Lacrimal History – Part 107: Doyens of Dacryology Series – Louis-Auguste Desmarres (1810–1882) and His Comprehensive Overview of Lacrimal Treatments in the mid-nineteenth Century

We use an Earth System model (HadGEM2‐ES) to investigate the sensitivity of midnineteenth century tropospheric ozone to vegetation distribution and atmospheric chemistry‐vegetation interaction processes. We conduct model experiments to isolate the response of midnineteenth century tropospheric ozone to vegetation cover changes between the 1860s and present day and to CO2‐induced changes in isoprene emissions and dry deposition over the same period. Changes in vegetation distribution and CO2 suppression of isoprene emissions between midnineteenth century and present day lead to decreases in global isoprene emissions of 19% and 21%, respectively. This results in increases in surface ozone over the continents of up to 2 ppbv and of 2–6 ppbv in the tropical upper troposphere. The effects of CO2 increases on suppression of isoprene emissions and suppression of dry deposition to vegetation are small compared with the effects of vegetation cover change. Accounting for present‐day climate in addition to present‐day vegetation cover and atmospheric CO2 concentrations leads to increases in surface ozone concentrations of up to 5 ppbv over the entire northern hemisphere (NH) and of up to 8 ppbv in the NH free troposphere, compared with a midnineteenth century control simulation. Ozone changes are dominated by the following: (1) the role of isoprene as an ozone sink in the low NOx midnineteenth century atmosphere and (2) the redistribution of NOx to remote regions and the free troposphere via PAN (peroxyacetyl nitrate) formed from isoprene oxidation. We estimate a tropospheric ozone radiative forcing of 0.264 W m−2 and a sensitivity in ozone radiative forcing to midnineteenth century to present‐day vegetation cover change of −0.012 W m−2.

On Christmas Day 1848 the Ramillies left England bound for Port Adelaide, Australia, carrying amongst its passengers a group of girls from London’s ragged schools and Marylebone Workhouse. An incidence of brutal punishment to which some of the girls were subjected on board ship went unreported in the British press at the time but became the subject of a heated debate in Parliament 12 months later. Through an examination of letters, press reports and official records, this article uses the journey of this one ship as a case study to illustrate the range of experiences, both negative and positive, faced by young poor female emigrants and demonstrates the ways in which those experiences were shaped by gender. It explores why emigration was seen as a particularly appropriate solution to the ‘problem’ of destitute girls and why the process itself was more challenging for them than for boys, using this analysis as a tool to bring into sharper focus some of the prevailing attitudes towards poor young women in the mid-nineteenth century. Finally, it shows how, whereas young women in similar situations are often portrayed as victims, some could, albeit operating within a restricted range of options, exercise at least some degree of choice. Early emigration schemes like this, operated by the Ragged School Union and others, have rarely figured in the historiography; this article will build on existing scholarship in gender, childhood and emigration studies and offer new insights into the life experiences of pauper girls in the mid-nineteenth century.

Morphological adjustments of the lower Orba River (NW Italy) since the mid-nineteenth century

In this paper we consider the major development of mathematical analysis during the mid-nineteenth century. On the basis of Jahnke’s (Hist Math 20(3):265–284, 1993) distinction between considering mathematics as an empirical science based on time and space and considering mathematics as a purely conceptual science we discuss the Swedish nineteenth century mathematician E.G. Bjorling’s general view of real- and complexvalued functions. We argue that Bjorling had a tendency to sometimes consider mathematical objects in a naturalistic way. One example is how Bjorling interprets Cauchy’s definition of the logarithm function with respect to complex variables, which is investigated in the paper. Furthermore, in view of an article written by Bjorling (Kongl Vetens Akad Forh Stockholm 166–228, 1852) we consider Cauchy’s theorem on power series expansions of complex valued functions. We investigate Bjorling’s, Cauchy’s and the Belgian mathematician Lamarle’s different conditions for expanding a complex function of a complex variable in a power series. We argue that one reason why Cauchy’s theorem was controversial could be the ambiguities of fundamental concepts in analysis that existed during the mid-nineteenth century. This problem is demonstrated with examples from Bjorling, Cauchy and Lamarle.

