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Chapter 3 presents the four cities selected in greater detail, exploring existing explanations for variations in success by emphasizing the cases’ historical and institutional similarities. It offers a framework for explaining the various state-society relationship outcomes; defining the indicators for a series of cultural, institutional, and agency-related factors that, combined and in interaction with one another, can explain variation along both the mobilization and the autonomy dimensions of state-society relationships across and within cases.

David Hartley ends the first part of his Observations on Man with an argument for necessitarianism that emphasises the obvious influence of motives upon choice, and that straightforwardly, and unusually, denies that we experience ourselves as free in our choices. Hartley’s style of philosophizing is taken up by Abraham Tucker and Joseph Priestley. Priestley deploys the rhetoric of Newtonian natural philosophy in his writings on free will, and seeks to establish that necessitarianism is the only position compatible with a ‘scientific’ approach to human action.

Chapter 4 discusses Walker’s gift of political and social activism and her leveraging of the number and voices of her agents to challenge Jim Crow. In a manner reflective of leading black women’s clubs and fraternal organizations of the day, Madam Walker organized her sales agents into local clubs and a national umbrella association to legitimize beauty culture as a profession, strengthen relations between them, and enlist them in doing charity and advocacy work in their communities that would last long after her death. The National Beauty Culturists’ and Benevolent Association of Madam C. J. Walker Agents, Inc., developed a model of associationalism, ritualism, and activism that galvanized Walker agents to serve their communities and the cause of racial uplift. Through it, agents regularly donated money to black schools and other organizations, held fundraising events, organized programs, and cared for the vulnerable in their communities. Together, they sent a resolution to President Woodrow Wilson demanding legislative action against lynching. The chapter reviews Walker’s unique ability to interact with black women across class differences, as exhibited by her engagement of working-class women in her agent clubs and the elite black women of the era through the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). Through these clubs and their rituals, Walker agents staked claims for themselves as respectable professionals, performed charitable works in black communities, and used their formidable numbers to speak out against lynching and Jim Crow.

This chapter emphasizes the feminine public sphere. The notion of the feminine public sphere is based on the active participation of women in the formation of a middle-class identity, which was derived from a commitment to civic life and public service. Associationalism was a key feature of civil society in the 1870 to 1914 period, and while women's contribution to philanthropic societies has received some attention this study represents a more concerted effort to link women's public careers with the rise of a middle-class identity. By taking a fresh perspective on the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ through the lens of local, urban civic life—as opposed to high politics and the upper echelons of industrial capitalism—this research shows that the wives, sisters and daughters of men in the local elite mirrored their male kins' investment in a public profile in order to assert their own social position. The feminine public sphere of this study is the sphere of influence more affluent women carved out of a hostile, male oriented ‘public’ through heterodox interpretations of separate spheres; it is the discursive and organisational sites from which women contributed to the socio-political issues of their day while further reinforcing middle-class notions of civic duty.

This chapter revolves around the core context of female public sphere. Female associationalism was the starting point for many middle-class women's public lives. Reforming organisations such as constitutional suffrage societies, temperance unions and Women's Liberal Associations (WLAs) provide more well-to-do women with opportunities to actively engage in the important social and political issues of their day. In Glasgow and Edinburgh, cross-membership knitted together women's organisations, imparting a multi-issue reform programme to a range of women's groups. These organisations, though part of international reforming efforts to enhance women's clout in public affairs, are rooted in local civic life. While it is shown that male associational life and civic involvement were marked by cross-membership within the local sphere, evidence from these organisations suggests a similar pattern among more elite urban women active in the feminine public sphere.

This chapter serves to bring out unresolved questions that brought other chapters. Specifically, the chapter focuses on exploring in detail the questions of gender politics, regional ethnic associationalism, the internal diaspora in Scotland and the politicization of ethnicity. In so doing the chapter provides important qualifications to the conclusions drawn thus far, hence providing deeper insight into the development of Scottish ethnic associations.

The conclusion serves to bring together the key themes of the book, providing final assessment of the development, focus and spread of Scottish ethnic associations, as well as critical commentary on the limitations of a study focused on ethnic societies and clubs. The conclusion draws out the distinct functional tiers of the Scots’ ethnic associationalism, and contends that these depended not only on the timing of the respective association’s set up, but also the migrants who established them. In so doing the conclusion ends by identifying the types of Scottish ethnic activism, which were critical in enabling the Scots to champion their ethnicity in a way that effectively transcended it, thus developing a distinct type of ethnicity: civic ethnicity.

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the research methodology and sources of the study. In particular, the introduction offers definitions of the key terms employed, including ethnic identity, diaspora, ethnic associationalism, and civility. In so doing the chapter provides the analytical framework for the study, setting out the principal themes and reference points for analysis.

What is it about third sector organisations that might make them special sites for the development of active citizenship? While a comprehensive study of this kind is beyond the scope of this book we can begin to unpack the theoretical claims and the different roles of third sector organisations. The chapter identifies four major features of third sector organisations that might provide contexts for active citizenship – or can be claimed as doing so. The four main features of third sector organisations that have been identified as nurturing active citizenship are: agency; association; democratic processes; and the development of cosmopolitanism. These are interrelated and not necessarily of equal strength in any one organisation. Nor are they evident in every third sector organisation. But they do provide cultural frames that can induce people to think and act in certain ways.

This chapter demonstrates the centrality of debates about economic and social ethics to the construction of Anglican national and transnational identities. It teases out the cross-cultural character of these debates, and argues for the development of complex and sophisticated traditions of engagement across the theological spectrum, which probed the interrelationships between individual and social morality. Reflection on economic and social thought ran through sermons, tracts, lectures, biographies, periodical literature, and treatises on philosophy, theology, and history, as well as informing the work of a wide range of societies, organizations, and philanthropic agencies. Anglican critiques of political economy recognized the Church’s responsibility to identify and confront the growing challenges of capitalism, and to provide frameworks for thinking constructively about the quality of life.