Many women wrote philosophy in nineteenth-century Britain, and they wrote across the full range of philosophical topics. Yet these important women thinkers have been left out of the philosophical canon and many of them are barely known today. The aim of this book is to put them back on the map. It introduces twelve women philosophers - Mary Shepherd, Harriet Martineau, Ada Lovelace, George Eliot, Frances Power Cobbe, Helena Blavatsky, Julia Wedgwood, Victoria Welby, Arabella Buckley, Annie Besant, Vernon Lee, and Constance Naden. Alison Stone looks at their views on naturalism, philosophy of mind, evolution, morality and religion, and progress in history. She shows how these women interacted and developed their philosophical views in conversation with one another, not only with their male contemporaries. The rich print and periodical culture of the period enabled these women to publish philosophy in forms accessible to a general readership, despite the restrictions women faced, such as having limited or no access to university education. Stone explains how these women became excluded from the history of philosophy because there was a cultural shift at the end of the nineteenth century towards specialised forms of philosophical writing, which depended on academic credentials that were still largely unavailable to women.
Newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets and books all reflect the ubiquity of 'public opinion' in political discourse in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. Through close attention to debates across the political spectrum, James Thompson charts the ways in which Britons sought to locate 'public opinion' in an era prior to polling. He shows that 'public opinion' was the principal term through which the link between the social and the political was interrogated, charted and contested and charts how the widespread conviction that the public was growing in power raised significant issues about the kind of polity emerging in Britain. He also examines how the early Labour party negotiated the language of 'public opinion' and sought to articulate Labour interests in relation to those of the public. In so doing he sheds important new light on the character of Britain's liberal political culture and on Labour's place in and relationship to that culture.
In this comprehensive study, Elizabeth Crawford provides the first survey of women’s suffrage campaigns across the British Isles and Ireland, focusing on local campaigns and activists. Divided into thirteen sections covering the regions of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, this book gives a unique geographical dimension to debates on the suffrage campaign of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Through a study of the grass-roots activists involved in the movement, Crawford provides a counter to studies that have focused on the politics and personalities that dominated at a national level, and reveals that, far from providing merely passive backing to the cause, women in the regions were engaged in the movement as active participants Including a thorough inventory of archival sources and extensive bibliographical and biographical references for each region, including the addresses of campaigners, this guide is essential for researchers, scholars, local historians and students alike.
How could Victorian capitalist values be harmonized with Christian beliefs and concepts of public morality and social duty? This book explores ideas about citizenship and public virtue and how public morality was reconciled with the market.
"Political intellectuals and public identities in Britain since 1850 will be of interest to scholars and advanced undergraduates in the fields of political thought and British intellectual and cultural history. It will also be of interest to a wider community of writers and commentators on the politics of English and British national identity."--BOOK JACKET.
Nancy Christie innovatively and significantly transforms the writing of Quebec history between 1763 and 1837 by locating Quebec within new British practices of imperial governance asserted in the wake of the Seven Years War. Breaking with the conventional master-narrative of the era as one of gradual integration between French- and English-speaking communities, accompanied by incremental political and social liberalization, Nancy Christie presents the six decades following the Conquest as a period of assertive British strategies for assimilating Quebec's French and Catholic majority, and refurbished authoritarianism deployed to arrest the spread of revolution in the Atlantic world. Brilliantly advanced, this new narrative of post-Conquest Quebec builds upon entirely new research meticulously gleaned from over 20,000 cases from the criminal and civil judicial archives and a sustained examination of both official and unofficial political and social discourses. This study charts both the British practices of colonial rule, which sought the assimilation of non-British 'others' through both formal modes of law and governance, and the consumption of British manufactured goods, and the contestation of these through the daily resistance of ordinary men and women. In so doing, Christie identifies Quebec as a case study with which to open a new trajectory in the wider study of the British Empire. Her striking conclusion urges a shift in historical focus from the interaction between European colonizers and racialized others, to the centrality of practices of rule designed to govern European subaltern peoples.
Designed to complement the author's A History of Modern Britain, this collection of primary sources illuminates and augments the study of modern Britain with coverage of political, imperial, and economic history as well as class and cultural issues Features a broad range of documents, in a well-structured and easy-to-use format, including important, well-known documents and lesser-known excerpts from memoirs and private correspondence Provides up-to-date, balanced coverage of political, imperial, social, economic, and cultural history with over 180 documents Offers a thorough rendering of social class and national identity, including coverage of changes in British society over the last 20 years Includes discussion questions for each document, as well as lists of historical debates and extensive bibliographies of both on-line and traditional sources for students' further research
Offers a reappraisal of the role of women in the politics and practice of welfare in late Victorian and early Edwardian England. Using a working diary written by the activist and female poor law guardian Mary Haslam, this book portrays Bolton women as sophisticated political operators.