601), a parish-based system of relief that divided the poor between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ and provided indoor relief, through workhouses, alongside outdoor relief. Similar legislation was not introduced to Ireland until the reform period of the nineteenth century. None the less, in its absence, rational, instrumental forms of medical and welfare relief, producing formalised and institutionalised mechanisms, which sought to discourage indiscriminate almsgiving, such as was evident throughout most of Europe since the Reformation, also emerged in Ireland. In the modern period there was an explosion in the number of institutions constructed to tackle the perceived problems of poverty and disease.

  • Online Resources and Exercises

  • Greg Anderson, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    Thermodynamics of Natural Systems
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp xvii-xviii

  • Summary

    This book is intended as an introduction to thermodynamics. To give instructors the option of including other aspects of particular thermodynamic topics, several chapters and sections from the second edition (Anderson, 2005) are available on the Cambridge University Press website for this book, www.cambridge.org/thermodynamics.

    These sections are as follows.

  • • Chapter 10 Real Solutions

  • • Chapter 11 The Phase Rule

  • • Chapter 13 Equations of State

  • • Chapter 14 Solid Solutions

  • • Chapter 15 Electrolyte Solutions

  • • The van 't Hoff Equilibrium Box

  • • Topics in Mathematics

    • At appropriate places in the text, reference to the additional information available online is noted in a box like this, on page 154:

    Equations of State

    The ideal gas equation P V = nRT or PV = RT is an equation of state; an equation relating the volume of an ideal gas to its pressure and temperature. For real gases there have been many modifications of this equation, and there are other equations of state which interrelate not only P, V, and T, but also thermodynamic parameters such as enthalpy, Gibbs energy, and entropy. See Chapter 13 Equations of State, in the online material.

    Other boxes add worked examples or more details of the material in the text. For example on page 21 there is this:

    Scientific vs. Engineering Units

    In science, molar properties, such as molar volumes and molar energies, are most commonly used. In engineering, on the other hand, specific properties are more common. Specific properties are mass-related rather than mole-related. Thus the specific volume of water at 25 ◦C is 1.0029 cm3 g-1. Molar and specific properties are related by the molar mass (or so-called gram formula weight, gfw) of the substance. That for water is 18.0153 gmol-1, so 1.0029 cm3 g-1 × 18.0153 gmol-1 = 18.068 cm3 mol-1.

    Exercises and Additional Problems

    Exercises

    At the end of each chapter there is a set of exercises on the material in that chapter under the heading Exercises. These are intended to be done by students as an aid to understanding, and the answers are in Appendix C.

  • 1 - Irish Demography since 1740

  • from PART I - Geography, Occupations and Social Classes
    • By John Fitzgerald, Adjunct Professor in Economics, Trinity College Dublin, formerly Research Professor, Economic and Social Research Institute, Dublin
  • Edited by Eugenio F. Biagini, University of Cambridge, Mary E. Daly, University College Dublin
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland
    Published online:
    09 August 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 7-24

  • Summary

    Introduction

    The demography of Ireland presents an unusual picture when compared, not only with our nearest neighbour, but also with other European countries. The dramatic fall in the population in the nineteenth century caused by the Great Famine, followed by near stagnation for much of the twentieth century, makes Ireland exceptional. However, probably the most striking feature of Irish demographic change over the past two and a half centuries has been the role played by very large migratory flows.

    One of Ireland's leading statisticians, writing in 1935, bravely provided estimates of the future population to 2016. His ‘high’ forecast for 1996 was very close to the actual outturn of 3.6 million. However, he went on to conclude that ‘it would appear that the population of An Saorstát is unlikely to exceed 3,700,000 during the next 80 years’. Already at 4.6 million, it exceeds this forecast by a quarter, highlighting the dramatic shift in demographic fortunes that Ireland has experienced in recent years.

    Section 2 of this chapter describes the data sources that are available. Section 3 considers the demographic changes that occurred over the period 1740 to 1850, while Section 4 describes the changes in the subsequent 160 years to 2010. As well as considering demographic change on the island of Ireland, taken as a unit, where possible this chapter also analyses demographic developments in both Northern Ireland (the north) and the Republic of Ireland (the Republic).

