Nineteenth-century Industry Research Articles

Nationalism as a Response to Worker Militancy

Nationalism is widely understood as a product of the nineteenth century, the doctrinal seeds for which were planted by the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution. It is an extension of tribalism to the nation and is understandable in terms of human evolution. It could be serviceable to first tribes and then nations as a means for acquiring social cohesion and domestic peace by convincingly identifying a foreign menace. But what explains the varying intensity of this strategy? This article claims that strengthening of nationalism’s expression has been substantially due to the threat to elites posed by the rise of powerful worker movements which gained increasing militancy during nineteenth century industrialization. Nationalism served to deflect attention from a system that workers found unjust to foreign forces as the cause of their malaise. In this expression, nationalism served as an ideology enabling the more powerful to assuage worker discontent and continue gaining at the expense of the weaker.  

Trying in Many Ways to Persuade: Agency and Local Politics in a Nineteenth-Century Iron Mining Scheme

Abstract: Relying on Chinese county gazetteers and contemporary publications by Western engineers working in China, this article examines the methods used by county officials to secure property needed for the Daye iron mine in Hubei Province. It focuses on a young scholar-turned magistrate, Lin Zuo, who grew up around the market city of Shanghai and the political center in Beijing under the dual clouds of imperialism and the Taiping Rebellion. Upon taking office in a remote but mineral-rich county along the Yangzi river, Lin Zuo was deputed to deterritorialize significant parts of the county’s rice fields and mountain farms to facilitate a modern iron ore mine and adjoining railroad that became part of the powerful Hanyeping Coal and Iron Company. To this end, he hired local gentry to coerce or force various landowners to give up lands that were deemed rich in minerals or suited for a proposed train track that skirted the southern face of Tieshan (Iron Mountain). Conversely, commoners utilized ingenious negotiating methods to fight back against the power of the imperial government, which led the county leaders to look elsewhere for properties and in some cases forced the government to pay much higher prices for the tracts they needed most. This article suggests that this significant modernization scheme was brought about in part utilizing the trappings of patronage-led county government policies but that even as it was designed to strengthen the empire, in fact it actually weakened the local community, leaving many landless if not impoverished. It therefore questions recent scholarship that looks more positively at late nineteenth-century industrialization attempts or critically at policies that undermined them.

Regional Inequalities in Nineteenth-Century Female Wages: Evidence from Belgium

Abstract Although recent studies on the geography of the female labor force have highlighted strong spatial variation in women’s labor market participation, little is known about regional female wage inequalities in nineteenth-century industries. An analysis of female regional wage inequality for late-nineteenth-century Belgium, a country known for its early industrialization, finds a positive correlation between female industrial employment and wage levels, underlining the importance of industrial labor demand in shaping the female labor market experience. This finding is augmented by a correlational analysis of various market drivers.

Chemical affinities: photography, extraction, and industrial heritage in nineteenth-century northern England

ABSTRACT “Chemical Affinities” explores how chemistry and visual culture were entwined in the long nineteenth century, focusing here on the role of photography as both a material cause of pollution and the aesthetic means to visualize the pollution that it caused. Chemical layering was a common dimension of all nineteenth-century photography and photographic printing, making photography a by-product of the chemical revolution of the nineteenth century, no less than fertilizer and paper. Drawing on hundreds of visual representations (drawings, engravings, photographs, and graphs), most of them located in local, scientific, and business archives in northern England, my research approaches photography as a material, economic, and social process: an extractive resource that raises questions about the global future alongside recording the tangible present and arrested moments of the past. Here, I examine the nineteenth-century industry in Widnes, Cheshire, as a particularly representative and vexed site of photography’s chemical effects on land and people, as well as its instrumentation in documenting and recording – and in so doing promising to expose and moderate – those effects. The article concludes with some reflections on the value of photographic archives and critical industrial heritage studies for historical understanding of nineteenth-century chemical industry and its legacies.

Adaptation of sperm whales to open-boat whalers: rapid social learning on a large scale?

