Suchergebnisse

As Inspector General of the Maritime Customs Service, Robert Hart (1835–1911), born in County Armagh in Ireland, was a chief fiscal administrator of the Chinese Empire. Hart was a British citizen, yet he was employed by the Chinese government and was responsible for hundreds of Western (mostly British) and thousands of Chinese employees. His ability to straddle cultures has been noted by the historians Bruner, Fairbank and Smith who refer to a trait of cultural sensitivity that was unusual among the merchants of the treaty ports in China. The source of this cultural sensitivity is of interest and some insights can be gleaned from his Irish origins. The employment under Hart of many persons from Ireland, family and others, in the Chinese Maritime Customs (CMC) has also raised questions about nepotism and favouritism. We will see that Hart did not only favour his family but was generally well disposed to long-standing acquaintances, whether they were Irish or not. Furthermore, his Irish contacts in both Ireland and China were of advantage to him in his career and his attainment of higher social status. Our examination of Hart's network of Irish contacts and his ideas about Ireland also reveal his multi-national identity. This seemed to allow Hart to be both pro-British while also retaining a critical perspective, as might be expected by someone who by place of birth, social class and religion was not from the heart of the English establishment.

This article investigates the extent to which the entry of female workers into long‐term receipt of sickness benefit is related not only to their health status but also to the experience of women in the labour market. It is argued that specific categories of female workers–women with children, women who enter sickness benefit from maternity or unemployment benefit or who live in areas of high female unemployment–have an incentive to remain on sickness benefit long‐term. This is supported by a logistic regression analysis on a random sample (n D1142) of individual social security sickness benefit claimants in the Republic of Ireland. The results can be used to understand how married, compared to single, women can come to be overrepresented among those on long‐term sickness benefit.

This article challenges the well-established finding that persons with higher levels of education are more likely to marry outside their own ethnic group. The empirical research upon which that finding is based has been dominated by studies of groups of either immigrant or low socio-economic status. We revisit the question by examining census of population data on two minorities - Protestants in the Republic of Ireland and the Swedish-speaking Finns - which are indigenous, traditionally of high socio-economic status and have strong communal institutions. For this type of minority, we reject the hypothesis that persons with higher levels of education are more likely to form intermarriages. We explain our finding in terms of the association between level of education and social integration into the minority sub-culture. Our findings also provide insights into the process whereby after national independence the high socio-economic status of formerly politically dominant minorities is maintained.