Authority Of Crown Research Articles

ЗОЛЬСКИЕ СОБЫТИЯ 1913 Г. КАК КРИЗИС ДОВЕРИЯ В ПРАКТИКАХ ОБЩЕСТВЕННО-ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОГО ВЗАИМОДЕЙСТВИЯ В НАЛЬЧИКСКОМ ОКРУГЕ

The subject of trust in public-state interactions and local self-government is examined using the example of agrarian protests on Zolsky pastures grasslands in Nalchik district in June 1913. The new pastureland usage laws, authorized in 1912 and applied in the spring of 1913, sparked mass protests among residents of many Kabardian rural societies. Based on archival sources and mate-rials of periodicals,The major strategies for achieving “trust” in the adoption and approval of pub-lic pastureland use laws are outlined. Ritual and rhetorical forms of official and informal interac-tion between the crown authorities and representatives of the Kabardian society, which allowed to restore trust in the regional authorities, are considered. The grounds for the protracted suspension of the Congress of Entrusted from making decisions on the control of pastureland usage are de-termined, and are related to the fear of repeated expressions of protest feelings. The conclusion is substantiated that the complete overcoming of ideological consequences of the pasture crisis of 1913 became possible only in March 1917, when the congress of entrusted, freed from the super-vision of the crown administration, abolished the rules of 1912, which caused unrest on the Zolsky pastures.

Provincial Financing During the First Regional Reform. The Arkhangelsk Version

Provincial institutions created by Peter I in 1710 were designed to ensure fiscal mobilisation, large-scale and maximum possible collection of material resources for the needs of warfare and the simultaneous reform of the armed forces. The first Russian governors had extensive administrative powers but, at the same time, they were under the strict financial control of the highest governing bodies: the Senate, its divisions, and the monarch himself. The governors were deprived of legal opportunities to spend at least some of the money collected through the provincial cash desks to ensure the functioning of their apparatus. It was not only about paying salaries to the ranks of provincial administrations, maintaining administrative buildings in working order, and purchasing consumables for office work. There was no money for more substantial expenditures: payment for the travel of numerous commissioners from the centre to the provinces, for the travel of their officials within the provinces, for the fees for the accommodation of these agents, for the expenses of their maintenance, for the payment of various kinds of state works, for the transportation of recruits and material supplies to the centre, i. e. everything that constituted the very essence of the functioning of local authorities. In this paradoxical situation, the main support could only be obtained from the zemstvo self-government bodies. The long-known practice of state bodies of local power being maintained by the population of the uyezd was replenished in the Petrine era with new elements. Lay fees covered the expenses of crown agents sent from the centre to the region and helped pay for some government work within the province. However, the peculiarities of the legislation of the era put the governors and their employees, who shifted the financial burden on the zemstvo, into a risky position. They could be accused of bribery and “unspecified fees” that undermined the solvency of the taxed population. Never previously published documents on Arkhangelsk province discovered by the author of the article reveal the complete picture of the financial support of the township communities of the Dvina uyezd for the activities of the provincial administration in 1711–1713 and the complex vicissitudes of relations between the central and local crown authorities and secular organisations. The documents were archived during the investigation of the case of the Arkhangelsk vice-governor A. A. Kurbatov and reflect one of the investigative episodes of 1716.

Кабардинская общественная сумма в политических практиках местного самоуправления в Кабардинском (Нальчикском) округе во второй половине XIX – начале ХХ в.

Based on archival documents and materials of pre-revolutionary periodicals, examples of political use of the Kabardian public sum are examined. This financial institution was formed as a mone-tary fund, which was managed by the authorities of the Central Caucasus Line. court deputies were involved in its management, and later the drawing up of decisions on allocations from the public fund became the function of the congress of entrusted rural societies, whose decisions were ap-proved by the crown regional or all-Caucasus superiors. Within the framework of the considered theme, allocations from the means of sum for maintenance of the activity of public officials, payment of expenses on participation of the Kabardian and Balkarian proxies in various public-political events, financing of various forms of political socialization and ideological maintenance of the subject political culture were revealed. At the expense of Sum funds, technological modern-ization of the communication capabilities of the district authorities and local self-government was carried out. The conclusion that in the practices of the congresses of confidants, Sum acted as a key financial resource through which the co-financing of regional political tasks was provided is substantiated. In the socio-state interaction organized by crown authorities and local self-government, first through the congresses of trusted rural societies, the political and cultural expe-rience of Kabardinians and Balkars in organizing and improving the management of joint life within the framework of the Nalchik district expanded.

