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Doing Urban History in the Coastal Zone
Abstract
A rich historiography exists on the subject of port towns, yet too often they are treated not on their own terms, but as the terminal point either of maritime space or of the terrestrial realm. This chapter outlines a new approach, drawing on vocabulary from the marine and littoral sciences and from the discipline of island studies to articulate an approach that is truly focussed on the coastal zone. It is necessary to adapt some of this vocabulary to suit the needs of urban history. The foreshore corresponds to the relatively small area that welcomes strangers and processes cargo, passengers, or tourists. The offshore is a space of idiosyncratic governance, both excised from the port town and yet often an integral part of its operations. Scholars interested in ethnic, gender, and civic identities are working on a deeper, more complex mixture that might well be called the urban estuary.
... The aim of PTUC was to provide a platform for scholars working in social and cultural maritime history to move beyond "treating the port town as merely the sluice gate regulating how the mighty oceanic flows interact with the mainland", and instead place these intersections of maritime and urban space at the centre of the inquiry. 12 In the course of developing scholarly networks on this theme, it was found that the term 'maritime' itself created more problems than it solved, and the group found itself looking for a new paradigm altogether. Coastal studies offered the solution. ...
Taking inspiration from the Swedish expression “one boot in the boat, and the other in the field,” Coastal Studies & Society is particularly interested in exploring the hybridity between environments, people, activities and things, on and across the margins where water encounters land, and along all the possible articulations between
them. If you find coastal studies ambiguous, that is not a bug; it is a feature of the software. Emulating the messy, intermediate spaces which we study, we hope to provide a space where processes, theories and lived experiences related to the coast can all be shared in one place, and mutually benefit from the unexpected juxtapositions that result. Indeed, it is precisely this untidiness and liminality which makes a coastal position the perfect spot from which to launch less conventional research and narratives, or contemplate
fresh possibilities.
... Port cities have received scholarly attention from (urban) historians, who have explored economic interconnectedness-networks, exchange, and flows-mainly between cities in Europe and on the transatlantic coasts. To some extent, they have also attended to the local specificity of many of the places involved (Land 2016). But naval aspects of port cities and cultural relationships to the hinterland have been somewhat overlooked (Beaven et al. 2016, pp. ...
Heritage in coastal landscapes confronts preservationists, spatial planners, policymakers, and politicians with distinctive challenges. Coastal landscapes in all their varieties share common features because humans have interacted in similar ways with their environments on the edge of land and sea, including coastal defence, fishing, shipping, mussel farming, harvesting salt, swimming, boating, and using the beach as a tourist attraction. Coastal communities and societies are historically interconnected with each other and are more like each other than their respective inland societies in language, customs, ways of life, ways of building, and heritage. Moreover, they have a distinctive cultural and spiritual relationship with the sea. Cultural heritage and its management in coastal landscapes can vary greatly from one area to the next, but throughout Europe several key issues and challenges recur. In this chapter, I argue that coastal regions in Europe could manage their heritage resources more efficiently by exchanging expertise and experience. I address the importance of taking each site’s regional, spatial, and historical characteristics into account, while not losing sight of their many contemporary economic, social, cultural, and ecological challenges. I address four of these issues: interconnected cultural frontiers; the common challenges of coast-specific heritage; the threats and opportunities of coastal tourism; and the effects of ecological changes on cultural heritage. Each of them is illustrated by an example from one of the European coastal regions. Finally, I consider the roles that coastal heritage plays in the historiography of regions and nations, and how that affects the ways in which the coastal past is remembered, preserved and redeveloped.
The functional relationship between the urban littoral of large contemporary cities and their inhabitants defines the urban coastal society, which is intimately linked to the area directly connected to the sea and to the coastal water itself. As the urban littoral and the urban coastal society mutually readjust themselves to environmental and social coastal issues, the city-sea interface can be described as an urban amphibious that serves as a hub for socio-economic and environmental services. In this context, littoral awareness becomes central to more efficient planning that takes into account the expectations of the community.
Coastal development did not arise from sovereign property rights to the coast or efforts to fix moving shorelines in law. Instead, it emerged from ideas of the public good and public trust that vested the protection of shores and seas in modern states. State protection supported coastal development, especially ports, in the era of steamship technology. By examining case studies from seventeenth-century to late nineteenth-century coastal India, this essay illustrates how the idea of state protection emerged through legal disputes over the obligations of littoral societies, international law, customary practices, definitions of navigable waters, accretion, and the status of subterranean or derelict land. The resultant terraqueous framework was legally plural. Nevertheless, it strengthened state claims over coastal areas and facilitated coastal development by circumscribing the boundaries of littoral societies’ claims that have traditionally relied on fishing or livelihoods tied to these waters.
