Britain In 1830s Research Articles

Mining knowledge: Nineteenth-century Cornish electrical science and the controversies of clay.

Michael Faraday's laboratory experiments have dominated traditional histories of the electrical sciences in 1820s and 1830s Britain. However, as this article demonstrates, in the mining region of Cornwall, Robert Were Fox fashioned a very different approach to the study of electromagnetic phenomena. Here, it was the mine that provided the foremost site of scientific experimentation, with Fox employing these underground locations to measure the Earth's heat and make claims over the existence of subterranean electrical currents. Yet securing philosophical claims cultivated in mines proved challenging for Fox, with metropolitan audiences, including Faraday, loath to give credit to the results of these underground experiments. This article explores how Fox developed a way of modeling his mine experiments, using clay samples, to communicate knowledge from industrial Cornwall to urban centers of elite science. It argues that the mine was an epistemologically complex venue of scientific activity, at once seeming to provide a way of examining nature directly, without recourse to laboratory contrivance, while simultaneously being a place where knowledge claims were hard to verify without access to these physically challenging locations. In exploring Fox's work, this study contributes to a growing literature of spatial investigation that takes the vertical as its unit of analysis.

From encyclopaedia to magazine: the Loudons, the public, and the architect in 1830s Britain

John C. Loudon and Jane Webb Loudon formed one of the most productive publishing alliances in the fields of gardening, botany, and architecture in early nineteenth-century Britain. They employed a range of genres with particular skill, such as the encyclopaedia, the magazine, and the manual. Between 1834 and 1838, they produced the first British architectural magazine — then still a young genre. They strove to improve architectural taste among anyone involved with architecture: from the builder, student, and architect to the client and occupier, including women. This article examines the shortlived Architectural Magazine and the claim that its inclusive approach documented a brief period of architectural democratisation during the 1830s, before the exclusionary tendencies of professionalisation and institutionalisation took hold. Who made up the early architectural magazine’s ‘public’, and in which ways can Loudon’s approach indeed be called ‘democratic’? To address such questions, this article considers the Architectural Magazine as a successor to Loudon’s Encyclopaedia of Cottage, Farm, and Villa Architecture. It explores the networks of readers and authors established by the Loudons, and the relationship between the public and the emerging architectural profession, in light of contemporary aesthetic and political theory.

"The Most Infamous Degradation of the Honour of Civil Government": The Turton Job and the sexual politics of colonial rule in 1830s Britain and British North America

"The Most Infamous Degradation of the Honour of Civil Government": The Turton Job and the sexual politics of colonial rule in 1830s Britain and British North America

Rage Against the Machines: Labor-Saving Technology and Unrest in England, 1830-32

Can the adoption of labor-saving technology lead to social instability and unrest? We examine a canonical historical case, the so-called 'Captain Swing' riots in 1830s Britain. Variously attributed to the adverse consequences of weather shocks, the shortcomings of the Poor Law, or the after-effects of enclosure, we emphasize the importance of a new technology - the threshing machine. Invented in the 1780s, it spread during and after the Napoleonic Wars. Using farm advertisements from newspapers published in 66 English and Welsh towns, we compile a new measure of the technology's diffusion. Parishes with ads for threshing machines had much higher riot probabilities in 1830 - and the relationship was even stronger for machine-breaking attacks. Threshing machines were mainly useful in wheat-growing areas. To establish a causal role for labor-saving technology, we instrument technology adoption with the FAO measure of soil suitability for wheat, and show that this in turn predicts unrest.

On the Cultural Projection of Population Crisis: The Case of <em>The Omega Man</em>

