Mill Town Research Articles

At the intersection of economic history and contemporary regional development: insights from a Swedish ‘bruksort’

ABSTRACT In this paper, we explore contemporary regional development in a historic industrial region. Specifically, we unpack the influences of industrial history and culture, built up over several centuries, on contemporary regional development dynamics and issues. In doing so, we draw on an evolutionary perspective within economic geography and perspectives from deindustrialization studies to understand how the past shapes the present. We combine these with theories of agency to understand how key actors comprehend the industrial heritage of a place, and how this is incorporated into contemporary regional development efforts. We explore this combination of conceptual lenses through an in-depth case study of Karlskoga, in Sweden, one of the country’s ‘bruksorter’ (mill towns) that grew up around the production of iron and steel, leading to it eventually becoming one of the largest arms manufacturing cities in Europe, home of the well-known Bofors company. However, all has not been plain sailing, and Karlskoga has experienced the challenges of de-population, industrial restructuring, and shocks to the sector upon which the town is reliant. By analysing these mixed fortunes we develop new insights into how regional development is intertwined with structural, institutional, and cultural industrial legacies.

Jacob D. Green and Britain’s Nineteenth-Century Black Abolitionist Network

ABSTRACT Jacob D. Green’s speaking career in England (1863-66) is an exploration of how an independent, self-financed Black speaker became a networked abolitionist building on the achievements of other expatriate African American activists like Moses Roper and James Watkins. Born enslaved in Maryland, Green made serial escapes from enslavement in Kentucky and elsewhere in the United States, sojourning in Toronto before arriving in Lancashire at about age forty-eight with evidently few funds. Green appealed to cotton and woollen mill town residents to oppose enslavement and the Confederate States of America from where most of North-West England’s cotton originated. He initially lectured under the sponsorship of nonconformist ministers in Yorkshire and built a network that included ministers in the United Methodist Free Church, Congregational Union, capitalists, and tradespeople. Nonconformist sponsorship led to an 1864 move to Heckmondwike in the centre of his lecture circuit. He connected with those who sponsored other Black abolitionists, burgeoning his network by speaking in West Yorkshire towns and cities that had hosted African American orators before. As a networked abolitionist, he earned income from speaking and publishing an autobiography and may have died in England in 1866.

“When I think about Shortfield, I think about mosquitos, and neo-Nazis”: Students’ narratives of racism, sexism, and intolerance in rural Swedish schools

The aim of this study was to analyse how young people living in geographical areas with a tradition of high neo-Nazi activism talk about racism and sexism, in particular, and the “school climate”, in general. Two schools situated in traditional rural mill towns were selected, and students (of ages 14–16) were interviewed. Influenced by Essed's theory on everyday racism, the study addresses how micro and macro dimensions of racism intersect through the voices of the students, when they talk about their community, their school, and the visible traces or signs of the neo-Nazi movement. The results show a recurrence of everyday racism in the schools, and indicate that the expression of racism was largely taken for granted. Initially in the narratives the students talked about their school and community in terms of inclusion and social connectedness. As the discussions proceeded, quite a few examples of racist practices and verbal racist and sexist harassment were mentioned. Such expressions were often downplayed, such that everyday racism and sexism appeared to have been normalised. This apologetic stance also seemingly contributed to a “return of the repressed”, in the form of overt expressions of neo-Nazi symbols and acts in the school environment.

A Latter-day Saint Apostle's Perception of the Southern Bazaar of Liverpool, October 1864

A Latter-day Saint Apostle's Perception of the Southern Bazaar of Liverpool, October 1864

When the Air Became Important: A Social History of the New England and Lancashire Textile Industries by Janet Greenlees

