State and local government

Sample

A.P.W. Malcomson

John Foster was the last (1785–1800) speaker of the Irish House of Commons and the most important opponent of the Act of Union which extinguished both his office and the separate Irish parliament. He also served three times as chancellor of the Irish Exchequer, passing on the first of these occasions the famous Corn Law of 1784 which has always borne his name. Although he remained doggedly and exclusively Irish in his mentalité, he achieved at Westminster in 1804 a political come-back which was quite remarkable, particularly for a man of 65, and remained politically active into his eighties. Dr Malcomson’s first book on Foster was published in 1978. Professor S.J. Connolly described it as ‘potentially one of the most important books on 18th century Ireland to appear in the past 50 years’. The present book incorporates new insights drawn from recently discovered archives, other new ideas generated by the commemorations of the 1798 Rebellion and the Union, and some second thoughts and shifts of emphasis which the author considers important. Foster's paternalist approach to politics, and his determined pursuit of improvement and prosperity as the cure for political ills, are the principal themes of the book and are shown to be the motive forces of Foster's career. In many ways, they are an anticipation of the late nineteenth-century Conservative policy of killing Home Rule with kindness.

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Hans Hägerdal

European traders and soldiers established a foothold on Timor in the course of the seventeenth century, motivated by the quest for the commercially vital sandalwood and the intense competition between the Dutch and the Portuguese. Lords of the land, lords of the sea focuses on two centuries of contacts between the indigenous polities on Timor and the early colonials, and covers the period 1600-1800. In contrast with most previous studies, the book treats Timor as a historical region in its own right, using a wide array of Dutch, Portuguese and other original sources, which are compared with the comprehensive corpus of oral tradition recorded on the island. From this rich material, a lively picture emerges of life and death in early Timorese society, the forms of trade, slavery, warfare, alliances, social life, and so forth. The investigation demonstrates that the European groups, although having a role as ordering political forces, were only part of the political landscape of Timor. They relied on alliances where the distinction between ally and vassal was moot, and led to frequent conflicts and uprisings. During a slow and complicated process, the often turbulent political conditions involving Europeans, Eurasians, and Timorese polities, paved the way for the later division of Timor into two spheres of roughly equal size. Hans Hägerdal (1960) is a Senior Lecturer in History at the Linnaeus University, Sweden. He has written extensively on East and Southeast Asian history. Among his publications is Hindu rulers, Muslim subjects: Lombok and Bali in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (2001).

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C. J. Bartlett

"When this highly successful survey first appeared in 1984 it dealt with the period 1880-1970. Now, this long-awaited Second Edition - which has been entirely redesigned and reset in a more readable format - brings the story up to date, following the themes through to 1990, and covering the momentous events of the last 20 years." "The book is an analytical account of the international rivalries of the great powers in the country since the centre of gravity of international politics began to move out of Europe into a wider arena. This shift was the result of the intensifying imperial rivalries of the European powers beyond the boundaries of Europe itself, and also of the rise to more than regional influence of two non-European newcomers, the United States and Japan. The new order has been characterised by growing global interdependence, where power struggles in one part of the world can, and increasingly do, have profound repercussions elsewhere." "Domination by the great powers has taken many forms in the period, from the competition of the European empires before the First World War, through Hitler's dream of world hegemony, to the bi-polarisation of the Cold War. Professor Bartlett traces the interconnections, and the widening fall-out, of these international rivalries, showing how the fates of Europe, America and Asia have become ever more intimately entwined as the century proceeded." "After the Second World War, a bi-polar world, held taut by the mutual antagonism of the American and Soviet blocs, became the new reality. It was only in the 1960s that the limitations and inadequacies of this bi-polar model in turn became apparent. Nevertheless, as the new chapters of the Second Edition make clear, the global rivalry of the two superpowers persisted, until the collapse of the USSR itself inaugurated a fresh pattern of global power-politics in the post-Soviet world."--Jacket.

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Marvin Rintala

When David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill began their long friendship, one of their numerous enemies nicknamed the new friends "the Heavenly Twins" after a set of gifted, irresponsible, and inseparable twins in a late Victorian novel. In Lloyd George and Churchill: How Friendship Changed Politics, Marvin Rintala explores the lengthy and unexpected friendship between these two statesmen, from its beginning in early 1901 to its end at Lloyd George's death in 1945. Rintala examines the dynamics that shaped the friendship between two powerful men (a friendship that belied Lloyd George's statement that "there are no friends at the top") and the ways in which this friendship shaped British politics during the first half of the twentieth century.