Regime change in 13th-century western Scotland

Previous interpretations of the courtyarded quadrangular structure surviving on the summit at Tarbert Castle, Argyll had suggested this was the earliest upstanding building on the site, and a potent symbol of increased crown authority in the region during the early-13th-century reign of Alexander II. This paper will present a consistent suite of archaeological, architectural and documentary evidence which indicates that this building is a multiphase early-14th-century structure that post-dates the surrounding L-shaped enclosure, as well as documentary evidence suggesting that a later 13th- to 14th-century transition from private to direct royal control of the site took place.
 Canmore ID 39316

Captives of Conquest: Slavery in the Early Modern Spanish Caribbean

This concise yet deeply researched volume joins a growing body of work that attends to the enslavement of Indigenous people in the colonial Americas. Distinguishing her book from studies of Indigenous slavery that focus on the North American mainland and that consider the period from the seventeenth century onward, Stone traces the enslavement of people native to the circum-Caribbean from the beginning of Spanish colonization in the 1490s until the passage of the New Laws in 1542. Arguing that “the search for and profit from Indian captives was central to the development of Spanish colonial institutions,” Stone convincingly demonstrates that Indigenous slavery and the slave trade were integral to Spanish exploration, conquest, and settlement of the Americas (p. 30). By combining archaeological and written colonial sources, she also succeeds in creating a detailed ethnohistorical account of the Caribbean's original inhabitants and their initial experiences of and responses to Spanish contact. The resulting work highlights the key role that Indigenous slavery played in early Iberian expansion while simultaneously striving to keep Indigenous people at the center of analysis.Among the most welcome elements of Stone's work is her careful attention to Indigenous social and political dynamics from the precontact era until the mid-sixteenth century. In chapter 1, Stone makes deft use of available archaeological and archival evidence to analyze fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Iberia and the Greater Antilles, respectively, demonstrating that both societies were dynamic, expanding, and already engaged in practices of slavery that would continue to evolve after contact.Stone's careful reconstruction of the precontact Caribbean—a society that she convincingly shows was shaped by long-distance trade networks long before European arrival—in turn allows her to explore varied Indigenous responses to Spanish arrival. In chapter 2, Stone reconstructs why some Antillean caciques allied with the Spanish, while others—usually those who wielded more power at the time of Spanish contact—did not.Whereas Nancy van Deusen's Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain (2015) explored how freedom suits brought by Indigenous Americans enslaved in early modern Iberia shaped metropolitan understandings of race, Stone is primarily concerned with the demographic, economic, legal, and social consequences of this large-scale trade in human beings in Spain's newly claimed colonies. In chapter 3, she shows how early sixteenth-century debates over Indigenous slavery reveal its importance in both religious and secular affairs, while also illustrating the limits of crown authority in the Americas.Chapters 4 and 5 explore how slaving shaped Spanish colonization of Florida, Mexico, and Central and South America, as Indigenous slavery became “one of the largest businesses in the New World” by the 1520s (p. 104). While some Indigenous captives became “involuntary collaborators” who served as translators and guides for Spanish explorers, thousands more were trafficked to the Andes or the Caribbean (p. 94).As Stone shows in her final chapter, Indigenous slavery in the circum-Caribbean eventually ended not because it was replaced by African slavery but because it became unsustainable. Although African and Indigenous people worked alongside one another in the first decades of the sixteenth century, repeated Indigenous and interethnic uprisings in the 1520s and 1530s, coupled with the increasing availability of enslaved Africans, led the crown to pass the New Laws in 1542. Realizing that “indigenous cooperation was crucial for the economic prosperity of their American colonies,” Spanish officials banned Indigenous slavery even in cases of war (p. 155). Yet much damage had already been done: as Stone shows, Spanish enslavement and forced movement of Indigenous people played an important and little-recognized role in facilitating early colonial expansion. Just as important, other imperial powers “followed the path of Spanish slavers, continuing to enslave indigenous peoples” elsewhere in the Americas (p. 162).The lack of specificity with respect to numbers is a common problem in studies of Indigenous slavery, and Stone's estimate that “between 250,000 and 500,000” individuals fell victim to the Spanish trade may frustrate some readers (p. 7). As Stone explains, however, the nature of available documents complicates the task of quantifying Indigenous bondage. Whereas European slavers trafficked people from West Africa as human cargo, leading them to produce shipping records, Indigenous people were often captured by individual raiders who sought to hide their activities, and “labor-starved residents of the Greater Antilles” proved willing to conceal the origins of their laborers (p. 113). Rather than focusing on numbers, Stone emphasizes how slavery “scattered diverse ethnic groups and cultures across the Americas,” changing the lives of countless individuals and helping to forge new ethnic groups, such as the Kalinago (p. 157).Captives of Conquest is short and readable, making it an excellent choice for courses on comparative slavery, Indigenous history, colonial Latin America, and the Caribbean-Atlantic world. Scholars interested in the origins and consequences of Indigenous slavery in the Americas have much to gain by engaging with this groundbreaking work.