Animals can mitigate human threats, but how do they do this, and how fast can they adapt? Hunting sperm whales was a major nineteenth century industry. Analysis of data from digitized logbooks of American whalers in the North Pacific found that the rate at which whalers succeeded in harpooning ('striking') sighted whales fell by about 58% over the first few years of exploitation in a region. This decline cannot be explained by the earliest whalers being more competent, as their strike rates outside the North Pacific, where whaling had a longer history, were not elevated. The initial killing of particularly vulnerable individuals would not have produced the observed rapid decline in strike rate. It appears that whales swiftly learned effective defensive behaviour. Sperm whales live in kin-based social units. Our models show that social learning, in which naive social units, when confronted by whalers, learned defensive measures from grouped social units with experience, could lead to the documented rapid decline in strike rate. This rapid, large-scale adoption of new behaviour enlarges our concept of the spatio-temporal dynamics of non-human culture.

SPATIAL PLANNING LEGISLATION IN GHANA: EXPLORING THE EVOLUTION, CONTRIBUTIONS, AND THE WAY FORWARD.

This paper explored the evolution of spatial planning in Ghana’s context. Using Institutional Analytical Framework, the paper posits that spatial planning has gone through several changes over the years. Additionally, it was revealed that spatial planning as an idea dates back to nineteenth-century industrialization and urbanization that mostly happened in developed countries. These had less focus on civic design and came to be more competent in state policy. Although planning in Ghana antedates the early 90s, nationwide spatial planning commenced with the preparation and initiation of CAP 84 (Town and Country Planning Ordinance) in 1945. Fast forward spatial planning in Ghana is presently being done by tenets and provisions as captured in Act 925 - Land Use and Spatial Planning Act 2016. However, this paper establishes possible conflict and duplication of planning efforts and practices by looking at Act 925 and Act 480 - National Development Planning System Act, 1994. It envisages that planning in Ghana will go through another evolution to avert the “spatial” and “policy” perspectives to planning and as well attain coordinated efforts to guide the course of planning in Ghana. Keywords: Spatial planning, Land use, Evolution, Planning conflict

The Cadottes: A Fur Trade Family on Lake Superior by Robert Silbernagel

Reviewed by: The Cadottes: A Fur Trade Family on Lake Superior by Robert Silbernagel Roger L. Nichols Robert Silbernagel. The Cadottes: A Fur Trade Family on Lake Superior. Madison: Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2020. Pp. 352. Bibliography. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Paperback: $28.95. In this thoughtful book, the author gives himself a difficult task. Robert Silbernagel wants to follow the lives and activities of the Cadotte family in the international fur trade on the southern shore of Lake Superior. Beginning with the actions of Mathurin Cadot during the 1670s, he traces the roles of family members to the near present. This is a tall order because there are virtually no documents, except for some trade account ledgers, no collections of personal letters, no diaries or family reminiscences to help put "meat on the bones" of this family. Silbernagel recognizes this and describes feeling as though he saw "the Cadottes through a veil." (xiii) If this were the story of a single person, it would be labeled a "life and times" rather than a biography. Yet the lack of personal material has not distracted the author from showing the family's contributions to the history of the region. His central thesis is that prior to late nineteenth century industrialization, the fur trade was the largest and most significant part of the regional economy. Coupled with that, he presents the roles played in the trade by French Canadian and French Indian métis, the Cadottes belonging to both groups, as being essential to the international success of that trade. These people and their Indian trading partners gathered and [End Page 158] transported the furs gathered in northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota to Montreal on their way to European markets. While tracing the fur trade, the author ties the Cadottes to the shifting international competition between the British and French in Canada, and later between the British and the Americans effectively. He also depicts the family as competent translators and diplomats who helped keep peace between the Ojibwe and their Dakota neighbors. Family members had two strong motivations. First, several of them married Ojibwe. Second, warfare disrupted the trade, so they saw diplomacy as essential. The narrative highlights the Cadottes' business skills, honesty, and general competence in a dangerous world of frequent challenge and change. The narrative gives most attention to Michel Cadotte and his Ojibwe wife Equaysayway and their lives on Madeline Island. Married into a prominent Indian family, Michel became a successful and respected trader, interpreter, and forest diplomat. The couple fit well into the mixed-race society that the trade fostered, and late in life had a church wedding, probably to protect their land claims and those of their children after the Americans had taken control of the area. Based on extensive research, this book is both readable and informative. While the names of men important in regional history including James Doty, Alexander Ramsey, Henry Dodge, and John Jacob Astor all appear, the Cadottes tie the narrative together. Their actions for nearly two centuries give a framework to the story. Because he lacks much personal or family data, the author fills out the family story by deft use of local details related specifically to the fur trade. He discusses wilderness travel and means of transportation such as snowshoes and the varieties of canoes, illustrates the difficulties of long, exhausting portages, and considers the roles of maple sugar making and wild rice harvesting for local Indians and their trade partners. To help guide the reader through the family history, the book includes a Cadotte family tree as well as a timeline that covers the two hundred years of family history. It has clear and effective maps and photos of people and places being discussed. This is an interesting and careful history that focuses on an era, a business, and people who rarely get much attention. [End Page 159] Roger L. Nichols Emeritus Professor of History and Affiliate in American Indian Studies University of Arizona Copyright © 2021 Historical Society of Michigan

