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This study is an historical and theoretical account of how market territory, configured from flows of production and trade, gets reshaped by the innovative behavior of business firms. The research for this study focuses on the production network developed in the late nineteenth century by the American firm of G.F. Swift & Company. The central theme of this case is how businesses reorganize their strategies, routines and structure as transport and communications technology changes, and how the innovations in production networks engineered by firms as part of this reorganization, become territorially embedded and reconfigure the space for economic activity. The production network pioneered by Swift from railroad and telegraph technology, created long-distance production and trade linkages in the economy that widened the boundaries of formerly-localized markets, and established the foundations of a more geographically-extended, nationally-oriented market space. As it widened market boundaries, however, the network of Swift concentrated economic activity in new places. The essay builds a theoretical framework of the route from the ‘communications revolution,’ to the process of innovation in the firm, to the production network, to territorial transformation. This framework reveals how the railroad and telegraph revolution enabled firms in the US to develop innovations in production networks on the basis of vertically-integrated, geographically-dispersed enterprises organized over a national market space. 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved
Personal documents, articles in medical
journals, brochures, and newspaper articles, and reports of public meetings
suggest that the medical profession in the Netherlands harbored a negative
attitude toward birth control during the 1870s and 1880s; during the 1890s and
thereafter, it maintained steadfast silence on birth-control matters.
Population-register data and vital registration information show, however, that
despite their reticence on the subject, medical men were among the most
effective birth controllers in the population, despite marrying relatively
young wives. They stopped having children once they had reached their desired
total number. The profession's fear of losing its hard-earned respectability
and status by becoming connected with contraception-related issues, such
as prostitution and venereal disease, may well have caused its public
disapproval of birth control.
This article examines the medico-legal systems of workers' compensation. It is divided into three parts, the first taking an historical perspective to locate the first workers' compensation laws, the circumstances which led to their implementation, and their consequences in terms of the shift from individual fault to industrial risk. In the second part, the discursive practices of medico-legal knowledge-power typically found in workers' compensation systems are examined, especially the principles and clinical practices that are deployed to 'police' the boundaries of such schemes and to mitigate costs. Part three then summarizes the effect of neo-liberal governmentality and its underlying economic rationality as it attempts to regulate, by means of the artifice of liberty, the behaviours of firms and workers. Workers' compensation deserves analysis for the special technical and insurantial problems it entails, given its complex triangular insurance relation (involving the insurer, the firm, and the worker), its deployment of medical, economic and actuarial knowledges, and its production of special problems and uncertainties surrounding the governing of a class of persons incapacitated for productive work.
The historiography of Tudor economic legislation has been preoccupied with two questions: firstly whether any consistent economic planning, or simply expedient reactions to various problems, can be discerned in Elizabethan policy; and secondly whether and to what extent policy was imposed “from above” by William Cecil and the privy council, or influenced “from below” by local and factional lobbying. Since the 1980s the research of Geoffrey Elton and his successors has extended our understanding of Tudor parliaments; yet the standard accounts of Elizabethan policy-making have on the whole paid insufficient attention to contemporaries’ perceptions and interpretations of economic change, upon which their suggested solutions and arguments for reform were based. As several studies of particular policies have shown, such as Norman Jones’ analysis of usury statutes, and Paul Fideler’s work on poor relief, the evolution of economic policy in sixteenth-century England can fruitfully be approached by cutting through the rhetoric of preambles and policy statements, and by focusing on the strategies of persuasion underlying debates in Parliament and beyond.
Competition between neighbouring ports to serve the same hinterland customers is often decided on the suitability of the infrastructure offered by the ports. Infrastructure, while a lumpy investment, is not fixed in time: provision of it can change, altering the competitive advantage of ports. This was the case with iron ore imports into west Cumberland, bulk cargoes requiring specialised facilities in the form of enclosed docks. First one port, Maryport, and then the other, Workington, gained precedence on the strength of its commitment to dock infrastructure. The ramifications of the trade for Cumberland ports are examined over an extended period beginning with the first imports of the 1870s.
