Company Men Research Articles

A Corporate Christianity: Religion in the Early Modern Hudson’s Bay Company

The early modern Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) built a form of Christianity that was decidedly corporate in its design. Unlike the way Catholicism in the French fur trade was deployed to achieve imperial as well as commercial ends, Christianity in the HBC was positioned exclusively with commerce in mind. This meant it was used not to colonize Indigenous cultures or spaces but to control and protect the company’s overseas resources and support corporate relations in London. Even when this use changed in the early 1800s as baptism and religious education was offered to mixed-ancestry children of company men, the corporate agenda remained at the heart of the company’s use of religion. The history of religion in the early modern HBC underlines that the company’s identity and aspirations at this time were commercial rather than imperial.

Humberto Garcia. England Re-Oriented: How Central and South Asian Travelers Imagined the West, 1750–1857.

Through a series of original and close readings that reverses the usual order of things, Humberto Garcia argues that (white) East India Company men were the original mimic men who adopted Persianate manners to ingratiate themselves to India’s provincial rulers and business elites. Persian-speaking travelers such as Joseph Emin, Mirza Shaikh I’tesamuddin, Mirza Abu Talib Khan, and Dean Mahomet, who had become acquainted with officials of the East India Company were welcomed to England. Their encounters with British society at various levels were shaped by ideas of hospitality that were widespread in the Persianate cultures of Central and South Asia. Using a “decolonial analytic” (37), Garcia treats the history of the late eighteenth-century British Empire in India as contingent. Rather than position this moment as a precursor to the nineteenth-century presumption that (white) colonizers had a superior culture, Garcia’s arguments offer a corrective to the idea that Central and South Asian travelers felt uncomfortable or inferior in eighteenth-century London. Instead, these engagements between cultivated interlocutors were based on hospitality and homosociality. Until the early nineteenth century, “an imperial homosocial arcadia” thrived, defined by “Persian politeness, bravery, generosity, and true manliness” (15). As British competition for Indian territories escalated, the Englishman became increasingly aligned with an empire that was gendered in ways distinct from Persianate ideals of male friendship. As argued by Mrinalini Sinha, one of the co-editors of this book’s series, by the late nineteenth century, colonial societies were marked by racialized colonial masculinities that differentiated between the putative “manly Englishman” and “effeminate Bengali.” Garcia’s book explains the process by which these distinctions emerged. As he notes, many of these texts are centered on “the friction between sentimental manliness and military aggressiveness” (146).

Transnational representation of a gendered recession in corporate dramas

The cinematic depiction of the financial crisis has centred on the explanation of the causes and consequences of the global recessionary scenario in which gender acquires special relevance. My aim in this article is to carry out a hitherto unaddressed transnational analysis of corporate dramas. More specifically, I elicit the commonalities as well as local specificities that different Western cinematographies show when tackling gendered recessionary discourses on ‘mancession’ and ‘austerity’. Films such as The Last Days of Lehman Brothers (Samuels, 2009, BBC), Money Never Sleeps (Stone, 2010), The Company Men (J. Wells, 2010) and The Big Short (McKay, 2015) have, on the one hand, aligned with nostalgic and retro-sexist discourses by focusing on male suffering to confront the recession while relegating female characters as emotional companions of the male hero. On the other hand, the representation of female characters in these films has also put to the test the inconsistencies of neoliberal discourses when analysed from the perspective of genre. To illustrate the transnational dimension of the ‘narrated’ impact of the ‘Global Financial Crisis’ in different scenarios, I compare a US Wall Street film and a Spanish corporate drama of the Great Recession: Margin Call (J Chandor, 2011, USA) and The Tip of the Iceberg (La punta del iceberg, D Cánovas, 2016, Spain).