The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England by Eric H. Ash (review).

Reviewed by: The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England by Eric H. Ash Robert Markley (bio) The Draining of the Fens: Projectors, Popular Politics, and State Building in Early Modern England By Eric H. Ash. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Pp. 296. In his 1704 work The Storm, a text that describes the devastation of the extratropical hurricane that struck southwestern England in November 1703, Daniel Defoe reminds his readers that "'tis not many Ages since these Countries [parts of Norfolk, Cambridge, Suffolk, Huntingdon, Northampton, and Lincolnshire] were universally one vast Moras or Lough, and the few solid parts unapproachable" (G. Strawbridge, 1704, p. 17). Defoe's characterization of the eastern fenlands of England as they existed "not many Ages past" rests on a chain of associations that encouraged his readers to view wetlands with horror. For centuries, the fenlands in eastern England frustrated efforts to extend networks of communication and transportation, as well as legal and financial control over land and people who often resisted metropolitan authority. For Defoe and his contemporaries, the draining of the fens in the seventeenth century remained a milestone of economic and even climatological progress—a large-scale reclamation project that had made the land more fertile and more conducive to good health and had stabilized property relations and extended state authority. Draining the fens, one of the largest engineering undertakings in seventeenth-century Europe, took place over decades and, according to its supporters, demonstrated that private investment in combination with the legal and financial support of the Crown could—at least in theory—remake a malarial-ridden landscape into a verdant, orderly, and profitable countryside. Eric H. Ash's compelling study traces the history of this project beginning in the 1570s, when draining the fens on a massive scale first began to take shape as a policy at Elizabeth's court, as would-be projectors and investors argued that their often-hazy ideas would be an unalloyed boon to agriculture, the sociopolitical order, Crown authority, and commercial development. In providing the first full-length history since H. C. Darby's classic The Draining of the Fens (1940), Ash brings together political, economic, engineering, and environmental history in enlightening ways. By the early 1600s, English and Dutch projectors had displaced cottagers and started digging channels to redirect water flows but experienced as many failures as successes. Ash is particularly adept at describing the complexities of these efforts and their unintended consequences. In the 1650s, the draining of the Great Level of the Fens finally was completed under Cromwell, after much expense, radical disruptions to traditional lifestyles, and a good deal of human suffering. Ash suggests that the persistence of these drainage projects over different regimes and many decades reflects the ideological [End Page 857] and sociopolitical assumptions about agricultural "improvement" that characterize sixteenth- and seventeenth-century attitudes toward wetlands. The ultimate success of projectors in transforming hundreds of thousands of acres into arable land came with myriad sociopolitical, economic, and environmental costs; in turn, these conflicts reflected the larger clash of interests that led to the English Civil War. The great virtue of Ash's study is that its detailed archival research shapes a powerful narrative about the ways that drainage projects disrupted traditional (and what we might now call—with caveats—sustainable) uses of the fenland's resources in the interests of economic profit and assertions of the nation-state's authority. Draining the fens inevitably led to conflicts between inhabitants of these wetland areas and agents of the Crown, provoking political and legal debates about the authority of the Crown to seize land, displace inhabitants, and undertake large-scale engineering efforts without the consent of those who made their living off the land. If the meandering streams and routinely submerged areas of the fens supported abundant wildlife and small-scale livestock operations, they also frustrated the nation-building goal of transforming "one vast Moras" into arable land. The concerns voiced by Defoe about agricultural productivity and profit that were the hallmarks of British efforts to colonize distant lands in North America had their origins in the internal colonization of the fenlands. Ash does...