Finland's fertility decline started in the 1880s among educated people, and in the 1910s among the masses. By the late 1930s, fertility had started to decline even at the most remote areas. Various documents, such as newspapers, magazines, pamphlets, and ethnographic collections, show that although mechanical, quasimodern contraceptives were widely sold and actively marketed in Finland by the early twentieth century, they were mostly used by the upper social segments of the population, and, to some extent, by the working classes of the urban and industrial centers. The primary methods of birth control used by the masses were withdrawal, often in connection with douching and abortion.
American frozen foods were originally considered a luxury product; the industry did not develop a mass market until the late 1940s. Only a few years after achieving mass-market sales, however, frozen-food producers tried to segment the market in order to increase profits. This change was partly the result of internal factors, such as technological developments and interfirm competition. The new marketing strategy also hinged on industry executives' shifting conception of the ideal consumer. Frozen-food marketers of the early 1950s envisioned themselves as providing the good life at a low cost to “average” Americans. When profits slowed in the late 1950s, they designed a variety of new products for groups according to their race, age, and class.
Beginning in 1897, the American ceramics industry entered a period of stability and collaboration that emerged from an agreement by several leading firms to fix prices and discounts, exchange cost and price information, and begin close contractual relations with its workers' union, the National Brotherhood of Operative Potters. One issue, however, remained trouble-some: how to deal with occupational health issues in this disease-ridden trade. Should firms rely on state or private inspection? Should they be bound to one standard? Significantly, the companies and unions opted for private inspection systems that allowed them to maintain trade stability, even at the cost of health improvements. This arrangement remained in place until 1923, when federal antitrust actions shattered the trade association. Employers then faced a shift to state inspection and enacted a range of new schemes and private welfare plans to suit their designs.
Chicago's large, diverse automotive industry specialized in truck, bus, and taxicab assembly, as well as automotive-parts manufacture, in the first decades of the twentieth century. From having just a handful of companies before World War I, by the mid 1920s Chicago grew to include more than 600 firms that were producing a wide assortment of automotiverelated products. This large, successful industry emerged out of two sets of advantages: First, Chicago's well-developed production factors—ranging from relatively advanced transportation and industrial facilities to a large labor force and an effective entrepreneurial business class—promoted industrial growth. Second, the automotive industry's production practices, elaborate division of labor, and intense set of interfirm relations encouraged metropolitan expansion. Even though the city's firms functioned both regionally and nationally, they were also deeply embedded within a local world of innovation, interaction, networks, financing, and servicing. Further adding to these advantages was Chicago's distinctive geography, which enabled a dense complex of linked, interrelated firms to flourish and contributed to the automotive industry's success before 1930.
Demographic, cultural, and oral-history approaches to the study of falling fertility in nineteenth-and twentieth-century France, Canada, Britain, Holland, Norway, and Finland confirm the importance of the persistent usage of traditional methods of birth controlsuch as coitus interruptus, abortion, and forms of periodic abstinencethroughout the period when fertility fell, though fertility fell in each case at a different point in time. These studies also use qualitative evidence that provides insight into the reasons for contraceptive preference, thereby combining the history of changing sexualities with the analysis of demographic change.
Recent research on British loyalism during the French Revolution has Focused heavily on traditional and patriarchalist varieties of conservatism to the exclusion of progressive and Enlightenment‐inspired schools of thought. This article examines selected pamphlets and their authors subsidised by the British government during the 1790s to redress this imbalance. All anti‐revolutionary loyalism, it is argued, owed as much of its logic and appeal to eighteenth century Court Whig civic humanism as to seventeenth century divine right political theology, while some on the left of the loyalist spectrum, here dubbed ‘commercial Whigs,’ derived intellectual inspiration rather from the political economy of the Scottish Enlightenment. The pamphlet press subsidy strategies employed by the government of William Pitt the Younger are also examined to ascertaion what, if any, specific types of loyalism the state sought to promote at home and abroad. Significant differences in policy can be found here. While no attempt was made by the state to impose any rigid ideological control over material produced for the domestic market, the Treasury was determined to present a positive neo‐liberal image of Britain in Europe as defender of liberty and property couched in polite and commercial terms.