The Great Divergence Reconsidered: Or, Is it Time to Reconsider the Great Divergence Debate?

Twenty years ago, Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence (2000) reshaped debates over the historical causes of Europe’s rapid nineteenthcentury industrialization and economic growth. By comparing the Yangzi Delta region of China to Britain, Pomeranz asserted that Europe was not exceptionally dynamic before the nineteenth century and that its divergence from Asia owed to colonial exploitation of the Americas and ecological contingencies, namely abundant coal deposits. Some recent studies have sought to refute or refine Pomeranz’s thesis using the Indian subcontinent as an historical case study. This essay reviews three of these works and, in doing so, demonstrates current methodological limitations of this debate. Specifically, recent scholarship, although seeking to critique Pomeranz, employs his two-way comparative methodology, but in a manner that operates within a Eurocentric teleology and takes the European historical experience as normative. Instead, I propose that scholars inquire after the historical connections among societies’ plural-yet-connected historical trajectories.

The Architecture of Van Diemen’s Land Timber

ABSTRACTVan Diemen’s Land timber-getting enterprises, one of the colony’s early nineteenth-century commodity-based industries, provided a crucial infrastructure for colonial architecture, generating material, components, and revenue for building. Its own architecture was dispersed and disparate, with places of material production and consumption interlinked by tracks, rivers, and coastal and oceanic shipping routes. To date, its sites have been the territory of archaeologists and historians rather than architectural historians. Yet, physically intertwined and instrumental in the construction of the colony’s early landmark buildings, and intersecting with other networks of constructional, engineering, and architectural expertise, they offer a subject for architectural history-making grounded in the geo-political, socio-economic, and material realities of the region’s early colonial period. This article describes this infrastructure and its products, comprising sites, spaces, and structures locally, regionally, and inter-regionally, considering their implications for a re-framing of Australian colonial architecture.

The Causality Effects of Manufacturing Sector on Some Macroeconomic Variables in Turkey

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century industrialization and specifically the development of the manufacturing sector are generally regarded as key determinants of economic growth and development. The development of manufacturing sector leads to economic growth by a number of effects such as the generation of backward and forward linkages, the expansion of technology knowledge and “training on the job” [1]. In this study, the causality relationship between manufacturing sector, services sector, savings, gross fixed capital formation and economic growth are empirically investigated in Turkey. Similar to Su and Yao [2]’s study, it is tried to find out whether manufacturing sector has a causal relationship with services sector, savings and economic growth. Moreover, the causality relationship between manufacturing sector and gross fixed capital formation is examined. In the empirical investigation, a dataset covering the period between 1970 and 2017 is used and Granger [3] causality test is applied in order to determine the causality relationship between manufacturing sector, services sector, savings, gross fixed capital formation and economic growth. According to the results of the empirical analysis, it is found that while there is no causality relationship among manufacturing sector, services sector and economic growth there is a one-way causality relationship between manufacturing sector-savings and manufacturing sector-gross fixed capital formation. The empirical results indicate that whilst manufacturing sector has a casual effect on savings it is the gross fixed capital formation which has a casual impact on manufacturing sector.

