British House Research Articles

“Paying the tribute of a song”: the poetry of albums and visitors’ books

ABSTRACT Victorian commentators identified visitors’ books with mass tourism and disparaged their contents as banal and absurd. However, a historicised approach shows that inscription conventions and commentators’ expectations were influenced by the print mediation of earlier practices centred on blank books, notably poetry composed for British country house albums. This article demonstrates how album poetry published in the late eighteenth century shaped later practice in, and reception of, visitors’ books. An artform which could elevate the album beyond recording fleeting encounters with places and persons, album poetry shows writers deploying literary strategies to construct a guest–host dynamic which navigates between the familiar and formal, and between hospitality and payment. Album poetry establishes a complimentary rhetoric and fantasy of hospitality and belonging that sets an unrealistic model for Victorian contributions to visitors’ books in public and commercial settings.

Temporal comparisons, historical semantics of interaction and ‘post-war consensus’ in British Parliament: Studying time references in a deliberative environment

This article aims to demonstrate that the transition from the mainstream narrative to the interactional history of concepts promises tangible benefits for scholars of social time in general and temporal comparisons in particular. It is shown that the traditionally close alignment of narration with the production of historical consciousness at various levels hinders the study of time as a semantic variable perpetually contested, amended and upheld across society. Alternatively, the references to time made in public settings, allowing for more or less instant reactions (turn-taking) as well as expression of dissenting opinions (stance-taking), offer a much more representative palette of temporal semantics and pragmatics in a given sociopolitical environment. In a particularly intriguing case, the essentially deliberative venue where contestation is supported by both institutional arrangements and political reasons (British House of Commons) is put to test under circumstances commonly known as ‘the post-war consensus’ – the unspoken convention directing opposing political parties to suspend stance-taking regarding the past actions of the government during WWII, its immediate aftermath and its future prospects. As a reliable indicator of this arrangement, the contestation of temporal comparisons between relevant pasts and futures is tested in oppositions reflecting party allegiances (Conservatives vs. Labour vs. Liberals) and executive functions (government vs. opposition) between 1946 and 1952. It is shown that, notwithstanding the prevalence of non-contested statements aimed at preserving interactional coherence and pragmatic functionality of the setting, the moderately active contestation of the adversary’s temporal comparisons in the House of Commons at that time helped all parties, albeit to a different degree, to shape their own political and institutional roles as well as to delegitimize their respective adversaries.

Documents on the history of the Indian National Congress from the archive of viceroy of India Minto

The subject of this research is the documents from the archive of the viceroy of India Minto, which contain the records about the Indian National Congress. The author examines the history of studying the archive of Minto in foreign scientific literature. Special attention is given to correspondence of Minto with the Secretary of State for India Lord John Morley and their deputies that covers the period from the first Partition of Bengal (1905), split in the Indian National Congress (1907), and draft of the Morley-Minto reform, which involved the members of the Indian National Congress. The article also discusses the activity of the Indian Parliamentary Committee in the British House of Commons, and the response of the colonial authorities to hire pro-Indian parliamentarians in London. The conclusion is made that the documents on the history of the Indian National Congress from Minto’s archive reveal the peculiarities of interaction between the British colonial administration and the national elites, which was aimed at preserving the loyalty of the most moderate representatives of the Indian National Congress, as well as at weakening the national liberation movement that manifested in countering by the colonial administration the significant extension of rights of the Indian nationals and implementation of “separate electorates: within the framework of the Morley-Minto reform.  The documents from Minto’s archive reflect the perspective of the colonial administration on the path of further development of India within the empire by preserving British power.

Tribute to Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

Tribute to Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks

A Systemic Perspective

A Systemic Perspective

The Politics of Select Committee Assignments in the British House of Commons

Legislative committees usually combine legislative and oversight functions. Most research has focused on the former. The British House of Commons offers an opportunity to shed light on MPs’ motivations to engage in the neglected oversight aspects of committee work, because its committee system separates lawmaking from investigatory functions. In this article, we examine the politics of assignment to the investigatory select committees. Using an original data set for the 2005–10 and 2010–15 Parliaments, we find that MPs’ long-standing policy interests are a strong and consistent predictor for select-committee assignments, especially when committees’ desirability increases. Our results are largely incompatible with partisan models predicting party loyalty to be a decisive factor in select-committee assignments. Evidence suggests that the “Wright reforms” have consolidated the self-selection mechanism operating in committee assignments. Against expectations of partisan motivations driving committee assignments, our evidence suggests that models based on informational concerns offer the most convincing rationale.