ISSUES OF INDIVIDUAL CAPITALISM IN THE NARRATIVE FILM OF THANK YOU FOR SMOKING AND THE COMPANY MEN

The idea of capitalism always refers to the triumph of the U.S. giant industry. In economic field, American and British capitalism is called as individual capitalism – the contrary of communal capitalism a la Japan and Germany. This paper is intended to examine the identity of economic character of individual capitalism in two Hollywood movies Thank You for Smoking (2006) and The Company Men (2010). Exploring the theory of individual and communal capitalism stated by Lester Thurow, it can be found that through mechanistic relationship, hard individual competition and unending punishment, those all erase emotional bound between individual and corporation. In short it becomes one of the reasons why American industry perishes its superiority slowly.

A New Kind of Company Town

A New Kind of Company Town Scott Warren In the 1990s, u.s. government policies of deterrence pushed millions of border crossers into remote areas along the U.S.-Mexico border, such as the desert that surrounds Ajo, Arizona (see Figure 1). A small town, Ajo lies approximately 40 miles north of the border and sits on traditional Hia C-ed O'odham territory. Whereas Ajo had long been a Border Patrol outpost, deterrence policies transformed it into a major hub of activity. In 1989, for instance, twenty-one Border Patrol Agents were stationed here. By 2012, when a new $22-million Border Patrol station opened, the number of agents had risen to 500. This growth is a local manifestation of the ascendance of the border security industry. In the Ajo corridor alone, tens of millions of dollars have been spent on border walls, new Border Patrol stations, highway checkpoints, surveillance towers, forward operating bases, vehicles, aircraft, and personnel. Additional millions are spent each year by other federal, state, and local agencies that also contribute to border enforcement work. Altogether, this new border security industry functions like an extractive industry. Some jobs and additional spending are created locally, but the vast majority of wealth is funneled to distant corporations and people who do not live in or anywhere near Ajo. Meanwhile, local residents, and significantly those of O'odham and Mexican descent, bear the burden of living in "high-intensity enforcement" zones. The very land itself is transformed as it is scarred by infrastructure, roads, and thousands of miles of vehicle tracks laid down in protected conservation areas. Border security, though, is not the first extractive industry to remake Ajo's landscape. In the 19th century, Ajo was a mining outpost in which mostly people of Mexican and O'odham descent lived. At the turn of the 20th century, an Anglo venture drilled a well, built a railroad, and began excavation of an open pit copper mine. The original settlement called Ajo was consumed by the pit. A new company town was laid out and built, which, over time, became the Ajo of today. The company imposed a three-tiered racial hierarchy, where the highest pay and best jobs went to Anglo workers, then down to Mexican workers, and lastly to O'odham workers. Reflecting this hierarchy, the new company town was built with segregated districts literally called American Town, Mexican Town, and Indian Village. Eventually, the company did provide housing, health care, and some education to its workers and their families. It also reacted violently against labor protest, union organizing, and strikes. Some of the more sinister practices were "deportations," in which not [End Page 188] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Southern Arizona (map by author). only striking workers but also those in the community who supported them would be rounded up and shipped off to distant towns or left in the middle of the desert. Company men made sure these undesirables did not return. In Ajo, for instance, company guards screened all arrivals at the train depot, deciding who belonged and who did not. In the 1980s, the company responded to a major strike by hiring replacement workers. Protests, pickets, and violence ensued as a largely Hispanic and Native workforce faced off against white supervisors, managers, and mine owners. Families who had lived in Ajo for generations were evicted from their homes because, according to a company spokesman interviewed in the Arizona Daily Star, "A replaced striker is no longer an employee, and his presence doesn't make any sense" (Rosenblum, 1984). Once the strike was broken, the company closed the Ajo mine and refocused its efforts on its foreign mines. Ajo was left traumatized, a post-industrial shell of what it had once been. The border security industry, with its long tendrils to the military- and prison-industrial complexes, filled the vacuum. Like the old company, the new company [End Page 189] imagines itself benign. Border security, they say, is about defense, protection, and safety. One hundred years ago, mining and other extractive industries imagined themselves benevolent, mounting a "peaceful invasion" of the borderlands, Mexico, and Latin America, and bringing progress and...