    The Data

    The 1926 census for Ireland collected estimates of the population from the late seventeenth century until the first full census for the island in 1821. Most of these estimates were based on hearth tax returns. However, as even contemporary analysts indicated, the estimates from these different sources were defective. Their reliability was affected by changes in the definition of exempt dwellings and also changes in the process of revenue collection. Connell analysed these data and provided a set of population estimates for the eighteenth century. However, his estimates also suffer from some problems. More recently, Dickson et al., using additional information, considered the reliability of individual tax returns, producing revised estimates of population in the eighteenth century.

  • 10 - Rock–Water Systems

  • Greg Anderson, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    Thermodynamics of Natural Systems
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 231-256

  • Summary

    Real Problems

    We have now completed our survey of the thermodynamic principles required to model natural systems. It only remains to gain practice in formulating problems involving natural systems in thermodynamic terms. Quite often, that is the hardest part. Once the problem has been set up in terms of relevant reactions and components, the equations can be solved by anyone who has absorbed the previous chapters. However, choosing the appropriate components and setting up the relevant balanced reactions only comes from experience. In this chapter we explore a few situations that have been investigated by thermodynamic methods.

    Is the Sea Saturated with Calcium Carbonate?

    If you have ever been to Florida or the Bahamas, you may be aware that there are vast areas adjacent to the coasts where the sea bottom at shallow levels is a white mud, which turns out to be made of almost pure aragonite. Carbonate muds extend well out to the deep sea as well; in fact, a fairly large proportion of the sea bottom is composed of calcium carbonate. There are also countless calcitic atolls and reefs throughout the tropical zones of the world. Given this amount of contact between the sea and calcium carbonate, both calcite and aragonite, plus the fact that there are vigorous oceanic currents stirring things up constantly, plus the fact that things have not changed drastically for millions of years, you would think that there would be little doubt that the system consisting of the oceans plus their bottom sediments must have reached equilibrium by now. If these were the only factors involved, perhaps they would have, but the situation is quite a bit more complicated. Why would anyone want to know? Reactions involving carbonate in the oceans are fundamental to an understanding of the global CO2 cycle, which in turn is linked to climate change and other things we would like to understand.

    How Do You Tell If a Solution Is Saturated?

    To explore this problem further, we must first find out how to determine whether a solution is saturated, undersaturated, or supersaturated with a given mineral or compound. One answer would be to just observe the solution in contact with the mineral.

  • 12 - Phase Diagrams

  • Greg Anderson, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    Thermodynamics of Natural Systems
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 293-342

  • Summary

    What Is a Phase Diagram?

    A phase diagram in the general sense is any diagram that shows what phase or phases are stable as a function of some chosen system variable or variables. Therefore, the Eh–pH, log f O2–pH, and activity–activity diagrams we have been looking at are a kind of phase diagram. However, if you mention the subject of phase diagrams to a petrologist, a metallurgist, or a ceramic scientist, they will immediately think of a particular type of diagram that is of great usefulness in these subjects. In these sciences, the compositions of phases and their relationships during phase changes, particularly solid→liquid and liquid→solid changes, are of particular importance, so diagrams that depict this information as a function of temperature and pressure have come to be the subject of “phase diagrams.”

    Thermodynamics and Phase Diagrams

    Though it is true that phase relations can always be described in terms of the thermodynamic principles and equations we have been discussing, and that any phase diagram can in principle be calculated given the appropriate data, the emphasis in this chapter changes from one of calculating what we want to know from numbers in tables of data, to one of simply representing experimentally derived facts in diagrammatic form. The reason for this is that once we get into systems more complex than a single component, and especially when high-temperature melt phases are involved, the calculations are often not possible because the data are not available, or, even if they are available, the results are not very accurate, because they are very sensitive to small inaccuracies in the data. Therefore, in this book, although we will show the relationship between functions such as G and our diagrams, this will be in an illustrative rather than a quantitative way.

