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Social Capital, Trust and the Industrial Revolution: 1780�1880
Abstract
The first text to examine the concept of trust and the role that it played on the Industrial Revolution, this book is a key resource for students' studying nineteenth century British history as well as historically minded sociologists. Analytical in style and comprehensive in approach, Social Capital, Trust and the Industrial Revolution covers a range of themes, including: the forms of behaviour, institutions and strategies that contributed to the formation of trust; the circumstances that could lead to its rise or fall; the presence of distrust; the relationship and links between trust and power. Although research has shown that high levels of social capital and trust promotes economic growth, low crime rates and improved labour relations, little work has been done on the historical impact of this essential resource. David Sunderland's incisive monograph is resets the balance and demonstrates how social capital played a crucial role in the industrial, social and political changes of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century.
... -Social capital Halpern, 2005, Sunderland, 2007 -The positive psychological development of the individual in the company or the country, characterized by high self-confidence, optimistic and positive attributes. Ability and potential to recover from problems and good chances of success again. ...
... -Groups and networking: According to (Bourdieu, 1986) relationship is the embodiment of social capital provided by community to its members. Without social networks (formal and informal) access to information can be expensive and difficult (Sunderland, 2007); Halpern, 1999Halpern, , 2005. ...
Social capital increasingly has received attention over the past decades due to its impact on workers and their relationship with the companies they work at. This research focuses on the impact of the social capital four dimensions (trust, groups and networks, shared values and norms, and collective activities) on the organizational loyalty three types (affective, continuance, and normative). The results of the study revealed that there are effects of the social capital dimensions on organizational loyalty types.
... Expropriation of land resources, as in the Scottish Clearances, also damaged local peasant farmers to the benefit of the meat supply to richer cities, becoming yet another basic mechanism of inequality and discrimination with loss of social and human capital for many -who often emigrated [104][105][106]. Despite higher incomes and more meat per person for a while after the population decline caused by the Black Death, by the 1700s the poor became virtually vegetarian [107][108][109]. ...
We evolved from herbivores to a meat eating "commons" in hunter-gatherer days and then to a non-egalitarian meat power struggle between classes and countries. Egalitarian-ism, trans-egalitarianism and extremes of inequality and hierarchy revolve around the fair-unfair distribution of meat surpluses and ownership of the means of meat production. Poor people on poor diets with too few micronutrients may explain many inequalities of human capital, height and health and divergent development of individuals and nations. Learning from past successes and collapses from switching trophic levels the lesson is that meat moderation toward the top of Engel's curves, not calorie-centrism, is the best recipe for countries and classes. Improved health with longer lives and higher crystallised intelligence comes with an ample supply of micro-nutrients from animal products namely iron, zinc, vitamin A, vitamin B12 and other methyl-donors (such as choline), and nicotinamide (vitamin B3). We concentrate on nicotinamide whose deficits cause the degenerative condition pellagra that manifests as poor emotional and degenerative cognitive states with stunted lives and complex antisocial and dysbiotic effects caused by and causing poverty.
... A number of historical observations suggest that social trust rose steadily in Europe from the early modern period onwards: religious tolerance increased, witch hunts abated, honor killings and revenge lost their appeal and intellectual freedom became a central value of modern countries 1,2 . Historians have used a range of cues to document this process: etiquette manuals, registries of friendly societies, or legal changes 1,3,4 . However, quantitative evidence is scarce and progress in the history of mentalities has been limited by the paucity of tools to capture people's extinct mental life. ...
Social trust is linked to a host of positive societal outcomes, including improved economic performance, lower crime rates and more inclusive institutions. Yet, the origins of trust remain elusive, partly because social trust is difficult to document in time. Building on recent advances in social cognition, we design an algorithm to automatically generate trustworthiness evaluations for the facial action units (smile, eye brows, etc.) of European portraits in large historical databases. Our results show that trustworthiness in portraits increased over the period 1500-2000 paralleling the decline of interpersonal violence and the rise of democratic values observed in Western Europe. Further analyses suggest that this rise of trustworthiness displays is associated with increased living standards.
... Hence, this case could be applied to the whole society. Sunderland (2007) further elaborates that many historians "overlooked trust" in comparison with "power" as the most important means in society. However, he puts a strong emphasis on trust, which is the key for any further interactions and relationships among people who seek to produce positive results based on mutual interests. ...
Historical phenomenon of human capital is being discussed through centuries. This important pillar in socioeconomic development is necessary to be monitored, analyzed, and debated by every country. So is for Bosnia and Herzegovina. The chapter tries to explain human capital from students’ perspective in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The current situation of human capital in Bosnia and Herzegovina is investigated and discussed. Based on the theoretical background, the study explores the main pillars of human capital depicted by an exploratory case study of students population, from the International University of Sarajevo. Several exciting insights were derived from the research, which are elaborated further as the study implications, recommendations, and the future work. Limitations, as well as other study phenomena, are also discussed.
... It seems likely that assessment of the potential business partner may have been much more important in developing a trusting relationship than the project itself, as can indeed still be the case in contemporary banking (Baecker 2008, 114). Mechanisms of fostering trust and building confidence in the nineteenth century have, for instance, been researched by David Sunderland (2007), who investigated the development of social capital in English society with regard to the use of clothing, language and objects and the role played by gifts, reputation and interactions with peers in the context of visits to the theatre, museums or art galleries. 31 The focus here is thus on symbols that demonstrate trustworthiness and generate social capital (Luhmann 2009, 36). ...