Globalization and Corporate Elites in South Korea: Education and Career Mobility

Mainstream globalization literature has maintained that a rapidly globalizing economy and neo-liberal reforms will lead to the emergence of a transnational business elite. The South Korean economy has implemented neo-liberal policies and reforms since the Asian financial crisis and has rapidly integrated into the global economy; these developments have occurred simultaneously with the globalization and growth of the Korean economy. Have these transitions led to the transnationalization of the corporate elite in South Korea? Using life-course data for top Korean managers from the top 100 industrial enterprises in 2010 and 2015, including information on educational background, career and mobility patterns, and the share of globally recruited top managers, we explore the evidence for the emergence of a transnational business elite in Korea. Our analysis indicates that nationally recruited company men – not global job- and company-hoppers – are still predominant in the South Korean economy.

Examining Patterns of Food Exchange and Dependency at Moose Fort, 1783-1785

Many historians studying the fur trade have argued or assumed that Indigenous peoples swiftly became dependent on the fur trading posts in North America for their survival. In order to gain insight into native-newcomer relations but also particuarly to address the question of dependency, this paper examines patterns of food exchange between Hudson’s Bay Company men employed at Moose Fort and the James Bay Cree homeguard that lived near the Fort from October 1783 to September 1785. It finds that the flow of foodstuffs from Indigenous peoples to Moose Fort greatly outweighed the flow of food from the Fort to Iindigenous peoples. Furthermore, this paper will argue that the traders of Moose Fort were consistently reliant upon these provisions supplied by Indigenous hunters, trappers and fishers, as periods when most Indigenous providers were absent from the area resulted in conditions of food crises at the Fort. Thus, the relations of food exchange at Moose Fort provided mutual benefits to both parties, but it was ultimately the Fort itself that was much more dependent upon this relationship. Overall, this evidence calls for more nuanced and less one-sided theoretical models of dependency in the history of the fur trade.

A “New” Economic Elite in India: Transnational and Neoliberal?

Much of the globalization literature and accompanying theory project that, as countries integrate into the global economy, they will converge towards a transnational and neoliberal version of capitalism. It is presumed that this happens with the rise of international companies, which along with a transnational class of managers, enable the spread of neoliberal management thinking. In the wake of liberalization policies and reforms as well as the globalization and growth of India’s economy, and using life course data for more than one hundred Indian top managers, including information on nationality, time spent working and studying abroad, education background, career and mobility patterns, we explore the evidence for the emergence of a transnational and neo-liberal business elite in India. In the Indian case, we find that top managers are not composed of “transnational rootless company hoppers” but are dominated by “nationally recruited company men.”

Face-making

This article explores emotional and gendered meanings of a series of Chinese clay portrait figures produced in Guangzhou during the 18th century for men associated with the Danish Asiatic Company. It investigates the presentation of emotions and corporate masculine hierarchies in these individual full-length and bust portraits, which combined emotional ideas and repertoires of performance of both Chinese craftsmen and the Company men who commissioned them. These portraits are contextualized with a range of examples made for the English and Dutch East India Company to understand performances of European emotions and masculinities surrounding consumption and display, and to assess them in relation to contemporary Chinese examples to distinguish specifically European sensibilities and cultural codes. It then explores how, on their return to Europe, these portraits enacted emotional and gendered meanings as objects of personal, familial and corporate value that were differently distributed and gifted. The essay concludes that these portraits were calculated investments that employed ‘face-making’; that is, a range of different tropes and traditions of emotional display both within and through these material objects, to differentiate hierarchies of power and modes of strategic action for Company men both individually and corporately.