Reviewed by: When the Air Became Important: A Social History of the New England and Lancashire Textile Industries by Janet Greenlees David Rosner Janet Greenlees. When the Air Became Important: A Social History of the New England and Lancashire Textile Industries. Critical Issues in Health and Medicine. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2019. xiv + 250 pp. Ill. $50.95 (978-0-8135-8796-7). In the early 1840s Charles Dickens, perhaps the singular English author giving voice to the horrifying realities of lower class urban life in England, toured the United States to understand the new republic and the people who had broken away from Empire only a few decades before. He made a special stop in Lowell, Massachusetts, one of the new textile mills organized to process the cotton that the slave-based South was pouring into the world economy. He was deeply aware of the importance of the cotton to the textile industry as it was the backbone of the industrial revolution in England where working people drawn to Manchester, Lancaster, Leeds and other cities were suffering from low wages and horrifying living conditions in what William Blake had dubbed “satanic mills.” What Dickens found in Lowell was a world apart from that he observed in the English mill towns. Dickens expected a dispirited workforce living in similar horrid conditions. Yet, in Lowell, the mills he observed were remarkably clean and tidy. “The rooms in which they worked, were as well ordered as themselves. In the windows of some, there were green plants, which were trained to shade the glass; in all, there was as much fresh air, cleanliness, and comfort, as the nature of the occupation would possibly admit of.” The young women who worked there appeared healthy and happy. “Out of so large a number of females, many of whom were only then just verging upon womanhood, it may be reasonably supposed that some were delicate and fragile in appearance: no doubt there were.” But he was at a loss to find them. “I solemnly declare, that from all the crowd I saw in the different factories that day, I cannot recall or separate one young face that gave me a painful impression; not one young girl whom, assuming it to be a matter of necessity that she should gain her daily bread by the labour of her hands, I would have removed from those works if I had had the power.”1 By the turn of the twentieth century, the halcyon days of happy workers and clean, tidy workplaces and living quarters were gone in the New England mill [End Page 165] towns, as they were in the British textile industry as well. By the time of the famous Lawrence textile strike of women made famous by the poem put to song, “Bread and Roses,” the towns were among the most unhealthful in the country. Fall River, Massachusetts had “gained the infamous distinction of having the highest death rate of any northern U.S. city, surpassing that of New York City and the Lancaster mill towns” of northern England. Chief among the diseases and causes of death in these once-salubrious towns was consumption, a collection of symptoms that were sometimes caused by the tubercle bacillus and, in some industrial sites, seen to be caused by the dust laden air created by a host of new water and steam-powered devices that produced huge amounts of dust in confined spaces that workers breathed in. Water driven looms, steam-powered drills and chippers, lung diseases of various forms came to dominate the lives and deaths of workers in textile mills, mines, quarries, foundries, steel mills, brick factories, and a host of other worksites central to the emerging industrial, urbanizing society. Silicosis in the quarries and foundries, asbestosis in the growing auto and brake industries, construction and insulation trades, and, most relevant to Greenlees’s story, byssinosis in the textile mills began to seep into medical and politicians’ consciousness. Heat and humidity in plants driven by coals, steam, electricity, oil and various forms of power, all contributed to a singularly unhealthful work environment. When the Air Became Important traces the history of consciousness of disease...

A Museum for the Working Class

A Museum for the Working Class Joanne McNeil (bio) Hulking granite mills tower over the city of Fall River, some fifty miles south of Boston, as a lingering reminder of its industrial history. The weathered buildings were infamous for cruel labor conditions back when Fall River led the country in cloth production. The Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art has occupied the ground floor of one such mill, which still operates as a textiles manufacturer; with factory workers sewing upstairs, it's an unlikely place for an art museum. That's exactly why it's there. When I first visited in the fall of 2021, I parked next to the VFW hall beside FR MoCA and met with its founders, Brittni Ann Harvey and Harry Gould Harvey IV. The couple, who are in their early thirties, met as teenagers attending punk shows at that same VFW. Now their art is exhibited at prestigious galleries in New York, but they [End Page 15] hold ambivalent feelings about this prestige—and its associated social mobility. So they choose to live and work in Fall River, close to their families. The museum, which opened in 2020, exists in the hatchway the artists have carved out for themselves between the art world and home. Click for larger view View full resolution Fall River Study no. 1 by Isaiah Raines (courtesy of the artist) The Harveys might have named their non-collecting art nonprofit the "Fall River Gallery," but "museum" conveys institutional heft. Plus, the word hints at how, through their curation, they playfully subvert the traditional gatekeeping of the art world. Conceived as a "museum," FR MoCA reveals where typical art institutions fall short. Art museums, while ostensibly for the public, cater to the tastes of the wealthy, especially major donors with sway over programming and exhibited work. Operating at a small scale, FR MoCA, modestly funded with state art grants and support from local businesses—including the owner of a Portuguese food emporium across the [End Page 16] street—has a grassroots ethos. The project demonstrates that art is not exclusive to the sons and daughters of capital; artists and art workers come from communities like Fall River, too. And their work has context and history. Art has long existed here, the Harveys are quick to point out, citing as an example the mill worker and artist Robert Spear Dunning, who began the Fall River school of still-life painting. When I first visited the museum, there were photographs, boiler inspection tools, and souvenirs from the Fall River Line steamboat company on display in the hallway entrance. On loan from the maritime museum, the artifacts highlighted the disparities between the lives of the workers below the decks and the Gilded Age robber barons who would ride between their residences in Newport, Rhode Island, and Manhattan. Inside the exhibition space were vibrant yet quietly affecting works by the late artist Kathleen White, including her "Love Letters" series of abstract paintings in lusty colors and her Play-Doh-bright "Car" sculptures molded into faintly recognizable vehicular formations. She was closely associated with Nan Goldin and the downtown scene of the 1980s and '90s, but crucially, for the purpose of this exhibition, White grew up in Fall River. Her grandfather was a Fall River Line captain. Exhibited here, in her hometown, one could sense the origins of White's humble brilliance. "Rendering truth" is how Harry summarizes the FR MoCA mission, referencing a Lonnie Holley song title. To Harry, it means the "emancipation" and utopias that emerge when art is produced with integrity. It's a phrase he uses regularly as a synonym for art or artmaking, for the perspective an artist shares outside any sort of market logic or transaction. In a sense, the rendered truth of FR MoCA is the roots it seeks to establish. Exhibited artists either come from the area or their work engages with the city. The regional focus, in this plainly unfancy old mill town, means that labor is an evident through line. The historical context the Harveys develop as curators—displaying mill-worker still-life painters alongside contemporary artists—offers a place for working-class art without tokenizing or...