... Fukuyama [4] demonstrates the results of studies in various countries which show that strong social capital will stimulate the growth of various economic sectors due to high level of trust and linkage in the widely grown network among fellow economic actors. Sunderland [11] states that the customs of mutual assistance and mutual advise among Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 404 individuals in a village community reflect the spirit of reciprocity, trust and social networking. The industrial development in society with high social capital will rapidly develop because the social capital will produce collective energy that generates motivations and entrepreneurial spirit in society which will improve the business world. ...
... More generally, eighteenth-century Europe was clearly ahead of non-European societies as well as ancient societies such as Athens and Rome, which tolerated or even celebrated much higher levels of violence (Pinker 2011a). Other indicators, such as the flourishing of societies and associations (Clark 2000;Sunderland 2007), suggest that the English were more prosocial and more trusting than other populations in the eighteenth century. Thus, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, England was the first state to implement a system of poor relief. ...
Baumard's perspective asserts that “opportunity is the mother of innovation,” in contrast to the adage ascribing this role to necessity. Drawing on behavioral ecology and cognition, we propose that both extremes – affluence and scarcity – can drive innovation. We suggest that the types of innovations at these two extremes differ and that both rely on mechanisms operating on different time scales.
... More generally, eighteenth-century Europe was clearly ahead of non-European societies as well as ancient societies such as Athens and Rome, which tolerated or even celebrated much higher levels of violence (Pinker 2011a). Other indicators, such as the flourishing of societies and associations (Clark 2000;Sunderland 2007), suggest that the English were more prosocial and more trusting than other populations in the eighteenth century. Thus, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, England was the first state to implement a system of poor relief. ...
Baumard proposes that life history slowing in populations over time is the principal driver of innovation rates. We show that this is only true of micro-innovation rates, which reflect cognitive and economic specialization as an adaptation to high population density, and not macro-innovation rates, which relate more to a population's level of general intelligence.
... In Germany, the medieval guild system provided some of the organizational and normative infrastructure for the development of capitalism (Greif, Milgrom, and Weingast 1994, 758-62). In the Anglo-American context, other scholars have charted the rise of reputational mechanisms, market governance structures, and organizations that helped to address the risks of nineteenth-century commerce (Gorton 1996, 386;Sunderland 2007, 1; Mokyr 2009, 382;Taylor 2013, 13;Klaus 2014, 4-5;Cook 2017, 140-41;Maggor 2017, 99). The theoretical literature conceptualizes these organizational forms as "agency relationships." ...
The role of fiduciary law in the development of North American capitalism has been overlooked by institutional economists, who interpret fiduciary law as a form of contract and make the judicial enforcement of contract central to the transaction-cost theory of economic development. This article argues that the emergence of distinctive, equity-based fiduciary laws and norms significantly influenced the development and growth of early-nineteenth-century American markets. Our historical research identifies lawyers as important economic actors, who served as catalysts for the emergence of this governance culture. Lawyers adopted fiduciary principles that allowed them to become trusted intermediaries, thereby addressing the agency-cost problems inherent in complex economic exchange that vex the institutionalists’ contractual account of economic development.
... Other indicators, such as the flourishing of societies and associations (P. Clark, 2000;Sunderland, 2007), suggest that the English were more prosocial and more trusting than other populations in the 18 th century. Thus, in the 16 th and 17 th centuries England was the first state to implement a system of poor relief. ...
Since the Industrial Revolution, human societies have experienced high and sustained rates of economic growth. Recent explanations of this sudden and massive change in economic history have held that modern growth results from an acceleration of innovation. But it is unclear why the rate of innovation drastically accelerated in England in the 18 th century. An important factor might be the alteration of individual preferences with regard to innovation due to the unprecedented living standards of the English during that period, for two reasons. First, recent developments in economic history challenge the standard Malthusian view according to which living standards were stagnant until the Industrial Revolution. Pre-industrial England enjoyed a level of affluence that was unprecedented in history. Second, Life History Theory, a branch of evolutionary biology, has demonstrated that the human brain is designed to respond adaptively to variations in resources in the local environment. In particular, a more favorable environment (high resources, low mortality) triggers the expression of future-oriented preferences. In this paper, I argue that some of these psychological traits – a lower level of time discounting, a higher level of optimism, decreased materialistic orientation, and a higher level of trust in others – are likely to increase the rate of innovation. I review the evidence regarding the impact of affluence on preferences in contemporary as well as past populations, and conclude that the impact of affluence on neuro-cognitive systems may partly explain the modern acceleration of technological innovations and the associated economic growth.
... The 'associational society' described in details by Clark (2000), while not entirely new in the 18th century, expanded enormously after 1750. It was felt, especially in the closing decades of the century, that the state was failing to create order and stability in an increasingly volatile society and that citizens had to create their own public goods through collective action (Clark, 2000: 94-96; see also Sunderland, 2007;50-84). ...
Professor McCloskey makes many telling and insightful points in her survey and criticism of what she terms the new institutional economics; yet there are a number of shortcomings to her paper. One is that she has bundled together a variety of quite disparate approaches to the role institutions play, and refers to them as ‘neo-institutionalist’. We unbundle these different strands, and show that an undifferentiated critique is unwarranted. A second argument made by her is that an institutional approach cannot explain either the Industrial Revolution or what she calls ‘the Great Enrichment’. We show that this conclusion is unwarranted and results from an overly narrow definition of institutions.