    Phase Diagrams as Models

    Metallurgists and ceramicists quite often deal with simple two- and three-component systems and use phase diagrams to represent their experimental results on the phase relations in these systems. The diagrams therefore truly represent their systems. Petrologists, on the other hand, are interested in the origins of natural rocks, which commonly have 10 or more important components.

  • 19 - Gender Roles in Ireland since 1740

  • from PART II - People, Culture and Communities
  • Edited by Eugenio F. Biagini, University of Cambridge, Mary E. Daly, University College Dublin
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland
    Published online:
    09 August 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 312-326

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Life has never been lived ‘without distinction of sex’. The social, cultural and political dynamics that shaped the relationship between sex and gender evolved in complex ways during the period from 1740 to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Central to the definition of these roles were notions of male and female arenas of operation which served to idealise, regulate and confine behaviour. This process was at various points one of negotiation, imposition, compromise and command. It was enforced by collective will, communal pressure, legal restraint, economic and social structures, overseen and rationalised by culture. This chapter explores some of these processes and the consequent meaning of marriage, work and sexuality for the genders across two and a half centuries.

    Gender and Place

    The most powerful force of gender conditioning throughout this period was undoubtedly the family. While itself an institution that changed significantly, the role men and women played therein as respective providers and nurturers was always central to its purpose. The emergence of the gendered family was complex, but intertwined with notions of male and female roles were issues of economics, inheritance and social status. Although the reality often did not conform to the tidy equation of separate spheres, the ideal became increasingly important in social and cultural terms and for political and legal status. Patriarchy was seen as the organising principle of civilised capitalism: much hinged on its success, transgressing its norms carried significant penalties for either sex, but with little economic power women ultimately paid the social price of non-conformance. The interests of the family were also tethered to collective compliance: if a daughter ‘misbehaved’, it had implications for the marriage prospects of other daughters. Social disgrace was a powerful tool in enforcing gender behaviour. Furthermore, matrifocality, the control of kin networks, did not necessarily equate to power within families. Indeed, women often had little control over some of its key tenets such as the number and spacing of births. Economic necessity as well as desire also led many women to work outside the home whilst men often faced economic displacement. Both sexes also struggled to establish families of their own and, as marriage rates declined and negative stereotyping of spinsters and bachelors grew, migration provided salvation for many.

  • 25 - The Diaspora in Comparative and Multi-generational Perspective

  • from PART III - Emigration, Immigration and the Wider Irish World
    • By Bronwen Walter, Professor Emerita of Irish Diaspora Studies, Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge
  • Edited by Eugenio F. Biagini, University of Cambridge, Mary E. Daly, University College Dublin
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland
    Published online:
    09 August 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 423-438

  • Summary

    Introduction

    In 1990 the newly elected president of Ireland, Mary Robinson, recognised an estimated total of more than 70 million people as belonging the diasporic Irish ‘family’. The precise size of the multi-generational diaspora is unknowable but this figure highlights the very large numbers involved and provides a telling contrast with the present-day ‘home’ population of around 6.5 million. It reflects the long time period of substantial emigration, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the greatest ratio of the two populations being in 1891 when 38.8 per cent of those born in Ireland were living outside.

    This decisive move to de-territorialise the nation signalled a remarkable change: as Richard Kearney put it ‘the Irish sense of belonging is no longer pre-determined by the map-lines of our island’. The struggle to achieve independence, unfinished in the six northern counties, has given a special resonance to the territorial claim. It was thus particularly symbolic that the clause stating ‘Furthermore, the Irish nation cherishes its special affinity with people of Irish ancestry living abroad who share its cultural identity and heritage’ should be substituted in the rewritten article 2 of the Irish constitution ratified in 1998 for the sixty-year old assertion of unity with the north. A different and much more diverse set of people was included in the Irish nation for the first time, bringing into view ‘Ireland's other history’.