Plumes, Quadroons, and Company Men: Colonial Louisiana and the Atlantic World

Over the past few decades, the field of Atlantic studies has risen to prominence as an alternative to national histories. Universities now maintain endowed chairs and academic centers to investigate the commercial, political, and cultural links that spanned that ocean from the fifteenth through the nineteenth century. Scholars’ efforts have transformed old perceptions of the Atlantic from that of a barrier between the Old World and the New into a thoroughfare that connected four continents. Yet at times Atlantic historians produce what resembles the old wine of the Age of Exploration poured into the new bottle of an Atlantic world. As Sylvia R. Frey, one of the contributors to Louisiana: Crossroads of the Atlantic World, notes, the field “still tends to break along national fault lines” (185). Books and articles on British and Spanish iterations of that “world,” populated by

Personal Gain or Organizational Benefits? How to Explain Active Corruption

Corrupt practices in organizations are commonly explained via the rational choice of individual employees, with the benefits of deviant actors at the heart of the theoretical approach. This Article challenges the rational choice perspective with reference to cases of corruption in which the organizational benefits are crucial and personal gains negligible. The authors propose to embed the concept of “useful illegality” (Luhmann) into an institutional theory framework and develop a set of indicators for the systematic comparison of individual case studies. Exemplary analyses of two landmark cases of corporate bribery on behalf of German corporations' subsidiaries abroad (Siemens ArgentinaandMagyar Telekom) show that active corruption was neither simply a function of individual deviance, nor of personal gain. In contrast, institutional theory allows the modeling of organizational deviance as a function of unwritten rules that lend legitimacy to the deviant behavior of bribe payers. Despite plentiful opportunities in the periphery of these two multinational corporations, the few instances of personal gain were either in line with the organizational incentive structures (as inTelekom) or attributable to the loss of membership (as inSiemens). Mostly high-ranking employees, loyal to their organization, committed those crimes at high personal risks. The discussion of factors that explain why these “company men” nonetheless complied with the unwritten rules, in support of organizational benefits, leads the authors to conclude with likely consequences for effective regulation. They argue that it is the usefulness of the illegal behavior for the organization, its entrenchment in organizational cultures, and amplified adaptation problems with regard to changing institutional environments that explain what makes corrupt practices so hard to control and to regulate in a formal legal organization.

Accumulation and Enjoyment on Mulholland Drive

Accumulation and Enjoyment on Mulholland Drive Todd McGowan hollywood contra capitalism When Hollywood addresses itself explicitly to the critique of capitalism, the results are often baleful. Rather than exploring either the inherent contradictions of the capitalist system or its psychic costs, films tend to provide either mystifying analyses or anodyne solutions. One need look no further than The Company Men (John Wells, 2011) or Larry Crowne (Tom Hanks, 2011), two responses to the 2008 economic crisis, to find lamentable confirmations of this maxim. The Company Men preaches an earlier version of capitalism as the solution to the contemporary crisis and Larry Crowne advocates going to a community college for worker retraining. These liberal remedies to a crisis within capitalism appear less noxious than the austerity measures proposed and enacted by conservative governments around the world, but they in no way present a serious response to the failures of the capitalist mode of production. The spate of documentaries probing the economic collapse confronts these failures more directly. They take up an entirely critical attitude toward the immorality prominent among those arch-capitalists who created the crisis. The most famous of these documentaries is Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job (2010). Ferguson shows how many bankers on Wall Street both precipitated the failure and profited immensely from it. The film makes clear that the financial crisis was not an accident or necessity of the capitalist mode of production but an act of volition on the part of savvy investors out to make as much money as possible. Here, there is no papering over the economic causes or the personal devastation of the crisis, as in The Company Men or Larry Crowne. Instead, Inside Job is a full-throated indictment of capitalism. And yet, this type of film does not go far enough and cedes far too much terrain to the object of its critique. Despite its radical tone and highly critical edge, Inside Job never takes aim at the proper target. It envisions the economic crisis as the doing of a few bad apples within the capitalist system rather than as the inevitable result of the system itself. It enacts a moral rather than a political indictment. This tendency to take up a moral rather than a political position infects many documentary [End Page 101] exposés, including those of Michael Moore, that otherwise provides an incisive critique of the contemporary capitalist economy.1 But even films that remain on an economic terrain rather than slipping onto a moral one in their critique of capitalism still come up lacking in their indictment. The masterpieces depicting the disastrous effects of capitalism or its inherent corruption, like Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges, 1941) or Glengarry Glen Ross (James Foley, 1992), fail to question how capitalism betrays its adherents. Though Sullivan’s Travels and Glengarry Glen Ross both show people destroyed by capitalism, neither is able to translate this depiction of destruction into a critique of the system’s basic premises. In Hollywood’s critical vision, capitalism produces inequality and corruption, but the cinematic critique never touches on the precise logic of enjoyment that subtends the capitalist system. By leaving capitalism’s logic of enjoyment intact, direct filmic critiques, even those coming from outside Hollywood like John Sayles’s Matewan (1987) or Ken Loach’s Bread and Roses (2000), enable spectators to continue to adhere to the fundamental structure of capitalism while wanting to see it tweaked on the edges. Capitalism isn’t working in these films, but its failure doesn’t stem from a fundamental error in understanding how we enjoy. The key to an effective critique of capitalism lies in the ability to expose this error and make evident that capitalism represents a barrier to our enjoyment, even for those who succeed. Unless cinema lays bare this fundamental error, its critique will remain within the orbit of what it attempts to critique rather than escaping it. Marx does not believe in the power of ideas or representations to challenge the dominance of capitalism. But he does admit that correctly apprehending the structure of capitalism can give material action a helping hand, though it can only do so if it thinks through capitalism in its...

