Stephen Cowley, Rational Piety and Social Reform in Glasgow: The Life, Philosophy, and Political Economy of James Mylne (1757–1839)

2016 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 172-174
Author(s):  
Gordon Graham
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Life Philosophy

Empire and Indifference

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 835-842
Author(s):  
Utathya Chattopadhyaya
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
Civilizing Mission ◽  
Colonial Modernity ◽  
Liberal Capitalism ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Political Freedoms ◽  
Anthropological Literature

The Caribbean's middleness within anthropological literature has been recognized and progressively untangled by scholars like Sidney Mintz and David Scott. The dialectics that figure the Caribbean as a perennially contingent space, always embodying too little and too much of the values that bound discourses of colonial modernity, frame the arguments in both Victorian Jamaica and Empire of Neglect. Both books respond to the problem of an ill-fitting Caribbean, especially after the formal abolition of slavery gave way to apprenticeships and inaugurated an uneven process of gaining political freedoms. Victoria's six-decade reign over the British Empire witnessed the expansion of liberal capitalism, reformulations of state and planter relationships, and movements for political rights under empire. Insurgencies and rebellions dotted the landscape of empire, from India (1857–59) and Jamaica (1865) to the Zulu territories (1879) and Alexandria in Egypt (1879–82). Empire responded to subjects who exposed its shaky footings through greater repression, social reform, and ballasting the civilizing mission from above. From below, colonized subjects inhabited empire in resistant, calculative, and often contradictory modes that revealed the undoing of imperial ambitions in practice. The Caribbean's marginalization in post-emancipation political economy, as the British Empire occupied more territory in Africa and Asia, produced many such complex habitations of empire that superficially may appear, pace Mintz, to be culturally midway between there and here.

The United Irishmen and social reform

1998 ◽  
Vol 31 (122) ◽  
pp. 188-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Quinn
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Social Thinking ◽  
Parliamentary Committee ◽  
The Government ◽  
United Irishmen

When questioned by a parliamentary committee after the rebellion of 1798, the United Irish leader Thomas Addis Emmet predicted that ‘if a revolution ever takes place, a very different system of political economy will be established from what has hitherto prevailed here’. Was there any real substance to this claim? Did Emmet’s words indicate that the republican leadership genuinely sought a radical reshaping of society, or was he simply indulging in empty rhetoric that a broken United Irish movement could never make good? It has always been difficult to pin down the United Irishmen’s socio-economic views: their pronouncements in this area were few and were generally couched in vague terms. This is hardly surprising. Given that the society’s membership was far from socially homogeneous, the leadership no doubt recognised the difficulties involved in trying to produce an agreed programme of social reform. In an organisation one of whose earliest rules had been ‘to attend to those things in which we agree, to exclude from our thoughts those in which we differ’, it was generally judged prudent to steer clear of such a potentially divisive subject. Moreover, the readiness with which the government instigated prosecutions of outspoken radicals, particularly after the outbreak of war in 1793, made advisable a degree of caution in any statements which could be construed as threatening the established social order. Nevertheless, the society did address the issue of social reform from time to time, and individual United Irishmen also espoused a variety of proposals. This article will attempt to examine some of the strands of United Irish social thinking and to determine if the movement had such a thing as a coherent programme of social reform.

Virtue and Necessity: The Bonds of Marriage and the Political Economy of J. S. Mill and F. W. Newman

1999 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 589-609
Author(s):  
Jeff Lipkes
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
New Testament ◽  
Land Reform ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
The Political ◽  
The New Testament

For his first review of someone else’s economic treatise following the publication of his ownPrinciples of Political Economyin 1848, John Stuart Mill chose to examine Francis Newman’sLectures on Political Economy(1851). One might expect that Mill’s review would be sympathetic. Both Mill and Newman were zealous reformers, much berated for pursuing endless “crotchets.” They were both great advocates of the two campaigns that, for Mill, eventually emerged as pre-eminent: land reform and the emancipation of women. It would be reasonable to assume that the political economy of each helped determine the scope and focus of his respective involvement in social reform, and there would be much commonality. Newman, moreover, had only the year before outraged orthodox opinion by his highly critical analysis of the New Testament inPhases of Faith. While Mill downplayed his own secularism, he would likely have felt more than a spark of kinship with someone who had managed to scandalize even liberal Unitarians.

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