Debating Settler Constitutionalism: Consent, Consultation, and Writing a Transatlantic Debate, 1822–1828

In 1822, Robert Wilmot, the undersecretary of state for the colonies, introduced a bill to unite Upper and Lower Canada in the British House of Commons. In doing so, he was proposing not just an intercolonial union but a new constitution. He believed that because the Canadas’ constitution was granted by an Act of Parliament in 1791 it could be changed by Parliament without colonial consultation or consent. Whig parliamentarians and colonists contested this interpretation and raised questions about consent and the status of colonial constitutions. These debates in the 1820s reveal just how muddied thinking about colonial constitutions and consultation had become. Lower Canadian opposition to the bill has received significant attention from historians, yet this attempt at constitutional change also forced Upper Canadians to take unexpected positions, including interpreting the 1791 act as a written charter. Through these transatlantic debates, they were continuing to fashion a settler interpretation of British constitutionalism. This article traces these ideas by examining the movement of news and rumours through emerging, intertwined colonial and imperial public spheres, which illustrate the permeability of the line between public and private information. Inserting this failed constitution-writing effort into the longer history of Canadian constitutions sheds light on the limits to imperial intervention and encourages a broader rethinking of Canadian constitutional histories and the role of empire in a long nineteenth century.

Ancient mitochondrial DNA connects house mice in the British Isles to trade across Europe over three millennia

BackgroundThe earliest records in Britain for the western European house mouse (Mus musculus domesticus) date from the Late Bronze Age. The arrival of this commensal species in Britain is thought to be related to human transport and trade with continental Europe. In order to study this arrival, we collected a total of 16 ancient mouse mandibulae from four early British archaeological sites, ranging from the Late Bronze Age to the Roman period.ResultsFrom these, we obtained ancient mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) house mouse sequences from eight house mice from two of the sites dating from the Late Bronze to Middle Iron Age. We also obtained five ancient mtDNA wood mouse (Apodemus spp.) sequences from all four sites. The ancient house mouse sequences found in this study were from haplogroups E (N = 6) and D (N = 2). Modern British house mouse mtDNA sequences are primarily characterised by haplogroups E and F and, much less commonly, haplogroup D.ConclusionsThe presence of haplogroups D and E in our samples and the dating of the archaeological sites provide evidence of an early house mouse colonisation that may relate to Late Bronze Age/Iron Age trade and/or human expansion. Our results confirm the hypothesis, based on zooarchaeological evidence and modern mtDNA predictions, that house mice, with haplogroups D and E, were established in Britain by the Iron Age and, in the case of haplogroup E, possibly as early as the Late Bronze Age.

К ИСТОРИИ ВОЗНИКНОВЕНИЯ ИНДИЙСКОГО ПАРЛАМЕНТСКОГО КОМИТЕТА В БРИТАНСКОЙ ПАЛАТЕ ОБЩИН

The aim of this article is to study the history of the formation of the Indian Parliamentary Committee (IPC) in the British House of Commons in 1893. To achieve this aim, the following objectives are envisaged: determination of reasons for establishing the IPC; analysis of the activities of the Indian National Congress and British liberals; analysis of the election campaign of Dadabhai Naoroji, which enabled him to get a seat in the House of Commons in 1892. The sources of the study are the pamphlets of the Indian National Congress members, which explain the need for Indian representatives to participate in the British Parliament; records of parliamentary hearings on the Indian issue; materials of the press describing the course of the election campaign of 1892 and the tasks of the Indian Committee in Parliament. In the course of the study, the author came to the following conclusions. The moderate branch in the Indian liberation movement considered the British Rule in India to be a progressive phenomenon in the Indian life. The defects of the British administration were due to the fact that the English people and Parliament did not understand the problems that the Indian population faced under the British Rule. The Parliamentary Committee dealing exclusively with the Indian issue could contribute to solving this problem. The main conductor of this idea in India was the National Congress, which, since its inception, began work on the formation of the IPC. In the late 1880s, an Indian political agency, which intensified attempts to organize an Indian committee in Parliament, was established in London. The interests of the Indians in the House of Commons at that time were defended by the Liberal MP Charles Bradlaugh. On the basis of the proposals of the National Congress, he prepared a bill on Indian councils, which came into force in 1892. Nevertheless, the creation of the Indian Parliamentary Committee became possible only in 1893, when Dadabhai Naoroji and William Wadderburn (founders of the British Committee of the Indian National Congress) were elected to the House of Commons as Liberal MPs. In general, the creation of the IPC was a progressive step in the development of the Indian liberation movement because the IPC gave the moderate nationalists and their British liberal supporters new tools of fighting for the rights of Indian subjects of the British Empire. The appearance of supporters of Indian reforms in Parliament was the evidence of the success of the IPC’s course of expanding political agitation in England, although it did not guarantee significant achievements in solving of the Indian question.