Black Life and Photographic Time

Photographer and video artist LaToya Ruby Frazier’s The Notion of Family series (2001–14) strikingly looks forward through the past. The project traces its origins to Frazier’s teen years growing up in the industrial suburb of Braddock, Pennsylvania, a once-thriving mill town just nine miles outside of Pittsburgh that drew many African Americans northward in the decades following the failures of Reconstruction. Braddock began experiencing rapid decline in the 1970s when American steel no longer dominated the global market. The Braddock that Frazier grew up in was characterized by many of the markers of industrial disintegration: widespread unemployment, decaying infrastructure, increased drug addiction, and palpable rage and despair about the collapse of the economy and local industry, among them. Frazier uses her photographic practice to document some of these developments and reckon with the implications and meanings of these changes in conditions for those suffering their consequences. Often central to and reflected in the artist’s work is a critique of narratives of progress. This article examines the ways The Notion of Family series bears witness to Black life experienced in real time while also demonstrating the impossibility of the dominant temporal order to account for Black living and being. Sharpening focus on several of the images of Frazier’s Grandma Ruby, featured in the series, The Notion of Family also examines how Frazier uses her photographic practice to refuse the kind of willful forgetting and violent obfuscating that insists upon rendering invisible or fungible Black people who have vitalized communities like Braddock for generations.

A Return to the Commons: An Eco-Marxist Reading of Jewett's “The Gray Mills of Farley” and Rebecca Harding Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills

A Return to the Commons: An Eco-Marxist Reading of Jewett's “The Gray Mills of Farley” and Rebecca Harding Davis’ <i>Life in the Iron Mills</i>

Outside belonging: a discursive analysis of British South Asian (BSA) Muslim women’s experiences of being ‘Othered’ in local spaces

ABSTRACT Drawing on empirical research with British South Asian (BSA) Muslim women in Oldham and focussing on the embodied intersectional nature of discrimination they face, this paper explores British Muslim women’s experiences of belonging in local spaces. Through a discursive analysis of place, belonging and identity, this paper argues that BSA Muslim women appear as a visible threat to the nation, occupying a contradictory position of both within the local and national but not part of it. Focused on the context of Oldham, a former mill town in the North of England, findings suggest wider hegemonic discourses of Muslim woman as “Other” are inflected by local dynamics and shape discordant everyday experiences. It is argued that Oldham presents a microcosm with which to view the nations complex relationship with its Muslim minority groups and resonates with the current political landscape of rising right-wing populism and Islamophobia.