Journal Article The Holy War OF Umar Tal: the western Sudan in the Mid-nineteenth century Get access The Holy War OF Umar Tal: the western Sudan in the Mid-nineteenth century, by David Robinson. Clarendon Press Oxford Studies in African Affairs, 1985. 375 pp. £28. ISBN 0 19 822720 5. DONAL B. CRUISE O'BRIEN DONAL B. CRUISE O'BRIEN School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 85, Issue 341, October 1986, Pages 628–630, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a097833 Published: 01 October 1986

This article examines specific ways in which sanitation infrastructure matters politically, both as a set of materials and as a discursive object in colonial and post‐colonial Bombay. It reflects on a history of sanitation as a set of concepts which can both historicize seemingly ‘new’ practices and shed light on the contemporary city. It considers two moments in Bombay's ‘sanitary history’— the mid‐nineteenth century and the present day — and elucidates the distinct and changing spatial imaginaries and logics of sanitation in their broad relation to urbanization and nature. It conceptualizes colonial discourses of a ‘contaminated city’ and public health, and finds productive sites of intersection between these discourses and contemporary debates and practices in Bombay, including bourgeois environmentalism, discourses of the ‘world city’, and logics of community‐managed sanitation infrastructures. It also highlights an important role for urban comparativism, in the context of different imaginaries and logics, in both cases. By connecting infrastructure, public health discourses and modes of urban government, the article traces a specific historical geography of cyborg urbanization that is always already splintered, unequal and contested. For the urban poor in particular, much is at stake in how the sanitary city is constructed as a problem, how the solutions to it are mobilized, and how improvement is measured.Résumé Cet article examine les façons particulières dont les infrastructures d’assainissement jouent un rôle politique, à la fois comme ensemble d’équipements et comme objet discursif dans le Bombay colonial et post‐colonial. Il étudie un historique de l’assainissement en tant que série de concepts capable à la fois d’historiciser des pratiques apparemment ‘nouvelles’ et d’éclairer la ville contemporaine. Deux moments de ‘l’histoire de l’assainissement’ de Bombay sont étudiés (le milieu du xixe siècle puis de nos jours) afin de clarifier les imaginaires spatiaux distincts et changeants ainsi que les logiques de l’assainissement dans leur rapport global à l’urbanisation et à la nature. Les discours coloniaux de ‘ville contaminée’ et de santé publique sont conceptualisés, afin que soient identifiés des points d’intersection constructifs entre eux et les débats ou pratiques contemporaines à Bombay (dont l’environnementalisme bourgeois, les discours sur la ‘ville mondiale’, et les logiques des infrastructures d’assainissement gérées par les communautés). Ce travail révèle, dans ces deux aspects, un rôle important pour le comparativisme urbain dans le cadre d’imaginaires et de logiques différents. En reliant infrastructure, discours de santé publique et types de gouvernement urbain, l’article dessine une géographie historique particulière de l’urbanisation des cyborgs qui, en tout cas, est déjàéclatée, inégale et contestée. Pour les populations urbaines pauvres notamment, il est crucial de savoir comment la ville saine est interprétée en tant que problème, comment les solutions sont mobilisées et comment on mesure une amélioration.