    Official reluctance to accept this change was illustrated by the distaste expressed in the Dáil in 1995 when Mary Robinson called on the home-based nation to ‘cherish the diaspora’. But realignment advanced rapidly over the next twenty years, reflected in an enthusiastic welcome for ‘The Gathering’ in 2013, especially in business quarters, and followed in 2014 by the appointment of a Minister for the Diaspora. For different reasons historians have not unanimously welcomed an extension of the ‘Irish’ story to include the diaspora. In 2005 Joe Lee fiercely attacked Don Akenson for the lack of precision in his definition, insisting that, without criteria for measurement, boundaries could not be drawn around this expanded Irish population. Describing diaspora as a ‘slippery concept’, he argued that indeterminacy about what constituted Irish identities, especially because of outmarriage and the role of personal choice, invalidated the academic use of the term.

  • 1 - What Is Thermodynamics?

  • Greg Anderson, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    Thermodynamics of Natural Systems
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 1-10

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Thermodynamics is the branch of science that deals with relative energy levels and transfers of energy between systems and between different states of matter. Because these subjects arise in virtually every other branch of science, thermodynamics is one of the cornerstones of scientific training. Various scientific specialties place varying degrees of emphasis on the subject areas covered by thermodynamics – a text on thermodynamics for physicists can look quite different from one for chemists, or one for mechanical engineers. For chemists, biologists, geologists, and environmental scientists of various types, the thermodynamics of chemical reactions is of course a central concern, and that is the emphasis to be found in this book. Let us start by considering a few simple reactions and the questions that arise in doing this.

    What Is the Problem?

    Some Simple Chemical Reactions

    A chemical reaction involves the rearrangement of atoms from one structure or configuration to another, normally accompanied by an energy change. Let's consider some simple examples.

  • • Take an ice cube from the freezer of your refrigerator and place it in a cup on the counter. After a few minutes, the ice begins to melt, and it soon is completely changed to water. When the water has warmed up to room temperature, no further change can be observed, even if you watch for hours. If you put the water back in the freezer, it changes back to ice within a few minutes, and again there is no further change. Evidently, this substance (H2O) has at least two different forms, and it will change spontaneously from one to the other depending on its surroundings.

  • • Take an egg from the refrigerator and fry it on the stove, then cool to room temperature. Again, all change seems now to have stopped – the reaction is complete. However, putting the fried egg back in the refrigerator will not change it back into a raw egg. This change seems not to be reversible. What is different in this case?

  • 21 - Marriage, Sexuality and the Law in Ireland

  • from PART II - People, Culture and Communities
    • By Maria Luddy, Professor of Modern Irish History, University of Warwick
  • Edited by Eugenio F. Biagini, University of Cambridge, Mary E. Daly, University College Dublin
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland
    Published online:
    09 August 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 344-362

  • Summary

    A referendum held in Ireland on 22 May 2015 saw an overwhelming majority of Irish voters vote for same-sex marriage. Ireland became the first country in the world where a popular vote supported such marriages. While the strategies of the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ campaigners will no doubt be analysed in coming years, the vote does reflect how Irish attitudes to marriage, family and sexuality have changed over the past two centuries. The purpose of this chapter is to look at some of the ways in which marriage, concepts of the family, and the understandings and practices of sexuality have evolved in Ireland.

    Marriage

    That families were important in Ireland can be revealed in the fact that few people lived alone, only one in twelve of the population in 1926 compared with more than one in five by 1996. The complexities of family formations and relationships are shaped by social, economic and religious concerns. Within all families there are shifting relationships of dependence, physical, emotional, economic and social, that occur along with changing roles of individuals within families that happen as the lifecycle progresses. Little historical work has been conducted into how Irish families were formed and operated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sociologists and other scholars have given some attention to Irish families from the mid- to late twentieth century.

    There were many routes to marriage from the eighteenth to the twentieth century in Ireland. Women were abducted, couples fell in love, families arranged marriages; where couples did not accept arrangements they ran away or eloped together. Couples lived together without getting married, there were bigamists, and those who broke promises to marry. People killed in fits of jealousy, or if they thought they were being replaced by a more ‘suitable’ partner; they killed when they thought their partner was adulterous, and over how material items might be utilised in a household. Marriage was of significance to women and men for social, emotional and economic reasons. Society considered women's natural place to be in the home, tending to the needs of husband and children.