An Interethnic Paradox: Chicago's Irish and Everyone Else

An Interethnic Paradox: Chicago's Irish and Everyone Else

William Wood, The American Woolen Company and the Creation of a Model Mill Village in Shawsheen, Massachusetts

Shawsheen, a model mill village planned and built in Andover, Massachusetts, between 1906 and 1924, was based on the vision of William Wood, then president of the American Woolen Company. It was arguably the most unique textile mill village ever built in New England. The article begins with a discussion of the motivation for the project. It then shifts to a summary of the critical features of Wood’s vision and identifies the historic institutional paths that informed him. This is followed by an analysis of how the plan was successfully implemented and an explanation of what happened to Shawsheen over time. The article ends with an interpretation of the significance of the Shawsheen experience in the context of the history of New England mill towns.

State socialist women’s organizations within Yugoslav factories: a case study of local activism in the Duga Resa cotton mill

ABSTRACT State socialist women’s organizations were particularly active in Yugoslav industrial towns with a significant female workforce, as in the case of the Croatian mill town of Duga Resa. By exploring the local activities of the Conference for the Social Activity of Women (KDAŽ), this article contributes to historiographical debates regarding state socialist women’s organizations and women’s agency as well as to the recent revival of interest in the social history of the post-Yugoslav region. An analysis of reflexive and representative archival sources, namely minutes of party and municipal meetings as well as official publications, shows that working women’s double burden was not silenced but was frequently discussed by socialist authorities, women’s organizations and female workers themselves. Through the Yugoslav politics of self-management, local KDAŽ activists often lobbied for better working and welfare rights, especially the provision of housing and childcare facilities for working mothers. While KDAŽ activists’ agency was shaped by dominant social norms, the possibilities for voicing open criticism in socialist Yugoslavia meant that a certain degree of bottom-up initiative was possible. The archives of municipal and socio-political organizations, therefore, are of fundamental importance in understanding working women’s position at the intersection of gender and labour history.

Spectacles of Settler Colonial Memory: Archaeological Findings from an Early Twentieth-Century “First” Settlement Pageant and Other Commemorative Terrain in New England

In 1923, rural New England mill town Dover, New Hampshire, staged a Tercentenary pageant of extraordinary proportions to celebrate its “first” settlement. This public spectacle memorialized a specific, and deeply exclusionary, narrative of English settler colonialism, shaped by social anxieties of the post-First World War United States. Recent archaeological research has found possible remnants from this spectacle on a seventeenth-century site. In disturbing this site, the Tercentenary pageant appears to have disregarded actual significant material traces from the very era it aimed to memorialize--traces that offer distinct, fuller understandings of deeply nuanced Native-settler interactions in the Piscataqua River region. Dover’s pageant is situated in a regional analysis of Native and Euro-colonial commemorative place-making of the early twentieth century, exploring how different communities pursued multivocal, monovocal, or other approaches in their performative engagements with the seventeenth century.

Morris, Yountsville: The Rise and Decline of an Indiana Mill Town

Morris, Yountsville: The Rise and Decline of an Indiana Mill Town

Narratives of the urban-rural divide: learning trajectories of three women returnees to a small mill town

ABSTRACT This paper explores learning trajectories in becoming ‘rural women’ in Sweden, by using a biographical and socially-situated learning perspective. The data is based on in-depth biographical interviews with three young women who moved between rural and urban areas, and finally decided to return to a rural area. The findings show three learning phases: the mythical, the questioning and the self-positioning phase. Furthermore, the paper identifies four types of learning spaces of urban and rural areas: an imagined, a career-related, a cultural-emotional and a biographical learning space. The paper offers valuable insights about everyday life learning and identity development in young adulthood, and how stereotypes of rural areas negatively impact on young adults’ views of themselves and their life choices.Keywords: young female, rural/urban dived, countryside returnees, learning space and trajectories, biographical learning.

Italian Diaspora in a Massachusetts Mill Town: Migration between Palestrina (Lazio), Italy, and Southbridge, Massachusetts

AbstractThis article offers a transnational examination of the Italian diaspora community from Palestrina, Lazio, in Southbridge, Massachusetts between 1900 and 1945 that addresses the impact of education on the economic empowerment of Italian immigrants. Due to the labor shortage in the area, the assimilation of Italians was more effective and second-generation Italians remained in the public school system longer. This combination of factors created more economic mobility for both foreign-born and second-generation Southbridge Italians. Factors that contributed to this unique circumstance included the intense competition for labor between two factories, American Optical Company (AO) and Hamilton Woolen Mill. Both firms were among the first in Massachusetts to invest in workplace English education and citizenship programs. This educational investment had the goal of retaining and advancing entry-level workers into skilled level positions. Furthermore, AO encouraged the town to establish a high school in 1917 and made substantial contributions to the establishment of a trade school in 1927. The Italian community in Southbridge developed their own institutions to promote cohesiveness and assimilation via their own social, community, and citizenship groups. There was also an increase in entrepreneurship within the Southbridge Italian community. Assimilation and upward economic mobility for Italians in Southbridge began in the workplace.