Is there a connection between the Industrial Revolution and the eighteenth century Enlightenment? The Enlightenment was a very broad cultural movement with many moving parts, but the one most relevant to economic history is what is known as the Industrial Enlightenment, a movement that directly advocated institutions that supported and promoted the accumulation and dissemination of technological progress and economic growth. These institutions included those that directly helped incentivize the accumulation of useful knowledge such as patronage and reputation effects, as well as patents, prizes, and other rewards to successful inventors. The movement also supported dissemination of knowledge through scholarly societies, publications, and various informal networks. The chapter concludes that both culture and the institutions it supported created a fertile ground for the rapid economic growth ignited by the Industrial Revolution.
Pellagra has largely been forgotten. This is unfortunate as important lessons are to be learnt about the diseases and social and economic consequences of poverty – and for the root cause of poverty (and of affluence) – that involve dietary nicotinamide and nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NAD) homeostasis. NAD disruption can occur not only from poor diet but from increased consumption from genotoxic, infectious and metabolic stresses. NAD deficiency is closely linked to poor physical and intellectual development, premature ageing and diseases of ageing. Acute infections, many with NAD-consuming toxins, that may differentially affect the NAD-depleted, now include COVID-19. Some Covid manifestations, such as myoclonic encephalopathy and “Long Covid,” resemble pellagra clinically and biochemically as both have disturbed nicotinic and tryptophan metabolism. Symbionts that supply nicotinic acid, such as TB and some gut micro-organisms, can become dysbiotic if the diet is very deficient in milk and meat, as it is for 1–2 billion or more. High doses of nicotinamide lead to inhibition of NAD-consuming enzymes and excessive induction of nicotinamide-n-methyl transferase (NNMT) with consequent effects on the methylome: this gives a mechanism for an unrecognised hypervitaminosis-B3 with adverse effects of nicotinamide overload for consumers on a high meat diet with “fortified” foods and “high energy” drinks. Methods of measuring NAD metabolism routinely for screening the populations at risk of deficiency and in metabolically ill or infectious disease patients should be developed urgently. Successful intervention should improve human capital and prevent many aspects of poverty, reduce discrimination and even the drive to emigrate.
Doktori értekezés.
(PhD dissertation in Hungarian.)
Short summary in English: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/350654228_The_Leap_of_Courage_Death_Anxiety_and_Social_Trust_Short_summary
Trust and Discourse: Organizational perspectives offers a timely collection of new articles on the relationship between discursive practices in organizational or institutional contexts and the psychological/moral category of trust. As globalization, the drive for efficiency and accountability, and increased time pressure lead groups and individuals to rethink the way they communicate, it is becoming more and more important to investigate how these streamlined and impersonal forms of communication affect issues of responsibility, authenticity and – ultimately – trust. The book deals with a variety of organizational settings ranging from in-hospital bedside teaching encounters and government communication following a nuclear accident to job interviews and foreign news reporting. This comprehensive study of an emerging new field will provide essential reading for linguists, discourse analysts, communication scholars, and other social scientists interested in a range of perspectives on oral, written and digital language use in society, including interactional sociolinguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, ethnography, multimodality and organizational studies.
Son dönemlerde sosyal sermaye yazınında önemli bir yer işgal eden güven kavramı, toplumsal ilişkiler ve toplumsal bütünlükte önemli bir unsur olarak kabul görmektedir. Bireylerin sosyal güven düzeyleri bir bakıma toplumda bulunan güven düzeyini yansıtan bir özelliğe sahiptir. Bireylerin birbirlerini ne kadar güvenilir buldukları, insanların yaptıkları iyilikte samimi olup olmadıkları, bireylerin toplumsal aidiyet duygusu düzeyi gibi faktörler, bireylerin sosyal güven düzeyini belirlemeye yardımcı olur. Bu gibi sorular ile sosyal güven düzeyi belirlenmeye çalışılırken toplumun geleceği sayılan ve toplumsal anlamda orta kuşak sayılan genç bireyler üzerine araştırma yapılması tercih edilmiştir. Araştırma verileri, amaçlı örneklem yoluyla seçilen Ankara, Atatürk, Dicle ve Dokuz Eylül İlahiyat Fakültelerinde birinci ve son sınıfta okuyan toplam 850 öğrenciye uygulanan anket sonuçlarına dayanmaktadır. Araştırmanın bulgularına göre İlahiyat Fakültesi öğrencilerinin sosyal güven düzeyi Türkiye ortalamasının üzerinde olmasına rağmen bu düzeyin bir toplumda istenilen sosyal güven düzeyinden daha aşağı bir seviyede olduğu tespit edilmiştir.
Having discussed the theoretical framework and how to construct Plan-like Architectures, this chapter follows on from the previous principles laid out in Plan Theory.
The overall purpose of this thesis is to understand how and why networks played a significant role for the merchants and company traders of the Danish Asiatic Company (DAC) in their trade in China.
To explore this, the following research questions will be answered:
1 - From the perspective of network analysis and prosopography, what characterised the merchants and traders as a group and how was experience transmitted among the company traders?
2 - From the perspective of microhistory, what role did networks play for selected individual company traders?
To examine these questions, an analysis on several levels is performed, starting from a broad perspective of the company, its function, and purpose from a network perspective.
The rise and fall of the DAC serves as an important backdrop for the research questions. Then the focus narrows down to the societal group of merchants who were responsible for managing the company as directors and others that handled the trade with China.
After examining the group as a whole using the prosopographical approach, the focus becomes narrower, turning to microhistory to get as close as possible to a small set of actors, distributed over the 100-year history of the DAC. The chapters reflect this division.