Examination of the session on the Ottoman Debts held at the British House of Lords on 21 May 1924

Sanayi Devrimi sonrasında zenginleşen Avrupa devletleri 19. yüzyılın ikinci yarısından itibaren ekonomik sıkıntı içindeki ülkelere borç vermeye başlamışlardır. Borçların devamında Avrupa sermayesi bu ülkelere akın etmiş ve ülkeler neredeyse sömürge haline getirilmişlerdir. Osmanlı İmparatorluğu da 1854 yılında Kırım Savaşı’nın getirdiği yük nedeniyle dış borç almak zorunda kalmıştır. Alınan borçlar verimli kullanılmadığı için borç yükü hızla artmıştır. Bu dönemde Avrupa sermayesi Osmanlı topraklarında demiryolu yatırımlarına da başlamıştır. İmparatorluğun dış borç serüveni 1876 yılında mali iflasla sonuçlanmıştır. Borçları ödeyebilmek için Duyun-u Umumiye İdaresi kurulmuştur. Bu kuruluş devlet gelirlerinin bir kısmını kontrolü altına almıştır. Böylece yatırımlarını arttıran Avrupa sermayesi, Duyun-u Umumiye İdaresi ve kapitülasyonlar kısa süre içerisinde Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nun ekonomik bağımsızlığına son vermişlerdir. Milli Mücadele sonrasında Lozan Antlaşması ile Duyun-u Umumiye İdaresi ve kapitülasyonlar kaldırılmış ve Türkiye Cumhuriyeti’nin tam bağımsızlığı sağlanmıştır. Ancak borçlar meselesi 1928 yılına kadar sorun olmaya devam etmiştir. Bu tarihte yapılan antlaşma ile borç ödemeleri başlamış ve 1954 yılına kadar devam etmiştir.

Questioning scrutiny: the effect of Prime Minister’s Questions on citizen efficacy and trust in parliament

ABSTRACT In most democratic regimes, the public often dislikes and distrusts parliamentarians. This should not surprise: the public likes neither compromise nor conflict, both of which are legislative hallmarks. One of the most famous examples of parliamentary conflict is Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) in the British House of Commons. It is the most viewed and commented upon part of the parliamentary week, but attracts strong criticism as a noisy charade promoting a poor image of politics. Does PMQs undermine individual levels of political efficacy and trust in Parliament, as some commentators suggest? We use an experimental design to answer this question and find evidence to suggest that, contrary to its negative reputation, PMQs does not adversely affect most citizens’ perceptions.

Visuo-material performances

AbstractDrawn from a larger project on reported speech in parliamentary interaction (Reber, forthcoming), this paper studies visuo-material performances of so-called “literalized” (Rumsey, 1992) quoting, i.e., verbatim reproductions of original utterances. Taking an interactional-linguistic perspective, I analyze how participants accomplish ‘literalized’ reported speech through vocal, verbal, and visual cues, recruiting their material documents. The data are culled from video recordings of Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs), a parliamentary session where the Prime Minister (PM) takes questions from the Leader of the Opposition (LO) and Members of Parliament (MPs) at the British House of Commons. I place my focus on cases where speakers use original documents as visual aids, a classic rhetoric device of persuasion, and show how paper documents are constituted, celebrated, and rhetorically enacted as (seemingly) original documents in embodied, situated ways. As a conclusion, I argue that the display of original documents allows the speaker to make claims of having not only evidential but also experiential access to their sources, a practice that underpins their evidential authority.