Este artículo examina las reformas impuestas por la corona española durante el siglo XVIII, para hacer del puerto un lugar de orden frente a las amenazas extranjeras que sufría la isla de San Juan Bautista de Puerto Rico como resultado del contrabando rampante que existía. Ancladas en las ideologías de la Ilustración, estas reformas enfatizan la naturaleza geográfica del puerto como espacio de control y manejo social. El artículo discute las reformas militares llevadas a cabo por el mariscal Alejandro O’Reilly con el apoyo de sus ingenieros y cartógrafos Thomas O’Daly y Juan Francisco Mestre.
The contribution aims to explore the concept of urban coastal society, a community intimately connected to the coast and to the sea, in the context of the socio-spatial and climatic-environmental critical issues that characterize the development of large coastal cities during the past pandemic situation. In spatial and functional terms, the urban shore could be considered as an urban amphibious, that is, the urban area where the land and the sea physically meet, in relationship with the ability of the city and the coastal community to constantly adapt to these two systems. It is an aggregator of coastal commons, shared resources whose importance is fundamental for the adaptation of the coastal society to external impacts. Anyway, its integrity appears to be fragmented since it is composed of variegated elements (port areas, production plants, urban beaches, insecure or abandoned spaces) that can also be considered as pieces of a potential green–blue infrastructure. In this sense, the concept of city–sea interface can be mobilized, as the physical, ecological, social and functional contact area between the edge of the city and the edge of the water: it can be considered as an expression of the urban amphibious, a space in which different ways of experiencing the coastal life of the city are juxtaposed, with a strong need for flexible management. These premises require us to investigate how to plan and manage ‘blue spaces’, considering them as potential quality public areas along the urban shore: during the Covid-19 pandemic, this necessity becomes even more absolute in relation to the evolution of social needs that require a greater amount of public space to guarantee to each user valuable social spaces while preventing contagion. Coastal areas therefore take on an even greater social and therapeutic value in large coastal cities.
Seamen from Royal Navy ships were boarded in the 1740s with Betty Wright, a lodging-house keeper of Gosport, Hampshire. Her surviving account books together with the wills of hundreds of mariners open up a new light on the life onshore for these men, in a previously unrecorded manner, and enable lodging houses, victuallers and the families of mariners, to be brought into the wider economic and social context of sailortowns. The authors’ research on London's sailortown was based on a methodology that took advantage of the increasing availability of online records, especially London's land tax and insurance records, wills and other archives. Together, they provide a basis for exploring the many ways that women coped with households and work, when their men folk were away. They also reveal the strong links between mariners and victuallers and the variety of services that the latter provided to a constantly changing international clientele.
Dans cet espace d’interface qu’est la zone littorale, les usages de la mer ne déterminent pas de clivages étanches entre les populations terriennes et maritimes. Le rapport à la mer est variable. Si le concept de vocation maritime est trop souvent invoqué pour qualifier au nom d’un déterminisme ou d’une force irrésistible le choix des riverains qui s’engagent dans une voie maritime pure et dure, celui de pluriactivité permet de décliner les rapports complexes que nouent les populations du littoral avec l’estran et la mer.
Port research is not a new field of interest for human geographers, evidenced by numerous conceptual models and empirical cases of port evolution and development in the literature. However, several critical questions remain unanswered, notably the exact position of port geography as a subdiscipline within human geography in the past, present and future. Based on a pluralistic approach, the paper analyzes the changing waves and development of port geography as a sub-discipline of human geography, with a special focus on whether port geography has experienced a paradigm shift and, if so, when, why, and how. Also, through analyzing the major terrains of port geography research from the macro perspective, it brings a new lease of life to port geography in this rapidly changing world.
This volume, which grows out of The Quality of Life (eds. Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, 1993), combines philosophical inquiry with economic concerns regarding women's equality in the developing world. Adopting Amartya Sen's capability framework, international contributors tackle issues of cultural relativism vs. cultural imperialism on the one hand, and questions of local traditions vs. universalist critical judgement on the other. The chief aim of this work is to critically explore the relationship between culture and justice as pertinent to women's development, with special attention paid to cultural sensitivity but without compromising the clarity of rational judgement in cases where women's capabilities are at stake. Building upon the practical and philosophical implications of the lived experience of women from a variety of cultures, the authors theorize the pragmatics of economic development beyond utility towards a vision of gender equality. This book is a must‐read for anyone interested in the ethics of women's economic development.