“Quite indifferent to these things”: The Role of Emotions and Conversion in the Dutch East India Company's Interactions with the South Lands

This article situates the engagement of the Dutch East India Company (the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC) with the South Lands in the context of diverse understandings of the missionary endeavour within the Company in the first half of the seventeenth century. In that light, it argues that both emotions and the idea of evangelising were critical to the objectives and experiences of the VOC in regards to the South Lands. Powerful feelings about evangelising informed both why and how the Company engaged with this region, shaping the nature of discussion within the Company archives about this endeavour. These sentiments were not consistent across the Company but were shaped by a wide range of factors that includes specific social, political, and economic motives for the Company, the hierarchical status of author and readership, the nature and purpose of the compositional form, individual social and confessional identities, professional expertise, and experiences in the region. Moreover, Company men's interpretations of the emotions of local peoples in regards to Company objectives were critical to their judgments about the susceptibility of these people to evangelising and the Company's decisions about its obligations to spread Christian doctrine in the region.

Anthracite Labor Wars: Tenancy, Italians, and Organized Crime in the Northern Coalfield of Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1897–1959

Anthracite Labor Wars: Tenancy, Italians, and Organized Crime in the Northern Coalfield of Northeastern Pennsylvania, 1897–1959

Screening The Crisis

Is the current economic crisis a turning point, or rather a condition in which indecision is perpetuated? This question is answered through a reading of three recent Hollywood films about the crisis: The Company Men, Margin Call, and Up in the Air. While valorizing resilience in the face of crisis, the films also point to what is lost in the pursuit of resilience, including the capacity to imagine alternatives.

Literary Barbed Wire

Literary Barbed Wire

<em>Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765–1858</em>, by Joseph Sramek