Закавказский край в царских путешествиях: от Александра II до Николая II

The travels of emperors on the national outskirts of the Russian Empire as a representation of power and mastering the symbolic space of multinational state were the means to manage cultur-ally complex communities of the Romanov dynasty servants. The article considers the circum-stances of the visits of Alexander II in 1871, Alexander III in 1888, and Nicholas II in 1914 to the South Caucasus. It describes the general characteristics of the routes and scenarios of the highest visits, shows the stability of the principal forms of communication with the local population. The importance of the continuity of the czarevitch’s’ Caucasian journeys in their future practices of ruling the region is emphasized. The commemorative aspects of the czarist visits that actualize in the public consciousness the key events of the Russian history of the Caucasus are investigated. It is noted while observing organizational and ceremonial canon, each visit solved concrete and his-torical problems determined by the completion of the accession Caucasus to Russia, the develop-ment of transport infrastructure and deeper integration of the region into the socio-cultural space of the empire, symbolic mobilization of demographic and material resources of the southern out-skirts during the World War I. The reasoned conclusion shows that the visits of the emperors pro-moted the legitimization in the eyes of the subjects of both the supreme crown authority and its representatives in the face of the authorities of the Caucasian region. “The Highest Visits” deep-ened the integration of the region into the larger imperial space and, at the same time, contributed to the reintegration of the peoples of the South Caucasus within the Russian state order.

The World of Plymouth Plantation

The World of Plymouth Plantation

Elite Coalitions, Limited Government, and Fiscal Capacity Development: Evidence from Bourbon Mexico

Limited government supported by elite coalitions can facilitate the development of fiscal capacity by tying rulers’ hands and enhancing their credibility. This paper presents evidence of the effect of the Mining Tribunal, an institution for the mining elite in late colonial Mexico that credibly constrained the Spanish Crown, on the development of fiscal capacity. The mining elite resisted the development of a strong fiscal state that was controlled by unconstrained Crown authorities. However, when mine owners were granted the ability to organize and protect their economic interests through a corporation, they ceased resisting. This enabled the Crown to invest in strengthening its fiscal capacity and raise more taxes from sectors other than mining. Difference-in-differences estimates using detailed fiscal data from regional royal treasuries indicate that this institution led to a substantial increase in the resources assigned to civil administration, as well as in revenues from nonmining production and trade.

"a massive colonial experiment": New Zealand architecture in the 1840s

It is more than obvious to say that the signing of the Treaty was the big event of the 1840s. The initial Treaty signing at Waitangi on 6 February 1840 by Lieutenant-Governor William Hobson, representing the British Crown, and "about 45 Maori chiefs" has become a defining moment in New Zealand's history, but, as Smith notes,
 [o]nly recently has the Treaty of Waitangi become central to national life ... Hastily devised at the time, the treaty sheets have become a national monument: they mean different things to different groups but have had an evolving official interpretation placed upon them.
 The Treaty "is the basis of the Crown's authority and legitimised European settlement in New Zealand," but important differences between the English version and the Māori version (which most Māori signed) include differences in the translations of article one (the cession of sovereignty vs "te kāwanatanga katoa" (governorship)), and silence in the te reo Māori text "on the Crown right of pre-emption. It promised the Queen "hokonga" - the buying and selling of land that Maori were willing to part with - but not exclusively, nor even as the highest priority.

Historical geographies of a colonised world: the renegotiation of New English colonialism in early modern urban Ireland, c. 1600-10

Following the defeat of the Irish at the Battle of Kinsale (1601), the English Crown's authority prevailed over most of Ireland and the loyalty of colonial outposts such as Cork no longer needed to be buttressed significantly. This paper examines the geopolitical environment of early seventeenth-century Ireland, by providing a case study of the renegotiation and strengthening of English colonial power from c. 1600-10 in an Irish urban space, namely the city of Cork. In examining the role of New English colonialism in forging the character of the early modem city of Cork from c. 1600-10, the wider military considerations related to New English imperial expansion at the time will be considered. A synthesis will also be provided of the resistance of the Cork citizens to the colonial strategies of the English Crown and Government in the early 1600s, as exemplified by the outbreak (and subsequent repression) of the 'Recusant Revolt' in 1603, when the citizens of the city refused to proclaim James I as King of England. The stronger colonial presence that manifested itself in the aftermath of the suppressed 'Recusant Revolt' is evident in a number of ways. Such strategies included the introduction by the colonial power of a policy of severe religious repression (predicated on a philosophy of English cultural supremacy) and a military strategy of locating garrisons at fortifications. These were accompanied by economic strategies that eroded Cork's charter liberties in 1608 (whereby the Crown took back the duties of poundage, tonnage and petty customs which were collected in the port).