In this thoughtful and engaging critique, geographer Martin W. Lewis and historian Karen Wigen reexamine the basic geographical divisions we take for granted, and challenge the unconscious spatial frameworks that govern the way we perceive the world. Arguing that notions of East vs. West, First World vs. Third World, and even the sevenfold continental system are simplistic and misconceived, the authors trace the history of such misconceptions. Their up-to-the-minute study reflects both on the global scale and its relation to the specific continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa--actually part of one contiguous landmass. The Myth of Continents sheds new light on how our metageographical assumptions grew out of cultural concepts: how the first continental divisions developed from classical times; how the Urals became the division between the so-called continents of Europe and Asia; how countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan recently shifted macroregions in the general consciousness. This extremely readable and thought-provoking analysis also explores the ways that new economic regions, the end of the cold war, and the proliferation of communication technologies change our understanding of the world. It stimulates thinking about the role of large-scale spatial constructs as driving forces behind particular worldviews and encourages everyone to take a more thoughtful, geographically informed approach to the task of describing and interpreting the human diversity of the planet.
Land uses readings of Lawrence Durrell, Amos Oz and Jacqueline Shohet Kahanoff to introduce the concept of coastal exceptionalism. The tolerant coast may be a utopian space, a permissive arena for expatriate Europeans, a zone of nostalgia, or a centre of synergy. The chapter examines the examples of the Levant and the West Coast of the United States in some detail. The belief that there is a specific local quality that makes port towns uniquely tolerant places offers an interesting counterpoint to recent debates about the universal values of cosmopolitanism, multiculturalism and superdiversity. Land concludes with a discussion of Steve Jobs and Silicon Valley as a coastal expression of Saskia Sassen’s neoliberal global city, both hosting innovative firms and marketing themselves as stylish and transgressive.
Although the popular myth of Cornish wrecking is well-known within British culture, this book is the first comprehensive, systematic inquiry to separate out the layers of myth from the actual practices. Weaving in legal, social and cultural history, it traces the development of wreck law - the right to salvage goods washed on shore - and explores the responses of a coastal populace who found their customary practices increasingly outside the law, especially as local individual rights were being curtailed and the role of centralised authority asserted.
This groundbreaking study also considers the myths surrounding wrecking, showing how these developed over time, and how moral attitudes towards wrecking changed. Overall, the picture of evil wreckers deliberately luring ships onto the rocks is dispelled, to be replaced by a detailed picture of a coastal populace - poor and gentry alike - who were involved in a multi-faceted, sophisticated coastal practice and who had their own complex popular beliefs about the harvest and salvage of goods washing ashore from shipwreck.
Two centuries of American maritime history, in which the Atlantic Ocean remained the great frontier Westward expansion has been the great narrative of the first two centuries of American history, but as historian Daniel Vickers demonstrates here, the horizon extended in all directions. For those who lived along the Atlantic coast, it was the East-and the Atlantic Ocean-that beckoned. While historical and fictional accounts have tended to stress the exceptional circumstances or psychological compulsions that drove men to sea, this book shows how normal a part of life seafaring was for those living near a coast before the mid-nineteenth century. Drawing on records of several thousand seamen and their voyages from Salem, Massachusetts, Young Men and the Sea offers a social history of seafaring in the colonial and early national period. In what sort of families were sailors raised? When did they go to sea? What were their chances of death? Whom did they marry, and how did their wives operate households in their absence? Answering these and many other questions, this book is destined to become a classic of American social and maritime history. © 2005 by Daniel Vickers and Vincent Walsh. All rights reserved.
Book synopsis: The Indian Ocean was global long before the Atlantic, and today the countries bordering the Bay of Bengal—India, Bangladesh, Burma, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Malaysia—are home to one in four people on Earth. Crossing the Bay of Bengal places this region at the heart of world history for the first time. Integrating human and environmental history, and mining a wealth of sources, Sunil Amrith gives a revelatory and stirring new account of the Bay and those who have inhabited it.
