English Trade Mark Law in the Eighteenth Century: Blanchard v Hill Revisited - Another 'Case of Monopolies'?

The decision of Lord Hardwicke LC in Blanchard v Hill in 1742 is the earliest reported case on the equitable jurisdiction to grant injunctive relief against trade mark piracy. The ambiguous manner in which the case was reported led to the decision being interpreted as either the basis of equitable jurisdiction or a denial of jurisdiction. This article seeks to establish the background to the case, what actually happened, and the immediate impact of the decision. The scene is set, however, in a parallel symbolic universe – heraldry – because in 1740, the officers of arms were confronted with a trade mark case.

'Dare the boist'rous main': the role of the Belfast Newsletter in the process of emigration from Ulster to North America 1760-1800

Before the mass migrations from Ireland in the nineteenth century, earlier waves of migration in the eighteenth century saw significant numbers of people leave Ireland, predominantly from Ulster, to settle in North America. This article, using as its principal data source the Belfast News Letter ( BNL), its letters, advertisements and reports, focuses firstly on reconstructing the late eighteenth-century migration process and voyage, highlighting the barriers represented by the Atlantic Ocean. In addition to the challenges of the sea, there were problems with the ships, the ever-present danger of disease and also threats from other vessels, from privateers to press gangs. The voyage was recognized as a ‘universal dread’, and the risks taken to ‘dare the boist’rous main’ were perhaps not minimized in the pages of the BNL, whose editorial stance was antipathetic to the migration for the potential harm it caused to Ulster by removing so many of its industrious young. The second part of this article goes on to consider the newspaper’s and others’ vested interests in the emigration process, demonstrates how these were manifested in the press and sets the coverage of this very significant early emigration flow within the context of contemporary religious and colonial discourses at a period of very lively transatlantic interactions.

Education and the 'universalist' idiom of empire: Irish National School Books in Ireland and Ontario

This paper compares the founding of the elementary school systems of Ireland and Ontario in the nineteenth century. The systems shared a common set of textbooks that had originated in Ireland. Using examples from a number of these books, which were part of a series that had been specially prepared for the Irish national school system, founded in 1831, and information from archive sources on policy and administration in both countries, the paper argues that there was a common, ‘universalist’, imperialist ideology being promulgated in both systems. The article focuses on these ‘universalist’ principles rather than undertaking a detailed analysis of the textbooks.