Since G. C. Homans first published his accounts of inheritance customs in medieval England, there has been some revival of interest in this aspect of English social history. It has been found that arrangements were less rigid, and hence more varied, than once thought, while it is now clear that regional patterns can often be recognized only as broad generalizations — different practices were sometimes followed in close proximity, even within a single township. Recent work has concentrated on forms of partible inheritance, emphasizing apparent differences between the effects of this and impartible inheritance, and stressing the practical advantages of partibility. In comparison, there are few detailed studies of customs of single son inheritance as followed in a peasant community. The present paper is an attempt to reduce this gap by examining succession to property in the Chiltern Hills, an area of primogeniture, during the thirteenth and early fourteeenth centuries, that is, the period for which adequate documentary evidence is available before the widespread depopulation and social disruptions of the mid-fourteenth century. Chiltern custom was similar to the third of the three main forms of impartible descent outlined by Homans in that it “preserved the principle that a tenement ought to descend to only one son of the last holder, while allowing the holder himself to choose which one of his sons was to be heir.” Apart from the actual mechanism of inheritance and succession, considerable interest attaches to the practical implementation of Chiltern custom — how, in fact, descent of property was related to the general economic situation — and especially to an examination, in the Chiltern context, of the contention that partible inheritance tended to favour an increase in population whereas impartibility meant stability of population.

Much needs yet to be learned about the Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland. Statistically that event can be described as the transfer from Catholic to Protestant ownership of about seven million acres of Irish land, occurring between 1641 and 1688. The Protestant share of Ireland increased in that period from 41 to 78 per cent, from a minority interest to that of an overwhelming majority. Although 1641 and 1688 are the most convenient termini for measuring that expansion, it was substantially begun in 1652 and completed by 1660. Except by main force, little land changed hands before the Cromwellian acts; and the Restoration modified, but in no significant sense reversed, the verdict which had been brought against Catholic Ireland by the recent conquest and settlement.

Much attention has been given the cruelty of the settlement, particularly the attempt to transplant the Catholic Irish to Connaught and Clare. But the origins of the scheme, indeed the entire genesis of Parliament's policy towards Ireland, has been left in obscurity. Cromwell himself contributed to that neglect by his insistence that the settlement was merely simple justice for the crimes committed against Protestants in 1641. As a result, historical interest has focused upon the cruelty of the rebellion and the cruelty of the settlement in a vain attempt to determine whether they balanced. Irishmen, minimizing the rebellion and maximizing the settlement, tended to find that they did not. Englishmen, reversing the process, came to understandably opposite conclusions. Neither took very great interest in the important years between the two events.

To many of his contemporaries and to most of the historians who have subsequently dealt with him, Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle (1693-1768), represents unredeemed mediocrity, or even the buffoon, in power. Lord Hervey ridiculed his “egregious folly and formal absurdity”; Horace Walpole described him as “a Secretary of State without intelligence, a duke without money, a man of infinite intrigue, without secrecy or policy, and a Minister despised and hated by his master, by all parties and Ministers”; Lord Waldegrave concluded that he “wants both spirit and capacity to be first in command: neither has he the smallest particle of that elevation of mind, or of that dignity of behaviour, which command respect and characterise the great statesman.”

More recent commentators, while often readier to look for redeeming characteristics in the Duke, have likewise tended to come to negative assessments. Basil Williams dismissed Newcastle as “woolly-minded and touchy … an essentially weak man without clear conceptions of his own”; Sir Lewis Namier wrote that “his nature and mind were warped, twisted, and stunted” and that “there was unconscious self-mortification in Newcastle's tenure of office”; J. H. Plumb portrayed a “dithering and twittering” Newcastle, a minister of unprepossessing intellectual gifts and given to excessive complaining and anxiety.

All these criticisms must face, however, one serious and recurring counterargument. Newcastle held major office for almost forty years – as Secretary of State (1724-54), as First Lord of the Treasury (1754-56, 1757-62), and as Lord Privy Seal (1765-66). Moreover, as early as 1717 he had been appointed to the Privy Council and been made Lord Chamberlain.

“It is very interesting to compare Spencer and Comte,” wrote George Sarton in an essay lauding their efforts to embrace all knowledge in a grand synthesis. The comparison, indeed, was tempting for contemporaries, as it has been for students of ideas. Both Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer were authors of new philosophic systems which, they believed, had been built on the firm foundations of science, and both were convinced that society should be reconstructed in accordance with the truths of their philosophies. The insistence of Positivists and some who were not Positivists that Spencer, consciously or not, had been influenced by Comte, and Spencer's repeated and fervent denials, made for a series of controversies that extended over half a century and ranged from the minutiae of priority to the more important issues of the classification of the sciences and the nature of religion.