Indonesia’s Judicial Review Regime in Comparative Perspective

This paper provides a comparative perspective on judicial review in Indonesia after the establishment of the Constitutional Court in 2003. It starts by retelling the well-known story of the "transformation of American law" over the first half of the last century. As narrated by Morton Horwitz, that story is about how nineteenth-century industrialisation processes destabilised the premises of "Classical Legal Thought", and then about how the legal realist movement exploited the ensuing crisis to transform the way Americans think about law and its relationship to other social systems. Mining this story for generalisable concepts, the paper argues that the establishment of strong-form judicial review necessarily draws on and, in turn, influences prevailing conceptions of legal and political authority. These conceptions vary along a continuum, in the first case, from public confidence in law's autonomy to a conception of law as deeply immersed in politics, and, in the second case, from a conception of legitimate political authority as contingent on a fairly won democratic mandate to a conception of political authority as residing in the power holder's capacity to promote important social goals, such as national security or economic prosperity. Each of these variables may change independently of the other. In certain situations, however, they may also combine to form a relatively stable judicial review regime – a hegemonic legitimating ideology in which conceptions of legal and political authority lock into and mutually support each other. The fourth section uses this conceptual framework to assess the Indonesian Constitutional Court's approach to its mandate after 2003. Under its first two chief justices, the paper notes, the Court engaged in a concerted effort to build public understanding of its legitimate role in national politics. The Court's abrupt switch between its first Chief Justice, Jimly Asshiddiqie's legalist conception of law's authority and his successor, Mohammad Mahfud's more instrumentalist conception, however, has impeded the consolidation of a determinate judicial review regime. Given the considerable threats still confronting Indonesia's democracy, this situation is worrisome. The Court urgently needs to present a coherent account of its legitimate claim to authority if it is to continue playing an effective role.

The Stronghold on St. Peter’s Hill in Radom (Poland). Archaeology, Biography of the Place, and Practices of Memory

The stronghold called St. Peter’s hill in Radom is located in the centre of the city, in an area severely degraded by the side effects of 19th- and 20th-century industrialisation. The archaeological excavations and paleoecological research carried out in 2009–2013 created a background for studying its complex past and designing the future. The biography of St. Peter’s hill encompasses the early medieval power centre, late medieval urbanisation, nineteenth-century industrialisation, subsequent degradation of material and human resources, and present revitalisation projects. This place is far more than an archaeological site or even a part of archaeological heritage. It is a unique cultural landscape, which emerged as a result of long-lasting mutual relations between man and nature. Its materiality constitutes an inalienable cultural capital, indispensable for the reconstruction of local identities and communities of memory.

Sustaining Authority in Persian Lithographed Books: Publishers and Printing in North India, c. 1835–57

During the 1840s and 1850s, lithographic presses in North India published over seven hundred titles in Persian, many of which were reprinted several times over subsequent years. These industries succeeded in drawing newly literate as well as established readerships, who appeared to be interested in a wide range of textual genres and forms. Despite recent interest in nineteenth-century Indian printing industries and their consumers, attention has been primarily focused on the production and reception of vernacular literatures. This article looks at the people, processes, and texts which constituted the Persian lithographic industry in mid-nineteenth century North India, focusing in particular on the role played by publishers in carving out identities as transmitters of texts. It argues that even as publishers sought to reach new readers and wider markets, they did so by drawing these groups into the existing ethos and hierarchies governing Persianate knowledge, rather than expressing a break from it.

Can You Tell Me How to Get to the Warsaw Ghetto?

