Using a neo-Marxian perspective, Benno Engels examines the absence of urban planning in nineteenth-century England. In his analysis of urbanization in England, Engels considers the influences of property owners, inheritance laws, local government structures, fiscal crises of the local and central state, shifts in voter sentiments, fluctuating economic conditions, and class-based pressure group activity.

In twenty-first-century Britain, scientific advice to government is highly organized, integrated across government departments, and led by a chief scientific adviser who reports directly to the prime minister. But at the end of the eighteenth century, when Roland Jackson’s account begins, things were very different. With this book, Jackson turns his attention to the men of science of the day—who derived their knowledge of the natural world from experience, observation, and experiment—focusing on the essential role they played in proffering scientific advice to the state, and the impact of that advice on public policy. At a time that witnessed huge scientific advances and vast industrial development, and as the British state sought to respond to societal, economic, and environmental challenges, practitioners of science, engineering, and medicine were drawn into close involvement with politicians. Jackson explores the contributions of these emerging experts, the motivations behind their involvement, the forces that shaped this new system of advice, and the legacy it left behind. His book provides the first detailed analysis of the provision of scientific, engineering, and medical advice to the nineteenth-century British government, parliament, the civil service, and the military.

In Victorian London, filth was everywhere: horse traffic filled the streets with dung, household rubbish went uncollected, cesspools brimmed with "night soil," graveyards teemed with rotting corpses, the air itself was choked with smoke. In this intimately visceral book, Lee Jackson guides us through the underbelly of the Victorian metropolis, introducing us to the men and women who struggled to stem a rising tide of pollution and dirt, and the forces that opposed them. Through thematic chapters, Jackson describes how Victorian reformers met with both triumph and disaster. Full of individual stories and overlooked details--from the dustmen who grew rich from recycling, to the peculiar history of the public toilet--this riveting book gives us a fresh insight into the minutiae of daily life and the wider challenges posed by the unprecedented growth of the Victorian capital.

The prevailing historical view of the Catholic Irish in the first half of nineteenth-century Scotland is that they were despised by native workers because of their religion and because most were employed as strike-breakers or low-wage labour. As a result of this hostility, the Catholic immigrants were viewed as a separate isolated community, concerned mainly with Irish and Catholic issues and unable or unwilling to participate in trade unions, strikes and radical reform movements. The Protestant Irish immigrants, on the other hand, were believed to have integrated with little difficulty, mainly because of religious, families and cultural ties with the Scots. This study presents a radically different view. It demonstrates that, whereas some Irish workers were used as a blackleg or cheap labour, others participated in trade unions and strikes alongside native workers, most notably in spinning, weaving and mining industries. The various agitations for political change in the region are analysed, revealing that the Irish – Catholic and Protestant – were significantly involved in all of them. It is also shown that Scottish reformers welcomed, and indeed actively sought, Catholic Irish participation. The campaigns for Catholic emancipation and the repeal of the Act of Union of 1800 are reviewed, as are the attitudes of the Scottish Catholic clergy to the political activities of their overwhelmingly Irish congregations.