For centuries the Bay of Bengal served as a maritime highway between India and China, and then as a battleground for European empires, all while being shaped by the monsoons and by human migration. Imperial powers in the nineteenth century, abetted by the force of capital and the power of steam, reconfigured the Bay in their quest for coffee, rice, and rubber. Millions of Indian migrants crossed the sea, bound by debt or spurred by drought, and filled with ambition. Booming port cities like Singapore and Penang became the most culturally diverse societies of their time. By the 1930s, however, economic, political, and environmental pressures began to erode the Bay’s centuries-old patterns of interconnection.
Today, rising waters leave the Bay of Bengal’s shores especially vulnerable to climate change, at the same time that its location makes it central to struggles over Asia’s future. Amrith’s evocative and compelling narrative of the region’s pasts offers insights critical to understanding and confronting the many challenges facing Asia in the decades ahead.
Today labor migrants mostly move south to north across the Mediterranean. Yet in the nineteenth century thousands of Europeans and others moved south to North Africa, Egypt, and the Levant. This study of a dynamic borderland, the Tunis region, offers the fullest picture to date of the Mediterranean before, and during, French colonialism. In a vibrant examination of people in motion, Julia A. Clancy-Smith tells the story of countless migrants, travelers, and adventurers who traversed the Mediterranean, changing it forever. Who were they? Why did they leave home? What awaited them in North Africa? And most importantly, how did an Arab-Muslim state and society make room for the newcomers? Combining fleeting facts, tales of success and failure, and vivid cameos, the book gives a groundbreaking view of one of the principal ways that the Mediterranean became modern.
In this stimulating and authoritative overview, Michael Pearson reverses the traditional angle of maritime history and looks from the sea to its shores - its impact on the land through trade, naval power, travel and scientific exploration. This vast ocean, both connecting and separating nations, has shaped many countries' cultures and ideologies through the movement of goods, people, ideas and religions across the sea. The Indian Ocean moves from a discussion of physical elements, its shape, winds, currents and boundaries, to a history from pre-Islamic times to the modern period of European dominance. Going far beyond pure maritime history, this compelling survey is an invaluable addition to political, cultural and economic world history.
slands have a unique hold on our imagination as intriguing places where - as Thomas More and Jonathan Swift showed in their fiction - fantastic utopic or dystopic worlds are possible. Perhaps such ideas developed because we are implicitly aware of the unique political and social arrangements that can be designed when a region is so distinctly separate. Island Enclaves highlights the idiosyncratic forms of governance that occur in places that are both a part of, and apart from, national boundaries. Examining subnational island jurisdictions such as Guantánamo Bay, Macau, Aruba, the Isle of Man, and Prince Edward Island, Godfrey Baldacchino shows how these distinct locales arrange special relationships with larger metropolitan powers. He also deals with the politics, economics, and diplomacy of islands that have been engineered as detention camps, offshore finance centres, military bases, heritage parks, or otherwise autonomous regions. More than a study of how detached regions are governed, Island Enclaves displays the ways in which these jurisdictions are pioneering some of the modern world's most creative - and shadowy - forms of sovereignty and government.
It is regrettable that maritime historians, in general, have paid so little attention to the seafarers' life ashore given its role as an integral element within an established maritime work pattern. Few, if any, of the published reminiscences of life at sea pay any attention to its domestic, familial and community context, and studies of maritime ethnology are concerned primarily with the organization of work aboard ship, role behaviour and communication networks.133 Despite some commendable attempts to unravel and undermine the mythology of Bachelor Jack and the popular image of drinking, whoring sailors, there is still a lack of empirical, interdisciplinary research which attempts to locate seamen within the cultural, economic and social reality of life ashore. This is doubly unfortunate given the casual nature of maritime employment in the past, the evidence of occupational pluralism and cultural similarities between seafarers and other key elements of port-based communities, whether in relation to male camaraderie, social interaction or occasional, violent conflict symbolizing the extension of occupation-based activities to non-work lives. At one level, seamen and dockers came from the same community and shared similar cultural values - dockland areas were seldom self-contained maritime enclaves but represented a critical intersection between maritime and urban space - and port towns were not necessarily dominated by seafarers and their families. As a result, the posited existence of distinct maritime cultures has to be questioned given the underlying and persistent instability of urban family life, the determinants of broader patterns of social interaction and anti-social behaviour and sectoral inter-linkages between maritime and land-based labour markets which often reflected the changing patterns of seasonal demand. By focussing on different aspects of a seafarer's life ashore, this article has sought to address a number of wider issues relating to family life, ethnicity, gender and welfare provision, some of which continue to attract new research.134 Sailors should never be regarded as a homogeneous occupational group, just as ports differed substantially according to size and their economic and trading functions, and even within individual port categories certain differences were always apparent. But a great deal still remains to be done before we can reconstruct with any accuracy the seaman's shore-based world and finally dispense with the normative assumptions which continue to influence debate and discourse. Indeed, the task of re-appraising the seafarer's urban world represents both a challenge and an opportunity for maritime historians, given the continued absence of detailed case studies which locate seafarers within their communities and explore their changing roles within a life-course perspective, utilizing family reconstitution, event-history analysis and network analysis. It is task which can only be undertaken on a multi-disciplinary basis involving active collaboration with a wide range of relevant disciplines (including ethnology, human geography, sociology and the history of medicine), but it also requires maritime historians to occupy a more central place within the historical sciences as a whole.
