Object Lesson Research Articles

“Das eigentliche Problem vom Menschen”: Debt, (Ac)Countability, and the Financialization of Wildlife Conservation

In 2019, a new strategy in wildlife conservation was announced: so-called “rhino impact bonds,” designed to support the conservation of African black rhinos, with the ultimate aim of establishing a global “conservation debt market.” This essay takes this development in the financialization of wildlife conservation as an object lesson in the mutual imbrication of guilt, debt, and the (non)human in the age of the Anthropocene. To this end, it traces a theoretical trajectory that explicitly frames the figure of “Man” in terms of Schuld, starting with Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals. The essay takes Nietzsche’s “sovereign individual” to refer not to the human species as a whole but rather a specific “genre” of the human, namely what Sylvia Wynter calls homo oeconomicus. In “overrepresenting” himself as the paradigmatic human, this figure has established capital accumulation as the goal of all human life. From here, the essay turns to Walter Benjamin’s characterization of capitalism as a religion whose ultimate aim is not salvation but universal debt/guilt, and finally to Adorno’s account of nature conservation as domination. The rhino bonds represent the logical consequence of this trajectory, namely the expansion of the principle of universal debt to the entire natural world.

Ghostly Outlines

Ghostly Outlines

The Role of Public Parks in Telling the Nation's Story

In this paper, we discuss the role of public parks in telling the nation’s story via statues, memorials, and monuments. We ground our discussion in affect theory, which addresses the affective responses statues, memorials, and monuments elicit in visitors. Of particular note is affective dissonance, which suggests that a statue, memorial, or monument may evoke a variety of conflicting affective responses. The way in which visitors reconcile these conflicting affective responses shapes their public memory of significant events in our nation’s history. As more is learned about the checkered past of individuals venerated in statues, memorials, and monuments, how should public park administrators respond? We provide several examples of statues, memorials, and monuments that are controversial in nature, and discuss how public park administrators have responded to the challenge of telling the nation’s story through the reinterpretation of events. We also consider the complexity of the management implications, focusing in particular on who should be driving the decisions made. We then discuss the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, as a good object lesson in how to deal with the affective dissonance involved in recasting public spaces. In so doing, we underscore the importance of frame theory in educating visitors about the preservation, modification, or removal of existing statues, memorials, or monuments.

Practical Applications of Strategies for Responsible Investing:Emerging Academic Evidence

In <b>Strategies for Responsible Investing: <i>Emerging Academic Evidence</i></b>, authors <b>Vaska Atta-Darkua</b>, <b>David Chambers</b>, <b>Elroy Dimson</b>, <b>Zhenkai Ran</b>, and <b>Ting Yu</b> (all of the <b>University of Cambridge</b>) summarize and explain the findings from the <i>Divest or Engage? Strategies for Responsible Investing</i> conference in October 2019 at the University of Cambridge. The authors use a responsible investing debate from that conference as an object lesson to critique two methods of responsible investment, negative screening and engagement. They also illustrate the importance of selecting an ESG score provider by examining the differences in metrics among different providers. <b>TOPICS:</b>ESG investing, portfolio theory, portfolio construction

Teaching classics with objects? The acquisition of classical antiquities by British schools, 1860–1950

Abstract British secondary schools amassed collections of antiquities from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. These ordinarily contained classical objects, sometimes alongside Egyptian antiquities, and accompanied collections of natural history, geology and ethnography. This paper uses the collection formed by Bedford Modern School, now housed at the Higgins Museum, Bedford, to study the phenomenon of school classical collections. The analysis presented here places school collections within a wider history of ‘object lessons’, but suggests that these collections were more than merely teaching aids. School museums could act as signifiers of power and prestige, connection to alumni and wider local communities, and to a heritage of learning and scholarship embodied by classical antiquities. Furthermore, these collections illustrate the personalities and interests of individual collectors – usually the schoolmasters who were instrumental in their formation.