In chapter II, the Danish Asiatic Company is analysed, sketching its history and examining the various purposes the company served for various actors of both individual and organisational nature. In chapter III, the focus narrows to the merchants of the company, seen as a group, approached with the help of prosopography. Here, first the merchants serving as directors will be analysed and then the company traders – both viewed as a group and with the assistance of network analysis. Finally, in chapter IV the focus becomes even narrower as four actors are provided with microhistorical narratives, followed by an analysis in view of the previous chapters.
Purpose
This article aims to take into consideration the mechanism in which the process of industrialization affects social capital in Iran.
Design/methodology/approach
In order to investigate the way in which industrialization affects social capital, a system of simultaneous equations has been introduced and then coefficients have been estimated using the three stages least squares method and the panel data of the 30 provinces of the country during the 2001‐2006 period.
Findings
The results show that industrialization has a significant effect on the level and composition of social capital in Iran. Although industrialization has improved the level of income through which bridging social capital has increased, a large part of this effect has been balanced out as a result of worsening the income distribution due to industrialization. Since industrialization has increased migration from non‐industrial to industrial regions, bonding social capital has been weakened while bridging social capital in the immigrant accepting regions has been strengthened. The increase of specialization in economic activities and division of labor resulting from industrialization have also improved bridging social capital and worsened bonding social capital. Industrialization has increased the demand for education. However, due to the non‐efficient and individual‐based trainings, this variable does not show a significant effect on the level and composition of social capital.
Originality/value
This research has tried to provide a more comprehensive theoretical explanation and introduced two more mechanisms through which industrialization can affect social capital. The subject of this paper is related to both economic and social affairs. Industrialization is one of the most important issues in the field of economic development and social capital is the completely relevant subject to cultural changes. Investigation of the social capital status and determinants can provide a suitable basis to analyse the cultural and social changes.
This article is a contribution to the prehistory of modern branding, presenting a case study of the textile trade in colonial Southeast Asia. The visual appearance of brands as well as their social meaning were altered in the cultural encounter of colonial trade. Through these encounters, trademarks were modernized: the reputation of a producer became less important than the distinctiveness of the product.
(The place of publication is London and the date 2008 unless otherwise stated.)
(The place of publication is London and the date 2007 unless otherwise stated.)
P. J. Atkins's article on adulteration practices in the supply of milk to a growing urban market, which yielded windfall profits in Britain in the later part of the nineteenth century, places the debate that ensued in a particular context. The political lobbying power of the shopkeepers utilized notions of free trade to oppose government intervention; at the same time the lively public debate on environmental issues and hygiene in relation to health questions increased awareness of improved food quality to set against pressures to supply plentiful and cheap provisions. By the end of the 1880s levels of milk adulteration were one of the main areas of concern which required special attention.
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Adjustment to urban life can be a difficult process, particularly for migrants from a markedly rural background. Their responses constitute a key area of scholarly investigation into the urban experience of both past and contemporary societies. The large and volatile Irish migrant populations which were living in most British urban areas by the middle decades of the nineteenth century provide vivid case studies. This paper discusses how the Irish in Manchester, the first modern industrial city, coped with their new political, social and economic environment. Using a wide range of contemporary sources, it shows how, when faced by an alien socio-economic environment and historic anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiments in the native population, they relied heavily upon various forms of communal solidarity, particularly as reflected in residential segregation and the Catholic Church. It also demonstrates that when the pressures of the new environment became most severe then violent, drunken, anti-social behaviour resulted.
There is an influential strand in the history of the Englishfamily, casting its shadow over interpretations of the nineteenth century and rapidly becoming sociological orthodoxy, which stresses the centrality of what has been termed the autonomous nuclear family. In this interpretation, the nuclear family dominates household structures, kinship is weak, and the community rather than family or kin is the main source of support for the needy sections of society. This article, which employs the technique of total reconstitution, examines the role of kinship in three adjoining rural communities in nineteenth-century Kent to question some of these orthodoxies. It shows that as many households in the area went through an extended phase as experienced only the simple family structure, and that kinship links in the immediate area were strong. Any separation between kin and commu nity would have been meaningless in these rural parishes where kinship was part of neighborhood.
The question of the degree of state intervention in nineteenth-century Britain has interested generations of scholars since the beginning of the present century. Did mid-nineteenth century England constitute an “age of laissez-faire ” which gave way to an “age of collectivism,” or did an “age of mercantalism” merge into one of state regulation during which process, even in the early and mid-Victorian period, the state exercised considerable control over the day-to-day lives of its citizens? These are two of the questions over which there has been extended debate.
The term laissez-faire has been employed in a variety of ways by different writers, by no means all of whom have troubled to define their understanding of the expression. Recently Professor Perkin has argued that during the nineteenth century two distinct meanings were attributed to it (and seven to the related, though antithetical, concept, collectivism!). For the purposes of this paper the term is taken to mean the philosophy, policy and, above all, the practice of minimal government interference in the economy.
The most influential case for an “age of laissez-faire ” was presented by Dicey in Law and Public Opinion . In this Dicey identified three overlapping legislative phases: Quiescence (1800-1830), Individualism (1825-1870), and Collectivism (1865-1900). The first consisted of an absence of legislation, the second of “constant” parliamentary activity to abolish restraints on individual freedom and the third of state intervention “for the purpose of conferring benefit upon the mass of the people” at the expense of some loss of individual freedom.