In this article, I seek to expand the relatively narrow focus of most work on commercial credit in eighteenth-century England by incorporating culture into an economic analysis. I argue that the various credit regimes that operated in the regional branches of the English wool textile industry are best understood as having a cultural dimension. A comparative analysis of business strategies in these regions suggests that the different cultures of credit had important implications for the development of the textile industry during the eighteenth century, shaping the character of the entrepreneurship of each region’s merchants and producers. It is something of a commonplace to remark on the extent to which eighteenth-century commerce was built on credit. Indeed, credit is of central importance in almost any economy whose exchanges are more complex than simple barter, but credit is a topic of special interest in relation to eighteenth-century England because economic expansion during that period (in terms of both size and complexity) was so robust in comparison to the financial system that supported it. Lacking a comprehensive credit market, the British economy was dependent on personal trust for all economic transactions, from commercial payments to capital formation.
Illegitimate children in the respectable working class in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries faced numerous obstacles in their childhoods, including violence, poverty, state intervention, and identity crises. Though most illegitimates were folded into the maternal family, their home lives were complicated by the hostile reaction of some relatives and neighbors to their births, and many such informal "adoptions" were unstable. Children discovered their real parents without preparation, or they felt constrained to keep the family secret without ever quite knowing why. They were also often shuttled between family members and into and out of state care. In addition, social and legal discrimination survived well into the twentieth century, leading to feelings of inferiority. Although some children reported happy childhoods, the majority never felt secure, and tended to blame their illegitimacy for all problems. In particular, their relationships with their mothers suffered, but they could also have difficulties with siblings and extended kin. The experience of these "outsiders" revises several historical interpretations of the working-class family, as well as showing the influence of Victorian sexual attitudes into the mid-twentieth century.
Over the last forty years, social historians have transformed the study of the Reformation in a variety of ways. New historical methods as well as a new interest in the laity and how religion was practiced and perceived rather than just how it was taught by clerical elites have challenged older narratives of the Reformation. These narratives often depicted Lutheranism and Calvinism as more modern and more progressive forms of religion, which replaced a decaying and outmoded medieval Catholicism. Because of their interest in religious practices, social historians have been more focused on the similar goals and aims of reformed Protestantism and reformed Catholicism, such as the goal of both to instill greater social and moral discipline in an effort to remake the kingdom of Christ on earth, than in the obvious doctrinal disputes that divided them. These contributions are most noticeable in several key areas—lay piety, rituals, gender and marriage, confessionalization and social discipline, and transmission of ideas through print, images, and education—and the greatest potential for future research lies in these same areas.
This article takes as its starting point a remarkable account of childbirth in the memoirs of a seventeenth-century Yorkshire gentlewoman, Alice Thornton. Her representation of the agony of her labour exemplifies the key structuring motif of her memoirs as a whole: the 'providentialist' pairing of danger and deliverance. The article aims to relate this passage to that textual context and to the broader cultural and social contours of Alice Thornton's world. Alice succeeded in giving eloquent words to the experience of extreme physical pain. Her words speak to us down the centuries, immediate and compelling. But this utterly personal, corporeal experience is culturally mediated. In order to understand her suffering, Alice Thornton drew on contemporary 'discourses of martyrdom', where pain could be understood as a test of faith and endurance from which she emerged strengthened, purified, reaffirmed, by God. Alice was pious and dutiful: her sense of duty and her faith motivated her to write, to record for posterity the proofs of God's power and mercy. But her writings, recording her perils and deliverances, also became the proofs of her virtue, a source of godly authority as well as identity.
Women were frequently involved in business as widows. Dorothy Wadham as founder of an Oxford college left documentation which illustrates her strategies in this situation. Aged 74, she was entrusted by her dying husband Nicholas with an ill‐formulated design for a foundation. A rival claimed Nicholas's commission for himself. Others saw the foundation as an opportunity for personal profit and patronage. Matters were complicated by the Wadhams' Catholic sympathies. Enlisting the aid of James I and leading politicians and churchmen, Dorothy out‐manoeuvred her rivals to win sole control. The college was complete by 1613, less than four years after Nicholas's death. Navigating the shoals of politics and the law depended on influential male intermediaries. The input of her confidential man‐of‐business was also vital. Nevertheless it was Dorothy's energy and determination which secured results. She was always careful to represent herself a widow dutifully following her husband's instructions. She would plead feminine ‘incapacity’ when it suited her. Nicholas would have found much more difficulty mobilising necessary support for a foundation than Dorothy could muster by skilfully pleading widow's status.