The eclipse of both the Positive Philosophy of Comte and the Synthetic Philosophy of Spencer in the twentieth century hardly suggests the interest they aroused in the nineteenth. The unification of knowledge and the discovery of the laws of man and society were dreams which nineteenth-century science and philosophy hoped to realize. Comte and Spencer made their contribution in this area; and while both were attacked for erecting systems on questionable assumptions, and for their weakness in details, their extraordinary ability to amass quantities of information and to come up with penetrating generalizations attracted admirers and disciples. Few of their critics thought that what they had set out to do was not worth doing, or could not be done.

In the spring of 1884 shortly before his viceroyalty came to an end, Lord Ripon wrote in an urgent manner to Lord Kimberley, then Secretary of State for India, about one of the more critical questions of policy confronting the Government of India: “You may rely upon it that there are few Indian questions of greater importance in the present day than those which relate to the mode in which we are to deal with the growing body of Natives educated by ourselves in Western learning and Western ideas.” Ripon was pointing to the existence of a new class of English-educated Indians within British-Indian society and to the failure of the Government of India to acknowledge this class and to absorb its talents and influence within the structure of British-Indian administration. That this problem begged for a realistic solution by 1884 and that it would continue to do so in the years ahead, he had no doubts whatsoever; it had been left too long to fester in a mode both damaging to the class itself and dangerous to British rule. In short, the English-educated Indian class had become a question of policy.

Simply stated, as the opportunities for Western collegiate education expanded and the avenues leading towards entry into the East India Company's service became available, the doors either failed to open or were placed out of the reach of the educated Indians seeking entry. By 1850, with the new class in existence in limited numbers in Calcutta, Bombay, Madras, and Delhi and with additional graduates appearing annually to swell its ranks, frustrations began to emerge as the graduates found themselves unable to secure the public employment which the Charter Act of 1833 had implied was to be their just right.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, for example, British imperialists were inspired with fervour and confidence. Nowhere was the inspiration stronger than amongst Australian colonists, who were beginning to thrill not only with the vicarious agony of exiles, but also with the virility of frontiersmen. Although the pull to the heart of the Empire was strong, the void beyond the red pale of civilization was beckoning too. In an increasingly hostile world it was encouraging to measure one's strength as part of the force of an Empire greater than Greece or Rome had known, and inspiring to feel that a colony's achievements were part of the historic mission of an imperialist power. It is not surprising, although it has been overlooked by European-centred historians of empire and by parochial historians of emerging nations, that the convinced and practising colonial imperialists were a significant force in shaping the ideals if not the strategy of European expansion, and in popularizing the creed, to the great comfort of the planners at “home” and the discomfort and bewilderment of local republicans.

The Boer War has become a symbolic episode in British imperial history and the spontaneous colonial participation a notable feature of it.

This paper is concerned solely with the genesis of the 1903 Tariff Reform Movement. Why did a veteran, realistic politician like Joseph Chamberlain challenge Britain's long-sacrosanct free trade policy? What political, economic, social, or other factors influenced him to make his decision? Was he really the originator of the program which he championed? What empirical lessons can be learned about the methodology and rationale of political decision making? The existing scholarly works dealing with the Chamberlain agitation, although exceedingly numerous, provide no really satisfactory answers to these questions. Thus a fresh appraisal of the origins of the Tariff Reform Movement seems clearly warranted.

I

The Liberal journalist-statesman John Morley, who became acquainted with Chamberlain in 1873, is reported as once saying that his friend's faith in the free trade policy was always “only skindeep.” Chamberlain himself said that he was first shaken in his free trade beliefs in 1881 when, as President of the Board of Trade in the second Gladstone Government, he was asked to reply to a protectionist speech by a then-obscure Conservative M.P. named C. T. Ritchie. Contrary to Chamberlain and Morley, however, one of the Birmingham leader's official biographers states that he has found no indication that his hero entertained any fiscal heresies prior to the winter of 1902-03; and though the date he gives may be disputed, the view that Chamberlain was a late convert to protection is substantiated by considerable evidence. Chamberlain's reply to Ritchie, despite his later admission of doubt, reveals no misgivings about the free trade credo.