The American Civil War had dramatic consequences for 500,000 Lancashire factory operatives who relied on supplies of cotton from America for their livelihoods. This study, concentrating on the small town of Clitheroe, investigates the responses of the Poor Law Board of Guardians, the charitable Relief Committee, local employers and the operatives themselves to this crisis and the deprivation that ensued. Using parliamentary papers, local newspaper reports, guardian Minutes Books and diaries kept by a prominent mill owner and one of his employees, the article questions the picture painted at the time and by later historians of a benevolent paternalism. It argues that relief was slow and strictly conditional. The employers' aim throughout was to take advantage of the economic situation and to maintain a submissive workforce. The cotton operatives found themselves at the mercy of the economic situation. Although praised for their quiet endurance, they protested at their treatment and accepted relief only grudgingly.
Romantic England witnessed a remarkably seminal period in English art. A prolific writer of reviews and essays on art, William Hazlitt was a sometimes ambivalent observer of this cultural plenitude who believed that the wide diffusion of art, through commerce and print technology, did not guarantee good art. This paper examines Hazlitt's criticism of portraiture and history painting as well as his writings on art collections, the latter revealing a subtle sense of how art is conditioned by its display and diffusion. While Hazlitt's sometimes harsh criticisms hardly affirm the existence of a genuine public art in early nineteenth‐century England, they set out the conditions necessary for one.
This paper questions those interpretations of 19th century police reform which seek to explain its incidence and intensity through the lens of economic relations. Through a critical reading of the work of Anthony Giddens and Michael Mann it replaces the concern with the quantitative features of the post-1835 provincial police forces with a sustained consideration of the changes in the organization of policing based on the idea of 'surveillance'. From this it is argued that police reform in this period involved transformations in the deployment of policemen across space and in the definition of administrative hierarchies (involving the organization of information and supervision). It also meant changes in the conception of public space. Applying this framework to the example of the Portsmouth Borough police it is demonstrated that, despite the lack of substantial industrial change, this provincial police force had been significantly transformed in the period before 1856 through a series of locally initiated reforms. It is concluded that the specific nature of police reform must be understood as part of a historical geography of state formation which theorizes states at all levels in terms of the administrative power they deploy.
While the new women's history has produced detailed accounts of women's lives, it has been very cautions about large-scale generalisations or theoretical development. This paper discusses macroquestions of historical change and attempts a historical periodisation of gender relations in Britain. It is important to distinguish changes in the form of partriarchy from those of changes in its degree. There has been a movement in the type of patriarchy from a private to a public form in Britain over the last century or so. This was caused by both the development of the demand for women's labour by an expanding capitalist economy and by the successes of first-wave feminism.
This article examines the relationships between banks and manufacturing industry in mid-nineteenth century Sheffield. It investigates the knowledge base and connections of the banks' directors and assesses the extent to which Sheffield banks were part of a regional information network concerning both investment opportunities and potential borrowers' creditworthiness. The findings reveal that close ties existed between the bankers and their customers. These took a number of forms, from interlocking directorships to ownership of local firms. A financial/industrial network appears to have existed, facilitating information flows and business contacts of vital importance in the provision of finance to local manufacturers. Moreover, the banks examined appear to have preserved impartiality when dealing with manufacturing customers as a whole and, more importantly, those in which directors were involved.
This paper develops the proposition that organized episodes of self-help criminal justice tend to arise as adaptive forms in places and times of sharp social transition-frontiers. Our method is to compare extralegal appendages to the official criminal justice systems of England and America between the mid-eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries. In England during this period, extralegal associations called private prosecution societies emerged as one approach to coping with ineffective criminal law enforcement and making the existing criminal justice system more accessible in the face of a very expensive private prosecution procedure. American crime-control vigilantism of the same time is similar in respect to its rationale, social composition and transitory period of widespread existence. However, the English self-help criminal justice organizations differed from most of their American counterparts by maintaining a strong attachment to the rule of law and rarely, if ever, acting as courts or executing a sentence. We conclude that both varieties of extralegal crime control were a response to the problem of social control on a type of frontier. The comparison also suggests a continuum of crime control strategies dimensioned along their relationship to the official legal system.
In nineteenth-century Britain, friendly societies (working-class mutual benefit clubs) and ruling elites contested definitions of respectability and independence in a struggle to delineate relations between societies and the state. This process was an important part of an ongoing set of negotiations by which working-class organizations influenced middle-class attitudes toward collective action. Pressure from friendly societies forced members of Parliament and bureaucrats to accept their claim to respectability and, with it, to independence from state control, changing the discourse of respectability in three stages. During the first quarter of the century, clergymen and landowners equated respectability with middle-class patronage and independence from the Poor Law. Around midcentury, the societies appropriated the discourse of respectability and, with qualified elite approval, used it to redefine independence as freedom from middle-class supervision. By the 1870s, however, friendly society leaders requested government assistance to limit the independence of rank-and-file members, whose autonomy they claimed was a threat to the societies' respectability.
Friendly societies wanted, as one member wrote, “to do what is ‘respectable.’” This meant redefining respectability in a collective, working-class context. While middle-class definitions rested on the premise that individualism and self-help were the twin foundations of respectability, friendly societies gained access to the social power of respectability by offering an alternative definition based on collective self-help and independence from external control. Friendly societies were democratically managed insurance clubs offering sickness and burial coverage and sociable activities in return for regular payments. They often met in public houses, which they identified as respectable, contradicting middle-class attitudes.
