Conscientious Objection to Various Compulsions under British Law (review)

68Quaker History to make sudden jumps in subject matter and chronology, but I will not enumerate them. The book's final chapter, dealing with Penn's colonial venture, is the most cohesive and enjoyable, probably because it deals with Quaker politics as they entered a truly statist frame of reference, where Ferguson's scholarly strengths lie. Generally, Ferguson's workrelies on secondary sources, except forafew primary Quaker sources, such as Fox's Journal, Barclay's Apology, and some of Penn's works. Unfortunately, Fox's Journal was written many years after the first and most revolutionary decade of Quakerism, and glosses over some of Fox's earliest radicalism. And generally many of the mostsalientlypolitical tracts offirst-generation Friends werenever reprinted, so they are not to be found among the materials drawn upon in this book. Doug GwynPendle Hill Conscientious Objection to Various Compulsions underBritish Law. By Constance Braithwaite. York, Eng.: Sessions, 1995. xiv + 420 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. £1 1.95. This is a very thorough detailing of the incidence of conscientious objection to a variety of legal requirements in England, Scotland and Wales over the past four centuries.* It is exactly the type of book which every historian of conscientious objection needs to have on the shelf, in that it consists of careful lists of those who objected to military conscription, to oaths, to religious education, to vaccination and to compulsory medical care ofchildren, in addition to providing a careful record ofcourtdiscussions and parliamentary debates. Braithwaite is unfortunately representative of the most fiercely empiricist school of British historians and the result is a very dull book in terms of both structure, style and analysis. The structure of the book illustrates the difficulty of tackling a topic that has no obvious chronology and in which one aspect dominates. Braithwaite has attempted to reconcile the issue of chronology by placing five chapters on resistance to military orders and payment of defence taxes between two chapters considering the testimonies against oath taking and against vaccination , and chapters on the resistance to the teaching of religion in schools and the compulsory medical care of children. Apart from the fact that it would have made some structural and analytical sense to couple the discussion of the Vaccination Acts with the issue of the medical care of children—it was, after all, children who were to be vaccinated—the result is that the book is dominated by the history of war resistance. It is possible to argue thatthis is as it shouldbe,butitis alsoeasily the bestrecorded aspect of conscientious objection, and rather than dedicate five chapters to the Book Reviews69 topic, a summary would have been quite acceptable. If this could not be achieved, it might have been better had the author begun with this issue, moving on to examine the parallels in other areas of life. The structure of Braithwaite's book is further dulled by the complete absence of analysis in the main text; this is carefully separated out into a rathershort"Partii" which consists ofthree chapters, none ofwhich contain any analysis: instead, one of these chapters consists of a summary of legal disabilities, constraints and penalties suffered by objectors and a second considers the rights and privileges accorded by individual tribunals and juries. There is nothing in these two chapters which has not already been said and they serve only to bring together the information previously distributed between the sections; a more thematic approach to and structuring of the book would have enabled cross-comparison to be distributed throughout the text and might have enabled an argument to have emerged. While Braithwaite's summaries in these chapters are very helpful, they are conducted in the systematic, empiricist fashion of the earlier chapters, without any attempt to move beyond the historian 's task ofrecording events to the historian's equally important task of interpreting them. Conscientious Objection to Compulsions UndertheLowis apublication of Sessions Press, who do a sterling job in making available to us the work of Quaker historians, both amateur and, as in this case, professional, but the standard ofpublishing which this textdisplays is sadly not impressive. There are a number of serious proofreading errors of a type which the most...