Heather Ellis

Efficiency and counter-revolution: connecting university and civil service reform in the 1850s

Historians have often recognised important links between the processes of university and civil service reform in mid-nineteenth-century England. Yet such connections are usually seen as forming part of a wider project of modernising reform with any conservative or counter-revolutionary aims largely discounted. However, as this article suggests, the decision to tie success in the new examinations to a career at the ancient English universities was not designed chiefly to recruit the most efficient people (as the report itself claims) or to provide new employment opportunities for Oxbridge graduates. Rather, the reformers sought to take advantage of the socialising function of the universities, to ensure the recruitment of men of sterling moral character, reliable and loyal, into a civil service increasingly called upon to serve as a bulwark of the state at a time of social and political upheaval.

Collaboration and Knowledge Exchange between Scholars in Britain and the Empire, 1830–1914

In recent years there has been a growing interest among historians in the British Empire as a space of knowledge production and circulation. Much of this work assumes that scholarly cooperation and collaboration between individuals and institutions within the Empire had the effect (and often also the aim) of strengthening both imperial ties and the idea of empire. This chapter argues, however, that many examples of scholarly travel, exchange, and collaboration were undertaken with very different goals in mind. In particular, it highlights the continuing importance of an ideal of scientific internationalism, which stressed the benefits of scholarship for the whole of humanity and prioritized the needs and goals of individual academic and scientific disciplines. As the chapter shows, some scholars even went on to develop nuanced critiques of the imperial project while using the very structures of empire to further their own individual, disciplinary and institutional goals.

Knowledge, character and professionalisation in nineteenth-century British science

Historians have frequently referred to the British Association for the Advancement of Science as an institution that had the professionalisation of British science as its chief aim. This article seeks to complicate this picture by asking what, if any, concept of ‘professionalisation’ would have been understood by nineteenth-century actors. In particular, it seeks to move away from traditional functionalist understandings of professionalisation, as the possession of specialist knowledge and expertise, and consider instead broader definitions, which incorporate the power relationships and identities constructed through discourses of professionalisation. It argues that it was just as important for professional scientists in nineteenth-century Britain to possess a particular type of character (independent, rational, self-controlled) closely identified with popular ideals of elite masculinity and developed through a thorough scientific education. It also reinterprets the growing popularity of scientific internationalism, with its emphasis on the independence of the scientist (from state control) as a crucial part of this masculinising discourse of professionalisation.

‘Boys, Semi-Men and Bearded Scholars’: Maturity and Manliness in Early Nineteenth-Century Oxford

In order to show the very different ways in which the categories of ‘manliness’ and ‘masculinity’ have been constructed historically, this chapter will focus on the various contexts in which the language of ‘manliness’ was employed by students and senior members at the university of Oxford in the early nineteenth century. Contrary to the argument of many modern historians, it will suggest that differences of age, generation and maturity were far more important in the construction of manliness in the early nineteenth-century university than distinctions of gender per se. By focusing on the construction of manliness in a largely all-male setting, distinctions between men, rather than between men and women, assume prime importance. Nor is the significance of maturity in the construction of manliness limited to Oxford alone; as the alma mater of almost half of Britain’s political elite in this period, the ideal of manliness cultivated there enjoyed a much wider influence within British society. It helps, in particular, to explain key features of another much-discussed and highly influential contemporary model of manliness, namely that promoted by Thomas Arnold at Rugby School in the 1830s.

Masculinity and Science in Britain, 1831–1918

This book offers the first in-depth study of the masculine self-fashioning of scientific practitioners in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. Focusing on the British Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1831, it explores the complex and dynamic shifts in the public image of the British ‘man of science’ and questions the status of the natural scientist as a modern masculine hero. Until now, science has been examined by cultural historians primarily for evidence about the ways in which scientific discourses have shaped prevailing notions about women and supported the growth of oppressive patriarchal structures. This volume, by contrast, offers the first in-depth study of the importance of ideals of masculinity in the construction of the male scientist and British scientific culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the eighteenth-century identification of the natural philosopher with the reclusive scholar, to early nineteenth-century attempts to reinvent the scientist as a fashionable gentleman, to his subsequent reimagining as the epitome of Victorian moral earnestness and meritocracy, Heather Ellis analyzes the complex and changing public image of the British ‘man of science’.