“SOMETIMES MARTHA ATTACKED RURAL SETTLEMENTS AND GENTRY ESTATES:” FROM THE HISTORY OF THE NOBLE BANDITRY IN THE ХVIII – FIRST HALF OF THE ХIХ CENTURIES (Based on Belgorod and Kursk regional materials)

Abstract. The author considers the banditry of Martha Durova, a prominent landowner in Putivl` uezd , Sevsk province, Belgorod guberniia , in the context of social relations in the Russian-Ukrainian borderlands in the eigthteenth through the first half of the nineteenth century. The government ultimately sent military units to the “ porubezhny krai ” to secure her arrest. While noble banditry was certainly not unique to Belgorod and Kursk provinces, no other regions of Russia recorded violent, bloody noble banditry and an accompanying governmental military response on a similarly large scale during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The author identifies the tradition of “vol’nitsa” (brigands) in the Russian-Ukrainian borderlands, as well as the weakness and corruption of the Crown authorities in the former southwestern borderlands of the Russian state, as the major factors that shaped the Durova incident. Keywords :

The distribution of tenancies in León, c. 1200–1250: charter evidence for a history of power

In the kingdom of León, royal tenancies – delegations of authority over the royal demesne to noble agents – are thought to have been under royal control in the early twelfth century, and under noble control by the late thirteenth. This paper aims to clarify the crown's authority over tenants and tenancies in the transformative period of the early thirteenth century. It also calls attention to the unusual but invaluable historical source created by the lack of patrimonialization in tenancies during this period – a source that reveals the ad hoc responses of medieval monarchs to contemporary events. The transfer of tenancies from one magnate to another represents the active intervention of the crown, and thus reveals royal strategies and conflicts that are often unrecorded in other contemporary records. If understood as a process that reveals the dynamic of royal will, rather than a static representation of power, the distribution of tenancies can serve as a valuable adjunct to narrative and other sources in the study of relationships between the crown and its magnates.

Gulliver as Slave Trader: Racism Reviled by Jonathan Swift by Eleanor L. Robinson

66 David Womersley. ‘‘Confessional Politics in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year’’ Anne Barbeau Gardiner John Jay College, CUNY BOOKS BRIEFLY NOTED ELEANOR L. ROBINSON. Gulliver as Slave Trader: Racism Reviled by Jonathan Swift. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2006. Pp. x ⫹ 241. $35. One of the contexts for Swift’s Gulliver ’s Travels has long been seen as the aggressive subjugation of non-Western peoples by white colonizers. Swift draws attention to this dark issue near the end of the book, after Gulliver has returned from his final voyage to the land of the Houyhnhnms. In a wellknown passage, Gulliver declares that he will break from his sovereign duty in declining to declare to the crown authorities the existence of any of his discovered territories in order to avoid what would surely otherwise happen: namely, the expedition of an ‘‘execrable Crew of Butchers’’ sent to dispossess the native people of their land and to indulge themselves in the process in ‘‘all Acts of Inhumanity and Lust.’’ Of course, Swift takes the most ironic pains to insist that such actions could not for a moment be associated with Britain, a nation committed to the utmost ‘‘Wisdom , Care, and Justice in planting colonies .’’ The appreciation that Swift’s book supports a burden of racial guilt, however , still stops well short of the thesis advanced in Ms. Robinson’s dogmatic and unappealing study. Her thesis, which admits little nuance, is that Gulliver is depicted as a slave-trader, or at least a ship’s surgeon specifically associated with voyages of enslavement, and that the whole fable can be read as a satire on the mania of white supremacism. The fundamentals of her case rest on the conviction that Swift must have been aware of the realities of the slave trade and that the named ships in which Gulliver travels, and the parts of the world which he visits, are ones that unerringly support an association with the slave trade. Her argument is not that these references are explicit, but rather that they remain silently encoded in the text, as a truth too unpalatable to be made manifest to Swift’s reader. The book relies, then, on enterprising acts of exegesis, at times illuminating, but on other occasions rather baffling. One such is her etymological unpacking of the word ‘‘Lilliput ’’ in which ‘‘Lilli’’ is taken to mean lily white, and ‘‘put’’ is understood in terms of the medieval acceptation ‘‘to launch persons, a boat, a fleet’’ (presumably as in ‘‘put to sea’’), the whole word thus being taken to mean ‘‘Lily-white men launching ships across the oceans to capture innocent black human beings to forcefully carry across an ocean.’’ Another typical piece of exposition occurs in relation to Gulliver’s departure from Brobdingnag when an eagle seizes his box by the ring on its top and carries 67 it up into the air. Ms. Robinson sees Gulliver’s fright at being buffeted by the eagle’s flight, not knowing where he is being transported, as an allegory of the plight of thousands of African slaves, shackled deep in the cargo holds of the slaving vessels. Gulliver’s petrified complaint about being ‘‘four Hours under these circumstances’’ only elicits the chilly reprimand: ‘‘What’s four hours compared to four months in the hold of a slave ship?’’ While Gulliver as a Slave Trader represents an arresting statement of a particular thesis about Swift’s book, it seems to me to be vitiated by overstating the case, by zealously crushing all aspects of the work into a single thesis. Moreover, Ms. Robinson confuses a thesis with indisputable fact. On p. 2, she announces ‘‘the fact that the Travels is a protest at white supremacy and the African slave trade’’ (italics added), and on page 27 associates this fact with her own personal discovery, made in the early eighties. Later Gulliver’s supposed participation in slaving is escalated into his ‘‘insatiable desire’’ for the slave trade. Some of Ms. Robinson’s later critical remarks and rhetorical flights are explicitly and rather incautiously based on the absolute and unavoidable rectitude of her principal claim. Part of this overstatement concerns the yahoos, who are seen as...