Technology and Culture 46.1 (2005) 31-50
Popular opinion in Britain regarding paper currency underwent a dramatic transformation in the first half of the nineteenth century. In 1800, paper money was commonly disliked and mistrusted; by the Great Exhibition of 1851, it had become generally accepted. Now, of course, paper currency is so well-established a notion that readers of this article must struggle somewhat to grasp its strangeness, even perversity. But in the early nineteenth century, paper stood more plainly in contrast to gold and silver. These "noble metals" were inert, heavy, and imperishable, and made the vaguely pejorative slang for banknote paper, "flimsy," seem entirely apt. Fear of forgery, unfavorable political events, and the development of print technology during this period all threatened to undermine belief in the authenticity and value of printed paper currency. Nevertheless, by midcentury a level of trust "without doubt and without reasoning" had been established. I will argue in this article that the flimsy banknote itself, by virtue of its appearance as a product of mechanical reproduction, helped to build that trust.
In the late eighteenth century such a development seemed unlikely. Although promissory notes were already an established medium of exchange, banknotes, described by David Hume in 1752 as "this new invention of paper," were an innovation. Paper currency has been described as the visible embodiment of the credit operations and relationships driving the "capitalist engine" of the time. But events in Britain, France, and the newly independent United States of America highlighted the question of paper currency's trustworthiness. Adding to the general social and economic disturbances, subversive connotations attached themselves to the banknote. The American War of Independence and the French Revolution both depended on paper currency. In 1830 the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, after scorning both revolutionary-era currencies as being driven by "favourite anticipations," seemed to condone paper's practical effect:
Though used in the most lavish manner, their credit, in either case, lasted long enough to enable the respective governments to baffle all the efforts of their opponents.
Britain had avoided political revolution, but had nevertheless been forced during the Napoleonic Wars to suspend cash payments and depend solely upon paper currency between 1797 and 1821. The French paper assignats had initially been floated on the security of expropriated church lands in 1789, but increasing lack of faith in the currency's value led to disastrous hyperinflation by 1795. Moreover, Britain had attempted to destabilize the situation even further by producing counterfeit assignats. Paper money thus seemed potentially doubly dangerous: a potentially "fallacious emission" of government that almost by definition invited forgery.
These events focused attention on paper currency in early-nineteenth-century Britain, and the seemingly obtuse question "what is the value of a one-pound note?" became a matter for serious, often alarmed, consideration in books, articles, pamphlets, and the reports of government committees. These commentaries ranged from the serious, such as the Society of Arts Committee Report on Banknote Forgery of 1819, to the cranky, such as the 1816 pamphlet by a Mr. Balbirnie of Glasgow, Reflections on the Bank Paper Currency, in which he announced his "secret plan" for forgery-proof banknotes based on "mysterious paper" and indelible inks. Balbirnie's idea was that fake notes would instantly disintegrate when subjected to his secret reagent; the author had been prompted to conduct his experiments after accepting a forged note and losing money.
In all these publications the overriding issues were gold versus paper money and the dangers of forgery. Two problems suggested themselves to the public. First, was the currency sufficiently supported by government or bank reserves? The mere hint that it might not be was potentially so destabilizing that the second problem, forgery, might seem a preferable focus for anxiety to those governments...
'Respectability' had great ideological power in
Victorian society. But current analyses of
middle-class leisure are seriously flawed in
over-marginalising less respectable behavior. The paper begins by examining 'respectability' and
the non-work contexts where pressures for
compliance were strongest, such as the home and
the church. It then explores a range of leisure
contexts where pressures were far weaker, and
where more sinful pleasures such as the drinking of
alcohol, gambling, betting and sex outside marriage
were more likely to be found. First there were life cycle contexts.
Middle-class teenagers, younger unmarried men and
men whose families had grown up were far more
likely to fall for such temptations. Second, certain
middle-class occupational groupings, such as
artists, travelling salesmen or those in the drink
trade were also more likely to pursue a less
respectable lifestyle. Third, the hold of
respectability was less strong in locational
contexts away from the tyranny of neighbours. The
more liminal nature of locations such as the
racecourse and the seaside, or the anonymity of
large urban areas, and the range of pleasures on
offer, could open up multiple leisure identities.
This essay seeks to uncover the distinguishingfeatures of small firms in Victorian Britain, and looks at the role of the family in the creation and survival of firms in what was a dangerously volatile business world characterised by low business morality. Based on a series of case studies, it suggests that although second and third generation firms were uncommon, the family played a critical if often informal role in maintaining stability and generating an environment of trust, and in those situations where family partnerships and inter-generational succession did exist, the characteristics of ownership and succession at the level of the smaller firm appear to have stimulated rather than prevented innovation and growth. Different types of family firm and family contribution are examined, and the latter part of the essay looks at family firm networks and entrepreneurial strategies such as market internalisation within a family network.
Cet article étudie la parenté entre les chefs de ménage et leurs serviteurs domestiques, dans la banlieue d'Exeter. On se concentre particulièrement sur les cas où le recensement ancien n'enregistre pas de lien familial et où le nom de famille du chef de menage est different de celui de son employé, homme ou femme. On a cependant réussi à prouver une parenté de sang entre maître et domestique. La méthode adoptée pour ce travail est inhabituelle, d'autant plus qu'on a tracé aussi bien les lignées féminines que masculines, ce qui a mené à des conclusions intéressantes et nouvelles en ce qui concerne d'une part les proportions de membres de la famille qui résident dans les ménages au début du XIXe siècle et d'autre part la nature du service domestique durant cette période.AbstractDieser Beitrag untersucht Verwandtschaftsbeziehungen zwischen Haushaltsvorständen und mitwohnenden häuslichen Dienstboten in einer Straße in den Außenbezirken von Exeter zwischen 1841 und 1861. Dabei geht es insbesondere um solche Fälle, wo in den Volkszählungsunterlagen keine Verwandtschafts-beziehung verzeichnet ist und Haushaltsvorstand und Dienstbote unterschiedliche Nachnamen besitzen, in denen sich aber zugleich der Nachweis erbringen ließ, daß die beiden Personen miteinander blutsverwandt waren. Durch das ungewöhnliche Verfahren, das für diese Mikrostudie verwandt wurde, insbesondere die Verfolgung sowohl weiblicher wie männlicher Abstammungslinien, ergeben sich neue interessante Schlußfolgerungen im Hinblick auf die Frage, wie hoch im frühen 19. Jahrhundert in den Haushalten der Anteil mitwohnender Verwandter war, und ebenso im Hinblick darauf, wie zu dieser Zeit der Bereich der häuslichen Dienstleistungen beschaffen war.