Reviewed by: Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765–1858 by Joseph Sramek Durba Ghosh (bio) Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765–1858, by Joseph Sramek; pp. xiii + 250. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, £58.00, $90.00. Gender, Morality, and Race in Company India, 1765–1858 begins with a puzzle that has dogged the study of the British Empire in India: how could a small group of British men rule over a large and diverse population of multiethnic, multireligous, and multilingual Indians across a disjointed group of territories on a subcontinent? The book spans from 1765 to nearly a hundred years later. However, the most compelling part of the argument is about the period between 1820 and the Indian Rebellion in 1857. Joseph Sramek focuses on the importance that the East India Company’s officials placed in earning the positive public opinion of Indian subjects. They constructed a public image of British officers, soldiers, and civil servants as more trustworthy and morally superior than they were in actuality. As he explains, early colonial officials felt a great deal of anxiety about the debts that British Company men contracted while in India and their proclivity toward drunkenness and violence, so they presented themselves as moral figures, contradicting all evidence to the contrary. Once the British constructed themselves as civilized and moral, the East India Company was bound to uphold this fiction, even though it was continually challenged by the actual behavior of those who drank and gambled. The most interesting example in Sramek’s analysis focuses on the numerical imbalance between Indian sepoys and British soldiers, which was as high as five to one in some areas. Combined with the appearance of dissolute behavior by British-born soldiers, this numerical lopsidedness provoked a crisis of authority that was resolved in unexpected ways. Until the 1820s and 1830s, the British framed the upper caste of the Indian soldiers in the army (the sepoys) as analogous to the class of landed elites who were putatively the officers in the British army. British officials believed that sepoys were upper caste, respectable men of social standing; they did not drink, gamble, and seemed to be faithful to their wives, unlike British soldiers who were often found drunk, indebted, and diseased from visiting prostitutes in the bazaar. Although British officials by and large felt that Indian soldiers were less competent and disciplined, thus requiring British officers to [End Page 124] oversee them, these “racist attitudes were offset by general characterizations among many Britons in India of sepoys as gentleman soldiers” (68). This show of respectful recognition may have been a strategic response to being outnumbered, but sramek argues that there was an ideological consequence: it heightened the anxieties that British officers felt about their tenuous hold on the soldiers in their command. By the 1820s, after a generation of British officials had equated upper caste with class, army officials were arguing that Indian sepoys’ caste identities corresponded to religion and race. This shift, sramek argues, showed a marked change in attitudes and trust between British officials and Indian sepoys. Although scholars including Thomas Metcalf and Heather Streets have argued that 1857 led to the British army bringing in “martial races,” such as Sikhs, Gurkhas, and Muslims, who were seen to be more docile and physically strong, Sramek shows that this shift was already underway in the generation before 1857 (7). By equating caste to something that was anomalous to British society, the British could characterize the sepoy as a kind of superstitious figure whose religious and caste attachments made him insufficiently loyal to be trusted to a high-ranking position. By focusing his study on the period before 1857, Sramek can argue that strategies and ideologies of colonial governance created a racialized and hierarchized discourse that predated the 1857 Rebellion, particularly as colonial observers, officials, and critics in Britain attempted to create a rationale for why a small group of merchants should rule a subcontinent. The goal of maintaining the image of British morality meant that the Company state actively produced and reproduced social distinctions between Indians and Britons, and class distinctions between those who were believed to possess virtue...

