Institute of Historical Research

Urbanization, mortality, and the standard of living debate: new estimates of the expectation of life at birth in nineteenth-century British cities 1By

Vast, daring, and sometimes problematic: what more could historians want from a work that combines large-scale synthesis with provocative arguments?Jürgen Osterhammel's heroic attempt to bring toge...

ABSTRACT This article examines the changing nature of patrilineality in east-central Uganda from the sixth century. While traditional anthropological models of lineality have been largely dismissed in recent scholarship, the problem remains that patrilineages and patriclans have played important roles in the lives of the Ganda, Gwere, Soga and their North Nyanza ancestors. By carefully examining changes and continuities in the form and content of patrilineality it becomes possible to understand it as historically contingent. In North Nyanza, patrilineal descent was the norm for inheritance and for household formation, but relationships formed through mothers were also crucial in the creation of new communities and in the legitimation of political power. This was not static: as communities negotiated their changing circumstances, so they adapted the form of their particular patrilineality to serve their needs.

The modern historiography of the origins of British national identities seems riven with contradictions and paradoxes. First there is a major chronological problem. Is the forging of Britishness to be located in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth centuries? Second, there is a difficulty in the compilation of such identities. Are they to be found in negative reactions to the perceived contemporary identities of others or in positive, if mythic, readings of ethnic history? Third, can there be a British identity at all when the cultural identities of what may be called the sub-nationalisms or sub-ethnicities of the United Kingdom seem to be forged at exactly the same time? And fourth, did the formation of the British Empire and the vast expansion of British imperialism in the nineteenth century tend towards the confirmation of the identity of Greater Britain or of the Welsh, Irish, English and Scottish elements that made it up?

ABSTRACT The evidence of criminal court records suggests that almost all London wives were engaged in gainful occupations in the eighteenth century. The records of the City livery companies and of Christ's Hospital show that the wives of craft masters and professional men worked, as well as those in poorer families where their income was essential. At lower socio-economic levels it was unusual for couples to work in the same trade. At middling levels it was more common, especially in textiles and retail, but no more than half of couples worked together or in related occupations.

There is nothing particularly new about the observation that the social order in Britain was subjected to immense strains by the processes of urbanization and industrialization. It threatened at times to disintegrate into anarchy through the disruption of social ties and institutions, and the emergence of frighteningly large masses of apparently masterless men. And it was transformed in the course of the nineteenth century without suffering the collapse, or revolution, which many contemporaries from right and left, from Martineau to Marx, and Eldon to Engels, had anticipated with dread or relish. Neither is there anything particularly new in observing that those who have power, authority, and influence seek to use these to protect and preserve the state of things which gives them power, and to maintain the peaceful, and preferably contented, subordination of those less comfortable than themselves. What is new is that in the last decade many social historians have approached a whole range of the activities of powergroups as exercises in devising mechanisms of social control which conditioned and manipulated the propertyless masses into accepting and operating the forms and functions of behaviour necessary to sustain the social order of an industrial society. Such efforts at social control are seen as playing an important, conceivably decisive, role in the formation and underpinning of bourgeois capitalist society. In such a view the success of social control in taming and civilizing the working classes in moulds shaped to fit the needs of bourgeois society must take its place alongside the iron disciplines of wage labour, and the coercive power of the state, as a key factor in the shaping of modern society. In many ways this is a curious view, placing the working classes perpetually on the receiving end of outside forces and influences, and portraying them as so much putty in the hands of a masterful and scheming bourgeoisie, a remote and powerful state, and a set of technological imperatives. It allows little for the possibility that the working classes themselves generated their own values and attitudes suited to the requirements of life in an industrial society, and imposed their own forms on middle-class institutions. The tables might be turned on

Patrick K. O'Brien, Leandro Prados, De La Escosura, Agricultural Productivity and European Industrialization, 1890-1980, The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 45, No. 3, European Special Issue (Aug., 1992), pp. 514-536

An analysis of innovations in the eighteenth-century British textile industry is the basis for an evaluation of aggregate studies of invention during the Industrial Revolution, derived from patent evidence alone. Disaggregation of the data challenges recent generalizations concerning the pace and pattern of technical change over the period. Discontinuities in the nature of invention, promoting an acceleration in total factor productivity growth, are traced to the 1790s. Prior to that date, industrial development conformed to a pattern of Smithian growth, as manufacturers diversified their output in response to an expanding domestic market for consumer goods.