Civil society remains the most challenging and all-pervading of concepts, yet too rarely is it examined empirically. The potential of civil society is that it better allows understanding of local political structures as well as cross-class associational activity. Its alternatives, while many, are principally ‘public life’ and ‘influence’, both of which have their own highly respected traditions. It is argued here that civil society offers a powerful analysis of structure and action in the urban world, and that it is one mediated by municipal government. To operationalize this definition, this article will introduce three further concepts: ‘enshrinement’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘legitimacy’. Each of these is linked to the relationship of the municipal state with that at Westminster, the formal mechanism through which the stability of civil society in nineteenth-century Britain was negotiated.
Through a study of middle-class power in Norwich in the first third of the twentieth century, this paper tests a number of hypotheses concerning the behaviour of British urban elites. Analysis of networks (freemasons, business organizations and family) assesses the level of social unification among the middle class; elite involvement in chapel, charities and voluntary organizations addresses the question of social leadership; whilst elite politics is considered through three questions: did they become unified behind a single anti-socialist stance? Did the more important members of the elite leave urban politics? And did they abandon faith in grand civic projects? Its conclusions suggest that the power and involvement of the elite continued into the 1930s, maintaining a positive approach to the scope and function of municipal authority.
Recent work on ‘civil society’ has made claims for the past capacity of mutual aid associations to generate ‘social capital’: self-help, trust, solidarity. Friendly societies in nineteenth-century Bristol are examined to test these claims. Their origins and growth are explored, as well as their membership and social, convivial and medical roles. Solidarities of class and neighbourhood are set against evidence of exclusion and division. Trust and close personal ties proved insufficient to avert the actuarial risks that threatened financial security.
This article is concerned with the relationship which existed between Manchester's parliamentary candidates and their involvement with local charities. Both of these areas, “charity” and “parliamentary elections” formed distinct fields of activity, each with their own structures and each producing a particular set of dispositions. Success depended on the individual's habitus and having the right degree of personal or cultural capital. In the mid to late Victorian period parliamentary candidates were meant to possess the qualities of a local leader. The election field determined the need to prove fitness to represent the local community. Part of the criteria for this included involvement with local charities. This suggested moral worth and firm commitment to the area. The charity field provided a particular type of status for the individual. This article will explore the relationship between the two fields of activity and how entering the election field determined the need to also enter the charity field to provide the individual with its vital dispositions.
Attempts to distinguish modern theories of refinement led eighteenth-century writers to highlight the moral integrity of a new code – politeness – in which outward civilities could be read as the manifestation of inner social virtues. To sponsors of polite culture this assurance was indicative of the superiority of modern manners manifest in the Lockean polite `person'. Yet the possibility and validity of synthesis remained a subject for debate; partly because of the difficulty of communicating character, partly because of the potential exploitation of a supposed congruity between outer expression and inner motive. In response, late century theorists sought to reinvigorate aspects of Locke's ideal through a culture of sensibility which both developed and criticised the existing polite code. But prone to similar weaknesses, sensibility was itself abandoned in the nineteenth century as writing on morals and manners diverged, and the distinctive, enlightened concept of politeness gave way to etiquette and a modern regimen of social dos and don'ts.
During Pitt's 1785 campaign for moderate parliamentary reform, William Wilberforce supported the government primarily on a moral basis rather than on political grounds. He explained his reasons to a friend, Lord Muncaster, as follows:
It is not the confusion of parties, and their quarreling and battling in the House of Commons, which makes me despair of the republic … it is the universal corruption and profligacy of the times, which taking its rise amongst the rich and luxurious has now extended its baneful influence and spread its destructive poison through the whole body of the people.
I. Privileged Spies
T OWARD THE END of Lady Audley’s Secret (1862), the most infamous femme fatale of the Victorian novel retires to her dressing room after a long day of committing arson and attempting murder. Shamming a headache, Lady Audley sends her maid from the room. The narrator explains her motive:
Whilst it would be wrong to claim that voluntary societies in Britain were new in the period 1780 to 1850, the growth of large industrial and urban populations was accompanied by an increase in the foundation and prosperity of such societies. These societies were diverse in their purpose, form, size and membership. Edward Baines, junior, one of the self-appointed tribunes of the industrial middle class, in 1843 described recent developments as follows:
For much of the 1970s and early 1980s historians using an urban focus to analyse social class, social stratification and political conflict led the field. The work of John Foster, Geoffrey Crossick, Robert Gray, Patrick Joyce and others helped set an agenda to which all social historians responded. Today research of a similar type can easily be found, but even whilst this shows a high degree of conceptual sophistication and empirical rigour it seems less central to the discipline and to the broad concerns of social history than was the case even a decade ago. In this speculative paper I reflect on some of the reasons for this and consider the contemporary prospects for studies of the relationship between urban history and social class.