This paper prints with commentary extracts from a number of previously unknown documents concerning the rising of 1536 in north‐west England. They are contained a late seventeenth‐century treatise on tenant right (the form of customary tenancy prevalent in parts of northern England) attributed to Thomas Denton (1637–98). There are indications that this text borrows from an earlier lost treatise, possibly by William Lord Howard of Naworth, and it is argued that the extracts are probably from the same body of material then in the Cottonian Library as was drawn on by Thomas Masters in his notes for Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury, published in 1985. Whilst the documents deepen our understanding of the movement in a number of ways, their major contribution is to confirm the opinion of earlier writers that the rising was characterised by a marked hostility to landlords. Extracts are given from two previously unknown inquests into the ills of the commonwealth, one of which complains about the practice of lords evicting tenants and calls on the tenants to band together to resist: the other rejects the payment of entry fines and performance of boon days.
The very poor and unskilled workers of mid-nineteenth-century London – often termed the ‘casual poor’ due to their irregularity of employment – have been generally portrayed as entirely apolitical, and to have exhibited purely mob responses to the issues of the day. This article suggests that we have not properly understood or ‘read’ the evidence we have of the attitudes towards politics of these people, and that we have assessed their actions purely within the framework of our own understandings. In particular, their views about Chartism, the major working-class political movement of the period, have been a key to how they have been perceived. But our understanding of these views has been distorted by what appeared to be their lack of knowledge of the ‘real’ aims of the movement. Instead, if we look at other types of evidence, such as from the theatre, we can find clues as to how their understandings of such conflicts may simply have been different, and so be able to explain in much more rational terms the actions and beliefs of this historically inarticulate group.
We provide here a complement to recent work on family business, which has demonstrated the need to go beyond the generic definition of the family firm to place personal capitalism in an appropriate institutional, historical, and cultural framework. By focusing on the nineteenth- and twentieth-century experiences in Britain, Spain, and Italy, we challenge the notion that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there was anything so simple as a Mediterranean model for family business. Rather, we demonstrate the need to consider family businesses in national and regional contexts if we are to understand their various capabilities and characteristics. We use similarities and differences in the experiences and responses of families and firms in the three countries to support this claim.
In the religious
controversies of the English Revolution (1640-60), one problem became
particularly urgent. How far were the Scriptures to be accepted as a faithful
record of history? Much ink was spilled over the theoretical and practical
problems of evidence and testimony and there swiftly developed an increasing
self-consciousness and sophistication about the meaning of "matter of fact."
This paper describes the response to skeptics and dogmatists of such moderate
divines as Henry Hammond, Seth Ward, Richard Baxter, and Brian Walton, and the
way in which they attempted to construct a defense of the Biblical
story—incidentally helping to defend the claims of history in general.
This article explores the question of housing need in post-war Toronto by looking at the diverse reasons why families applied to the few public housing projects that were constructed after the war. It identifies a number of often overlapping causes for the housing dilemmas of low income families, including outright inability to pay, landlord intransigence to families with children and evictions, illness, overcrowding, deprived housing conditions, racism and social factors within the family. It aims to make a contribution to a growing body of work that complicates accepted notions of post-war prosperity and the benefits of the welfare state for low-income earners in advanced capitalist countries. The first section is based on adaptations of various statistical indicators of housing hardship generated by researchers for Toronto's public housing administration as well as analyses by social agencies, contemporary observers and recent scholarly research. It briefly looks at pre-World War II developments and then chronicles housing need from the 1940s to the 1990s. Various methods and databases were used in these studies and rarely did they originally attempt to chart processes over time. Nevertheless, we can make a reasonable assumption that this information offers us sound indications, if not exact measures, of the housing difficulties faced by low-income families. The second section of the article elucidates the informative if partial statistical record of housing need by considering various qualitative sources such as oral testimony, tenant correspondence and other documentary voices of low-income families. My interests in exploring this subject emanated from a larger study of Regent Park (RP) in Toronto, Canada's first and largest rent-geared-to-income housing project. The archival records, which contain numerous letters from prospective tenants and rare resident case files, and the interviews I conducted with former tenants of RP, speak directly to the question of housing need. I use the evidence both of families that secured places in RP and of prospective tenants who expressed a need for state assistance. By no means does this exhaust the low-income housing experience in Toronto but it provides readily accessible qualitative evidence to explore the question of housing hardship in the post-war era. The article thus highlights individual accounts of housing hardship, allowing us to put a much-needed human face on those left out of the much-vaunted, post-war "age of prosperity."