Introduction: Constructing Juvenile Delinquency in a Global Context

The division between East and West has been one of the most important structuring principles used to make sense of the world both today and in the past. Historically, it has been most commonly applied by individuals and groups who have identified with the West and has been used to denote a particular geopolitical relationship, between the West as the stronger, superior partner and the weaker, dependent East.1 Insofar as transfers of legal ideas and institutions have been considered by historians in the context of East-West divisions, they have mostly been seen as taking place from West to East, and tend to be interpreted within a discourse of imperial “improvement” and “civilization”. In recent years (in particular, since the publication of Edward Said’s Orientalism2), it has become popular to critique this division and to question how it came into being and what relation it bears to historical reality.3 The East-West binary has been articulated in a variety of geopolitical contexts: within the continent of Europe, between Western imperial powers and their “Eastern” colonies and between the Western and Eastern hemispheres more broadly. In the post-war period, the East-West division was once again reinterpreted against the background of the Cold War to refer primarily to the division between the capitalist “free” West and the Soviet Communist East. Although this was a significant variation of the traditional East-West division, it should not be seen as a separate phenomenon, as it continued to bear the familiar imprint of “superior” West versus “inferior” East.4

Juvenile Delinquency and the Limits of Western Influence, 1850-2000

1. Introduction: Constructing Juvenile Delinquency in a Global Context Heather Ellis PART I: COLONIAL CONTEXTS 2. Adolescent Empire: Moral Dangers for Boys in Britain and India, c. 1880-1914 Stephanie Olsen 3. The Road to the Reformatory: (Mis-)communication in the Colonial Courts between Judges, Juveniles, and Parents in the Netherlands Indies, 1900-1942 Amrit Dev Kaur Khalsa PART II: JUVENILE DELINQUENCY AND TRANSNATIONAL MIGRATION 4. It Takes a Village: Budapest Jewry and the Problem of Juvenile Delinquency Howard Lupovitch 5. Latino/a Youth Gangs in Spain in Global Perspective Miroslava Chavez-Garcia PART III: JUVENILE DELINQUENCY AND WAR: EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY PERSPECTIVES 6. Bad Boys? Juvenile Delinquency during the First World War in Wilhelmine Germany Sarah Bornhorst 7. Empires Little Helpers: Juvenile Delinquents and the State in East Asia, 1880-1945 Barak Kushner PART IV: COLD WAR CONTEXTS 8. A Soviet Moral Panic?: Youth, Delinquency and the State, 1953-1961 Gleb Tsipursky 9. Danger and Progress: White Middle-Class Juvenile Delinquency and Motherly Anxiety in the Post-War United States, 1945-1965 Nina Mackert PART V: JUVENILE DELINQUENCY AND THE POST-WAR STATE 10. Becoming Delinquent in the Post-War Welfare State: England and Wales, 1945-1965 Kate Bradley 11. Mapping the Turkish Republican Notion of Childhood and Juvenile Delinquency: The Story of Childrens Courts in Turkey, 1940-1990 Nazan Cicek

Men of Science: The British Association, Masculinity and the First World War

This chapter examines the experience of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) during the Great War. By 1914 the BAAS had come to be seen as a shadow of its former self; consequently, engagement in the war through the application of scientific expertise allowed the BAAS and its members to advance the long-term cause of science and to promulgate a more masculine perception of scientists. This paper demonstrates the myriad and often complex reasons underpinning scholarly mobilization for war; it was not only (or even) a question of believing in the righteousness of the national cause, but in many cases it could be justified and understood as being in the best interests of associational and disciplinary vitality.

Trinity in war and revolution 1912–1923, by Tomás Irish

In this well-written and beautifully presented book, Tomas Irish tells the story of Trinity College Dublin in the turbulent years between the outbreak of the Home Rule Crisis in 1912 and the end of...

New Masculine Heroes: Davy, Bacon and the Construction of the Gentleman-Scientist

While the early nineteenth century witnessed widespread worries about the British man of science, it also saw the creation of new models of scientific masculinity, intimately bound up with shifts in contemporary understandings of gender identity. According to James Secord, ‘The role for the enquirer into nature was also being transformed, from older images of scholarship and learning to the new ideal of the heroic discoverer, engaged single-mindedly in the investigation of nature.’1 Jan Golinski has described the turn of the nineteenth century as a ‘critical moment’, witnessing a ‘profound transformation’ in the development of the identity of the male scientist. Stressing in particular, the influence of Romanticism, Golinski writes that, ‘[t]he years around the turn of the nineteenth century brought to prominence models of male creativity that stressed imagination and the emotions, rather than classical rationality’.2