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Linda Mahood The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth (JHCY) explores the development of childhood and youth cultures and the experiences of young people across diverse times and places. We are keen to publish original articles that embrace novel historical methodologies as well as interdisciplinary scholarship that shares a historical focus on children and young people. Many issues also include an "object lesson" on the material culture of childhood, contemporary policy pieces, and reviews of books. This issue begins with Shurlee Swain's "An Imperial Mission? The National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and the International Dissemination of Ideas around Child Protection prior to World War I." Swain traces the transmission of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC), dissemination of their ideas throughout the colonies, and the factors that led to the success, failure, or local adaptation of the NSPCC's child-saving mission. She shows that within ten years of its foundation, the NSPCC was reporting on kindred societies in India, South Africa, New Zealand, and several of the Australian colonies, although none was able to completely replicate the original model. The next three articles deal with political and missionary movements. In her article, "Better Off with 'Their Own People': Basque Refugee Children, Catholic Anti-Communism, and the Geopolitics of Compassion in FDR's America," Anita Casavantes Bradford details how, in 1937, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, the autonomous Basque government organized the evacuation of 25,000 endangered Basque children. At the same time, American anti-fascists launched a program to bring Basque refugee children to the United States. Opposed by a restrictionist State Department and powerful anti-communist Catholic leaders, they were ultimately unsuccessful. Bradford argues that close examination of the failed program reveals how foreign policy and domestic political interests have long interacted with changing notions of race and religion to determine which unaccompanied children were seen as deserving of asylum in the United States. Divya Kannan's article focuses on children in India and [End Page 185] how missionary literature for young British readers drew upon a hierarchy of colonial childhoods premised on racial differentiation. In "'Children's Work for Children': Caste, Childhood, and Missionary Philanthropy in Colonial India," Kannan states that in the colonial field, such literature colluded with existent dominant caste biases, perpetuated through violent means. Kannan shows how Othering of low-caste children destabilized missionary notions of sentimentalized childhood even as periodical literature represented them as objects of pity. These children were not "voiceless victims," but their lived realities impinged on missionary practices and literary representations. In "Celebrating Violence? Children, Youth, and War Education in Maoist China (1949–1976)," Orna Naftali looks at the role of children's education in the creation of Chinese war culture in the Mao era (1949–1976). Analyzing school textbooks as well as pedagogical and media publications, Naftali highlights the existence of competing visions of children's roles in military violence. The findings challenge the thesis that childhood in Maoist China was ultra-militarized and the assumption that during the Cold War era, countries on different sides of the divide held starkly contrasting notions of the young. The final two articles deal with children's relationship to the natural world. Chris Rasmussen looks at the Children's International Summer Villages (CISV). His article, "A Whole Network of Friends: Doris Twitchell Allen's Children's International Summer Villages and American Peacemaking in the Cold War," examines a post–World War II effort to harness applied psychological expertise for the cause of world peace. Psychologist Doris Twitchell Allen believed that the American summer camp had the potential to break down national barriers and unite eleven-year-olds in "friendships without frontiers." The ambitious vision to engineer a lasting peace was characteristic of postwar psychology, and the history of the early CISV demonstrates how the Cold War made it an impossible goal. Finally, Joe Goddard examines three mid-twentieth-century Walt Disney short cartoons. His article, entitled "Celluloid Cityscapes: Kids, Cars, and Cartoons in the United States, 1938–1965," argues that initially, Disney cartoons were aimed at a mixed adult and child audience, but over...