Sympathy and India in British Literature, 1770–1830 by Andrew Rudd

Andrew Rudd. Sympathy and India in British Literature, 1770-1830. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Pp. 216. $102. Sympathy and India in British Literature, 1770-1830 begins with the failure of imaginative sympathy. Facts coming from afar made little impression, Alexander Dow reflects in The History of Hindostan (1768). [We] heard, without emotion, of the great actions of some of our countrymen; and, if we listened to any detail of oppressions committed by others, it was with a phlegmatic indifference, unworthy of our boasted humanity, Dow adds (1). Andrew Rudd's monograph seeks to explain how in an age when India became an object of humanitarian concern (2) to the British public, and consequently revived a sentimental mode of writing, Dow's and others' indifference towards colonial matters, well, matters. Exploring the intersection of aesthetic, cultural, philosophical, and political discourses that marked this transformative period, Rudd makes persuasive connections between British literary culture and the colonial project in India. Moving chronologically through a range of texts, Rudd traces a familiar narrative of British imperialism in India--from the syncretic Orientalism associated with figures such as Sir William Jones and Warren Hastings in the last decades of the eighteenth century, to the influence of evangelical missionaries and the rigid Anglicanism of James Mill and Thomas Macaulay into the nineteenth century. Rudd provides a framework for his understanding of sympathy based on the moral philosophy of the Scottish Enlightenment. Echoing Hume's skeptical claim that imaginative sympathy meets its affective limit at the national border, Rudd contends that the British were fundamentally incapable of meaningfully engaging with India due to its geographic remoteness and cultural otherness. His book investigates the aesthetic and ethical problems caused by the failure of the sympathetic imagination, as well as the evolution of the strategies of representation through which India was brought before the British public. In his first chapter, Rudd examines Edmund Burke's failed use of imaginative sympathy as a rhetorical strategy in his parliamentary speeches against Warren Hastings, former Governor General of Bengal. According to Rudd, Burke superimposes classical rhetoric onto eighteenth-century models of sentimental distress to depict the atrocities perpetrated onto hapless Indian victims by East India Company men. Rudd argues that Burke fails to establish an emotional connection between Britain and India precisely because of the impossibility to engage with a remote object, his audience more readily identifying with Hastings than with suffering Indians. Rudd engages productively with Sara Suleri's discussion of Burke's sublime rhetoric, but seeks to redress Suleri's influential interpretation of Burke's irony and pessimism, emphasizing instead Burke's insistence on the humanitarian capacity of the imagination. In the course of its consideration of Burke, the chapter gives a comprehensive social and cultural portrait of Burke's milieu, presenting writers and texts ranging from contemporary literary representations of the nabob to satirical prints, philosophical discourse, parliamentary speeches, and trial commentaries. Chapter 2 moves from London to Calcutta to consider how, like Burke, Sir William Jones and the Asiatic Society attempted to assimilate India into the British imagination, this time by reconfiguring Orientalism as a cosmopolitan and neoclassical aesthetic that could inspire transnational bonds. Rudd suggests that Jones and Burke rely equally on the power of sympathy to ensure imaginative engagement. An analysis of Jones's translations and adaptations of Hindu verses, as well as his Asiatic Society discourses allows Rudd to elucidate Jones's theory of cross-cultural poetic sympathy. Influenced by Nigel Leask's notion of costume poetry, Rudd demonstrates how Jones, adapting Eastern poems to European sensibilities through classical allusion, tries to elicit the reader's sympathetic response toward a universal spiritual desire. …

Letters from Rupert’s Land, 1826–1840: James Hargrave of the Hudson’s Bay Company (review)

Reviewed by: Letters from Rupert’s Land, 1826–1840: James Hargrave of the Hudson’s Bay Company Erika Behrisch Elce (bio) Helen E. Ross, editor. Letters from Rupert’s Land, 1826–1840: James Hargrave of the Hudson’s Bay Company. McGill-Queen’s University Press. 2009. xi, 402. $49.95 Reading Helen E. Ross’s introduction to her edited collection of James Hargrave’s letters initially confused me: Hargrave, who ‘served almost forty years in Rupert’s Land,’ retired in 1859 as the Hudson’s Bay Company chief factor at York Factory, but Ross’s introduction deals in as much – if not more – detail with Hargrave’s family history, religious background, and attitudes toward women than with his experience at the gateway to the HBC’s vast Northern Department. What became clear upon reading the letters was that Ross, a respectful editor, was following Hargrave’s lead. Though readers interested in HBC history may be intrigued by the book’s title (McGill-Queen’s University Press makes it a handsome book to behold), they may be surprised by the contents. Hargrave’s letters are from Rupert’s Land, but the location of their creation is almost the only connection they have with York Factory. The presiding impression of Hargrave’s life at and around the Hudson’s Bay Company post is that he continually longs to be elsewhere. Moreover, though he professes contentment at his post – and his letters do occasionally speak of social pleasures to be had, most often around the table and involving a bottle – he only rarely feels compelled to describe his experiences. Part of his reticence may be prim professionalism; he simply doesn’t want to share company secrets with others. But the consistency with which he declines to offer any detailed anecdote – even against his correspondents’ express wishes to hear more details about his life – suggests that he is, in fact, uninterested in the events that fill his days. He excuses himself from playing the northern raconteur in many of his letters, lamenting that ‘month follows month without one story occurring worth telling.’ When adventures do occur, he is often [End Page 687] just as reticent: ‘The account of my journey from lake Superior hither [. . .] I am sorry to say I can now recall so lamely that every feature of interest has been blotted from it.’ These moments are disappointments, since Hargrave is so ideally placed to tell the story of life at York Factory and in the Hudson’s Bay Company: he is literate, articulate, and obviously has the gift of the gab, but he is excessively choosy about his topics. The collection contains numerous letters, especially to Hargrave’s family, that repeat each other, but the information in them remains interesting: Hargrave’s constant advice to his parents and siblings – about what to purchase and the price they should pay, how to arrange their houses, why never to lend money – reveals much about settler life in Lower Canada during the period. On occasion, his letters also contain some fascinating details of northern life in the 1830s, and almost against his will a narrative of HBC life emerges. These details are mostly found in the infrequent but regular letters to John George McTavish, chief factor at York Factory from 1821 to 1830. In his correspondence with McTavish, Hargrave describes HBC personalities, social factions, the quality of stores, and the fallout of McTavish’s decision to marry a Scottish woman after starting a native family. These comparatively short letters give a tantalizing peek into the commercial as well as social practices of company men, and their sprinkling throughout the book perks up the narrative considerably. In spite of his refusal to describe his life at York Factory, Hargrave’s correspondence reveals what is perhaps the essence of life in Rupert’s Land: it is a place to work but not to live. Hard-working and dreaming of his future, Hargrave devotes his youth to the stores at York Factory in order to live out his later years among family and friends. His greatest pleasures are the packages he receives that have nothing to do with work: personal letters and the occasional book. He is an...