Historical geographies of a colonised world: The renegotiation of New English colonialism in early modern urban Ireland,c. 1600–10

Abstract Following the defeat of the Irish at the Battle of Kinsale (1601), the English Crown's authority prevailed over most of Ireland and the loyalty of colonial outposts such as Cork no longer needed to be buttressed significantly. This paper examines the geopolitical environment of early seventeenth‐century Ireland, by providing a case study of the renegotiation and strengthening of English colonial power from c. 1600–10 in an Irish urban space, namely the city of Cork. In examining the role of New English colonialism in forging the character of the early modem city of Cork from c. 1600–10, the wider military considerations related to New English imperial expansion at the time will be considered. A synthesis will also be provided of the resistance of the Cork citizens to the colonial strategies of the English Crown and Government in the early 1600s, as exemplified by the outbreak (and subsequent repression) of the ‘Recusant Revolt’ in 1603, when the citizens of the city refused to proclaim James I as...

Miekka ei laske leikkiä. Suomi suuressa pohjan sodassa 1700-1714 by Antti s> Kujala (review)

342 SEER, 8o, 2, 2002 in great detail the impact of Nadasi's works.Here, for instance, there is a map of the places of publication, which are very widely spread across Europe, including Rome, Antwerp, Cologne, Vienna, Graz and Prague as major centres,but also rangingfromVilnius, Wroclawand Cracow in the north-east to Palermo in the south. There are also tables of printers and publishers, details of translationsof NAdasi'sworks and close analysisof the translations into Hungarian, illustrationsof title pages, and indications of readershipthat demonstratethat acquaintancewith and actualuse of Nadasi'sworkwent well beyond the intended use and beyond theJesuit order. A significant item is the bibliography provided of Nadasi's works. This contains five manuscripts and sixty-two printed works, with details of the originaland latereditions. It is chronologicallyarranged,usuallyconsistingof a title and a reference to a standard bibliographical reference work. Only when there is no referencein the latter to location does Tuskes offerdetailsof a librarylocation. In general he has provided a good clear record of Nadasi's worksthat sortsout independently and non-independentlypublisheditems. A necessarypart of such a volume is the index, since the readerwill want to checkon otherinternationalnames fromtheperiod. This index oddlyincludes references to mythological figures and modern scholars as well as to figures from the period examined. The study was translated into German but reads excellently, remaining natural and clear in expression. Tuskes has produced a highly professional piece of work, painstaking in research, that illuminates many significant aspects of the literary life of the Early Modern period. It is good that it has been takenup into Niemeyer's impressiveFruheNeuzeit series,which thereby demonstratesthe breadthof its horizons. Glasgow ANTHONY J. HARPER Kujala, Antti. Miekkaei laskeleikkid. Suomisuuressa pohjansodassaI700-I7I4. HistoriallisiaTutkimuksia,2 II. Suomalaisen KirjallisuudenSeura, Helsinki , 200I. 367 pp. Notes. Illustrations.Maps. Tables. Figures. Bibliography .Index. FIM I6o.oo. ALTHOUGH militaryoperations are covered in Antti Kujala'sstudyof Finland duringthe firstpart of the GreatNorthernWar,the focus of the book is on the relationshipbetween the crown and its subjectsand on the legitimization and loss of the crown's authority. The book ends with the defeat of the Swedish (Finnish) army at Napue in February