The Gendered Debate: Do Men and Women Communicate Differently in the House of Commons?

AbstractIt has long been claimed in the gender and politics literature that male and female legislators have different communication styles. The evidence for this claim has come mostly from interviews with legislators as the key informants on gendered differences. We contribute to this literature in two ways: First, we empirically examine speeches by Members of Parliament to establish whether gendered differences are observable in parliamentary debates. Second, we advance existing measurement approaches by testing for multiple dimensions of communication style, providing a more systematic approach to studying gendered speech behavior. Communication style is examined through a content analysis of almost 200 speeches in three parliamentary sessions of the British House of Commons. We find compelling evidence for differences in communication style: women evidence arguments with personal experience, discuss policies in a concrete way, and are less adversarial than men. Our findings have important implications for how political communication styles might improve public engagement with politicians, offer a different focus to the discussion, and improve democratic legitimacy.

The size-growth relationship: a test of house price growth across the regions of the British Isles

PurposeThis paper aims to propose that a Neave-Worthington Match Test for Ordered Alternatives is a simple, non-parametric test that can be used to consider Gibrat’s law. Whether the law, that states that the proportional rate of growth is independent of absolute size, is supported by regional house price growth rates is considered. The Match Test is further used to test the applicability of beta-convergence and dual economy models to a house price context.Design/methodology/approachThe Match Test relates an actual rank order with an expected one. Gibrat’s law implies house price growth rates are independent of the absolute price levels. Beta-convergence posits that growth rates are inversely related to the initial price level. With a divergent system, there is a direct relationship between size-order and growth rates. As such, the Match Test is used to test alternative models of size-growth relationship.FindingsRather than convergence, there is a tendency to diverge across the UK, but not in Eire. That said, the size of growth shocks is related to price level on the upswing of a price cycle, but not in the down. Assigning the high-priced regions of the two islands into core and the rest into a periphery, total matching is dominated by the capital cities’ growth. The sigma-convergence observed in British house prices is likely to be associated with slower beta-divergence, not a convergent system. The law of Gibrat is not found to apply in a regional house price context.Research limitations/implicationsThis work only covers two countries and nineteen regions. Gibrat’s law in regional house prices may be better examined using a multi-country analysis.Practical implicationsAs the law of Gibrat is not found to apply in a regional house price context and core-regions appearing to dislocated, this has interesting implications for growth trend analysis and the claim of cointegration, which should be explored further. In particular, the level-growth relationship in the cyclical price upswing points to a ratcheting of differentials between high and low house price regions. The common trends in the long run may result from corrective periodic crashes. Not an ideal mechanism for policymakers.Originality/valueTo the best of the author’s knowledge, this paper makes a novel use of the Neave-Worthington test in the realm of regional convergence-divergence and in the first consideration of the law of Gibrat in a house price context across two countries.

Visualizing the Spirit of Freedom: Performing Irish Women’s Citizenship and Autonomy in Amanda Coogan’s Floats in the Aether

This article examines Amanda Coogan’s Floats in the Aether (2018-19) in relation to ‘home rule’, broadly interpreted to encompass the agitation for Irish women’s citizenship and autonomy. Between November 2018 and January 2019 Irish performance artist Amanda Coogan staged performances with 100 women and girls responding to the exhibition Markievicz: Portraits and Propaganda. This was the first performance artwork commissioned by the National Gallery of Ireland (NGI). The exhibition and Coogan’s commission marked the centenary of women’s suffrage (1918), the election of Constance Markievicz (1868-1927) to British House of Parliament (1918), and the formation of the first Dáil (1919). A revolutionary feminist, socialist and republican, Markievicz was an enigmatic figure who, as an artist, carefully crafted images of herself using performative photography to construct a public persona. Floats in the Aether included secondary school students, the Dublin Theatre of the Deaf, a choir and sitting female parliamentarians including two former Tánaistí, Cabinet Ministers and TDs. This essay argues that Coogan’s performances, situated at the intersection of historical and institutional critiques, offer new perspectives on ‘home rule’ with regards to Irish women’s history, gendered spaces and the struggle for gender equality.

