Nineteenth-century Industry Research Articles

Buildings of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania

Buildings of Pennsylvania: Philadelphia and Eastern Pennsylvania

Ties That Bind: Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Quest for Economic Justice

Ties That Bind: Walter Rauschenbusch, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Quest for Economic Justice

PEPPERED MOTHS IN BLACK AND WHITE

![][1] The peppered moth represents one of the most iconic examples of natural selection in action. The popular account of its evolution is both simple and intuitive. Nineteenth century industrialization in Britain dramatically altered the landscape. Pale lichen covering tree branches

Through the magnifying glass: provincial aspects of industrial growth in post‐Unification Italy1

This article presents estimates of industrial production in post‐Unification Italy's 69 provinces in the census years 1871, 1881, 1901, and 1911. Initially industry was largely artisanal, and located in the former political capitals; but even then the waterfalls of the subalpine north‐west attracted what factory industry there was. Contrary to widespread opinion, in the aftermath of Unification the industrial and overall growth leaders were actually in the south, where selected provinces reaped the gains from the freer foreign trade, and infrastructure investment, that accompanied the loss of independence. Over the later nineteenth century industry concentrated into the ‘industrial triangle’; but even there industrialization remained sharply local, and excluded the right bank of the upper Po. The early twentieth century, in turn, brought a measure of industrial diffusion—to the centre/north‐east, where it was tied to the production of perishables on recently improved land—and concentration within the north‐western triangle itself, into its major cities, as progress in energy transmission effectively moved the waterfalls into the plains.

The Cakewalk of Capital in Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition

Engaging in a long-standing debate about how to understand post-Reconstruction era “spectacle lynching,” Kilgore's essay revisits Charles Chesnutt's 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition in light of current theories of racial violence read through the logics of corporate capitalism. It contends that Marrow highlights the deep affinities between two nineteenth-century national institutions of US popular culture—minstrelsy and lynching. Chesnutt's novel does not support the traditional view that late nineteenth-century popular industries functioned as a mask of progressive modernity in order to conceal the regressive barbarisms of racist violence, a violence understood as the resilient legacy of convulsive, psychoaffective white supremacy; as a conspiratorial compromise between a reunited North and South; or as a response to the rise of an African American middle-class in the wake of a depressed Southern economy. Instead, Chesnutt gives the reader a subtle and underappreciated look into the constitutive, imperial, and “modern” economic forces behind racial violence, represented, like cakewalk performances, as banal popular entertainment, part and parcel of the extension of US capital both intranationally and internationally. Thus, in an analysis of the violent marrow of US racism, Chesnutt offers a surprising diagnosis: the cakewalk of capital.

Was there a family gap in late nineteenth century manufacturing? Evidence from Sweden

While women today often face a substantial wage penalty for childbearing, we show that this was not always the case, making use of a rich material of matched employer-employee data covering the Swedish tobacco industry in 1898 in its entirety. Although working conditions were dire, and hours long, women working in the late nineteenth-century manufacturing industry faced no motherhood penalty. Compared to other women, mothers worked slightly less but earned higher (six per cent) hourly wages. Experience increased women's wages but firm tenure did not, and women were not penalized for career interruptions or changes of employer. The wage premium, however, occurred only among women working on piece rates, and not among women working for time rate wages. Apparently, it was related to effort; mothers on piece rates could increase their work effort in order to provide more income for their dependent children.

Producer co-operatives and economic efficiency: Evidence from the nineteenth-century cotton textile industry

The relative efficiency of producer co-operatives is investigated through an examination of the financial performance of a group of cotton spinning firms that emerged from the spread of co-operative ideals after the mid-nineteenth century. Reflecting such influences these firms adopted two particularly important aspects of democratic governance: use of low denomination partly paid shares to encourage wide share ownership among local working class operatives, and the use of a one shareholder one vote rule at company meetings. Prior literature, much of which predicts the failure of producer co-operatives due to incentive problems, has not specifically examined these aspects of democratic control. Moreover because the case study utilises samples of stock market quoted companies, there is an opportunity to quantify the financial performance effects of these governance mechanisms. The case study therefore offers a unique insight and important contribution to the wider literature. The results show that both aspects of democratic governance contributed to the economic success of the companies that adopted them, enabling them to satisfy the high demand for cash dividends that characterised investor requirements. However, the cyclical nature of the cotton industry and the stock market booms and slumps that resulted led to redistributions of wealth through time that in the long run undermined the co-operative project.