I7I4 which preceded the Russian occupation of Finland. Kujalajudges the ability of the government to impose its authority on the Finnish people, and in particular the peasantry, on the basis of evidence derived from the systematic analysis of court cases in ten districts. He has divided these cases into such categories as the neglect of obligations to pay taxes and repair roads, crimes against crown officials, failure to report for militia duty and desertion from the army. The evidence shows how peasant disobedience of authority grew as the war went on. As far as militia service was concerned, refusal to serve was so considerable that the provincial REVIEWS 343 governorsand courtscould not check it. The peasantsbelieved that they were discharging their military obligations through the tenure system and should not also have to serve in person in the militia. By 17 I3 desertion from the army and the militia had become a seriousproblem because it was clear that the crown's representativeshad lost their authority.The peasantrywere even demanding that the stateshould fulfilits duty to protect them from the enemy and notjust requirethem to carryout theirobligations. A protractedwar exposed the weaknessboth of the Swedishmilitarysystem and the autocracy. Kujala examines the ability of Finland to defend itself in terms of manpower and financial capacity. On the outbreak of the war the population of Finlandwas some 400,000 which supported(throughthe newlyintroduced military tenure establishment)armed forces of 13,000 men. The recruitmentof about 50,000 men in the course of the warwas a heavy burden on the population and caused at firsta shortage of labour until more women were used to replacemen. Militaryand civiliandead duringthewarnumbered some 54,000 which, as Kujala points out, was a proportionately higher loss than FinlandsustainedduringWorldWarII. The crucial problem for the army was not, however, men but money. Finland's economic potential for waging a long war was very weak, as the author demonstrates. For example, in I 711 the maintenance of the army of 8,ooo men in Finlandrequiredbetween fourand fivetimes as much money as could be raisedin the country. During the...

FIFTEENTH-CENTURY DURHAM AND THE PROBLEM OF PROVINCIAL LIBERTIES IN ENGLAND AND THE WIDER TERRITORIES OF THE ENGLISH CROWN

IT is remarkable when an historical interpretation has stood almost unchallenged for one hundred years. Yet this is the case with the approach to the history of the county palatine of Durham outlined by G. T. Lapsley in 1900; it is a story of the steady decline of this once highly autonomous jurisdiction which has been retold by virtually all those who have written on the subject since. 1 It is even more remarkable when that interpretation has acted as a vital support for two much more far-reaching paradigms. In the case of Lapsley’s interpretation of Durham, these extend not just elsewhere in the British Isles but also to North America. On the one hand is the approach to the territories of the English crown as a precociously centralised polity, characterised by the effective authority of the crown’s institutions and the rapid decline of what little provincial particularism had once been present. 2 With Lapsley’s Durham a pale shadow of its former self by the fifteenth century, historians have been able to propose that even the strongest of the ancient palatinates was effectively defunct and the power of the centre unopposed. 3 On the other hand, there is the paradigm which sees English North America as the scene of a conflict between the direct authority of an ambitious crown and a burgeoning desire for local self[hyphen]government which was eventually successful