In 1806 the anatomist Sir Charles Bell wrote famously, “In the lower creatures, there is no expression . . . while in man there seems to be a special apparatus, for the purpose of enabling him to communicate with his fellow-creatures, by that natural language, which is read in the changes of his countenance.” 1 Bell’s exploration of the effects of pathologies on facial expression and his exhibition of the role played by facial muscles in demonstrating emotion formed a landmark in metoposcopy. 2 Half a century later alienists (mental pathologists or “mad-doctors”) such as John Conolly reproduced photographic images of Hugh Diamond in order to promote study of the features of the mad and the stupid. 3 Yet, for all its originality and lasting influence, Bell’s work also had historical precedents. 4 Writing in the 1790s, for example, Erasmus Darwin had opined, The vascular system of other animals are less liable to be put in action by their general sum of pleasurable or painful sensation; and . . . the trains of their ideas, and the muscular motions usually associated with them, are less powerfully connected than in the human system. For other animals neither weep, nor smile, nor laugh; and are hence seldom subject to delirium. . . . Where the quantity of general painful sensation is too great in the system, inordinate voluntary exertions are produced either of our ideas, as in melancholy and madness, or of our muscles, as in convulsion. From these
History of Political Economy 35.4 (2003) 679-684
In the recent concluding volume of his biography of John Maynard Keynes, Robert Skidelsky (2000) discusses Keynes's influence on British financial policy in the Second World War and for the eventual debt-laden peace. Effectively, that influence stemmed from Keynes's critique of rearmament policy in 1937, a critique further developed in How to Pay for the War, published in 1940. From mid-1940 Keynes dominated economic policy discussions in the British Treasury. These concerned basic domestic aspects of war finance, such as taxation and management of the national debt. Increasingly, however, external financial issues, notably Britain's shrinking overseas assets and mounting sterling debt, Lend-Lease, and bold Anglo-American proposals for international financial cooperation, became Keynes's major, though not sole, concern. Rightly, Skidelsky gives considerable attention to the six missions to the United States—four during the war, two after—in which Keynes was involved. The most important were in spring 1941 and autumn 1945.
In 1941, the imaginative U.S. device of Lend-Lease ensured for Britain's war effort massive supplies that could not otherwise have been financed. But there was a price: surveillance of Britain's exports and gold and dollar reserves. The United States did not intend Lend-Lease materials supplied to Britain to be used to boost her exports, to the detriment of America's. Further, the United States did not wish to provide aid if that was not really necessary. She would therefore carefully watch Britain's gold and dollar reserves; any sign of an appreciable increase would signal that Lend-Lease aid was not needed. Moreover, U.S. legislation required a "Consideration," known also, when embodied in the Mutual Aid Agreement of February 1942, as "Article VII": a commitment to liberalization of international trade and payments, including eventual elimination of British imperial preference, resented as discriminating against U.S. trade. Against this background Keynes, in the words of Skidelsky's title, would be "fighting for Britain," while sustaining the entente with the United States: to retain financial independence after the war.
That fighting reached its climax in autumn 1945, following the sudden end of the war in August. Three arduous months of negotiations then brought generous settlement of Lend-Lease; cautious movement on trade liberalization; and, above all, aid for Britain's postwar economic recovery on terms and conditions bitterly disappointing to the British, and controversial ever since. Open to serious question, however, is Skidelsky's evaluation of Keynes's judgment in advocating such wide-sweeping and unsatisfactory negotiations, and the tactics he unsuccessfully deployed.