Reviewed by: Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic: Health Care in Early America by Elaine G. Breslaw Susan Hanket Brandt Breslaw, Elaine G. — Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic: Health Care in Early America. New York: New York University Press, 2012. Pp. 236. News reports are awash with debates on the “healthcare crisis” and strategies to reform the ailing medical care system in the United States. In Lotions, Potions, Pills, and Magic, Elaine Breslaw takes an intriguing backward look at the history of healthcare in early America and finds parallels between the current disillusionment with physicians and the former “gloomy picture of the early state of health care and the medical profession” (p. 193). Breslaw offers an accessible [End Page 537] synthesis of scholarly works on the history of medicine. Her overarching goal is to chart the longstanding tensions between doctors and the public. According to Breslaw, doctors experienced a period of prestige during the colonial years, but their medical authority then declined from the early national period through the mid-nineteenth century. While European physicians were on the forefront of nineteenth-century scientific advances, Breslaw asserts that doctors in the United States resisted change and clung to familiar but outmoded therapies. Breslaw begins with Alfred Crosby’s classic “Columbian Exchange” paradigm that underscores the devastating depopulation of American Indian groups caused by the transfer of pathogens between the Old and New Worlds. European colonists also fell prey to diverse epidemics. Breslaw analyzes publically-enacted early eighteenth-century therapeutic conflicts between medically-savvy ministers who advocated smallpox inoculation and physicians wary of unorthodox practices. Doctors in all colonies faced continued challenges from numerous authoritative non-physician healers in an unregulated medical marketplace. Breslaw concludes that these struggles between practitioners over “traditional” versus experimental treatments “gradually dissolved the magical aura” that had long surrounded physicians (p. 41). In the pre-Revolutionary period, physicians reasserted an aura of authority by employing “heroic” therapies, including extensive bleeding and purging. Breslaw argues that the colonial culture of deference allowed socially prominent, university-trained physicians to claim preeminence in healing hierarchies. Physicians’ authority was also bolstered by the placebo effect—the phenomenon in which the patient’s belief in the efficacy of a drug or therapy prescribed by a reputable practitioner causes physical healing despite the remedy’s lack of actual therapeutic effect. Breslaw’s arguments though intriguing, raise questions regarding the nature of colonial deference and historians’ ability to assess the placebo effect retrospectively. During the American Revolution, public rivalries between Continental Army medical officers dampened public confidence in physicians. In the post-war Republic, doctors’ acrimonious debates over the etiology and treatment of yellow fever during the devastating 1790s epidemics further undermined patients’ trust in the medical community. In the early nineteenth century, “medical nationalist” physicians achieved consensus by arguing that the American health environment was exceptional, causing Americans to experience different medical issues from those in Europe. According to Breslaw, this mentality prevented U.S. doctors from taking advantage of European advances in statistics, clinical studies, and pathology. Medical nationalism devolved into medical sectionalism, as southern physicians argued for a differentiation in southern physiology and remedies, including differences in African American bodies. Breslaw considers themes of personal agency and institutional coercion in chapters on gynecology and mental health. Although male midwives secured obstetrical practices among urban middle-class women by the late eighteenth century, female midwives presided over most American women’s childbirth into the mid-nineteenth century. For enslaved women, childbirth was a site of resistance to [End Page 538] slaveholders’ coercive healthcare practices and sexual abuse. Coercion also shaped alterations in psychiatric care. Leading American physicians like Benjamin Rush promoted humanitarian treatment based on new notions of rational, secular causes of mental illness. However, therapies included physical restraint and incarceration in asylums. By the mid-nineteenth century, asylum-based psychiatric physician specialists asserted professional authority to determine the boundaries between normality and deviancy. In Jacksonian America, the celebration of the common man fostered a popular health movement in which numerous “sectarian” practitioners, including Thomsonian herbalists, homeopaths, and hydropaths challenged “regular” physicians’ authority. In the face of failed regulatory efforts to block competition, “regular” doctors clung more fiercely to their “heroic” therapies. According...

The long-term impact on income inequality of agricultural commercial specialization is still an open-ended discussion. Diverse economic models and approaches offer competing views, while historians increasingly stress the contingent nature of the paths followed in the various contexts. Applying common inequality indices like the Theil index along with new ones such as the inequality possible frontier (IPF) and Inequality Extraction Ratios (IER), this study examines how winegrowing specialization in Catalonia correlated with agr icultural income distribution in the municipalities of the province of Barcelona during the mid-nineteenth century. This analysis examines a large dataset assembled from over 86,000 cadastral taxpayers in 292 municipalities and recorded in the Distribution of Personal Wealth in Real Estate Ownership of the province of Barcelona in 1852, combined with other population and land use data listed in the Estadística ter ritor ial de la provincia de Barcelona (Land Use Statistics of the Province of Barcelona), compiled in 1858. The results confirm that inequality in agricultural income distribution was lower in predominantly winegrowing municipalities than in timber and cereal-growing ones, despite the fact that commercial specialization and higher population densities could have extended the inequality possible frontier of those wineg rowing areas in the mid-nineteenth century.