Object Lessons: The Materiality of Legal Practices

Object Lessons: The Materiality of Legal Practices

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction Linda Mahood The Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth is the official journal of the Society for the History of Children and Youth (SHCY). Our mandate is to promote the history of children and youth by supporting interdisciplinary research on childhood, youth cultures, and the experience of young people across diverse times and places. I would like to begin this issue by acknowledging winners of recent SHCY prizes. Hizky Shoham's "Small Sales Agents (of Nationalism) Inside the House": Childhood, Consumer Culture, and Nationalism in the Jewish Yishuv of Interwar Palestine" (Winter 2019) won the JHCY Best Article Prize for 2019. The winner of the Fass-Sandin Article Prize in English (2019) is Kelly M. Duke Bryant's "Runaways, Dutiful Daughters, and Brides: Family Strategies of Formerly Enslaved Girls in Senegal, 1895–1911" in Women, Gender, and Families of Color 7 (Spring 2019). The Fass-Sandin Article Prize in Scandinavia (2019) is Randi Dyblie Nilsen's "Barneperspektiv—en ressurs i kritisk samfunnsvitenskap?" in Nordisk tidsskrift for pedagogikk og kritikk volume 5 (2019). The prize committee awarded an honorable mention to Ning de Coninck-Smith for her article "Transnationale arkitektoniske kulturmøder" [Transnational architectural encounters]. The Grace Abbott Book Prize (2019) was awarded to Rebecca Swartz's Education and Empire: Children, Race and Humanitarianism in the British Settler Colonies, 1833–1880 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and Mary Hatfield's Growing Up in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2019) received an honorable mention. We congratulate all of the entrants and winners and thank the judges. For more information about SHCY activities and conferences, go to: https://www.shcy.org. This issue opens with an object lesson by Katherine Reed. Memory forms the thread of "Commemoration of the Living: A Graffiti Fragment from Ellis Island." Reed analyzes graffiti by a fifteen-year-old boy, Cesare Colosimo, who was detained at Ellis Island immigration station in 1922. Reed argues that Colosimo and his desire to be remembered can be seen in the graffiti, memories, and keepsakes at the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration, which [End Page 1] shapes a collective memory of migration. Memory and memoir are also the theme of "Grief and Youth Remembered: Accessing Experiences of Historical Youth Justice through Memoir" by Clarissa Carden. Carden argues for the recognition of grief as an important, and often neglected, aspect of marginalized youth experiences. Her article examines disenfranchised grief in the memoirs of two former inmates of the Westbrook Farm Home for Boys in Queensland, Australia. The boys were incarcerated in the institution during a moment in its history when abuse was rife. According to Carden, published memoir is a means to access the historical experiences of marginalized young people. Talia Diskin's article "Socializing Austerity: Imparting Legal and Moral Values in Children's Periodicals during Israel's First Years" examines the challenges of the rationing regime during Israel's first decade and its depiction in the central children's periodicals of that time. Diskin shows how the restrictive consumption policy was mediated to children in the young state, the social roles that adults—the journals' creators—had appointed to children during those lean times when the black market prospered, and the ways in which young readers were instilled with the need to conquer their longing for coveted goods and gather their mental and physical strength in the face of adversity. In the next article, we move to Japan, where Tatsuya Mitsuda investigates the interplay between children, sweets, and parents before and after the Second World War. "Consumed by Sweets: Parents, Children, and Snacking in Modern Japan" focuses on the problems posed by the penny sweet shop and the street sweets it sold to children, analyzing society's attempts to control and reform the contents of sweets and the practice of snacking. It demonstrates that street sweets served as powerful exemplars, shaping middle-class notions of "proper" confections, how they should be made, with whom they should be shared, and where and when they should be purchased and eaten. Mitsuda concludes that children were formidable consumers who bought less into the nutritional or hygienic value of confections and more into the broader experience of snacking. The welfare state...

Blazing a Path to Wilderness: A Case Study of Impact Litigation Through the Lens of Legislative History

Litigation can be a catalyst for legislation. Legislative history can reveal just how influential litigation is. The legislative history of the laws to designate wilderness in the 1980s provides an object lesson. It demonstrates that litigation both pushed Congress to act and shaped the legislation Congress enacted. This is especially true of the watershed year of 1984. That year, Congress enacted more wilderness laws and added more wilderness areas to the National Wilderness Preservation System in more states than in any other year. The legislative history of the 1984 wilderness laws embedded in bills, hearings, committee meetings, committee reports, and floor proceedings, in conjunction with the legislative history of the various wilderness bills and laws considered, rejected, and passed from 1979 through 1983, reveal the significant impact a particular lawsuit had on Congress in 1984 and beyond. Specifically, a lawsuit grounded in the National Environmental Policy Act, taking advantage of a powerful precedent, prompted the preservation of the wilderness character of millions of acres of public land. To be precise: The lawsuit impelled Congress to designate more than 9.171 million acres in twenty-three states as wilderness from 1984 through 1989. Of that number, more than 7.335 million acres are managed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture through the Forest Service; more than 1.835 million acres are managed by the U.S. Department of the Interior through the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service. This article uses legislative history to demonstrate how a strategic lawsuit sparked congressional action. It traces the litigation engendered by the Forest Service’s decision regarding roadless areas in national forests and the evolution of Congress’s response to that litigation, from the first lawsuit filed in 1979 to the last filed in 1983. In the process, it shows how legislative history can illuminate the underlying causes and policy choices that lead to legislation.