In 1974, Kurt Waldheim, then secretary-general of the United Nations (UN), declared the year to come Population Year (1974).1 Coming less than a month after the divisive and widely publicized World Population Conference in Bucharest the same year, the UN's agenda reflected an already charged and unprecedentedly global circulation of alarm.2 The briefest historical overview of industrial capitalist culture suggests a consistent coincidence of moments of systemic economic crisis with the proliferation of alarmist discourses of population. The Malthusian problem of population, for example, was born in the context of industrialization in Britain in 1830s, whereas the eugenics movement reaches the height of its influence in the wake of the Great Depression (1929-39) (and the 1917 October Revolution), during the volatile interwar years. In this sense, the popular alarm about overpopulation that reemerges in the late 1960s can be read as a simple reflex response to the systemic crisis that is dated to these years. Yet, as the significant periodizing claims rooted in these years suggest (articulated by the now familiar terms of deindustrialization, post-Fordism, globalization, and neoliberalism), there is room consider the possibility of a more complex shift at work in the idea of itself. In other words, it is worth asking how the discourse of population-as-threat, which was (and remains) such a powerful reactionary discourse when articulated through the lenses of nationalism, industrial class antagonisms, and biological racisms, adapts to the transformations of scale (global), production (post-Fordist) and socalled racism.This essay explores the relevance and consequence of this question from the standpoint of popular film culture. I first situate the crisis discourse of within the volatile political-economic conjuncture of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the period during which the idea of a population takes hold in the popular imagination. I turn to film and the problem of crowd photography to theorize a framework for reading the media aesthetics of alarm. I finally look to American science fiction cinema-perhaps the most concentrated archive of demografictions of any historical period-and, in particular, The Omega Man (dir. Boris Sagal, 1971). Situating these cinematic imaginings of apocalyptic demographic futures within a longer history of a crisis discourse of and its ideological function during moments of capitalist system failure exposes an internally conflicted field of political investments and points to a deeper conceptual crisis, apparent in the 1970s, of the modern, industrial imaginary of population.3The Crisis Discourse of PopulationBy the 1970s, a discourse of crisis focusing on dynamics had already undergone a series of transformations. What appears as the threat of a global bomb in the popular culture at the very end of the 1960s builds upon a discourse of disaster that had been shaped and reshaped, over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in relation to the concentration of urban populations, wage labor, and the development of statistical management and medical rationalities of reproduction. Popular cultural expressions of alarm in the 1970s can be usefully read as emerging from within a polarized discursive field that was a constant characteristic of earlier imaginings of crisis. At one pole, there is the threat of overpopulation: the alarmist prognostications of a global bomb revitalize the logic of the Malthusian problem of population, extrapolating their environmental and political catastrophes from the assumption of the natural inequity of two powers of and the production of the earth.4 At the other extreme and less evident in the dominant 1970s' rhetorics of bombs is the threat of decline. Exemplary here is the eugenics movements that exerted such widespread influence across Europe and North America during the first half of the twentieth century. …

Trykkemaskinens politiske økonomi. Værdien af viden og litteraturens pris i 1830’ernes England

Thomas Palmelund Johansen: “The Political Economy of the Printing Press. The Value of Knowledge and the Price of Literature in 1830s Britain”The article explores the use of the printing machine as a symbol and illustration of enlightenment and economizing principles in the cheap periodical literature of Britain in the 1830s. Focussing on two key cheap periodicals from the period it seeks to highlight the central role played by the printing press and steam print in the self-image of the publishers of cheap instructive and wholesome ‘useful’ and scientific literature targeting an upper working-class audience in the attempt to curb the influence of the illegal radical papers. The printing machine as an ideal object provi-ded an illustration of the economic and social structure of civilized society while at the same time symbolizing enlightenment and reason as opposed to ignorance and violence. The use of the material production of print as an instruction in political economy is seen as an attempt to engage with the reader and bring forth a sense of interconnectedness between the social classes based on underlying economic principles of e.g. division of labour.

The democratic anti-capitalism of Bronterre O'Brien

The following article analyses the political economy of James Bronterre O'Brien, arguably the single most important intellectual of 1830s' British working-class radicalism. It examines O'Brien's critique of 1830s Britain, and it examines his depiction of the society he wished to see Britain become. The article argues that O'Brien's work of the period 1832–1841 is best viewed as the first example of a genuinely democratic anti-capitalist political economy. The article goes on to analyse changes that occurred to O'Brien's democratic anti-capitalist political economy, and offers an account of why it, together with the class analysis with which it was closely connected, was partially abandoned in 1841. The article concludes that the reasons for these changes are to be found not in ideational factors internal to O'Brien's political economy, but rather in O'Brien's personal circumstances and relationship with his imagined audience.

The Problems of Church and State: Dissenting Politics and the London Missionary Society in 1830s Britain

The Problems of Church and State: Dissenting Politics and the London Missionary Society in 1830s Britain