Accounting and economic returns in British coal mining: The Carlton Main colliery, 1872–1909

Various estimates, both ex ante and ex post, have been produced of the accounting rate of return on investments in the late nineteenth-century coal industry, with some ex post figures also being calculated for individual firms engaged therein, such as the Consett Iron Co. Ltd. No one, however, has previously tried to calculate the economic rate of return from investing in a single coal mine over the duration of its life. In this article we examine both accounting and economic rates of return for the Carlton Main colliery, from its sinking during the 1870s through to its closure in 1909. Our results enable us to judge the accuracy of previous estimates of returns for the late nineteenth-century coal industry, and of contemporary estimates of the potential rate of return in coal mining. We also offer insights into the efficacy of using accounting rates of return as an indicator of the economic rate of return during that period.

Knowledge Economies in Agnes Grey

The article contextualizes Anne Brontë's novel Agnes Grey (1847) in terms of the dynamics of exchange characteristic of a knowledge economy. It revisits and discusses the central issue of the heroine's growth from an impressionable child reflecting established and socially reinforced norms to a facilitator of new ways of thinking and being. It is shown that her own often difficult trading in an economy in which knowledge — even if not linked to, or determined by, middle-class financial independence — is the capital that enables individuation and the formation of a holistic human being. Embedding Agnes within the context of the nineteenth-century patriarchal knowledge industry makes possible not only a nuanced understanding of her own emotional and epistemological processes; rather, it also substantially contributes to questioning the often applied generic category of the Bildungsroman to Anne Brontë's narrative.

Indian Higher Education and the Need for Critical Knowledges

The construction of a reflexive modernity calls for people who can look at their own society and correctly identify its greatest challenges. Modernity may be weak and poorly rooted in India but this is precisely why more sensitivity is called for not less. While many of the contradictions created by nineteenth-century industrialisation are surfacing now in India, the risks of late industrial societies are simultaneously making their presence felt. The weakening of social and normative knowledges cannot be said to be a problem restricted to liberal welfare states, it threatens India too. The dangers created by this weakening may take up special forms here, given the small ratio of the educated section in comparison to the rest of Indian society. The demand for critical and human knowledges will never go away. The challenge now is for us to rethink how we can meet that demand.

A new nation of goods: the material culture of early America

In the middle of the nineteenth century, middle-class Americans embraced a new culture of domestic consumption, one that centered on chairs and clocks as well as family portraits and books. How did that new world of goods, represented by Victorian parlors filled with overstuffed furniture and daguerreotype portraits, come into being? A New Nation of Goods highlights the significant role of provincial artisans in four crafts in the northeastern United States-chairmaking, clockmaking, portrait painting, and book publishing-to explain the shift from preindustrial society to an entirely new configuration of work, commodities, and culture. As a whole, the book proposes an innovative analysis of early nineteenth-century industrialization and the development of a middle-class consumer culture. It relies on many of the objects beloved by decorative arts scholars and collectors to evoke the vitality of village craft production and culture in the decades after the War of Independence. A New Nation of Goods grounds its broad narrative of cultural change in case studies of artisans, consumers, and specific artifacts. Each chapter opens with an object lesson and weaves an object-based analysis together with the richness of individual lives. The path that such craftspeople and consumers took was not inevitable; on the contrary, as historian David Jaffee vividly demonstrates, it was strewn with alternative outcomes, such as decentralized production with specialized makers. The richly illustrated book offers a collective biography of the post-Revolutionary generation, gathering together the case studies of producers and consumers who embraced these changes, those who opposed them, or, most significantly, those who fashioned the myriad small changes that coalesced into a new Victorian cultural order that none of them had envisioned or entirely appreciated.