How Global Events and Social Change Affect Modern Lexicography

How Global Events and Social Change Affect Modern Lexicography Ben Zimmer (bio) Long gone are the days when dictionary publishers were only expected to push out major revisions every decade or so when a new print edition appeared, with perhaps occasional updates adding new entries and senses along the way, depending on the production schedule. Ever since the advent of online dictionary publishing, lexicographers have increasingly taken advantage of the agility of digital content creation in order to react speedily to the latest lexical developments. As dictionaries have shifted to having a primarily online presence, some in the industry have rosily portrayed the move from page to pixel as a “liberation from the straitjacket of print” (Zimmer 2014). Kory Stamper, in her book Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, summed up this evolution: “Dictionaries move online and they are no longer fixed objects, revered books kept on the family shelf, but malleable, ever-changing works that mirror the quicksilver nature of our language” (Stamper 2017, 258). But when dictionaries are no longer “fixed objects”—the weighty tome sitting magisterially on the dictionary stand—do they lose some of their traditional authority? And in what ways should dictionaries be “malleable” and “ever-changing”? For most dictionary publishers, this malleability has meant adding and revising entries at a vastly more accelerated pace, along with [End Page 41] various other changes to the way that the major digital dictionaries present their information to an online audience (Zimmer 2017). Perhaps most notably, lexicographers have learned to become more nimble in addressing dynamic social situations regarding word usage, as well as in responding to changing expectations from users of their online dictionaries. New socio-political realities, such as those brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, have the potential of deeply affecting or even upending standard lexicographical practices. The three papers in this forum provide distinct perspectives on how exactly lexicographers are adapting to these contemporary concerns, with insights from different dictionary programs. Stefan Fatsis, in “Thirty-Four Days: Inside Merriam-Webster’s Emergency Coronavirus Update,” provides an object lesson in just how expeditiously a dictionary publisher can respond to global events, even a publisher not traditionally known for its editorial alacrity. When, in 1984, Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary added an entry for AIDS a mere two years after the acronym first appeared in print, it was seen as an outlier, contravening the more deliberate approach favored by Merriam-Webster’s dictionary editors. But when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in early 2020, it was clear that an entire array of pandemic-related terms, including Covid-19 and the shorter Covid, would need to enter the dictionary as quickly as possible. Merriam-Webster’s turnaround of slightly longer than a month, measured from the time that the World Health Organization established the official Covid-19 terminology, signaled a remarkable shift in the way that lexicographers could mobilize as a kind of rapid-response team—a shift that was simultaneously mirrored at other major dictionary publishers making their own special pandemic updates in 2020. Wendalyn Nichols and Lewis C. Lawyer offer the vantage point from Cambridge Dictionaries in their paper, “Identifying Emergent Meanings via the Word of the Year Process: A Case Study.” The Cambridge lexicographers, upon selecting quarantine as their Word of the Year for 2020, discovered that their entry for the word was sorely lacking in capturing Covid-era usage patterns. Corpus analysis helped reveal just what those patterns look like, necessitating a revision to the quarantine entry to account for its evolving semantic outlines. No longer is a quarantine expected to last for a specific period of time, and the word has become applied to healthy people seeking to avoid the disease rather [End Page 42] than simply sequestering those who are potentially contagious. It is also notable that the process of revising the quarantine entry was set into motion by analyzing spikes in lookup data for the Cambridge Dictionary website in order to make a quantitatively sound Word of the Year selection. Analyzing lookups can help lexicographers pinpoint which entries are most salient to dictionary users at any given time, thus focusing their editorial attention on what is most valuable...

Being Kathy H.: Relatability in Never Let Me Go

This essay takes up relatability as a fundamental thematic and critical concern in Never Let Me Go. The power of the novel, I argue, resides in the way that Ishiguro makes relatability a difficult but necessary task that intentionally creates a great deal of emotional and cognitive dissonance for readers. The problem that the novel identifies with relatability is not that it is too easy, but that it is so difficult. Never Let Me Go offers a kind of object lesson on how hard it is to relate, and the tragic consequences of failing at it.

