Martinalia
Welcome to Martinalia. An academic career generates material which for one reason or another does not get into print. There are public lectures and keynote addresses. Some are never intended for publication. Others are commissioned for projects which never get off the ground. There is material prepared for teaching, which may be useful to colleagues and students involved in similar courses. Some projects seem worth sharing with interested readers even though they remain unfinished, lacking the final polish needed for conventional academic publication. Since 2014 I have used Martinalia to publish essays and research reports.
The term “Martinalia” was coined by my friend Jim Sturgis.
How much did Canada 'pay' First Nations for the prairies?
In a series of seven treaties between 1871 and 1877, the Dominion of Canada persuaded Aboriginal people to cede their rights over the land of Manitoba and the North-West. First Nations communities were promised various forms of annual payments, but no actual purchase price changed hands. Is it possible to calculate an assumed, if notional, capital value on the basis of these continuing outlays, the price that Canada would have paid had the treaties constituted a normal property transaction?
Income tax in Canada before 1917
The Dominion of Canada adopted income tax as a wartime measure in 1917, 75 years after Britain. It was widely argued that few Canadians were sufficiently wealthy to justify the complex and intrusive administrative machine needed to enforce the measure. However, income tax was charged by at least one province, British Columbia, from 1876, and by several cities across the country.
Two invocations of the Canadian Identity: Arthur Lower, Northrop Frye and the invisible French
English Canada has been home to few recognised intellectuals. Two of the most influential in the mid-twentieth century were the historian Arthur Lower, who disguised his theorising by projecting a persona based on robust common-sense, and Northrop Frye, who operated at the other extreme of oracular omniscience. Both engaged in fantastical invocations of the national psyche, Lower distorting the French Canadian identity, Frye ignoring it altogether. This essay briefly documents how the two academics attempted, separately, to theorise Canada without taking account of the identity and orientation of its French populations. It also notes that their definitions of Canada contained undeveloped hints of geographical determinism: the country was defined in some way by its landscape, but how this had impacted upon and shaped Canadians was not explored.
Magdalene College Cambridge Notes: the visit of the Duke of Wellington, 1842
The 250th anniversary of the birth of the Duke of Wellington (1 May 1769) seems a good moment to remember his visit to Magdalene College Cambridge on Monday 4 July 1842.
Carnarvon Diaries: Camden Series, volume 35. Comments and Corrections
Peter Gordon, ed., The Political Diaries of the Fourth Earl of Carnarvon, 1857-1890: Colonial Secretary and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland
Camden Fifth Series, volume 35 (Cambridge University Press, for the Royal Historical Society, London, 2009)[1]
In 2009, the Royal Historical Society published, as Volume 35 of its Camden Fifth Series, an edition comprising extensive extracts from the diaries of the fourth Earl of Carnarvon (1831-1890), the selections particularly emphasising his interest in Canada, South Africa and Ireland.
The Department of Indian Affairs in the Dominion of Canada budget, 1882
This examination of how Ottawa taxed and spent in 1882 is intended to place expenditure by the Department of Indian Affairs in the overall context of government priorities.
John A. Macdonald, Alcohol and Gallstones
Throughout the twentieth century, Canadians were well aware that their first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, had problems with alcohol. In 2006, I published an article examining the episodes of inebriation and reviewing how Macdonald returned to sobriety in the late eighteen-seventies. This 2019 reconsideration of the material suggests that his alcohol problem should be considered in the wider context of his health, drawing attention especially to evidence of bouts of illness caused by gallstones. It is suggested that the life-threatening illness which felled him in 1870 may have been pancreatitis. Gallbladder surgery in that era was a new and dangerous procedure, and the condition could best be managed through control of diet. Reduction in alcohol consumption would have formed part of this.
French in the Canadian public sphere, 1763-1969
What were the obstacles to the use of French in a society dominated by Anglophones? Who spoke French in English Canada? This May 2019 work-in-progress study by Ged Martin is offered as a British historian's tribute to fifty years of Canada's Official Languages Act.
Surname Issues and British Prime Ministers, 1828-2007
Roughly half the politicians who served as prime minister of the United Kingdom between 1828 and 2007 had some form of surname "issue": the name by which they were known was not the birth surname of their linear male forebears.
Explorations in the history of Cambridge by Ged Martin
The history of Cambridge is one of my interests. Over the decades, I have written about University life in the nineteenth century, the debates of the Cambridge Union, and episodes relating to Hughes Hall, King's and (especially) Magdalene. In addition, I have tried to understand some of the people connected with those institutions.
More Articles …
- Pissingford: an embarrassing Essex place-name
- Passingford Bridge sketch map
- Explorations in the history of Tramore, County Waterford: a list
- Tramore, Sierra Leone and Johnny McGurk
- The farmer landlord and the labourer tenant: a County Waterford sidelight on Ireland's Land War, 1882
- Curing toothache by magic at Tramore, County Waterford in 1888
- "A man among millions": Martin Joseph Murphy and the development of Tramore 1888-1919
- Holidays at Tramore in Verse (1894) and Prose (1910)
- Tramore Sketch Map
- Havering History Cameos: Third Series (2016-2017)
- A.C. Benson and Cambridge: II, 1885-1925
- A.C. Benson and Cambridge: I, 1862-1884
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