New York's Lascivious Nineteenth-Century Publishing Industry

New York's Lascivious Nineteenth-Century Publishing Industry

Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day: Friends

IN DECEMBER 1932 an American could be forgiven for taking a short view of things. The Great Depression that had begun three years earlier had deepened and then deepened again. At least 25 percent of workers were unemployed, over one-third of the nation's banks had failed, and the gross national product was one-half of what had been just three years before. As the nation awaited recently elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal--a massive governmental effort at relief, recovery, and reform--the circumstances of millions of Americans were clearly desperate: what about jobs? food? shelter? What of hope in the land of opportunity and freedom? The nation had suffered through other depressions in its history, especially in the generation after the Civil War, but this one would come to be called the Great Depression due to the severity of its assault on national and personal well-being over ten years' time. All in all, was easy to connect with a severely contracted view of things when everyday life was so tenuous, the social order so fragile. There were, of course, those who did have a wider perspective about the economic and social catastrophe. Systemic solutions were bobbing about in the roiled national waters: various forms of socialism, communism, and statist initiatives were advertised; even a few native fascists offered their ideas as to how best to bail out the imperiled American ark. What had seemed so good, so promising in America's self-conscious voyage beyond humanity's historic scarcities and into the ever more visible land of material plenty had instead foundered. Just a generation earlier, for example, an exuberant Andrew Carnegie had taken America's new prosperity for granted and offered well-intended solutions regarding its actual distribution. But now all about was the wreckage of the American economic system. And so the system had to be rescued and reformed. What Roosevelt would accomplish would be a social welfare state built upon capitalism. It was a curious feat that would disappoint many of the would-be systemic ideologues, all armed with their own blueprints detailing mandatory political or social or economic alterations in order to save the American experiment. Critics of the American system, political as well as social and economic, however, did offer many thoughtful comments as to the problems of modernity. Late nineteenth-century industrialization had helped to create an astounding abundance and accordingly America was a preferred destination for a good two-thirds of the world's migrants in the century ending with the Great War (1914-18). It was the most attractive location to seek liberty and the freedom to achieve. This, of course, was not an automatic result of leaving one's native land. The periodic depressions highlighted the miseries of unemployment, urban overcrowding, and health and education issues, while in its turn an enduring American nativism or anti-immigrant attitude assaulted these new strangers in the land. Technology and science were producing wonders, but the perceived anonymity of modern life was worrisome, as was the alienation and secularization seemingly woven into the new corporate and bureaucratic modern state and economy. While newly minted pragmatists championed the practical ethic of it is good if works to achieve what is you wish to achieve, other American observers wondered aloud about the apparent loss of a capacity not only to see things whole, but also to embrace a life so marked with the blessings of this perceived wholeness. As the expatriate T. S. Eliot phrased it: is the Life we have lost in living? / Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? / Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? (1) In The Education of Henry Adams (1918), for which he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1919, the grandson and great-grandson of two American presidents struggled with the issue. To Henry Adams, appeared that all of the energies let loose in post--Civil War America, from the creating of economic abundance to startling discoveries in science and technology, all of this multiplicity, had undermined any perceptible reality of unity in this brave new world. …

The effects of 118 years of industrial fishing on UK bottom trawl fisheries

In 2009, the European Commission estimated that 88% of monitored marine fish stocks were overfished, on the basis of data that go back 20 to 40 years and depending on the species investigated. However, commercial sea fishing goes back centuries, calling into question the validity of management conclusions drawn from recent data. We compiled statistics of annual demersal fish landings from bottom trawl catches landing in England and Wales dating back to 1889, using previously neglected UK Government data. We then corrected the figures for increases in fishing power over time and a recent shift in the proportion of fish landed abroad to estimate the change in landings per unit of fishing power (LPUP), a measure of the commercial productivity of fisheries. LPUP reduced by 94%-17-fold--over the past 118 years. This implies an extraordinary decline in the availability of bottom-living fish and a profound reorganization of seabed ecosystems since the nineteenth century industrialization of fishing.

Through the Magnifying Glass: Provincial Aspects of Industrial Growth in Post-Unification Italy

This article presents estimates of industrial production in post‐Unification Italy's 69 provinces in the census years 1871, 1881, 1901, and 1911. Initially industry was largely artisanal, and located in the former political capitals; but even then the waterfalls of the subalpine north‐west attracted what factory industry there was. Contrary to widespread opinion, in the aftermath of Unification the industrial and overall growth leaders were actually in the south, where selected provinces reaped the gains from the freer foreign trade, and infrastructure investment, that accompanied the loss of independence. Over the later nineteenth century industry concentrated into the ‘industrial triangle’; but even there industrialization remained sharply local, and excluded the right bank of the upper Po. The early twentieth century, in turn, brought a measure of industrial diffusion - to the centre/north‐east, where it was tied to the production of perishables on recently improved land - and concentration within the north‐western triangle itself, into its major cities, as progress in energy transmission effectively moved the waterfalls into the plains.