Researching the efficacy of a reading intervention: An object lesson

Conducting classroom-based educational research trials is important for establishing the efficacy and effectiveness of specific instructional interventions. Such endeavours, however, are challenging to implement. This was made evident during a recent independent evaluation of the efficacy of the MiniLit program, wherein various difficulties emerged relating to the dosage and fidelity of instruction, and the measures and analyses employed by the research team. As such, this served as an object lesson in what can, and frequently does, go wrong in even the best planned intervention research enterprises conducted in schools. The present article is intended to capture the authors’ experiences in implementing research trials in school contexts, with specific examples drawn from the independent evaluation of MiniLit. In particular, this study has reinforced the need to select assessment measures carefully, according to how well they represent targeted skills in the specific population of interest. In addition, it has highlighted the importance of planning program efficacy trials such that participants can receive enough exposure of the intervention to progress to a realistic extent.

Victorian Jamaica, edited by Tim Barringer and Wayne Modest, Settlers, War, and Empire in the Press: Unsettling News in Australia and Britain, 1863-1902, by Sam Hutchinson, and Special Correspondence and the Newspaper Press in Victorian Print Culture, 185

Reviewed by: Victorian Jamaica ed. by Tim Barringer and Wayne Modest Natalie Zacek (bio) Victorian Jamaica, edited by Tim Barringer and Wayne Modest; pp. ix + 722. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2018, $139.95, $38.95 paper. On August 1, 1838, just five weeks after Queen Victoria’s coronation, Jamaicans celebrated the end of the emancipation process, and for more than a century afterward many Black Jamaicans attributed their freedom to the intervention of “Missis Queen,” a belief based on imperial propaganda rather than historical fact (2). Victoria’s sixty-four-year reign was not only “a period of unresolved transition and crisis” (3) that exposed the “ambiguities of hard-won freedom” for Afro-Jamaicans; it was also marked by constant dialogue and conflict between colony and metropole in the spheres of politics, economics, and culture (2). In Victorian Jamaica, a huge and beautifully produced volume, art historian Tim Barringer and scholar of material culture Wayne Modest, in conjunction with several dozen contributors, provide readers with an encyclopedic history of the political, visual, and material culture of Jamaica from the eve of Emancipation to the beginning of the twentieth century. They also expand on the work of, among others, Thomas Holt and Catherine Hall by placing the Caribbean at the center of historical understanding of this era of British history. [End Page 695] Although the latter half of the nineteenth century saw the formation of both Black and brown middle classes in Jamaica, the majority of non-whites remained impoverished and disenfranchised. They were also subject to ongoing attempts, by this emergent bourgeoisie as well as the remaining white inhabitants, to “civilize” them by eradicating their creolized culture and replacing it with one based on English Protestant values. Nonetheless, many aspects of Afro-Jamaican culture survived, and ideas and practices imported from the metropole underwent sometimes surprising metamorphoses in the Jamaican context. While some of these cultural formations have been studied in recent years from a textual perspective, Barringer and Modest focus on the visual and material culture of this period, which is often ignored in favor of that of the pre-Emancipation or post-Independence eras of Jamaican history. In so doing, their goal is to locate the Caribbean in general and Jamaica in particular within the “material turn in the humanities” of the past few decades, and specifically to foreground the experiences of non-white Jamaicans, traces of whose material and expressive cultures can help to compensate for the paucity of archival representations of their lives (23). Following the editors’ substantive context-setting introduction are twenty-two “object lessons,” brief essays by historians and scholars of visual culture that center on a single image or object and evaluate “the complex entanglements that characterized colonial relations in Jamaica during the Victorian period and the broader implications of these relations for the history of empire” (51). Many examine symbols of the “civilizing mission” (5), such as Joseph Bartholomew Kidd’s 1854 map of the city of Kingston (explored in a chapter by Rivke Jaffe) which emphasizes the central square known as the Parade, created as a “stage for displays of military might and social status” (73). Similarly, Anthony Bogues’s essay considers a turn-of-the-century image of an Afro-Jamaican wedding party in which the bride’s lavish white gown, the groom’s morning coat, and the couple’s white-gloved hands symbolize these newlyweds’ “markings of black respectability,” which might allow ex-slaves and their descendants “to be seen as human and as her majesty’s subject[s]” (95). But other contributions depict covert or overt evidence of resistance, such as (in Diana Paton’s essay) an Obeah figure which supposedly had such power that both Black and white viewers expressed fear of it, or (in Modest’s) a British military officer’s photograph of the gravesite of eighty Afro-Jamaicans who had been executed on the orders of colonial governor Edward Eyre for their involvement in the Morant Bay uprising of 1865. Beyond this series of brief but illuminating “lessons,” the bulk of this immense volume is made up of twenty-three chapters, separated under the rubrics of “Making Victorian Subjects,” “Visual and Material Cultures...