To take first the wide-ranging 1945 negotiations for postwar aid—a "line of credit"—to Britain, Skidelsky borrows the arguments of R. W. B. ("Otto") Clarke (452). The Treasury's best brain after Keynes's death in 1946, Clarke (1982, 57) considered that it would have been better to have sought simpler, interim arrangements; but he was writing long after those negotiations. Limited borrowing for the first year or so of peace would have minimized British commitments to the United States and allowed time to assess postwar conditions. With engagingly heroic hindsight, Skidelsky makes much of one of those postwar conditions: the rising consciousness of the Soviet threat. In a development that Keynes could scarcely have foreseen, the Soviet threat eventually motivated the United States, through the Marshall Plan, to direct further aid to Britain, with fewer strings than those attached to Lend-Lease assistance and to the postwar line of credit. Skidelsky's fantasy is that a less impatient Keynes, willing to contemplate limited, interim assistance, could have ensured abundant postwar help from the United States in due course, as the severity of the Soviet threat emerged, prompting the Marshall Plan to aid Western Europe.
Had the war ended gradually rather than abruptly, a more measured approach than eventually prevailed might indeed have been possible. But the war did end abruptly, presenting Britain with drastic time pressures and unfavorable political conditions. Does Skidelsky understate the impact of those changes? While the war was still in progress, Keynes and Britain's government hoped to resolve, with the United States, two...
Contemporary discussions of information overload have important precedents
during the years 1550-1750. An examination of the early modern period
in Europe, including work of humanism, science, theology, and popular
encyclopedias demonstrates that perceptions of information overload
have as much to do with the ways in which knowledge is represented as
with any quantitative measurers in the production of new texts, ideas,
or facts. Key figures in this account include Francis Bacon, Conrard
Gesner, Francesco Sacchini, Johann Heinrich Alsted, Casoar Bauhin,
Rempert Dodeones, Samuel Bochrt, Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, John Wilkins,
Jonathan Swift, Ephraim Chambers, Smauel Johnson, Denis Diderot, and
Louis-Sébastian Mercier.
Social historians have become increasingly aware of the multiple forms of social diversity within all societies, including age diversity. But less attention has been paid to older rather than younger ages. This article examines the history and social meanings of aging and old age, mainly in the 'western' cultures of Europe, North America and Australasia, and mainly concerning their White inhabitants due to the very limited availability of historical work on other cultures which it should be part of our future agenda to repair. Even across these 'western' countries, it is difficult to make systematic comparisons, due to the different preoccupations of, and uneven volume of work by historians of different countries. Nevertheless, existing work makes us aware of the significant presence of older people, especially of older women, in most past societies and of the subjectivity and highly variable experiences of aging and old age across place and time; and it cautions against negative narratives of declining experience over time. This is a field in which social history has much to contribute to present-day debates, and fears, about the aging of societies, and it is one in which there is much exciting work still to be done.
This paper explores the manner in which architectural and urban forms staged social performance. Drawing on architectural theory regarding the uses of space, it reveals the manner in which the urban environment provided various spatial stages upon which to establish and promote social standing, political alliance and gender relationships. Evidence is drawn from the Grosvenor estate in Mayfair between 1720 and 1760. Demographic studies of the estate provided evidence of a rich and diverse society in residence, which included a significant number of single women and influential political persons. Utilizing diverse social variables, such as gender and class, this research seeks to expose the varied roles and dimensions played by the urbanite, specifically those who utilized Grosvenor Square as their platform for social and spatial performance. Attention is drawn to the means by which eighteenth-century London society consumed and utilized specific spatial patterns in the urban landscape.
After 1815 a large range of French goods could enter Britain free of duty. Many London trades had to face new French products that had fashionable status and were often considerably cheaper than the equivalent British products. This article analyses the relationship between the Parisian and the London shoemaking trades during the first half of the nineteenth century. Its aim is to understand the economic transformations that posited London in direct competition with Paris. Starting with a quantitative analysis of the competition between the two cities, the article focuses on the differences of products, materials and the selling and marketing techniques of the Parisian and the London boot and shoe trades. The article aims to show how differences in the way products were marketed played an important role in the success story of French shoemaking.