Reviewed by: Landscapes of Freedom: Building a Postemancipation Society in the Rainforests of Western Colombia by Claudia Leal Ulrich Oslender Claudia Leal Landscapes of Freedom: Building a Postemancipation Society in the Rainforests of Western Colombia. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2018. xiii + 336 pp. Figures, maps, graphs, tables, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00 cloth (ISBN: 978-0-816-53674-0); $55.00 electronic (ISBN: 978-0-816-53838-6). Let's start by saying this is a beautiful book! It looks beautiful, it feels beautiful, and it is beautifully written. It also stands out from a growing body of literature on race in Colombia, which mostly deals with the contemporary moment of race relations in the country, the political mobilization of a black social movement, or the unfolding tragedy of forced displacement in the Pacific lowlands. Writing about the same region, the author instead delves into the past, intent on critically examining the transition period from slavery to freedom in the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century. She does so with an admirably clear vision and structure, deploying impressively detailed archival material to sustain her arguments. There is some serious scholarship at work here, which can be placed in the fields of environmental and social history, as well as geography and agrarian studies. The book is organized around two key concepts and parts – extractive economy and racialized landscapes. It makes sense to foreground both. The former signals the initial interest the region held for Spanish colonizers who began to exploit the auriferous deposits along the Pacific river basins: "gold [End Page 187] mining started a long-lasting dependence on the natural supply of resources for the functioning of a market economy" (p. 227-28). Yet while economic gain was initially produced through enforced labor during slavery times, gold mining also became the foundation for a free black society after emancipation in the mid-nineteenth century, when free blacks continued to mine for gold, but did so in conditions of relative autonomy. This is one of the central and fascinating claims in this book, which the author sustains with ample documentary and archival evidence. After emancipation other extractive resources came to play an important part of the experience of freedom. The extractive economy diversified and included the tapping of rubber and collection of vegetable ivory nuts (tagua). As Leal summarizes, "two very different political economies of extraction – one characterized by labor coercion, the other by autonomy – came to define the lowlands before and after the mid-nineteenth century" (p.228). What both periods had in common, though, was the dependence on nature as a means of production; it provided the raw materials that were to be extracted directly, unlike agriculture or industry, which display a more mediated dependence on nature. The second concept – racialized landscapes – is fascinating in that it offers a spatial sensibility to how the Pacific lowlands as we perceive them today have evolved over time as a result of the intimate relationship that the free black population built with it. The population patterns so ubiquitous in the Pacific river basins today – with wooden houses built on stilts along the river levees – are a direct result of the post-emancipation move when free blacks began to leave the gold mines and settle along the river banks, erecting first huts, then more elaborate housing, which over time turned into hamlets and villages. Leal stresses these accomplishments while pointing out the racialized undertones and outright racism that are found in literate men's accounts (sic – yes, these were always men) at the time. White travelers in the region regularly remarked on its oppressive heat and humidity, which they portrayed as a source of the cultural backwardness of its black inhabitants. One of the central claims in this book is that the history of the Pacific coast rainforest region in Colombia reveals an unusual postemancipation trajectory, in that the experience of freedom for the formerly enslaved black population was characterized by high levels of autonomy. This autonomy was linked to the particular geography of this large, remote and sparsely populated region, in which free blacks had plenty of space to settle along the banks of the many rivers that...

Ideas of islands shaped Britain's self-identity and its relationship with the wider world in the early and mid-nineteenth century. Existing interpretations of Anglo-Japanese relations have emphasized the development of the idea of Japan as the ‘Britain of the East’ in the late nineteenth century with the significance of Japan adopting a western model of development. This article argues for a critical re-evaluation that directly engages with the crucial developments within early nineteenth-century ideas of Japan as Britain's eastern reflection. It argues that the idea of Japan as Britain's eastern reflection did not arise out of Japanese reforms during the mid-nineteenth century but significantly predated these developments, grounded in ideas of geographical and cartographical connections between the two island nations and reinforced by firsthand travel accounts from the late 1850s onwards. Crucially, it argues that these ideas of twin isles of East and West exerted a powerful, at times eclipsing, influence over British conceptions of Japan in the early and mid-nineteenth century, employing geographical imaginaries in the face of geographical and cartographical difference.