Who is responsible for the hockey rink? – A critical analysis of a citizen dialogue meeting in a small Mill town

Sweden is often perceived as “a model welfare state” (Castell, 2013, p. 1) with a generous welfare system (Bergh, 2011). A substantial part of the welfare provision is organized and administered at...

Hidden Places: Maine Writers on Coastal Villages, Mill Towns, and the North Country

Hidden Places: Maine Writers on Coastal Villages, Mill Towns, and the North Country

NFL Football: A History of America's New National Pastime

The National Football League (NFL) seems nearly omnipresent today in the United States. Even people who are not football fans know the team names and recognize the star players. That was certainly not the case one hundred years ago when the league was founded at a car dealership in Canton, Ohio. How this change occurred is the story that Richard C. Crepeau tells in NFL Football: A History of America's New National Pastime. Originally published in 2014, the University of Illinois Press issued this revised edition in 2020 to coincide with the NFL's centennial. The author has expanded a couple of chapters from the previous edition and added a new chapter.The book is divided into three sections: “The Formative Years,” “The Rozelle Era,” and “The New NFL.” Within each section, chapters are often thematic, which occasionally means there is some repetitiveness. The first section examines the birth of professional American football in the 1890s and its slow growth through the early decades of the twentieth century. Initially centered in the factory and mill towns of the Ohio Valley, professional football developed as a game to entertain the working class on Sundays. By 1920, team owners decided to create an organization, the American Professional Football Association, the forerunner of the NFL. The league's first decade was rocky; few teams survived into the 1930s. (An excellent appendix lists all NFL franchises by the year they were founded, including those that folded.) Crepeau moves through the NFL's formative years quickly. The league's founding and first decade are covered in about thirteen pages. The author then summarizes the next decade and a half (1930‒45) in twelve pages. This is mostly a work of synthesis, so Crepeau cannot be blamed if the literature on early professional football and the first several decades of the NFL is thin. But readers hoping for more on the formative years will be disappointed.Crepeau begins to hit his stride by the third chapter, which examines the late 1940s and 1950s. In this chapter, some important themes emerge—the NFL as a business enterprise, the reoccurrence of labor disputes, race and racism in the league, and the role of television in shaping the sport. These themes are continued into Part 2, which looks at what Crepeau calls “The Rozelle Era.” This is the book's longest section, and it forms the core of the book. In this middle section, chapters follow a general chronology but are also organized thematically. Chapters 4 and 5 examine the rise of professional football as a major cultural phenomenon in the 1960s, as well as the NFL's dispute and eventual merger with the American Football League (AFL). Television, of course, played a major role in propelling professional football to the forefront of American culture. As Crepeau notes, “The landscape of the NFL changed permanently with the coming of television, the AFL, and the commodification of nearly everything” (61). Thanks to the game's seemingly made-for-television controlled violence and drama, Crepeau argues, by the end of the 1960s, “football was clearly the national pastime” (90). In Chapter 6, the author takes a deep dive into television contracts and the ever-increasing amounts of money that they brought to the league. After discussing expansion, battles over team moves, and the league's handling of various publicity problems (Commissioner Pete Rozelle's specialty) in Chapters 7 and 8, Crepeau turns to labor disputes in Chapter 9. His coverage of the formation and growth of the NFL Players Association (NFLPA), as well as the three major strikes of the 1970s and 1980s, is excellent and probably makes Chapter 9 the strongest one in the book.Section 3 begins with the rise of Paul Tagliabue as the new commissioner following Rozelle's retirement, and the subsequent chapters focus on Roger Goodell's tenure as commissioner. Although Crepeau does not ignore social and cultural issues in the book's concluding section, at times, it comes across as largely an institutional history of the league from 1990 to the present, with the commissioners—Tagliabue and then Goodell—as the central actors. The author devotes two pages, for instance, to Goodell's handling of Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice's assault of his fiancée in 2014; the emphasis is on Goodell, not on domestic violence. The final chapter examines the Super Bowl as America's gaudy new national holiday.Creapeau's book examines the NFL as a business and a cultural phenomenon. It succeeds on both accounts. Anyone looking for a short overview of the NFL's meteoric rise to America's national pastime should begin with Crepeau's book.