The past, present and future of the non-traded NAV REIT structure

Purpose Over 15 years ago Goodwin created the first open-ended, non-traded real estate investment trust (REIT) with regular sales and redemptions at net asset value (“NAV REIT”). While NAV REITs are now well established, there is still room for improvement. Design/methodology/approach We traced the evolution of the NAV REIT’s innovative, investor-friendly features – transparent valuation to strike NAV, liquidity via redemption at NAV per share, indefinite life, lower/simpler selling and management fees, share classes with different upfront loads and trailing distribution fees. Findings To improve the liquidity feature of NAV REITs, share classes could be used to lower the drag on performance and match available liquid assets with expected redemption requests. The goal: balance inflows and outflows, optimize portfolio construction, and better safeguard liquidity. Practical implications One need not look far for the dark side of liquidity in open-ended real estate funds. The UK experience with regulated property funds is a painful object lesson. There is a better way: while traditional non-traded REITs were designed and marketed for investment by retail investors, NAV REITs appeal to a diverse range of investors, and share classes could be enhanced to offer both a menu of selling loads and a menu of liquidity and dividend-rate options to produce a smooth curve blending cost and time. Originality/value Innovation in structuring real estate investment vehicles has broadened choices for all and the NAV REIT is flexible, scalable, open-ended and cost-efficient. Fund sponsors, fund managers, financial advisors, investors and even regulators could find food for thought in our analysis.

An Object Lesson: Objects, Non-Objects, and the Power of Conceptual Construal in Adjective Extension

ABSTRACT Despite the seemingly simple mapping between adjectives and perceptual properties (e.g., color, texture), preschool children have difficulty establishing the appropriate extension of novel adjectives. When children hear a novel adjective applied to an individual object, they successfully extend the adjective to other members of the same object category but have difficulty extending it more broadly to members of different categories. We propose that the source of this difficulty lies at the interface of the linguistic and conceptual systems: children initially limit the extension of an adjective to the category of the object on which it was introduced. To test this hypothesis, we manipulated whether participants construed images as “pictures of things” (objects) or “blobs of stuff” (non-objects). For both 36-month-old children (Experiments 1 and 2) and adults (Experiment 3), the conceptual status of an image influenced how they extended an adjective applied to that image. Children extended novel adjectives more successfully when they construed the images as non-objects than when they construed the same images as objects. Similarly, adults were faster to make adjective extensions when construing the images as non-objects rather than objects. Learners of all ages must navigate this linguistic-conceptual interface in assessing whether and how novel adjectives should be extended to new individuals.

Commemoration of the Living: A Graffiti Fragment from Ellis Island

This object lesson analyzes graffiti by a fifteen-year-old boy, Cesare Colosimo, detained at Ellis Island immigration station in 1922. Memory forms the thread of this piece: from Cesare Colosimo's desire to be remembered, as articulated and materialized in the graffiti; to the Colosimo family's memories and keepsakes; to the Ellis Island National Museum of Immigration's shaping of a collective memory of migration.

Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594. Edited by Rory Loughnane and Andrew J. Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. v+324.

<i>Early Shakespeare, 1588–1594</i>. Edited by Rory Loughnane and Andrew J. Power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. v+324.

Subcontracting and low pay kill: lessons from the health and safety consequences of sweated labour in the garment industry, 1880–1920

ABSTRACT Over the past 20 years, regular reports of eroding safety standards and deaths among workers, customers and other members of the public in an array of industries ranging from transport (ride-share platforms, long-haul trucking and aviation), construction (including, in Australia, insulation batts installation), mining, oil rigs and refineries, and factories, have emerged. These workplace deaths shared one largely overlooked characteristic; all involved subcontracted work arrangements and sometimes very elaborate supply chains. Where these fatalities have been subject to critical investigation, three causal factors consistently emerge, namely economic/cost pressures compromising safety, disorganisation, and regulatory failure. These failures raise important political and industrial questions, not the least of which is the social cost of dominant neoliberal policy-settings that encourage subcontracting practices. Furthermore, historical object lessons can provide insights because subcontracting of work is by no means new. Drawing on evidence from the garment industry, predominantly in the UK, but with reference to the USA and other countries, this paper highlights substantial historical evidence of the safety risks embedded in this type of business/work arrangement. The inquiries and investigations into sweated labour discussed here not only highlighted risks to health; they also suggest a contemporary need for urgent reform to the regulation of work in order to mitigate the prospective risks of injury and disease, including epidemics.