INHABITING THE BRITISH COUNTRY HOUSE IN INDIA: THE INHERITANCE OF LOSS BY KIRAN DESAI

Kiran Desai’s critically acclaimed novel, The Inheritance of Loss, intertwines narratives of the lives of three characters: the judge, haunted by his past, is joined by his granddaughter Sai in his house in north-eastern India, while the son of his cook is working illegally in America. Published in 2006, the novel has mostly been analysed in the light of diaspora studies and praised for its author’s questioning of the effects of globalisation and immigration when leaving home. Yet what is also worth examining is the way in which some of the characters of the novel, including the judge, inhabit their chosen homes as foreigners or, to be more specific, as surrogate Britons in their country of origin, creating a separate community of anglophiles. The “solace of being a foreigner in [their] own country” (29) is but one of their rewards in their attempts at mimicking a British way of life. If the houses of the novel are set in independent India, this article questions the extent to which they could be read as counterparts to the British country house, relating them to values of continuity, tradition and Englishness. While anglophile characters take the British country house as model for their own Indian houses, their nostalgia is for a British home they never knew or owned. Their experiences of immigration can only lead them to create a pastiche of an English country house, which relies on a mythified vision of England. Their acceptance of English values and social hierarchy turns them into foreigners in their own country, seemingly blurring the definitions of “home” and “abroad”. Their reliance on the model of the British country house further points to the ways in which The Inheritance of Loss parodies the genre of the English manor house novel and the way it relies on colonialist norms.

National Heritage and Style in Late Victorian Country House Architecture

The last years of Queen Victoria’s reign saw a marked change in the country’seconomic and public life. If the preceding decades, known as the High Victorian age, saw the peak of the growth of the empire, the 1880s was the time of crisis and economic decline. That could not but impale the idea of a great national past which inspired certain architectural prototypes borrowed from what was seen as the golden age of the empire. The new social tendencies were reflected vividly in architecture including the work of Ph. Webb. The article primarily concerns the country houses built by the architect. The British country house architecture saw some important changes in the Late Victorian age. Mainly, they concern the attitude toward national heritage. The High Victorian architects usually chose a distinct style or epoch in national architecture that they tried to imitate. In the Late Victorian era, architects often mix various styles and epochs in one project creating an image of an “Old English” house and Ph. Webb was the first one of them.

Laura Wright, Sunnyside: A Sociolinguistic History of British House Names. British Academy Monograph. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2020. 281 pp. 24 b/w illustrations plus color views in the gazetteer.

Laura Wright, <i>Sunnyside: A Sociolinguistic History of British House Names.</i> British Academy Monograph. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2020. 281 pp. 24 b/w illustrations plus color views in the gazetteer.

The Meaningful Votes: Voting on Brexit in the British House of Commons

Why do politicians rebel and vote against the party line when high stakes bills come to the floor of the legislature? To address that question, we leverage the three so-called Meaningful Votes that took place in the British House of Commons between January and March 2019 on the Withdrawal Agreement that the Conservative government had reached with the European Union. The bill was defeated decisively three times following a major revolt amongst Conservative backbench Members of Parliament (MPs). We find that three factors influenced their rebellion calculus: the MP’s own ideological views, constituency preferences and career concerns. Somewhat paradoxically, the rebellion within the Conservative Party came from MPs who had supported Leave in the 2016 Brexit referendum and from MPs elected in Leave-leaning constituencies.

The Three Meaningful Votes: Voting on Brexit in the British House of Commons

Why do politicians rebel and vote against the party line when high stakes bills come to the floor of the legislature? To address that question, we leverage the three so-called Meaningful Votes that took place in the British House of Commons between January and March 2019 on the Withdrawal Agreement that the Conservative government had reached with the European Union. The bill was defeated decisively three times following a major revolt amongst Conservative backbench Members of Parliament (MPs). We find that three factors influenced their rebellion calculus: the MP’s own ideological views, constituency preferences and career concerns. Somewhat paradoxically, the rebellion within the Conservative Party came from MPs who had supported Leave in the 2016 Brexit referendum and from MPs elected in Leave-leaning constituencies.