The cooperative communal side of peasant life in the Middle Ages has been discussed widely, most often in the context of open field agriculture as being the basis of village solidarity. Although such writings state, or imply, the important truth that economic reality necessitated a degree of cooperation among peasants, they tend to offer little or no evidence to justify the romantic notion that the medieval village possessed a spiritual cohesiveness, that it represented a harmonious society with close emotional bonds between neighbors.

For example, one scholar suggests the romantic view of community life in the Middle Ages when he states:

Another writer presents a similar perspective in a discussion of the pre-industrial village:

… living together in one township, isolated, spatially, from others of comparable size, of very much the same structure inevitably means a communal sense and communal activity ….

One wonders about the meaning of the terms “solace” and “communal sense,” and also about the evidence which supports the above positions. The nature of the ties within the medieval peasant community represents a major question which should not be answered with the kinds of a priori assumptions quoted above.

The war against France was the most potent force for change in English government and politics in William III's reign, but during those same years the contest for control of the lucrative East India trade also set off strong reverberations at Whitehall, in parliament, and even in the constituencies. Ever since its reorganization in the 1650s, the East India Company had been subjected to intermittent attack from a motley array of foes: some questioned the desirability of the bullion-greedy trade to the Far East, others disputed the Company's exclusive commercial privileges held under the royal charters of 1661 and 1683 and argued for a regulated company, and from the early 1680s onwards a number of once prominent Company members (most notably, Thomas Papillon) challenged the directorate of Sir Josiah Child. In turn, the Glorious Revolution ushered in the decisive phases of the dispute between the Company and its enemies — a controversy finally brought to a peaceful conclusion only in the closing months of William's reign.

By 1689, the struggle for control of the East India trade had already developed a “constitutional” dimension and taken on a political tinge. On the one hand, there was the question, first raised by the critics of the early Stuarts, whether any group could be endowed with a commercial monopoly by virtue of royal charter alone. On the other hand, there was the issue of the Child clique's close identification with the Stuart Court during the 1680s — a “Tory” posture Sir Josiah and his associates had adopted in order to ward off challenges to their own predominance and to the Company's privileges.

“He (Adam Smith) wanted to show how from being a savage, (man) rose to be a Scotchman.” (Walter Bagehot)

The Rev. Dr. Folliott:

“Pray, Mr. MacQuedy, how is it that all gentlemen of your nation begin everything they write with the ‘infancy of society?’”

(Thomas Love Peacock, Crotchet Castle)

The purpose of this essay is to consider an intellectual method which enjoyed a considerable vogue among the philosophes of Scotland. This method, ‘conjectural history,’ appears to be the direct or indirect source of many of the schemes of social evolution so popular in the nineteenth century, but it has itself been little investigated, and often misunderstood by assimilation to its progeny.

I. The Nature of Conjectural History

‘Conjectural history’ was, it seems, first distinguished from the more conventional narrative form of history by Dugald Stewart. He remarked on its use in the writings of Adam Smith, but the sort of inquiry to which we find Stewart referring is a method for understanding social phenomena which was characteristic of a whole group of Scottish writers, and we may take what he tells us about Smith as preliminary identification of the method.

Stewart explained conjectural history as arising out of comparisons between “our intellectual acquirements, our opinions, manners and institutions, [and] those which prevail among rude tribes” (whether of the past or the present). Such comparisons, he claimed, cannot fail to raise the question “by what gradual steps the transition has been made from the first simple efforts of uncultivated nature, to a state of things so wonderfully artificial and complicated.”

Demographic movements remain a controversial and largely unknown facet of medieval studies. This is particularly true for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the later middle ages, which in western Europe coincided with the second and most destructive pandemic of plague in recorded history. Most observers of late medieval England agree that population declined from sometime early in the fourteenth century, and that the decline extended to at least 1450, but the precise causes, extent, and chronology of this decline are still very much in debate. A recent analysis of 20,000 testamentary records from East Anglia, London, and Hertfordshire from 1430 to 1480 indicated that epidemic disease was the primary element in controlling and establishing demographic trends. It also showed, however, that this pattern began to change in the early 1470s when child replacement ratios, the generational measure of parents to progeny at fixed periods in time, began to rise for virtually all socio-geographic groups surveyed. By process of elimination, it was concluded that this was the result of an upturn in fertility. Since population increases generally have been attributed to changes in marriage patterns and/or mortality schedules, and since mortality was the major element in regulating population from 1348, the onset of the Black Death and the second plague pandemic, the postulated fertility rise of the 1470s took on even greater interest. Were the events of the 1470s anomalous, or did the projected fertility rise continue on into the 1480s, and even lead to the long-term period of population growth which occurred in the sixteenth century?

The occasional conformity controversy has been the subject of considerable study by historians, both contemporary and modern. However, recent research has tended to concentrate on the parliamentary and electoral aspects of the issue, with somewhat less attention given to its importance as an ideological question. Nevertheless, the latter aspect of the controversy is well worth examining, for aside from its impact upon the struggle for office and power, occasional conformity was also the subject of heated debate on the theoretical and philosophical level. And although this debate often degenerated into partisan diatribes and rhetoric, it also raised questions that transcended the political ploy on the one hand, and the theologian's quibble and the propagandist's stalking horse on the other. The arguments used by both sides during the controversy revealed the basic philosophical differences that lay at the heart of the rivalry between the Whig and Tory parties. Occasional conformity's role as an expression of, and its relation to, this struggle is the subject of this article.