The view that class occupied a central place in the lives of nineteenth-century English workers has recently come under increasing criticism within the fields of labour and social history. Joyce (1980), Stedman Jones (1982 and 1983), Calhoun (1982) and Glen (1984) are prominent examples of scholars who have proclaimed, albeit to varying degrees and with different points of emphasis, that at various times during the nineteenth century workers were far less motivated by class than claimed by Edward and Dorothy Thompson, Hobsbawm and likeminded historians. Criticisms of this latter group of historians are, of course, not new. Nevertheless it may be suggested that the recent criticisms of class do possess two distinguishing characteristics. Firstly, they have surely gathered a momentum and a degree of influence within labour and social history which the criticisms of the 1960's (especially the positivist-based critiques of Edward Thompson's view of class) failed to achieve. (This change is, in part, related to the defeats and retreats suffered by the labour movement under Thatcherism, and the current intellectual and political re-assessment of the historical strength of class-consciousness within the British working class.) Secondly, the criticisms of the 1980's issue from a much wider range of theoretical perspectives than was the case during the 1960's.
Oddfellows' lodges in mid-nineteenth-century Lancaster and Preston offer fresh perspectives on affiliated friendly societies. These societies combined fraternal good fellowship with a hierarchical organization which operated on the assumption that members were breadwinners supporting dependants in nuclear family households. Despite the skilled or artisan occupational status of many oddfellows, their domestic economies often relied on more than one wage and complex household structures. Since oddfellows' households also clustered in certain neighbourhoods, social associations established by lodge membership overlapped with local networks. By considering these lodges less as bounded institutional entities and more as focuses for intersecting social networks where mores of respectablity and social identity were worked out, relations of gender and community as well as class, can be brought to bear on a historical appreciation of this topic.
The houses in early modern European cities almost all had names and signs. These are usually taken to be an early form of advertising, or else a way of finding one's way around the city in times before street names and numbering. This article argues that their primary purpose was to mark the individual, family or ethnic identity of the house owner or tenant. During the eighteenth century the names and signs changed in character, and by the mid-nineteenth century they had almost disappeared from city centres, primarily as a result of changes in individual and family identity among the urban middle classes, and of the transformation of neighbourhood communities under the pressure of urban economic and social integration. The evolution of house names and shop signs therefore illustrates the changing relationship between the city's residents and the urban environment.
This article calls for greater attention within urban history to the ‘civic economy of the book’. By means of a case study of the Manchester Free Public Library and its context, examining the internal workings of the library system and its impact on the broader cultural life of the city, it is argued that the nineteenth-century public library, if not an especially successful disciplinary institution, may yet have been a significant mechanism of cultural disempowerment.
Writing on the Living conditions in Devon and Somerset in 1849, Alexander Mackay set out to discredit the often picturesque depiction of the homes of the poor:
We are accustomed to associate with the idea of a country village, or with a cottage situated in a winding vale, or hanging upon the side of a rich and fertile slope, nothing but health, contentment and happiness. A rural dwelling of this class … makes such a nice pencil sketch, that we are naturally inclined to think it as neat and comfortable as it appears. But to know it aright, it must be turned inside out, and its realites exposed to the gaze of the observer. (qtd. in Lester 320)
It was this turning “inside out” of working-class interiors to the voyeuristic gaze of their largely middle-class readers that Mackay and his fellow journalists on the Morning Chronicle set out to accomplish in a series of “letters” written in 1849 and 1850. But such depictions of working-class houses and their interiors had been a staple part of the discourse on the condition of the laboring population as early as 1832, when the Manchester physician and later Assistant Poor Law Commissioner James Kay published The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes , and they continued to appear throughout the 1830s, 40s, and early 50s in the work of Peter Gaskell, William Alison, Thomas Beames, Hector Gavin, Edwin Chadwick, Henry Mayhew, and others. This writing, as I will demonstrate, betrays similar discursive and ideological underpinnings as the workingclass interior becomes the focal point for the assertion of bourgeois value and the maintenance of class distinction.
Abstract This article argues that much recent writing on the development of the ideology of domesticity within the working class and the role in this of struggles for protective legislation suffers from undue neglect of class interests in the construction of family life. As a contribution to a fuller account of the interaction of class and gender concerns, a case study is presented of the analysis of the family, gender and laissez-faire capitalism contained in the writing of Richard Oastler, a leading figure in the British Ten Hours Movement of the 1830s and 1840s.
In his latest work on the relations—or on the non-relations—between businessmen and landowners, Professor W. D. Rubinstein has challenged his critics to prove him wrong. Accordingly, this article analyses the statistical arguments in Rubinstein’s work, and shows that they do not prove what they are claimed to prove. In the course of its analysis the article undertakes to explore the problem inherent in using the probate accounts to discuss the purchase of land, suggesting that that problem cannot be dismissed as Rubinstein has dismissed it, but showing that its seriousness alters with the level of wealth-holders considered.
This article examines the importance of local reputation and collaborative commercial politics for the business practices of individuals in industrializing Birmingham. It is suggested that shared ideas about quality standards, free trade and the national interest were instrumental in encouraging businessmen to work together to establish local representative institutions. Furthermore, these normative conceptions of how trade should be conducted reflected particular interpretations of the history of Birmingham and of individual enterprise. It is concluded that the particular geography of a provincial town was central to the application of principles and abstract ideas.