Patrick K. O'Brien, Leandro Prados, De La Escosura, Agricultural Productivity and European Industrialization, 1890-1980, The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 45, No. 3, European Special Issue (Aug., 1992), pp. 514-536

Peter Lake, Michale Questier; AGENCY, APPROPRIATION AND RHETORIC UNDER THE GALLOWS: PURITANS, ROMANISTS AND THE STATE IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND, Past & Prese

Astronomy does not often appear in the socio-political and economic history of nineteenthcentury Britain. Whereas contemporary literature, poetry and the visual arts made significant reference to the heavens, the more earthbound arena of finance seems an improbable place to encounter astronomical themes. This paper shows that astronomical practice was an important factor in the emergence of what can be described as an accountant's view of the world. I begin by exploring the senses of the term ‘calculation’ in Regency England, and then seek to reveal how the dramatic growth of vigilance in science, the organization and control of labour, and the monitoring of society and the economy drew upon and informed this disciplined numerical technique. Observations in all these areas could only be trusted if correctly reduced through a single system of calculation assisted by a group of standardized tables and division of mental labour. Within this setting the stellar economy provided an object that was seemingly ordered and law-like and therefore predictable through a powerful combination of techniques.

The ceremonial life of the early modern town has emerged as an important area of study for urban historians. Ever since the publication of Charles Phythian-Adams' innovative study, attention has focused on the elaborate series of processions, pageants and rites of passage which were a constant feature of the yearly cycle of town life. In the wake of his work other studies of the ceremonial life of late medieval and early modern towns have added to the urban historian's awareness of the importance of ritualized forms of behaviour as a symbolic thread which helped bind together the social fabric of the townscape. The research done thus far forms one of those areas of scholarship in which the cross-fertilization of the interdisciplinary approach, so beloved of the ‘new’ urban history, has proved particularly fruitful. It might be surprising then that London, the largest of English towns, has yet to receive similar treatment. There have been, of course, several important studies of the capital in the early modern period, and they have something to say about the ceremonial life of the city. These have largely concentrated on topics such as the structure of government, the nature of London's ruling elite, and social mobility within the city's craft organizations. While providing important sidelights on ceremony, these treatments have tended to place ceremonial events in the background, as the ‘icing on the cake’. At the same time there have been many important studies by art and literary historians of ceremonial occasions such as coronations, royal entries or the Lord Mayors' Shows, but these have tended to concentrate on ceremony as an expression of dynastic propaganda or as a development in dramatic form rather than as part of the social history of the city. The object of this article will be to attempt to rectify this gap in our knowledge by applying some of the framework bequeathed by Phythian-Adams, and so try to assess the relevence of his conclusions about urban society in this period to the particular case of London.

ABSTRACT The achievement of universal suffrage after 1918 stimulated new forms of democratic participation in Britain. These decades witnessed not only renewed efforts by political parties to mobilize the mass electorate, but also the establishment of new kinds of civic association, often secular in character, strongly invested in a discourse of active citizenship, and committed to creating and defending a space within associational life which was free of partisan or sectarian conflict. This article presents a fresh perspective on the political culture of interwar Britain by comparing and contrasting the experiences of four voluntary associations active during this period: the National Federation of Women's Institutes, Rotary International, the British Legion, and the League of Nations Union. It analyses their relationship with conventional party politics, rejecting the argument that these associations served as vehicles for middle-class anti-socialism, and concludes, instead, that their pluralist values and political centrism formed part of a wider response by political, religious, and educational elites to the challenge of class conflict, economic instability, and political extremism in the post-war decades.