The ideological debate over occasional conformity was necessarily stimulated by the parliamentary struggles during the first decade of the eighteenth century over the various bills which were designed to discourage the practice, and many of the tracts on the subject were written in response to these and other political maneuvers. But the pamphlet war had its own distinct existence, and the writers involved fought with their pens a battle that was parallel to the one that the politicians were fighting with votes and influence.

Opinion in the eighteenth century varied widely on whether or not “military justice” was, in fact, justice by the civilian standards of the day. Many leading legal commentators viewed the system with disdain. Blackstone dismissed military justice in these words:

Another writer, arguing along similar lines, wrote: “The moment … a gentleman enters the service, he waives the Rights and Privileges he might be entitled to as an Englishman.” It was generally believed that law in the army was deemed less important than order and discipline. A man who opted for the army or was forced into service left more than his civilian clothes behind: he abandoned the legal rights under which he had been born and bred.

Yet defenders of military justice were not lacking, particularly during the last half of the eighteenth century. Stephen Payne Adye, who had served as Judge Advocate in North America, wrote a treatise praising military justice; and at the end of the century, Alexander Tytler, drawing heavily on Adye's work, did the same. Other writers occasionally complimented the army on certain legal practices they viewed as superior to civilian court procedures. Still, then as now, the arguments of the advocates of the military system were largely ignored — a reflection of the deep distrust of all military institutions in Great Britain.

As the likelihood of war with revolutionary France grew at the end of 1792 and beginning of 1793, the pro-government press in England reported that a serious plan for an insurrection, scheduled for the first weekend in December 1792, had been nipped in the bud by the authorities. On December 3 The Times stated that, as it had not wished to create alarm, it had not previously mentioned the full facts of the seditious attempts being made in the country. These attempts, the newspaper maintained, had prompted almost daily meetings of the Cabinet climaxing in a meeting at Lord Grenville's house which had lasted until one a.m. on the preceding Saturday morning (December 1). It was from this meeting that the Cabinet had issued the royal proclamation which embodied part of the militia and which deplored the ineffectiveness of the May 1792 proclamation against seditious meetings and writings. Three weeks later, beneath the headline “Revolution Plans,” the World reported that two parties were involved in the projected insurrection: the “moderates” who sought first the destruction of the House of Lords, the Herald's Office, and the Horse Guards, and then the enlarging of the Commons; and those whose plans were “more extensive” and who would have gone on to destroy St. James's Palace, the Bank, the law courts, the prisons, the customs house, and excise office. A month later, under the headline “Project of an Insurrection,” the London Chronicle gave similar details of a plot “to overturn the government and the constitution of this country.”

Greed, avarice, rapacity, the quest for filthy lucre, are none of them traits peculiar to western Europeans of the last few hundred years — the capitalist epoch. Eastern potentates, feudal lords, magnates of the church, humble peasants, noble Romans, cultured Greeks and many others have been infected with the love of gold. The desire for wealth is not confined to capitalism; wealth for high living, conspicuous display or hoarding are all non-capitalist. Mediaeval and Renaissance monarchs shared with a number of ‘primitive’ tribes a taste for extravagant display. The hoarding of treasure typical of French peasants (at least until quite recently) is strikingly similar to the practices of wealthy Romans described by M. I. Finley.

None of these people are capitalists in any strict sense of the word. Some of them own some means of production — although this would not necessarily be true of churchmen or princes who were the beneficiaries of systems forcibly expropriating a surplus from the producers. But even those who, like some peasants, own means of production, do not necessarily live in a capitalist system in a capitalist manner. They do not reinvest in order to procure further income; they merely exchange commodities for money, which is then exchanged for other commodities or hoarded (not ‘saved’ or invested, merely hoarded). Capitalism, on Marx's account, involves a different process — money is exchanged for commodities which are exchanged for money once more: M-C-M rather than C-M-C. In Capital Marx describes hoarding as a petrification of money; it exists in a naive form in traditional societies producing for a limited circle of wants.

“Imperialism,” like “empire,” is a word with many connotations; briefly, it describes an attitude of mind to the possession and use of dependent territories by the metropolitan power and the effect of colonization on the society and polity of the colonized. Despite attempts to discover a common basis to imperialist thinking at all times in history, most historians perceive differences, both in degree and kind, between different empires and at various times in the history of a single empire. They approach their task either with a definition of “imperialism” or a theory about the phenomenon it is meant to describe, and are concerned primarily with the effects of policies rather than how and why they were made; or they ask why something happened when it did, in the way it did, and are concerned primarily with the making of policy and the motives of the policy-makers.