Document embargo until 04/03/2016.
Let us begin with the jokey new term ‘ferrosexuals’, meaning people who experience wanton fetishistic desire for trains—also more romantically labelled ‘buffer kissers’. When I was a lass too young to have heard of the Mile-high Club, ferrosexuals were called ‘train-spotters’ and their ardour was seen as innocuous, if pitiably nerdy. Does the new term mean that machines for travel are now seen as sexy, because we live in increasingly sexualised societies? Or does it mean that an underlying sexual charge in people’s interest in trains is finally being made explicit and taken seriously? We do not know. And the reason we do not know is that scholarly work—particularly historicised work—has yet to be done on sexualities’ many interfaces with transport and mobility.
In December 2012, a comparative workshop was held at Flinders University, Adelaide to discuss emerging regimes of power in response to irregular migration. The workshop was conceptually organised around similar challenges being experienced by Australia and the southern European states of Italy and Greece. In both zones, the construction of the migration problem as a question of numbers and peoples plays a large role in developing border-control policies. Reactive policies are developed around highly visible cases, rather than a systemic review of the broader problem and its real causes. Instances of highly visible irregular migration in Australia and the European Union include the post-Tampa crisis and the ‘boat people’ debate in Australia, and the critical situation on the small Italian island of Lampedusa, near Tunisia. These instances elicit strong and equally visible responses, such as the revived ‘Pacific Solution’ (offshore processing) and the transformation of Lampedusa into an offshore detention ‘container’ that closely resembles the Christmas Island detention facility. This symposium arose from these themes and aims to offer a more comprehensive approach to the issue of irregular migration.
MilneGraeme J.. Trade and Traders in Mid-Victorian Liverpool: Mercantile Business and the Making of a World PortLiverpool: Liverpool University Press; dist. by ISBS, Portland, Ore. 2000. Pp. x, 243. $56.95. ISBN 0-85323-606-2. - Volume 34 Issue 3 - Simon Ville
This article looks at the cultural impact of the shipping forecast issued by the Meteorological Office on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. It has a strange status that is unprecedented for a weather bulletin. The forecast has become engrained as a part of British culture and as a signifier of Englishness. This distinction of British and English is deliberate; this article will suggest that while the forecast covers the whole of the United Kingdom, and has an aesthetic resonance that extends nationwide, the characteristics and opinions that it has been used to represent appear to have been made specifically in respect of Englishness.The article considers reactions to the change of the sea area named Finisterre before looking at the artistic uses of the forecast. It argues that the cultural importance of the forecast has increased at the same time as its functional, informative role has become virtually redundant. Reactions to the forecast from the 1980s onwards have tended to reflect a crisis in English national identity, jostling for position in the ‘new Europe’ and re-evaluating itself at home in light of the establishment of the Scottish parliament and the national assemblies in Wales and Northern Ireland at the end of the 1990s.
This article assesses the strengths and weaknesses of Linda Colley's thesis about the formation of British identity, using the public response to black war veterans as a case study. Colley's contention that behavior, not birthplace or bloodline, was enough to qualify a person as "British" is in keeping with recent scholarly interpretations of Enlightenment theories of human difference, which were xenophobic or ethnocentric, but not racist in the modern sense. Responses to the significantly named "Black Poor" of the late 1780s, however, demonstrate that color-coded thinking could play an important role in shaping philanthropic and government responses to poverty in London. Jonas Hanway, who was best known as an advocate of charities to foster Britain's "nursery of seamen," led an effort to name, register, and remove the "Black Poor"—despite the fact that about half of these individuals had sea experience. In response, black sailors such as Joseph Johnson sought to articulate a different definition of Britishness, exploiting the ambiguity of the term. Johnson's successful career as a street entertainer who sang patriotic war songs with a model ship bound to his head illustrates the possibilities of a social history of citizenship "from the bottom up."