  • 5 - Getting Data

  • Greg Anderson, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    Thermodynamics of Natural Systems
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 110-136

  • Summary

    Introduction

    We have had quite enough theoretical discussion for now. Let's see how to get some numbers into our equations so as to be able to calculate something useful. Welcome to the world of experimental thermochemistry.

    In this chapter we will have a look at a few of the ways in which the thermodynamic parameters we have derived are measured; i.e., where the numbers in the tables and databases come from. A deep knowledge of this subject is not necessary in order to use thermodynamics to model chemical, geological, or environmental systems, in the same sense that a knowledge of a composer's life and times is not necessary to enjoy his or her music. But it does enrich the experience, and in the case of using thermodynamics, such knowledge does serve to make the user conscious of the many reasons why his or her data might be incorrect.

    Thermochemical data are produced for the most part by dedicated scientists, who devote a good part of their lives to tracking down elusive sources of error, and devising ever-improved methods for determining nature's fundamental parameters as defined by thermodynamic theory. When determined by independent methods and/or independent laboratories, the results are often satisfyingly in agreement, but almost as often they are not, meaning that there is some source of error, and identifying it can take a lot of discussion (perhaps argument would be a better term) and a long time.

    Beginning with the establishment of the Geophysical Laboratory in Washington in 1905, scientists primarily interested in geological processes have contributed to our knowledge of these thermodynamic properties, especially, as might be expected, those of the rock and soil-forming minerals, liquid–solid phase relationships of these minerals, and aqueous solutions such as sea water and hydrothermal solutions. In addition to the measurement of mineral and solution properties, collecting these data into databases for use by computer programs and the testing of these databases for internal consistency have become increasingly important.

    The experimental part and the self-consistent database part of using thermodynamics in the Earth sciences today have both become large and complex subjects, each worthy of separate study.

  • 4 - Languages and Identities

  • from PART I - Geography, Occupations and Social Classes
  • Edited by Eugenio F. Biagini, University of Cambridge, Mary E. Daly, University College Dublin
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland
    Published online:
    09 August 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 53-67

  • Summary

    Introduction

    This chapter will consider two distinct but, certainly in the Irish historical context, interlocking understandings of language as a constitutive element of the social. Firstly, the ideological dimension: the significance of language in the construction of a distinct sense of peoplehood or nation. This will principally entail an examination of the origins and later elaboration of the idea of cultural nationalism in Ireland. Secondly, we will consider the related – but distinct –issue of language as cultural practice. Here the central concern must be the historically exceptional case of Ireland's major vernacular shift from Irish to English, beginning in the seventeenth century and with the centuries under review in this volume being the decisive period.

    Language in the Construction of a Distinct Sense of Peoplehood

    The ideological dimension of language surfaces strongly during the Tudor conquest of Ireland. Earlier attention to language in the medieval frontier between Gaelic and Anglo-Norman settlers, while generally aimed defensively at preventing the Anglo-Normans from being thoroughly assimilated into majority Gaelic culture, had, nevertheless, fixed what would prove to be an enduring ‘cultural value frame’ on the two languages, Irish and English. This frame identified the native Irish (language and general culture) as degenerate and English as the – at the time endangered – language of civility. This categorisation became more aggressively articulated in the conquest of Ireland during the Tudor and early Stuart monarchies, with military and political conquest rationalised in terms of a superior people and culture overcoming a more backward one, and with English as the language of the new political and civil order being introduced and, as necessary, imposed. New settlers or planters constituted a key element of the new civility.

    For some of the leading apologists for the new English order and its civilising mission – such as Sir John Davis – language as the marker of civility/loyalty (English) and degeneracy/rebelliousness (Irish), and as constitutive of character and culture (individual and collective), was central to the legitimation of the conquest and plantations.

  • 8 - The Farmers since 1850

  • from PART I - Geography, Occupations and Social Classes
    • By Paul Rouse, Lecturer in History, University College Dublin
  • Edited by Eugenio F. Biagini, University of Cambridge, Mary E. Daly, University College Dublin
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland
    Published online:
    09 August 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 129-144

  • Summary

    The translation of dreams into realities is no easy task.