Climatic deterioration in the later middle ages was associated with an increasing frequency of marine storm surges affecting the coasts of the southern North Sea. This paper investigates the impact of storm surges upon the lands bordering the Thames estuary and tidal river between the mid-thirteenth and mid-fifteenth centuries. Land use in the coastal and riverine marshes is reviewed, and the means and costs of defence against marine flooding explored. The impact of flooding upon human use of the marshlands, upon the suburbs of medieval London and upon the Thames fisheries are all investigated. Stress is placed upon the complex interaction of economic and environmental factors in determining the response to the threat of marine flooding.

Early probate inventories, an under‐used source in the history of cartography, can provide an insight into sixteenth‐century map ownership. Those from the Vice‐Chancellor's Court at Cambridge, for example, are sufficiently detailed in many cases to show how the university towns of England must have comprised a distinctive map market, how there were different categories of map owners within the university ambit, what maps were bought, and for what purpose. A number of the maps and atlases can be identified and the existence of lost maps confirmed.

Abstract This article looks at what has and has not changed in women's lives since they gained the vote. Women are still more prone to poverty than men, especially single mothers and older women, a fact which would have disappointed the suffragists, many of whom saw elimination of poverty as a priority and played a major role in bringing the Welfare State into being. Suffragists did not expect gender equality to follow quickly after getting the vote. They expected – and got – a long, hard struggle. The women's movement was stronger in the nineteen-twenties and thirties than it had ever been and led to an impressive number of legislative changes. Women's activism was more muted after the Second World War, but revived in the nineteen-fifties even before the great wave of feminism after 1968. The spate of legislation which resulted was comparable with that of the nineteen-twenties. It is not enough to examine legislation. The greatest change in women's lives has been due to increased use of birth control from the late nineteenth century. From the nineteen-sixties the Pill has allowed women to delay starting families without sacrificing sexual relationships, and to establish themselves in a career. However, career opportunities for women remain limited, especially in the skilled trades, while divorce and the ‘long hours’ culture since the nineteen-eighties have made it more difficult for women to combine family and career. The historical record suggests that increased gender equality has been achieved only by campaigns, legislation and measures of positive discrimination, not by gradual persuasion.

Journal Article Social Histories of Old Age and Aging Get access Pat Thane Pat Thane Institute of Historical Research, University of London, Senate House, London WC1 E 7H4 Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Social History, Volume 37, Issue 1, Fall 2003, Pages 93–111, https://doi.org/10.1353/jsh.2003.0163 Published: 01 October 2003

(2004). ‘An Era of Domesticity’? Histories of Women and Gender in Interwar Britain. Cultural and Social History: Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 225-233.

The first comparative study of the spread of mass education around the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this unique new book uses a bottom-up focus and demonstrates, to an e

Large historical problems are stimulating to debate but difficult to specify and answer in ways that might carry forward our long-standing discourses in global economic history. The papers which form the basis of our essay deal with a meta question and are focused upon the economic consequences (the costs and benefits) for those European societies most actively involved in territorial expansion, colonization, world trade, capital exports and emigration to other continents over the past five centuries. Our symbolic dates mark (rather than demarcate) the beginning and ending of European imperialism. Colonisation occurred in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages but between 1415 and 1789 European powers, particularly Britain but also Spain, Portugal, Holland, France and Italy, founded hundreds of colonies. Individual articles have concentrated upon periods of significance for particular countries and are, moreover, analysed within the context of an international economy, evolving through four eras (or orders) of mercantilism (1415–1846), liberalism (1846–1914), neo-mercantilism (1914–48), and decolonisation (1948–74). Our Introduction draws heavily upon six national case studies as well as discussions that took place at a conference in Madrid in 1997. We do not intend to cite particular contributions to the inferences and conclusions in this essay. Our views represent an elaboration upon and an interpretation of the articles that follow.