The Catholic Church in Haiti: Political and Social Change by Anne Greene

BOOK REVIEWS811 state in Mexico." From this section,we also learn much about the Uves of several prominent clerics, as weU as nuns and beatas, aU of whom Brading treats sympatheticaUy . Indeed, as the author reminds us early on, "one bad priest was apt to generate more episcopal paperwork than ten good priests quietly going about their business" (p. xu). The second and third sections—"Priests and Laity" and "Bishops and Chapter "—include essays on the secular clergy, on confraternities, brotherhoods, parochial income, on popular reUgion, bishops and chapters, tithes and chantries, and on the thinking of the three key clerical figures of the early nineteenth century—Manuel Abad y Queipo, Miguel Hidalgo, and José Maria Morelos . AU these chapters contain much that is informative and useful. In these chapters Brading uses case histories of young men denied entry to the priesthood because of non-white ancestry, shows the growing number of unbeneficed priests residing in the diocese in the decades preceding the outbreak of the 1810 Insurgency, demonstrates the serious inequaUty between the wealthy curas and the under-educated and often unemployed priests, many of whom lived in poverty and were reduced to begging for alms, and explains the ways in which the last generation of Spanish bureaucrats repeatedly sought to curtaU the influence, privUeges, and prerogatives of the Mexican clergy. "At aU points," Brading argues,"the church . . . found its jurisdiction chaUenged and reduced ," leading to a growing divide between "the secular and spiritual arms of the monarchy."Popular reUgion, too, came under increasing attack by the end of the eighteenth century. FinaUy, with the Consolidation decree of 1804, church wealth and income also became a target to be plundered by the crown. U there is a central theme running through this study, it is that such repeated attacks on the Church aUenated a substantial portion of the Mexican clergy and contributed to the widespread participation of clerics in the 1810 Insurgency. As the author reminds us at various points in Church and State, the enlightened ministers of the Bourbon period wanted above aU to curtaU ecclesiastical power, no longer viewing the Church "as the mainstay of the crown's authority over society," though it should perhaps have heeded the warnings of Francisco Javier de Iizana y Beaumont, penned in 1809, that "he who has the priests has the Indies." Caroline A.Williams University ofBristol West Indian The Catholic Church in Haiti: Political and Social Change. By Anne Greene. (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press. 1993. Pp. vii, 312. $28.95.) ParadoxicaUy Haiti's history is richer than the country itseU. Not much is scientificaUy known about its religious history, aside from myths created by Hollywood through the distortion of what Voodoo reaUy is. But this poor country is more than this African reUgion. And that is what Greene shows the reader 812book reviews through this book. I would caU this a ground-breaking study of an important part of Haiti's reUgious history. Since the time when the whole of Hispaniola was under Spanish control, the official religion of the colony was Catholicism. This situation did not change after the French took over. One of the main tasks of CathoUcism was to bring into the flock through conversion the substantial slave population of the colony. But for many this ¦was only done in part, since they didn't give up their African beUefs.What we know today as Voodoo is a syncretism ofAfrican and European reUgious traditions, Protestantism included. This book presents the presence of the CathoUc Church and Voodoo as the two main reUgions and how they affected and were affected themselves by the political situation ofthe country through different time periods.The author also studies the Protestant presence and its influence in this struggle. The book has several shortcomings, including repetition. Many times after a subject has been covered, the author repeats it again almost verbatim, and sometimes several times.AdditionaUy at the end of the book, under the subtitle "The Church Elsewhere" she gives detailed information on the Catholic Church in the PhiUppines, El Salvador, and even Colombia which is not pertinent to the discussion. In Chapter 7, which is the last one, Greene loses...

The 1784 Handel Commemoration as Political Ritual

Between May 26 and June 5, 1784, five concerts were given in Westminster Abbey and a West End entertainment palace to mark the death of George Frideric Handel twenty-five years before. The event became a legend in its own time. The scale of the commemoration festival of 1784 was unparalleled among musical events: 4,500 people gathered in the abbey to hear 525 performers render Handel's Messiah, and, as European Magazine put it, “so extraordinary a spectacle, we believe, never before solicited the public notice.” This novel festival to a German-born composer captured public attention all around the Western world but in Britain made Handel's music into a national tradition. The commemoration was indeed a political event. It came on the heels of constitutional crisis—the dispute over the authority of crown and Parliament, the Fox-North ministry of 1783, and the turbulent election of 1784. Nobody planned the commemoration for political reasons, but that is what it became, willy-nilly, celebrating the end of the crisis and the hope for a harmonious new order.The commemoration put in ritual form the culmination of the country's political development over the previous three decades. The new harmony seen in the grand event suggested the reunion of Tories with Whigs in government and the growth of a new political community—a kind of establishment—that, despite the conflict over the war and the constitution, was broad-bottomed in its inclusion of faction and opinion. Yet that does not mean that the commemoration was unanimously supported or was truly nonpartisan, any more than was this establishment itself.

Reports by anaesthetists to procurators-fiscal: analysis of "anaesthetic deaths" over 10 years in four Scottish teaching hospitals.

Review of 489 "anaesthetic deaths" reported to procurators-fiscal over 10 years disclosed only 30 that were thought to justify such reporting. Most of the remainder occurred in patients so desperately ill at the time of operation that death was expected. Postmortem examinations ordered by the Crown authorities in nearly all cases were probably largely unrewarding and mostly unnecessary. The results suggest that the present regulation on reporting should be revised to focus more attention on the few deaths that occur in patients who have no apparent contraindication to anaesthesia or operation.