    In the years after 1850, the prosperity of agriculture was central to Irish economic development. This centrality underpinned a social position that was founded on the rise of tenant farmers in the nineteenth century and in the triumph of peasant proprietorship in the early twentieth century. The nature of the Irish political revolution and the subsequent partition of the island further influenced the lives of farmers and their position either side of the border. The entry of both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland into the EEC in 1973 was also significant in changing farming in Ireland. Into the new millennium, farming remained a vital industry in Ireland, despite the substantial diminution of the importance of agriculture on the island.

    The Triumph of Livestock, 1850–79

    Irish agriculture, wrote Raymond Crotty, is influenced by climate, system of land tenure and demand for its products. Seemingly oblivious to patterns of land tenure, though, the cattle trade dominated after 1850 through the comparative advantage arising from climatic conditions and the proximity of the British market. The trade in cattle across the Irish Sea was underway by 1600 and was so attractive it was suggested that Ireland seemed destined for conversion into vast cattle walks while its population might be transferred to provide a helot class in England. The caustic exaggeration of such suggestions does not disguise the essential truth of the enduring romance between cattle and Irish land.

    The decades immediately before the Great Famine of the 1840s had seen both pastoral and tillage farming in Ireland struggle under falling prices, but tillage, with its higher inputs, proved less profitable than grass, thriving, as ever, with little encouragement under Irish conditions. Most critically, cattle prices held more firmly than tillage ones as demand on the British market ebbed from cereals towards livestock. This trend continued after the Great Famine. Britain's policy of free trade encompassed unlimited food importation on a comparative cost basis and on the lines best suited to the British economy. Imported American grain on an improving transport network worsened the corn market, while Irish agriculture bowed to the imperatives of climate and allowed natural conditions to provide enough grass at negligible cost to feed livestock.

  • 5 - Catholic Ireland, 1740–2016

  • from PART I - Geography, Occupations and Social Classes
    • By Colin Barr, Senior Lecturer in Modern British, Irish and British Imperial History, University of Aberdeen, Daithí Ó Corráin, Lecturer in Modern Irish History, Dublin City University
  • Edited by Eugenio F. Biagini, University of Cambridge, Mary E. Daly, University College Dublin
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland
    Published online:
    09 August 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 68-87

  • Summary

    1740–1878

    Church and Society

    In 1730, everyone agreed that Ireland had too many priests. The Catholic bishops thought so; Rome thought so; and the Irish government certainly thought so. Although exact numbers are hard to recover, Emmet Larkin estimated that there were in that year perhaps two thousand Catholic priests engaged in parish work in Ireland. A substantial proportion of these were friars (Franciscans and Dominicans), whose numbers had been steadily recovering after their effective expulsion in 1698. To the bishops, the friars appeared at best an ungovernable drain on scarce resources and at worst a source of scandal, and they frequently complained of them to Rome; to the government, Ireland seemed to be teeming with priests of all kinds, and they feared for the Protestant state. Perhaps ironically, it was Rome that took action.

    In 1742, the Propaganda Fide (the Roman congregation with responsibility for the mission territories, including Ireland) limited each Irish bishop to twelve ordinations in his lifetime without regard to local need or the size of the diocese; although some exceptions were eventually allowed, in theory and to a degree in practice the archbishop of Dublin had no more ordinations than did the bishop of Achonry. In 1750, Rome turned its attention to the regular clergy, ordering that prospective friars had to undergo at least a year's novitiate on the continent before they could be received. This substantially increased costs, thus drying up the supply of men attracted by the opportunity to become a priest quickly and cheaply in Ireland. The bishops were also permitted to compel friars to become parish priests, which invariably meant the best and most committed were diverted from conventual life to parochial work. The result was that by 1840 the number of friars in Ireland had declined by some 77 per cent, or from around 800 to some 180 members. The collapse was particularly severe after 1800, and by the time of the Great Famine the secular clergy dominated the Irish Catholic Church to an extent unseen almost anywhere else in Europe.