Under the rules of the medieval common law, widows were normally entitled automatically to a third share of their late husband's lands as their dower. A series of case beginning in the middle of the thirteenth century indicates, however, that widows were only entitled to their dower if they had been old enough to ‘earn’ their dower by the time their husbands died and that this meant being old enough to engage in full sexual intercourse. Under the provisions of chapter 34 of the statute of Westminster II (1285) it also became possible for wives to forfeit their claim to dower for adultery. The following two decades provide evidence of around 100 cases in which these provisions were invoked. These two developments suggest that during the second half of the thirteenth century there was a significant shift away from seeing dower as an automatic entitlement arising out of any valid marriage to seeing it instead as a ‘reward’ for service rendered by the wife during marriage.
Metadata only entry This paper was published as Social History, 2003, 28 (1), pp.1-30. It is available from http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/content~db=all?content=10.1080/0307102032000040170. Doi: 10.1080/0307102032000040170 This article tackles the subject of 'local xenophobia' in rural and cottage-industrial areas of England and Wales in the period c. 1700-1938. It argues that historians have neglected the historical record of such sentiments towards 'foreigners' from other parishes, and it suggests that these attitudes were so widespread in the countryside (and rural workers so numerous within the population) as to lead one to doubt arguments for the early, post-1790, emergence of the working class, as expressed most famously by E. P. Thompson. Many manifestations of this 'culture of local xenophobia' are discussed, pointing also to its legal and related contexts. The article outlines some of the factors that led it gradually to be eclipsed in many regions during the nineteenth century by a wider trans-parochial sense of class consciousness and allegiance.
While there has been some research on the parliamentary enclosure of upland waste in England and Wales during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this topic still receives little attention in some recent accounts of parliamentary enclosure. Many aspects of the processes involved, and their impact on the landscape, are also poorly understood. Much research has proceeded either at a very general level or on the basis of detailed individual case studies. This paper adopts an intermediate scale, focusing on the old county of Westmorland to examine the geographical and chronological patterns of enclosure before looking more closely at some of the problems involved in creating a new landscape.
New entrants to the British peerage between 1700 and 1850 included both traditional landed magnates and men from humbler backgrounds. The rate of recruitment accelerated rapidly after 1782. This article identifies and analyses the social and economic backgrounds of new peers and the reasons for which titles were bestowed. While the inclusion of large numbers of Irish and Scottish grandees sustained the longitudinal sinews of the peerage, war and empire produced an increasing number of titles awarded on merit. Men of modest backgrounds had always been admitted to the elite, but ‘Old Corruption’ and the marriage market allowed most of their descendants to blend in with the old peerage after a few generations. The wave of new recruits, especially after 1782, included numerous relatively poor or landless men, and governments increasingly intervened with grants of multi-generational annuities in order to protect the status of the peerage while continuing to use titles to reward new men. Ministers boldly and astutely acted both to preserve the pre-eminence of the old order and encourage the prowess of state servants as Britain bestrode the globe. A new peerage emerged to help save the old.
Argues that to see the contrasts between late medieval `courtesy books' and early modern manuals of manners as markers of changing ideals of social conduct in England is an interpretation too narrowly based on works written in English. Examination of Latin and Anglo-Norman literature shows that the ideal of the urbane gentleman can be traced back at least as far as the most comprehensive of all courtesy books, the twelfth-centuryLiber Urbaniof Daniel of Beccles, and was itself underpinned by the commonplace secular morality of the much olderDistichs of Cato.
The professionalization of history in Ireland resulted from the 1930s effort of T. W. Moody and R. Dudley Edwards to fuse writing on Irish history with a received version of the history of early modern England. This enterprise enhanced the academic standing of work on early modern Ireland, but it also insulated professional history in Ireland from the debates that enlivened historical discourse in England and continental Europe. Those who broke from this restriction, notably D. B. Quinn, Hugh Kearney, and Aidan Clarke, made significant contributions to the conceptualization of the histories of colonial British America, early modern England, and Scotland. These achievements were challenged by the New British History turn which, for the early modern period, has transpired to be no more than traditional English political history in mufti. None the less, writing on the histories of Ireland, Scotland, and colonial British America has endured and even flourished. Such endeavour has succeeded where the focus has been on people rather than places, where authors have been alert to cross-cultural encounters, where they have identified their subject as part of European or global history, and where they have rejected the compartmentalization of political from social and economic history. The success of such authors should encourage practitioners of both English history and the New British History to follow their examples for the benefit of endeavours which will always be complementary.