Can You Tell Me How to Get to the Warsaw Ghetto? Benjamin Paloff (bio) "An enormous cap of dark grey smoke above the Extinct City in the Capital maintains, with the weight of its material, the reality of the fiction that is the emptiness: the City in the City, the City that no longer is." —Stanisław Śreniowski, a Jewish historian living in hiding on the "Aryan" side, recalling the Ghetto Uprising1 In the courtyard behind the apartment building at 55 Sienna Street, one can still visit a rare fragment of the wall that, for a brief period between November 1940 and October 1941, marked the southern boundary of the Warsaw Ghetto. Though situated just northwest of the Central Train Station, in the heart of the Polish capital's downtown, it is remarkably hard to find. To approach its east side, you have to be buzzed through a gate by a guard who, though unseen, is apparently keeping watch for visitors, who are invariably checking a map or guidebook against the addresses on the adjacent buildings, certain that if they were in the right place there would be a sign to direct them to a site of such importance. There is not. The momentary puzzlement is interrupted by the rattle of the electric lock and the reflexive desire to push the gate. Against an otherwise unremarkable red brick wall, a dusky plaque shows the contours of the Ghetto and locates this modest section of wall (fig. 1). It turns out that we are still outside the Ghetto. The approach from the western side is more interesting, but more challenging. You have to be lucky enough to find one of the apartment entryways open in order to pass through to the inner Click for larger view View full resolution Figs 1–2. left to right. One of the last surviving fragments of the wall around the Warsaw Ghetto, east side and west side. Photographs by the author. courtyard, the perspective from inside the Ghetto. Should you do so, you will also see a space where two bricks have been removed (fig. 2). A small hexagonal plaque, dated August 1989, informs the visitor in Polish and English: "A casting and two original bricks of this wall erected by the Nazis to enclose the Warsaw Ghetto were taken to the United States Holocaust Memorial and Museum in Washington to give authentic power to its permanent collection." An empty space once occupied by the missing bricks stares out from the middle of the wall. However we relate individually to such material anchors of collective memory, it is clear from this example that even the most undistinguished object can attain tremendous signifying power under the right circumstances. In this case, those circumstances are not limited to the historical catastrophe of the Ghetto's brief and tragic life, which saw nearly half a million civilians crammed into an urban zone of about 1.3 square miles—roughly four times the population density of the most overcrowded cities in the world today—before the first, utterly hopeless armed rebellion of Jews against the Nazis in April and May 1943.2 More important from our contemporary vantage point is that the story of the Ghetto also encompasses the near-total annihilation of architectural traces of its ever having existed. "The place where the Ghetto used to be is empty," Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak write in their epilogue to the most comprehensive collation of information about the Ghetto published to date: "The place survived, but was somehow hollowed out, deprived of contents, an interior. The Ghetto that was here was exterminated, but the 'here' remains. … The framework remains within which a different reality is located; a topographical point remains, a cartographical abstraction."3 In this regard, the outline of space around the missing bricks may be more emblematic of the Ghetto as we now experience it than the modest section of wall itself. It suggests an economy of presence and absence, of authentic artifact and simulated space, that is central to the modern experience of the past in population centers, where we witness most readily the conflict between architectural preservation, with its roots in nineteenth-century industrialization...

The problem of milk in the nineteenth-century Ontario cheese industry: an envirotechnical approach to business history

This article analyses Ontario’s export-oriented cheese industry and its challenges in the second half of the nineteenth century using an ‘envirotechnical’ approach. The reorganisation of cheese production from farms to rural factories in the 1860s increased opportunities for spoilage and adulteration of milk at the same time that it made detecting and managing the same more difficult, which compelled the provincial dairymen’s associations to develop quasi-managerial roles to contend with these unanticipated challenges. The ‘problem of milk’ highlights the extent to which the rural cheese industry was an ecological and envirotechnical process rather than an entity separate from the non-human world. Ultimately this case study offers one model for combining environmental and business histories at a scale beyond the individual firm while also highlighting the relevance of the local in the development of the global food system in the late-nineteenth century.

The Romantic Days of Juniata Charcoal Iron

ABSTRACT In the annals of Pennsylvania history, few industries had as significant an impact as iron and steel. From its beginnings in the southeast, the industry headed westward after the American Revolution, until firmly landing in Pittsburgh in the mid-nineteenth century. Historian Arthur C. Bining documented the origins of ironmaking in the state, and numerous authors wrote of the later steelmaking centers in the Lehigh Valley and western Pennsylvania. Sandwiched in between is the Juniata Valley, which has been and is a major transportation corridor, with trails, the turnpike, canal, railroad, and modern highway successively following the Juniata River through central Pennsylvania. It seems a backwater today, but centered in the nineteenth century, the iron and steel industry briefly stopped here and sent the name “Juniata” around the world. In 136 years, around 150 charcoal-fueled furnaces and forges produced iron regarded as among the finest in the world. During its peak, the Juniata produced nearly half of all iron in Pennsylvania, and a fifth of the national output. With the rise of big steel, the Juniata Valley became a mere footnote in history. Few today know of the incredible legacy of Juniata iron. This article brings to life the story of Juniata iron, its rise, prominence, and fall, and sheds light on the veracity of its reputation.