Beyond the Teacher Certification Program Debate

This theme issue of the Journal of Teacher Education (JTE) considers the impact of various program and policy features on teacher education and professional development. In publishing this issue, the editorial team aims to challenge the field to shift attention from general debates about traditional versus alternative certification programs toward more nuanced conversations about specific features of programs (whether traditional or alternative, preservice or inservice) that appear to hold particular promise. Of the four articles that comprise the issue, two articles (Conklin; Kennedy & Archambault) explore the impact of aspects of initial certification programs on pre-service and beginning teachers' development. Two additional articles (Atkinson; Matsumura, Gamier, & Spybrook) investigate relationships between characteristics of professional development programs or policies and teacher-participants' thinking and practice. In the first article, Company Men: Tracing Learning from Divergent Teacher Education Pathways Into Practice in Middle Grades Classrooms, Hilary Conklin compares two models for middle school social studies teacher education, one that focuses on social studies content knowledge and another that focuses on knowledge of young adolescents. Through longitudinal case studies of beginning teachers from each kind of program, this study identifies characteristics of the teachers' practice and, where feasible, tracks differences back to specific features of the teachers' preparation programs. Conklin's conclusion is that neither model adequately prepared the teachers to engage students in challenging, meaningful work. By focusing on either subject matter or adolescent development, she argues that the programs missed opportunities to help beginning teachers integrate these areas of knowledge and develop practices that were rich in content and appropriately flamed for adolescent learners. Kathryn Kennedy and Leanna Archambault explore the preparation of teachers for K-12 online learning environments in the second article, Offering Preservice Teachers Field Experiences in K-12 Online Learning: A National Survey of Teacher Education Programs. Although several states now require K-12 students to complete an online experience before graduating from high school, and it is projected that 50% of high school classes will be offered online by 2020, the authors found that very few teacher education programs in the United States have field placements for teacher education candidates in virtual schools or online learning environments. They argue that teacher candidates who plan to work in online contexts will need to understand the pedagogy of online learning, instructional design for online learning, and online learning theory to engage learners successfully in these environments. The third article in this issue examines the assumption that teachers' use of student test data will result in improved instructional practices and yield higher test scores. In Target Practice: Reader Response Theory and Teachers' Interpretations of Students' SAT 10 Scores in Data-Based Professional Development, Becky Atkinson reports an analysis of how elementary teachers read, interpret, and make decisions based on test score data. …