Made in Britain: Nation and Emigration in Nineteenth-Century America

The process of leaving a customs union is immensely complicated and time-consuming, as some politicians have belatedly discovered in post-Brexit Britain. Similarly, the thirteen colonies’ decision to depart from the customs union of the British mercantilist state led to a realization that political independence did not sever economic ties across the Atlantic with the new country’s major trading partner and financier. Despite its defeat in 1783, the British Empire remained expansive and dynamic, and American businessmen needed to maintain links. And not unlike the situation in post-Brexit Britain, the issue of citizenship hung in the balance. The more common story is how British immigrants became American despite their supposed “perpetual allegiance” to the sovereign. Yet, another issue, which is at the core of Tuffnell’s book, is that the continued economic ties across the Atlantic led to expatriate communities of Americans whose status and loyalty remained in question. Were they informal ambassadors who could leverage British power to American economic interests, or were they dangerously de-nationalized vectors of antirepublican contagion who were evading the obligations of citizenship and even serving as agents of re-colonization?At the outbreak of the American Civil War, two main expatriate groups were in Britain—about 2,800 Americans in Liverpool and 1,910 in London. The cotton trade of Liverpool linked the slave south with Lancashire mill towns; the credit and capital of London financed trade and investment in the growing economy of the United States. By the end of the century, the expatriate community in Liverpool fell to fewer than 1,000; the cotton trade could be managed by cable. By contrast, the expatriate community in the City of London rose to around 5,000 to exploit the opportunities of the world’s major financial center. Tuffnell is interested in the economic activities and associations of the two communities, even more in their social lives—their clubs and celebrations of American identity that could also foster American interests through engagement with British elites.American slavery and the Civil War created tensions in Britain. The Liverpool merchants expected support from English aristocrats and Lancashire mill owners in defense of the Confederacy. However, their networks were shallower than the social contacts that the Union’s State Department established in London. The rift was healed in the later nineteenth century through a shared “Anglo-Saxondom”—founded on racial superiority—that fostered cooperation between two kindred empires, despite the counter-charge that this form of cosmopolitanism subverted American nationalism. The debate between insular nationalism and internationalism continues in both countries to this day.Tuffnell’s analysis is compelling and well told, with generous details and incidents to inform and entertain. His main theme of the identity of expatriates in Britain is certainly worth exploring, though it has gaps. The issue of expatriate identity extends beyond the business communities in London and Liverpool to the world of culture and high society. Tuffnell mentions the “gilded prostitution” of American heiresses marrying British aristocrats—for instance, the marriage of Mary Leitner of Chicago to George Nathaniel Curzon or that of Consuelo Vanderbilt to Charles Spencer-Churchill, the duke of Marlborough. He points out that these marriages intimated the kind of international “special relationship” to which Winston Spencer Churchill alluded in his A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (New York, 1956–1958), 4 v. He fails to mention, however, expatriates like Henry James or John Singer Sargent, who inhabited a milieu of social and cultural, rather than strictly business, exchange.Tuffnell also could have deepened his focus on the business communities in London and Liverpool by considering the network of interactions in the ports of the eastern seaboard. Liverpool, London, and, for that matter, Bristol and Glasgow were part of a North American world that including Baltimore, Boston, New York, and New Orleans in which firms operated on both side of the Atlantic, whether those of the Barings, the Brown Brothers, or George Peabody. They were joined in the later nineteenth century by other businessmen who operated within the capacious limits of the British Empire, such as the mining engineer Herbert Hoover or Chester Beatty, the “king of copper,” who transformed from a New Yorker into a British knight and ultimately an honorary citizen of Ireland.Tuffnell’s study is fascinating as it stands. It is no criticism to say that it is fertile soil for future work that could extend the coverage of the expatriate community into culture and society, add links to the eastern seaboard of the United States, and move ahead to the continued connections between American business and British imperialism and, more recently, the American influence on the City of London.