In any study of seascapes, an investigation of the littoral must be central, for it is here
that land and sea meet. Is there such a thing as littoral society? Is it possible to go
around the shores of an ocean, or a sea, or indeed the whole world and identify societies
that have more in common with other littoral societies than they do with their
inland neighbors? If so, do these societies draw more on their forelands—that is, their
maritime connections—than on their hinterlands? Fishing peoples, who ostensibly
are quintessential littoral peoples, exemplify the difficulties of this identification.
While their men draw their livelihood from the sea, their women engage in processing
and marketing on land, and the whole fishing community is dependent on landbased
economic forces. Many fishing communities engage in agriculture as well as piscatorial
activity. Concepts of littoral society need to be sensitive to gradations along
the strand, from the more aquatic Marsh Arabs and peddlers at the floating markets
in Bangkok to peasants who happen to live on the coast. Three criteria in particular
need attention: location, occupation, and culture.
This essay reviews recent scholarship in oceanic and imperial history in the context of the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Marcus Rediker's classic book, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea. It offers a critique of Atlantic History as it is currently practiced and proposes a new category, "coastal history," to describe scholarship that engages with oceans but does not center upon them. In evaluating work by N.A.M. Rodger, Paul Gilje, Kathleen Wilson, Michael Fisher, and others, the essay explores how ships and sailors both are, and are not, representative of the social history of islands and coastal regions.
There is the Raleigh Tavern, where more business has been transacted than on the Exchange of London or Amsterdam; in that building formerly assembled the rich, wealthy merchants of all Countries from Indies to the pole, from the Tween to the Oracles; here the Exchange of the world, the relative value of money in every kingdom on earth was settled; who has not heard of the fame of the merchants of this ancient Dominion, your Hansons, Brisbanes, &c.
Those gentlemen who please to favor me with their custom may depend upon genteel accommodations, and the very best entertainment
Taverns mattered to colonial Virginians. In the sprawling farms of early Virginia, taverns were where colonists connected. It was in the taverns that colonists learned current crop prices, purchased goods, read newspapers, and discovered business opportunities. Visitor Alexander Macaulay could mock the provincialism of Virginia's taverns to his European friends (quoted above), but for the majority of Virginia's colonists the tavern was the only link to the world off the tobacco farm. To Virginians the tavern indeed held the significance of the marketplaces of Europe.
Interestingly, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many of these taverns—perhaps two-thirds of them—were run by middling women and prominent widows. It is surprising that so important an institution was frequently managed by women because scholars have agreed that women found their options and roles progressively constricted during the eighteenth century. The case of tavernkeeping suggests the need to add to the declension model of eighteenth-century women's lives. Middling white Virginia women during the eighteenth century not only retained tavernkeeping, but also were preferred for it. Magistrates awarded licenses to middling families with previous female tavernkeeping experience deliberately. Scholars have not previously recognized that magistrates, who often passed their positions from father to son, frequently transferred taverns from mother to daughter. Tavern licenses were assigned to men, but both magistrates and license applicants knew that the tavern itself would be run by the petitioner's wife or daughter.
Passing tavernkeeping through middling women was the magistrates' effort at policing the taverns, not because they feared immorality or other challenges to the social order in the taverns, but because they feared the taverns' potential for rendering colonists penniless. Magistrates awarded taverns to families with financial and social stakes in the status quo in the hope that these tavernkeepers would encourage fiscal responsibility in their clients. Market forces assisted magistrates in this effort. Scholars have not noted how expensive it was to run a tavern and how dicey the chance of profits was. These factors limited the trade to families who had experience and could bear the financial risk. In these families, women continued to enjoy the possibility of keeping a tavern as at least one option for a respectable livelihood in eighteenth-century Virginia.