Following the second approach, this paper explores one of the most crucial and continuous questions that imperial administrators had to resolve: the problem of self-government in colonies of European settlement, leading to the ultimate transfer of power; and by looking at the “University Question” in Upper Canada during the half-century after 1791, it examines how the perpetual adjustment that was “policy-making” actually happened. More specifically, in answering the question, “Who ran the British Empire?”, it is concerned not so much with the effects of Britain's control over subject peoples as with the method by which it exercised that control.

Lamb in the 1820s and Dickens in the 1830s had written about some of those who made their living or advertised their services in the streets of London: beggars, chimney sweeps, cab drivers, the vendors of baked potatoes and kidney pies. When, in the late forties, Henry Mayhew began his extensive study of the street-folk, he found reason to cite both these chroniclers. London Labour and the London Poor, however, is an enterprise different in kind from the essays and sketches it occasionally quotes. Somehow, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, the street-folk became a subject worth four volumes and sixteen hundred pages.

The decision to devote so much attention to the people of the streets came at a crisis-point in Mayhew's journalistic career. He had undertaken for the Morning Chronicle (1849) a comprehensive study of the metropolitan poor. Defining the poor as “those persons whose incomings are insufficient for the satisfaction of their wants,” Mayhew proposed to discuss them “according as they will work, they can't work, and they won't work.” He had progressed part way through the first of these classifications when he quarrelled with the editors of the Chronicle and ended by severing his ties with them. On his own, Mayhew commenced the publication in parts of London Labour. The “will, can't, won't” division, which persists in these volumes, was supplemented or perhaps superseded by another. Mayhew's ultimate object was still to study all the London poor but he now began with a trade-by-trade survey of the street-folk.

Gladstone to Lord Reay, 9 April 1880.

“He was by nature an interferer, by training a man of Power,” A. J. P. Taylor remarked of Gladstone in his noted Oxford Ford Lectures on “Dissent over Foreign Policy, 1791-1939,” later published as The Troublemakers. He continued: “Press Bright's policy to its conclusion and you arrive at isolation, inaction except in the case of actual invasion. Press Gladstone's doctrine to its conclusion; and you have universal interference, as the Radicals discovered too late.” This view of Gladstone's contribution to the foreign policy of Victorian England is highly attractive. It stresses the ethical basis for much of his “conscience politics;” and it points to the laudable actions of liberals in championing the cause of “national self-determination” — “peoples struggling to be free” — in nineteenth-century Europe. So far so good. But is it right to make a direct connection between liberal sympathies for nationality and the actual use of British power or prestige abroad? Indeed, is it true that Gladstone's “moral fervour tempted him to universal interference?” And if it is valid, did Gladstone always get his own way in the Cabinet?

The critical transition in social policy in nineteenth-century Britain, it is still generally believed, was the change from individualism to collectivism. Yet since Dicey came under fire in the late 1950s, there has been no accepted consensus about how and when this transition came about. Dicey himself, who was not strictly a historian but a theorist of jurisprudence, held a naive view of how things happen, how policy changes and is translated into law: a great thinker thinks, and converts disciples, who in turn contrive to turn the master's thoughts into the dominant wisdom or accepted common sense of the age, which then finds its way on to the Statute Book. In this way he arrived at his famous tripartite division of the nineteenth century into three periods of public opinion, government policy, and legislation: the first, up to 1825 or 1830, the period of Old Toryism, legislative quiescence, or Blackstonian optimism, dominated by Sir William Blackstone; the second, from about 1830 to 1865 or 1870, the period of Benthamism or Individualism, dominated by Jeremy Bentham and his disciples; and the last, from 1865 or 1870 to the time of his lectures on Law and Opinion published in 1905, the period of Collectivism, dominated, it seems, by no great thinker of powerful mind and principle, but merely by the pragmatic need to propitiate the emerging and increasingly powerful working-class voter. It is surprising that Dicey could not find a great thinker on whom to serve an affiliation order for fathering collectivism.

In her recent book On Liberty and Liberalism — The Case of John Stuart Mill, Gertrude Himmelfarb is temporarily annoyed at Mill's use of the “negative argument” in the opening pages of his Subjection of Women. “It is astonishing, at first reading,” Himmelfarb writes, “to find Mill devoting so much space to what is essentially a negative argument.” What Mill does in his introductory chapter to prove that “the legal subordination of one sex to the other — is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement,” which “ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other,” is attack as strongly as he can the prejudicial nature of that subordination which had hardened into rigid and implacable legal barriers vastly inimical to that perfect equality Mill wanted to achieve. Here is a portion of Mill's summation of that legal subordination against which married women, in particular, had to contend:

There are two prevailing views concerning Labour's response to the New Deal. Labour is said to have been either uninterested in the New Deal or else sharply divided, with sympathetic trade unions on the Right, and critical or even hostile socialists on the Left. This discussion will deal with each of these views, but it will focus on the second, which grew out of the attack on unions by the Left in the 1930s. Unions were attacked at that time not only for their defense of capitalist democracies and for their commitment to parliamentary procedures, but also for their willingness to consider short-term remedies in connection with the problem of unemployment; their interest in remedies proposed by such middle-of-the-road organizations as the Council of Action or the Next Five Years Group; and, not least, for their enthusiastic response to the New Deal. Repeatedly, unions were challenged to explain,