Opening Editorial: The Next Step in a Disciplinary Journey

The opening editorial provides context for the journal

Varieties of Anti-Catholicism on Tyneside and in County Durham, 1845-1870

This study examines the nature and extent of various forms of anti-Catholicism which existed on Tyneside and in County Durham between 1845 and 1870. Previous studies that have touched upon anti-Catholicism in the North East of England have tended to argue that local cultural factors reduced the anti-Catholic feeling which was more evident in other areas of the country during this period. However, in applying and expanding upon previous theories of anti-Catholicism, the study will take a multi-faceted and broader perspective, rather than simply a manifestation of one specific type, to argue that local cultural conditions actively encouraged different forms of anti-Catholicism in different areas within Tyneside and in County Durham. It will demonstrate this through an examination of the major tenets of anti-Catholic ideology and their appeal among the wider population; the relative strengths and weaknesses of the various political campaigns which drew on ‘Conservative’ and ‘Liberal’ anti-Catholic thought; the Protestant response to the resurgence of Catholicism at the local level and the role played by the local Catholic communities in increasing anti-Catholicism; and, finally, the varieties of religious violence, both English and Irish and intra-Irish, which were greatly influenced by local conditions and circumstances. This study has wider implications for our understanding of the pervasive and all-encompassing nature of nineteenth-century English anti-Catholicism generally. It also contributes towards the wider debate on North East regional identity by questioning the continued credibility of a paradigm which views the region as exceptionally tolerant and coherent

Call for Submissions

Call for submission

United We Stand: The Anti-Competitive Implications of Media Ownership of Athletic Teams in Great Britain

This Note analyzes the increasing integration of the sports and broadcasting industries and the British framework for evaluating the permissibility of transactions furthering such integration. In the context of the recent attempted takeover of British football club Manchester United by Rupert Murdoch\u27s British Sky Broadcasting, the Note examines how the Monopolies and Mergers Commission (MMC) was uniquely poised to fully consider the ramifications of this developing nexus of sports and media and evaluates the significance of the MMC\u27s decision on the future of both industries. A diverse array of domestic, international, political, and economic issues and implications face any court or administrative agency confronted with a media/sports merger. Although the MMC ultimately recommended that the British Sky Broadcasting-Manchester United merger be prohibited, it will only be determined through the united consideration of such an array of issues whether the vertical integration of broadcasting and professional athletics is merely the inevitable result of a growing trend or a legitimate cause of concern for free competition in sports and media worldwide

Free to Enslave: The Foundations of Colonial American Slave Law

Only a few decades ago, it was possible to write accounts of the culture or economy of the antebellum South which barely mentioned slavery or omitted the peculiar institution altogether. Today, slavery and race are rightly seen as central questions for the entirety of Southern-indeed American-history. Much of the scholarly attention to slavery has focused on the law. Historians have quarried legal records, including cases, statutes, probate inventories, and records of debtors\u27 sales, for a wide range of social and economic history research projects. But scholars also have examined late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century slave law, Northern as well as Southern, for the legal reasoning and intellectual underpinnings of slavery. How did the common law permit, explain, and classify this uniquely problematic form of property? And how did mandarin appellate judges, so often the heroes of legal scholarship, apply their professional skills and moral sensibilities to cases involving slaves? The interpretive efforts have yielded diverse and often brilliant views, but the scholarship shares the assumption that the law was an important social institution buttressing slavery and that the precise configurations of slave jurisprudence therefore matter. This article approaches slave law with the contrary premise that, in the critical first century of English colonial slavery, the common law had very little of importance to say about slaves, and it seeks to explore the significance of that unexpected silence. Unlike many other slave societies, colonial America never developed a systematic law of slavery. Early American slave law was largely reactive and, in particular, played little role when the choice was made in the seventeenth century to turn to slavery. Rather than focusing on what substantive law of slavery existed, this paper instead explores how emigrants from the densely legalistic culture of the English common law erected slavery without direct legal authority. It asks how they and their descendants, unlike colonists elsewhere in the New World, maintained slavery without the sanction of a thorough slave law. If accurate, this claim that common law was irrelevant describes a seemingly paradoxical state of affairs. English society was intensely \u27law-minded\u27, obsessed with legal considerations, legal rights, and legal remedies. Early seventeenth-century Englishmen regarded law and litigation as a principal means of dispute resolution, and the volume of litigation in royal courts continued to grow. Litigants sought more than speedy resolution; they seem to have viewed the law as an important means of social interaction. In the words of one leading historian, litigation had everything that war can offer save the delights of shedding blood. It gave shape and purpose to many otherwise empty lives ... [and] remained the most popular of indoor sports . . . . The swaggering, quarrelsome frontier entrepreneurs who clawed their way to the top of colonial Southern and Caribbean society shared these values, and they too were law-minded, using local courts and law to consolidate property and position. And of course slaves and indentured servants were valuable investments for planters, capable of yielding enormous profits though raising unusual legal issues. For these practical reasons, we might expect a slave law to develop not long after the inception of slavery as an institution