Lord Byron and the end of fame

A B S T R A C T • This article sketches a theory of celebrity culture that relies on taking a longer view of its history than has been customary in Cultural Studies. While a number of cultural theorists have analysed contemporary celebrity, and a number of film historians have connected the cultural history of celebrity to the rise of modern cinema, this essay suggests that modern celebrity culture has its roots in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century industrialization of print. It argues that a celebrity's branded identity circulates so extensively in part because it can be appropriated so easily. In order to trace in greater detail the processes of appropriation that drive celebrity culture, the essay takes the reception of Lord Byron (1788—1824) as a case study. The article surveys a number of nineteenth-century commentators who predicted that Byron's work would be unread after his death. It examines in detail the posthumous reprinting of one stanza from Byron's poem Childe Harold in travel guides, school anthologies and elocution manuals, showing how some fragments of Byron's writing were given renewed currency, in part, by becoming embedded in new contexts and refitted for new ideological purposes. It suggests that by understanding the infrastructure of citation, appropriation and redeployment that can turn celebrities from earlier ages into canonical figures for later ones, we can grasp how their original celebrity becomes obscured, and with it the long history of celebrity culture, which seems perpetually to be a recent innovation.

K. D. M. Snell.Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales, 1700–1950.:Parish and Belonging: Community, Identity and Welfare in England and Wales, 1700–1950

There was a time when the study of the parish was regarded as the essence of antiquarianism among academic historians of the British Isles. But, for over two decades, the work of K. D. M. Snell has done a great deal to remind us that sophisticated and close studies of the parish, with its rich and abundant records, are essential to a fuller understanding of British experience in former times. In many respects, one can regard this new book as a lengthy sequel to Snell's Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (1985), which was similarly concerned with the ways in which social relations, family formation, occupation, and mechanisms of poor relief were all highly localized. The more recent book takes the subject well into the twentieth century whereas the earlier work treats the so-called long eighteenth century with more depth and originality (particularly in its use of primary evidence from that earlier period). It is on the nineteenth century (where these two books overlap) that Snell's new study is most energetic and most impressively supported by his application of a wide range of period evidence to quantitative and qualitative analyses. The most illuminating findings support his argument that the decline of community (a vexing issue in a centralizing and globalizing society) was not produced by nineteenth-century industrialization but by a much later, gradual decline of the parish itself as the real and perceived basis of community in England and Wales.

Investment and Diversification in the American Whaling Industry

This article analyzes the connection between investment decisions and financing arrangements in the nineteenth-century American whaling industry. Managers of whaling ventures shared their risks by selling some equity claims but retained a substantial portion due to moral hazard considerations. As a result, they had little incentive to consider the covariance between their own returns, and those of others, in planning their voyages. This stifled diversity in whaling voyages and increased industry-wide risk. The analysis suggests a link between financial market development, or the extent of risk sharing in financial markets, and the range of economic activities pursued. n October 1851 news of the whaling fleet's summer season in the North Pacific reached American ports. The reports were devastating: due to the unexpectedly early incursion of ice in the Bering Straits, many of the vessels were badly damaged, and eight were lost. Conditions were so difficult that even the vessels that escaped serious harm were unable to pursue whales. In a letter home, the first mate of one New Bedford vessel described the ordeal:

The Quantitative Analysis of Family Names: Historic Migration and the Present Day Neighborhood Structure of Middlesbrough, United Kingdom

This article describes the way in which a unique new quantitative data resource and evidence base has been used to relate historic measures of U.K. migration flows to the contemporary socioeconomic patterning of neighborhoods. The resource enables generalized analysis of the regional origins of British and Irish people from their family names, and makes it possible to relate the current regional distribution of names in the United States, Great Britain, and other English-speaking countries to equivalent information from the Great Britain Census of 1881. Illustrative applications may be viewed at http://www.spatial-literacy.org. In this article we develop a number of indices of the historic origins of English and Irish family names, as a prelude to detailed microscale analysis of late twentieth century surname patterns. We illustrate the usefulness of these various indices through case study analysis of Middlesbrough and East Cleveland, an area of the United Kingdom that attracted large numbers of economic migrants during its rapid nineteenth century industrialization. We use our quantitative evidence of the historical distributions of different family names in order to characterize the social mobility of descendants of Scottish, Irish, and Cornish migrants, and to evaluate the practice of ascribing family names to particular localities in historical GIS. The case study thus illustrates the ways in which our data resource may be used to substantiate existing thinking about historic migration and residential structure, as well as to generate and investigate new hypotheses that might guide future work.

Being Modern

In the period between the First and Second World Wars, Brisbane — in common with most of the ‘Western’ world — embraced a self-conscious modernity: the by-product of nineteenth century industrialisation, imperialism, liberalism and emergent consumerism. Reflected in material and intellectual culture from high art to daily lifestyle, and from the home to the workplace, modernity became the catch-cry and call-sign of the interwar years.