The germ of capitalism (Roman business through slave as the primordium of private enterprise). Part II. A counterpart of corporation

PurposeThis paper aims to expose the nature, pattern and mechanism of Roman private enterprise as the rudimentary form of capitalistic business. In the second part, it is shown why and how the directorship of slaves in private enterprise appeared and what shape it took.Design/methodology/approachBy means of historical analysis and theoretical reconstruction, the author reveals the pattern and mechanism of business through slaves as the primordial form of private enterprise.FindingsA comprehensive view of public and private entrepreneurship at the end of Republic and the beginning of Empire is presented. The origin and advantages of Roman public enterprise acknowledged by the state are brought to light. The way the benefits the corporate status affords were adjusted to a business framework allowed by law is demonstrated. It is just business through slaves that, combining peculium with free administration, secured limited liability for owners and turned the slaves to whom a business was entrusted into a kind of director. This construction enabled masters to become the proprietor of many formally separate enterprises at once, thereby expanding their business into something like a holding.Research limitations/implicationsThe results obtained allow historians to retrace the origins of modern private enterprise to classical antiquity, and economists and managers to better understand the nature of private enterprise and organizational status of those owning and managing it.Practical implicationsLeaders and executives can draw from the paper an object lesson of how to make, within the existing political system, legal regulation and economic traditions, a radical innovation whose true meaning and social potential are so immense and far-reaching that show up in full measure evident many centuries later. The findings and conclusions the author comes to may be used in educational courses on economics, entrepreneurship, management, business history and so on.Social implicationsThe paper provides an instructive model of conciliation of interests (social “compromise”). “Directors” – those organizing and managing a business but not owning it – were held subject to proprietors but within legally regulated relations with them. The state created incentives for initiative and competent businessmen in subjection to well-offs, to work hard, on one hand, and made their masters to use these incentives to public and their own profits. The benefits of all parties were taken into account, though, of course, not to the same degree.Originality/valueThe structure and “engine” of Roman private enterprise as well as the functions and organizational status of its “director” are demonstrated in relief for the first time.

The germ of capitalism (Roman business through slave as the primordium of private enterprise) Part I. Above free labor

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to expose the pattern and mechanism of Roman private enterprise as the rudimentary form of capitalistic business.Design/methodology/approachBy means of historical analysis and theoretical reconstruction, the author retraces the background and foundations of business through slave as the initial stage of private enterprise.FindingsA comprehensive view of public and private entrepreneurship at the end of Republic and the beginning of Empire is presented. The riddle of “unnaturally” dear slaves in Rome (as compared with free labor and slaves in other countries of antiquity) is scrutinized. It is shown that “excessively” high demand for them was largely determined by their institutional worth: thanks todominica potestas, they appeared to be the key organizational resource for expanding private industrial business. The framework of private enterprise securing limited liability for owner and turning “business slave” into a kind of director is brought to light.Research limitations/implicationsThe results of this research allow historians to retrace the origins of modern private enterprise to classical antiquity, while economists and managers get an opportunity to better understand its nature and organizational status of those owning and managing it.Practical implicationsLeaders and executives can draw from the paper an object lesson of how, remaining within the existing political system, legal regulation and economic traditions, to make a radical innovation whose true meaning and social potential are so immense and far-reaching that get evident only many centuries later. The findings and conclusions the author comes to may be used in educational courses on economics, entrepreneurship, management, business history and so on.Social implicationsAn instructive model of conciliation of interests is scrutinized. “Directors” – those organizing and managing a business but not owning it – were, as well as workers, recruited by coercion and legal regimentation of their relations with proprietors. The polarization of their institutional roles was at the bottom of private enterprise from the very outset. The state created incentives for initiative and competent business men in subjection to well-offs to work hard, on one hand, and made their masters to use these incentives to public and their own profits. The benefits of all parties were taken into account, though, of course, not to the same degree. Thereby, a kind of social compromise embodied in a novel institution was attained to.Originality/valueThis paper is the first to demonstrate in relief the background and framework of Roman private enterprise as well as the functions and organizational status of its “director.”