The Multiple Deindustrializations of Canada’s Maritime Provinces and the Evaluation of Heritage-Related Urban Regeneration11 For valuable comments on an earlier version of this essay, the authors wish to thank Donald J. Savoie and the participants at the Swansea Conference organized by the Canadian Studies in Wales Group on Regeneration, Heritage and Cultural Identity: Trans-Atlantic Perspectives, June 2013.

The Maritime provinces of Canada share with many other nations the experience of nineteenth-century industrialization and twentieth-century deindustrialization. For deindustrialized areas, the social and environmental pressures imposed by deindustrialization are frequently held to be open to mitigation through urban regeneration projects that seek to build on existing cultural heritage and ultimately enable communities to thrive in both cultural and economic terms. In the Maritime provinces, however, two factors have greatly complicated the emergence of effective urban regeneration. One is the historical complexity of both industrialization and deindustrialization in the region, while the other is the critical weakness of evaluation criteria for defining success in urban regeneration and thus assessing the effectiveness of regeneration projects. Without advocating the adoption of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ model, and recognizing the complexity – even intractability – of the ‘wicked problems’ that attend any regeneration project, this essay will argue that historical and policy-related analysis can be combined to generate a regional approach to urban regeneration and its evaluation, which will take account of the need to maintain existing cultural integrity and to support processes of policy learning and social learning.

Breaking the silence. Family ties and social networks of the deaf. A case study of East Flanders, Belgium, 1750–1950

In this article the social networks and family ties of a pre-industrial (married and/or died between 1770 and 1850) and industrial (married and/or died between 1850 and 1950) cohort of deaf men and women are compared to each other and to a cohort of non-disabled siblings. The aim is to assess the extent to which the deaf participated in a full-fledged manner in family and social life and to evaluate the ways in which their social networks changed as a result of nineteenth-century industrialisation processes. The extent of social integration is deduced from the profile of the witnesses registered in marriage and death certificates. In the absence of personal testimonies of social experiences, demographic sources are invaluable for providing a glimpse of the everyday social life of ordinary people in the past. In combination with historical records identifying disabled individuals, this research is a first attempt to study the social opportunities of an up-until-now often forgotten, but nevertheless integral part of society: the disabled. Based on the analysis of the witnesses, this article argues that in the course of the nineteenth century deaf individuals became less embedded in their social environment and their relationship with their family weakened. The minority of married deaf persons, however, expressed a much higher connectedness with family.

Backstreet capitalism: An analysis of the family firm in the nineteenth-century Sheffield cutlery industry

Drawing upon a database compiled using digital sources, this article explores the development and characteristics of over 1000 Sheffield cutlery enterprises. In Sheffield cutlery, the family was virtually synonymous with the firm. Large factories were rare, with no more than a dozen businesses employing more than 250 workers by 1914. Foreign manufacturers or merchants were sparse, too, and only about 20 have been found operating in Sheffield in the nineteenth century. Businesses drew their strength in the first instance from individual family skills, within a quintessentially craft-based industry. The backstreet nature of most cutlery enterprises enabled women (and children) to play a key role in both the home and factory – sometimes providing additional support through their involvement in the beer houses and shops that many families operated as a second enterprise. Companies often formed miniature family dynasties, reflecting the father-to-son nature of the trade and the connectedness (sometimes through marriage) with other families. Digital sources should allow other family-based English industries or clusters to be recreated in similar detail.

The global ring? Boxing, mobility, and transnational networks in the anglophone world, 1890–1914

AbstractThis article examines professional boxing as a compelling and dynamic example of globalization from below between 1890 and 1914. It explores the sport's fluctuating legal and organizational status and maps the movement of professional boxers – and the networks that facilitated this movement – across the anglophone world. Boxing was particularly suited to cross-national mobility because it developed alongside, and built upon, the global circuits of the late nineteenth-century entertainment industry. Yet the main sites of the anglophone boxing world were not connected in any structured or standardized fashion. Channels of communication and routes of traffic were continually shifting, with no one city, region or nation emerging as a consistent hub of activity. This article explores boxing's fluid, multiple and loosely structured ‘networks’, and shows how the sport remained largely resistant to international regulation and standardization in this period.