Historians have agreed on a declension model for colonial women, stating that after a moment of potential gender equality in the seventeenth century, women found themselves ridiculed during the eighteenth century until they lost their public roles and former respect. Cornelia Dayton found that women lost access to courts in eighteenth-century Connecticut. Deborah Rosen argued that laws of coverture and inheritance "worked to marginalize women from the growing [eighteenth-century] economy." Jeanne Boydson reasoned that the value placed on women's domestic labor in the seventeenth century declined during the eighteenth century. Accordingly while "the colonial goodwife [was] valued for her contribution to household prosperity," by the mid-eighteenth century, "the denigration of women's household labor was becoming an established cultural practice." Kathleen Brown maintained that in eighteenth-century Virginia in particular, men divided women into "good wives" and "nasty wenches," both of whom lived in ever-growing fear of male violence. Regarding taverns specifically, Brown concluded that women possessed an "increasingly marginal position in the male world of the tavern...
Diversity in Britain is not what it used to be. Some thirty years of government policies, social service practices and public perceptions have been framed by a particular understanding of immigration and multicultural diversity. That is, Britain's immigrant and ethnic minority population has conventionally been characterized by large, well-organized African-Caribbean and South Asian communities of citizens originally from Commonwealth countries or formerly colonial territories. Policy frameworks and public understanding - and, indeed, many areas of social science - have not caught up with recently emergent demographic and social patterns. Britain can now be characterized by 'super-diversity,' a notion intended to underline a level and kind of complexity surpassing anything the country has previously experienced. Such a condition is distinguished by a dynamic interplay of variables among an increased number of new, small and scattered, multiple-origin, transnationally connected, socio-economically differentiated and legally stratified immigrants who have arrived over the last decade. Outlined here, new patterns of super-diversity pose significant challenges for both policy and research.
In recent years, melodrama has increasingly been recognized not only as an important element in popular theatre studies, but for the intrinsic importance of the form itself. Less considered has been the relationship of the material of melodrama to the ‘real life’ it reflected in a highly conventionalized yet ultimately (for its audiences), recognizable fashion. Here, Jim Davis looks at one major category, nautical melodrama, setting the images of the navy and of sailors that it created alongside factual and critical accounts of life at sea in the first half of the nineteenth century. He conveys both the pressures that existed for redress of abuses, and the consequent balance between coercion and subversion in the melodramas themselves – —drawing in particular on the memoirs of Douglas Jerrold to explore aspects of the ambiguity to be found in contemporary attitudes. Jim Davis, who is the author of several books and articles in the area of nineteenth century theatre history, is presently teaching in the School of Theatre Studies at the University of New South Wales.
With their unusual densities of young people, highly educated workforces, comparatively cosmopolitan populations, dominant institutions of higher education, and characteristic landscapes such as the campus, fraternity row, and college-oriented shopping district, college towns represent a unique type of urban place. This study identifies several basic differences between college towns and other types of cities, considers why the college town is largely an American phenomenon, distinguishes among types of college towns, and examines some of the characteristics that make them distinctive.
The use of salt marsh for agricultural use has probably been going on for thousands of years. This paper will look at the situation in southeast England, particularly the Wash. Here enclosure for extended grazing and over the last several hundred years, for arable cultivation, may have taken place since Roman Times. An enclosure of Freiston Shore salt marsh (1979) and a proposed further enclosure at Gedney Drove End at about the same time raised concerns about the cumulative effect of these developments on nature conservation interests. These concerns prompted the nature conservation agencies to oppose the Gedney Drove End enclosure.
Though the conservation argument did not persuade the Government that no further enclosure should take place, economic circumstances changed such that the pressure for the creation of new agricultural land diminished. This marked the end of ‘reclamation’ in the Wash. Since then, in the UK at least, there have been no further enclosures of salt marsh for agriculture.
What were the arguments that lead to this change? Up to this point the perceived wisdom, in the Wash at least, was that as enclosure took place new inter-tidal land was created to seaward— with no net loss of inter-tidal land. Today we accept that this is not the case and a policy of managed re-alignment has increasingly been adopted in England, at sites ranging from the Porlock shingle ridge in north Devon to the salt marshes of Freiston in the Wash.
It is argued that recognition of ‘coastal squeeze’ probably began in the Wash some 20 years ago. It would appear that we are now witnessing a reversal of this trend. How far will it take us? Will we see a return of the large expanses of tidal swamp around the Wash and elsewhere along the southern North Sea coast? Is this an inevitable consequence of global warming?
This paper provides an historical perspective of the issues and arguments that have led us to recognize ‘coastal squeeze’ and the importance of dynamic coast, including the European Commission’s ‘EURosion Project’, which reported in 2004 (Salman et al. 2004).