  • 2 - Occupation, Poverty and Social Class in pre-Famine Ireland, 1740–1850

  • from PART I - Geography, Occupations and Social Classes
    • By Peter M. Solar, Emeritus Professor of Economics, Vesalius College, Brussels
  • Edited by Eugenio F. Biagini, University of Cambridge, Mary E. Daly, University College Dublin
  • Book:
    The Cambridge Social History of Modern Ireland
    Published online:
    09 August 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 25-37

  • Summary

    In Ireland, before the Great Famine, most people lived in the countryside and worked in agriculture. The conquest and land transfers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had created a simulacrum of English rural society. As in England, the land was owned by an elite of several thousand proprietors who kept some of their property in gardens, parks and forests, but cultivated little of it. They rented most of the land, especially the good land, in holdings of viable size to a larger class of tenant farmers. These farmers cultivated the land with the help of a much larger class of labourers. Where rural society in pre-famine Ireland differed markedly from that in England was in the situation of these labourers, who grew their own food rather than working for wages. Their growing numbers in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, aggravated by Ireland's peculiar status within what became the United Kingdom, made for an increasingly precarious and impoverished existence for the bulk of the Irish population.

    This characterisation of pre-famine rural society needs to be qualified to take account of the impact of rural manufacturing activity in the north of the country. During the eighteenth century that part of Ireland north of a line between Drogheda and Westport became one of Europe's major producers of linen textiles. Rural industry was most heavily concentrated in eastern Ulster, but its tentacles increasingly reached westward and southward. The result was a society where, compared with the south, farm sizes were smaller and non-agricultural income more important to both farmers and labourers. This area was prosperous for much of the eighteenth century, but rural linen producers suffered in the early nineteenth century when competition from the British cotton industry limited the demand for their product and when flax spinning was mechanised and became increasingly concentrated in Belfast.

    In 1700 Ireland was among the least urbanised countries in western Europe and it fell further behind during the next century and a half. Measures of the degree of urbanisation are somewhat arbitrary, but cut-offs of 5,000 and 10,000 inhabitants are quite common. Moreover, population estimates for some Irish towns in the eighteenth century remain uncertain.

  • 4 - The Second Law of Thermodynamics

  • Greg Anderson, University of Toronto
  • Book:
    Thermodynamics of Natural Systems
    Published online:
    28 May 2018
    Print publication:
    27 April 2017, pp 66-109

  • Summary

    Introduction

    The first sentence of Gibbs’ (1961a) classic memoir “On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances” is

    The comprehension of the laws which govern any material system is greatly facilitated by considering the energy and entropy of the system in the various states of which it is capable.

    Given the fact that virtually all of equilibrium thermodynamics can be derived by doing exactly that, as Gibbs did, this must rank as one of the world's great understatements. In this chapter, we begin to explore what Gibbs was referring to. By considering “the laws which govern any material system,” we should be able to find out the answers to the questions we posed in Chapter 1.

    The Entropy Paradox

    In this chapter we introduce a thermodynamic parameter called entropy. Entropy is often described in the following way:

    The entropy of an isolated system continuously increases during a spontaneous, irreversible process until it reaches a maximum value at equilibrium.

    However, if at the same time we consider the fact that in classical thermodynamics entropy is defined only in equilibrium states we have a paradox, stated for example by Tisza (1966, pp. 120–121):

    The nature of this problem is illustrated by the following paradox: How are we to give a precise meaning to the statement that entropy tends toward a maximum, whereas entropy is defined only for systems in equilibrium? Thus in an isolated system, the entropy is constant, if it is defined at all.

    The discussion of constraints and metastable equilibrium states in this chapter will provide an answer to this paradox.

    The Problem Restated

    Having taken a couple of chapters to get our terminology settled and to get used to discussing energy changes in systems, we must now get back to our main problem – what determines whether chemical processes will go or not go? Our method of determining this might be considered a bit simple-minded – we will simply determine the “chemical energy” differences between equilibrium states. Processes can take place spontaneously if they are in the direction of lowering the chemical energy. They cannot take place spontaneously in the opposite direction.

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