The Strange Career of Judge LynchWhy the Study of Lynching Needs to Be Refocused on the Mid-Nineteenth Century William D. Carrigan (bio) The systematic reporting and analysis of lynching began as a way to shock ordinary white Americans, both northern and southern, to reconsider the system of racial oppression and segregation that dominated the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. The impact of such antilynching work on the lives of African Americans in the South is open for debate, but there is no doubt that the efforts of early lynching specialists shaped the scholarly study of lynching all the way to the turn of the twenty-first century. While applauding this foundational work, this essay nevertheless argues for a broadening of lynching as a field of study. The history of mob violence in the United States is for not only those interested in race relations in the postbellum South but all historians interested in the evolution and transformation of ordinary people's attitudes toward crime, punishment, the law, and the state over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The role of discrimination and racial prejudice remains central to any understanding of this history, but there is much to be gained from disentangling the history of lynching from the relatively narrow framework that gave birth to the field. In 1955, in the introduction to his iconic The Strange Career of Jim Crow, C. Vann Woodward wrote that southerners should understand more than all other Americans that social institutions are not fixed and immutable. In echoing Woodward's title, I hope to underline an irony at the heart of the study of lynching in the United States. Historians of the nineteenth-century United States should be the ones leading the exploration of the subject, because the mid-nineteenth century was the key period in the history of mob violence in the United States, the period that proved pivotal in creating a culture that nourished extralegal violence and defined racial minorities as perpetrators of violent crimes. Yet, relatively few historians [End Page 293] of nineteenth-century America have published monographs on the history of lynching and mob violence; instead, they have largely left the field to historians of the early twentieth century. This essay has two goals. First, I argue that the history of lynching should occupy a greater space within the larger body of work on the history of violence and crime in the United States. In particular, I suggest that the study of lynching in the mid-nineteenth century holds great promise for historians interested not just in American race relations but in fundamental issues such as the history of law, crime, and the development of the state. Second, I want to try to explain why the literature itself has been part of the problem, one of the reasons the study of lynching was for so long the domain of journalists, sociologists, and historians of the early twentieth century. Understanding how the field developed should give clarity as to why there are still many opportunities for historians to study mob violence as a means for understanding the nineteenth-century United States. ________ Perhaps the most effective way to illustrate the value of the study of lynching for a longer history of violence is that of the U.S.-Mexican borderlands, a topic I know well from years of research with my co-author Clive Webb. Historians of the border have long known about violence against Mexicans in the Southwest, and they have made this violence an important element of their history of the Mexican experience in the Southwest. Yet, these historians did not make connections to existing scholarship on lynching, while historians of lynching paid scant attention to extralegal violence in the Southwest. Webb and I saw clear advantages to a comparative approach; from our research, we drew four conclusions that we think illuminate the history of racial violence across regions. First, we found evidence that the chronology of lynching varied greatly by ethnic group and followed no standard timeline. Second, murder remained the most frequent charge of lynch mobs across time and space, but secondary justifications varied greatly; Mexicans were rarely charged with...