The paper surveys almost fifty women-authored texts of the 1790s, asking what they reveal about the gendering of space in elite houses, about the meaning of buildings and landscapes for women and about women's aesthetic preferences. They imply that elite houses had largely ungendered public, private and intermediate spaces. Castles had negative meanings for women, but not ‘olden time’ houses; there was some disapproval of exclusionary landscapes and an idealisation of country life (but not for hunting) and of rural cottages (but not rural villas). A neoclassical aesthetic was endorsed by women writers alongside sensibility and the picturesque.
This article analyses Nathaniel Hone's portrait of Lord and Lady Scarsdale (1761) and the significance that such images have for our understanding of the eighteenth-century family. It first discusses the imagery of the painting and places it in the context of the shift that occurred in family portraiture between 1740 and 1760. Whilst earlier images presented stiffly posed figures, later portraits such as that by Hone came to focus on the sitters' affective relationships. The article argues that, whilst aesthetic influences played a part in this transition, it was chiefly prompted by the sentimentalization of familial ideals. Such ‘promenade portraits’ encapsulated the companionate marriage, hailed as a blend of masculine rationality and feminine tenderness. However, once contextualized within the state rooms for which it was conceived, the Hone portrait also reveals more ‘traditional’ concerns. It makes formal references to accompanying portraits of Stuart monarchs and dignitaries, emphasizing the tory affiliations of the Scarsdales and their loyalty to the Stuart dynasty. The state rooms also contain a portrait of Lord Scarsdale as a baby with his parents and his deceased elder brother. This image affirms the continuation of the male line in the face of high infant mortality rates, a statement that is confirmed in the Hone painting.
The infants left at the London Foundling Hospital in the first twenty years of its operation have generally been classed as illegitimate. This study examines some of the characteristics of the children who entered the hospital between 1741 and 1760, and points to a far larger component of legitimate infants than has previously been suspected, up to a third being born in wedlock. The backgrounds of the children varied considerably, as did the reasons for their abandonment, with a stress on personal and economic misfortune for both married and single parents. The higher level of legitimacy among the foundlings than has been thought has implications for the illegitimacy ratio of London, pointing to relatively low levels, in common with those found for the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries.
This paper examines aspects of the social meaning of the parish boundary in Hanoverian England. The parish touched most people's lives through its role as a form of local government and as a significant landscape feature which defined a circuit of territory to which local people may have felt an allegiance. Evidence for the social meaning of boundaries is found in acts of boundary marking and related perambulation ceremonies and through written records, sometimes involving maps. The paper draws on a contrasting range of cases from a variety of counties with different landscape and settlement types in the century or so before the local government and administrative reforms of the 1830s – a time of significant change in central-local government relations. The paper evaluates the significance of the parish as principal repository of detailed information on its own boundaries in our period, with a premium placed on local knowledge, especially of the older parishioners. It is also suggested that acts of boundary recording could enhance a sense of parish consciousness and community.
This article uses court records, overseers' accounts, pauper examinations and other records from several counties, including Huntingdonshire and Staffordshire, to look at the experiences of poor relief in early modern England. It shows the varied circumstances under which the poor ‘encountered’ the poor law in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, highlighting the often contradictory attitudes that poor people encountered. More than this, it argues that there were many sorts of ‘poor’ people with very different capacities to negotiate about relief and to help themselves and each other. These features compounded enduring regional differences in the nature and extent of relief to generate a complex patchwork of experiences for the poor in early modern England.
Despite its association with the ill-fated reforms of Archbishop Laud in the 1630s and its dubious legality, the railed altar re-appeared in parish churches in the years after 1660. Initially only a handful of parishes and a minority of bishops backed so controversial a change, but the reconstruction of the city churches in London after the fire of 1666 popularised the railed altar, which was adopted elsewhere, particularly during the tory reaction of the 1680s. Studies of two urban parishes in the early 1680s indicate how struggles between dissenters and zealous anglicans could extend to disputes over worship. By 1700, what had been new and contested in the 1630s was becoming widely accepted, which may point to the powerful legacy of Laudian ideals in the restoration church.