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Reviewed by: Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age ed. by Kate Fullagar and Michael A. McDonnell Katie Lantz (bio) Keywords Native Americans, Indigenous peoples, British Empire, Africa, North America Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age. Edited by Kate Fullagar and Michael A. McDonnell. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. 356. Paper, $39.95.) In Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age, editors Kate Fullagar and Michael McDonnell place indigenous peoples at the center of histories of the British Empire during the Age of Revolution (1760–1840). Even indigeneity, the editors observe, is a category born of empire: a shorthand through which colonial officials could distinguish between imperial subjects imported by empire, and those whose residence pre-dated imperial imposition. These essays range from Australia, the West African coast, Pacific Islands, the Great Lakes, the Persian Gulf, the Ohio country, to the Scottish Highlands. The editors facilitate comparisons between diverse indigenous experiences and strategies, and seek to demonstrate that Native peoples collectively influenced European policies and practices during the Age of Revolutions. Most of these essays offer stories of indigenous peoples deploying strategies to advance their own goals in new imperial contexts. Set on the shores of Lake Huron, Michael McDonnell's essay demonstrates the power of the Anishinaabe Odawa to teach British newcomers to trade and engage in diplomacy on Native terms during the 1760s and 1770s and in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War, when the French ceded their northern North American claims to the British Empire. Rebecca Shumway explores the Fante, a community on the coast of modern-day Ghana, between 1807 and the mid-nineteenth century. Taking advantage of confused British policy toward West Africa, the Fante drew British military commanders to their defense against the encroaching Asante kingdom. Sujit Sivasudaram examines the Persian Gulf, a space of many peoples and diverse communities contesting power. Colin Calloway tells a complex borderlands story of Iroquois, Shawnee, British, French, and eventually American powers competing for advantage in the Ohio country, from the 1750s to the 1770s. Nicole Ulrich examines class formation in the Cape of Good Hope from the 1790s through the 1810s, as the [End Page 334] region passed from Dutch East India Company to British colonial rule. Tony Ballantyne considers late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century New Zealand, where multiple Māori leaders competed for trade advantages, and interacted with Samuel Marsden, a missionary skilled at interpolating his cosmology into new cultural contexts. Kate Fullagar shows how Ostecano, a Cherokee leader, and Mai, the son of a prominent family from Ra'iatea, tried to maneuver the British into serving the interests of their communities and homelands during the late eighteenth century. Justin Brooks compares the experiences of Scottish Highlanders, North American Indians, and Bengalis in South Asia, 1745–1775. In each region, Brooks finds that British imperial policy evolved from diplomacy to increased use of military force to secure colonial aims. Finally, Elspeth Martini explores the efforts of an Ojibwe Methodist missionary, Shawundais, alias John Sunday, to convert his people and protect their lands around the upper Great Lakes during the mid-nineteenth century. The other primary pattern examines how indigenous peoples adapted to environmental change caused by imported plants and animals—and the commercial exploitation of resources for external markets. Bill Gammage shows how Aboriginal peoples before the colonization of Australia used fire to cultivate a mix of grassland and forests, ecosystems that supported the plants and animals and their lifeways. Robert Kenny reveals how Australian settlers' livestock transformed the landscape cultivated by the Taungurung—and how the Taungurung drew on their cosmological knowledge to resist invaders who unbalanced their lands. Examining two Pacific archipelagos, Tahiti and Samoa, from the 1760s to 1840s, Jennifer Newell depicts how Tahitians and Samoans incorporated British plants, animals, and cosmology into their environments and cultures. Joshua Reid carries the interaction between settler colonialism and indigenous lifeways into maritime space, and compares the Māori of the South Pacific and the Makah of northwestern North America, during the mid-nineteenth century. By framing essays around indigenous peoples "facing empire," this collection locates specific Native groups in binary relationships with the British Empire. Editors Fullagar...

The nineteenth century was a pivotal period for surgery. The introduction of ether anesthesia in 1846 and aseptic wound treatment in 1867 permitted major operations. By the end of the century, radiographs made operative planning and evaluation possible. After two millennia without any substantial alteration to the Hippocratic treatment of humerus fractures, new classifications and treatments emerged based on pathoanatomical findings. The Hippocratic and Galenic influence remained prevalent until the mid-nineteenth century, with bloodletting, diet restrictions, and leeches intertwined with new treatment modalities. These new treatment modalities were responses to findings from postmortem studies in pathological anatomy. A generation of anatomists and surgeons established a pathoanatomical classification accurate by modern standards in the mid-nineteenth century. Although anesthesia permitted open surgery in the mid-nineteenth century, it was used infrequently, mainly for subcutaneous fractures. Mortality and postoperative morbidity rates were high due to a lack of reliable implants, aseptic methods, and antibiotics. By the second half of the century, biomechanical studies in cadaver bones facilitated an etiological understanding of fracture patterns. The pathoanatomical and pathophysiological knowledge acquired by surgeons and anatomists in the nineteenth century and the advent of radiology paved the way for orthopedic procedures developed during the early twentieth century (Chap. 7).

This chapter explores, from a metropolitan perspective, the government's approach to the expansion of British influence beyond the territorial British Empire in the mid-nineteenth century, and the nature of the relationship that developed between Britain and several regions where such expansion occurred. It primarily concentrates on economics because commercial and financial intervention was recognized at the time as critical to reshaping such areas in Britain's interests, however those interests were ultimately defined. It also provides a general assessment of both Britain's success in this reshaping and the degree to which, in these years, the British economy in practice asserted its influence over such regions outside the colonial Empire. Free trade was a principle that involved British economic expansion overseas and implied an important role for the British government in the encouragement of this. In the mid-nineteenth century, British economic and political influence overseas expanded considerably.