Showing papers in "Social History in 1983"
TL;DR: In this article, domestic servants and households in Victorian England were studied and the authors presented a survey of domestic service and household life in the British Isles, focusing on the following: 1)
Abstract: (1983). Domestic servants and households in Victorian England. Social History: Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 201-210.
116 citations
54 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors use Gramsci's concept of organic intellectuals to pose in general terms the ways in which left-wing organizations could be seen as rooted in the working class.
Abstract: In the general election of 1928 the German social democratic party, the SPD (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands) polled 9 i million votes, 29-8 per cent of the total, while the communist party, the KPD (Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands) polled 3 3 million votes, i o6 per cent of the total. In the same year the SPD claimed goo,ooo members, the KPD 130,000.1 Such figures alone show the strength of the working-class movement in Weimar Germany. In addition to these parties there also existed a range of left-wing sporting and cultural organizations, such as the German workers' singing clubs, the DAS (Deutsche Arbeitersanger-Bund) and the workers' sporting movement, the ATUS (ArbeiterTurnund Sportbund), with in I 928 270,000 and 770,000 members respectively.2 Impressive as they are, such numbers tell us little about the relationship between these organizations and the social class they claimed to represent. The first part of this paper uses Gramsci's concept of 'organic intellectuals' to pose in general terms the ways in which left-wing organizations could be seen as rooted in the working class. From this discussion there follow three stages of empirical analysis, using a case-study of the city of Frankfurt am Main: the social composition of the local leadership of the SPD, USPD and KPD; the relationship between these political organizations and what will be termed the 'working-class movement' as a whole; the ideological influence of this 'working-class movement' on workingclass everyday life.
44 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, popular loyalism and public violence in the north-west of England, 1790-1800, was studied. But the authors focused on the North-West of England.
Abstract: (1983). Popular loyalism and public violence in the north‐west of England, 1790–1800. Social History: Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 295-313.
41 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss literacy and society in the west, 1500-1850, and discuss the role of women in the development of the English language in this process.
Abstract: (1983). Literacy and society in the west, 1500–1850. Social History: Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 269-293.
28 citations
TL;DR: In the context of the English Civil War and the English Revolution, the difficulties of incorporating evidence drawn from local rather than from central sources and focused on economic and social rather than strictly political changes have heightened disharmony among students of a field long famous for its controversies.
Abstract: In the historiography of seventeenth-century England, the Crisis of the Aristocracy and the Crisis of Parliaments have been followed close on by the crisis of historians.1 A proliferation of county studies in the last two decades has altered our awareness of the importance of the world beyond Westminster and Whitehall, but this needed expansion of our horizons has also confounded our understanding of the causes of the English Civil War and the English Revolution.2 The difficulties of incorporating evidence drawn from local rather than from central sources and focused on economic and social rather than strictly political changes have heightened disharmony among students of a field long famous for its controversies. Any brief characterization of the disagreements between 'revisionist' and 'nonrevisionist' historians risks caricature, but most of the conflicts concentrate on one or more of three questions: (i) Was the outbreak of war in i 642 a natural continuation of a disillusionment that can be traced back at least to the I620S or was the fighting born of more limited and fortuitous circumstances? (2) Did allegiances in the war and later turn upon ideological principles, or upon local
16 citations
TL;DR: The invention of English individualism: Alan Macfarlane and the modernization of pre-modern England is discussed in this article, where the authors focus on the early 20th century.
Abstract: (1983). The invention of English individualism: Alan Macfarlane and the modernization of pre‐modern England. Social History: Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 345-363.
16 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, trade union organization and skill in the cotton and engineering industries in Britain, 1850-1960, were discussed, with a focus on the textile industry and trade unions.
Abstract: (1983). Trade union organization and skill in the cotton and engineering industries in Britain, 1850–1960. Social History: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 37-55.
13 citations
TL;DR: In the context of the Repeal of the Combination Laws in I 824, and the succeeding strikes by many workers, McCulloch's intervention was twofold. On the one hand, he defended the right of labourers to form Unions if they were only intended to push wages up to their 'natural' level, even if there might conceivably be a delay before the mechanism of competition did this as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: ion is at once the condition of the scientificity of Political Economy and a guarantee for its subsequent practicality. If one measure of the difference between the discursive hierarchies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is that Adam Smith was a Professor of Moral Philosophy while Nassau Senior was a Professor of Political Economy, the further abstraction within the economic was what made the latter necessary at all. Though described in different ways, this shift from the concrete to the abstract, from the particular to the general, from the apparent to the real, is inscribed in the discourse of Political Economy. For Ricardo, it appears in his characteristic method of argument by hypothetical example. For Senior, it appears as a polemic against common sense, which in economic matters appears to him to be no more than a distillation of the Mercantile System, a mystifying illusion to be dispelled by sounder principles.8 For J. S. Mill, it appears in an apparently inverse way, as the distinction between the delusive appearances to be found in the phrases and forms of common discourse, and the truth which is to be found by looking at the elementary facts. Yet this is only an apparent inversion, for these elementary facts are themselves established by the operation of economic science.9 This abstraction from the mystifying appearances of things, however, while the condition for the establishment of Political Economy as a would-be scientific discourse, also determines the kind of ideological use to which it can be put. An example of the practical ideological use of Political Economy, dependent upon the shift within it from the apparent to the real, can be seen in the success of the wage-fund theory a success which endured for at least sixty years. In the abstract, corn-commodity economics of Ricardo, the regulation of wages was part of a coherent, self-regulating system, drawing indeed upon Malthusian population theory but only as an independent regulator for that system. In the hands of McCulloch, at a particular social and political juncture, a version of this explanation 8 N. W. Senior, An Introductory Lecture on Political Economy (I827), 33-4. 9 J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, edited by F. E. L. Priestley and others (Toronto, I963-), vols ii and III (I965). First published in I848. This content downloaded from 207.46.13.76 on Wed, 24 Aug 2016 06:05:47 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms May I983 Ideological language I87 for the regulation of wages became part of the ideological armoury to be deployed against trade unions. In McCulloch's version, the rate of wages is simply a function of the ratio between capital and population.10 In any given country, part of the capital owned by the capitalists is made up of a wage-fund, to be distributed amongst the wage-earners. The rate of wages is prevented from rising above this 'natural' level by competition among the labourers, while equally it is prevented from falling below this level for any length of time by competition among capitalists for labour. In the context of the Repeal of the Combination Laws in I 824, and the succeeding strikes by many workers, McCulloch's intervention was twofold. On the one hand, he defended the right of labourers to form Unions if they were only intended to push wages up to their 'natural' level there might conceivably be a delay before the mechanism of competition did this anyway. On the other hand, if labourers attempted to push wages beyond their 'natural' level by interfering in the mechanism of competition (by, for example, enforced membership of Unions, or intimidation), then the state had a duty to intervene and suppress such actions. At all events, the action of combinations in raising wages could only have a tiny effect compared to the grand principle of the proportion of capital to population. Moreover, since the decreasing fertility of the land puts a limit on the growth of capital, the only part of the equation which is effectively open to control is the growth of population. The wage-fund theory thus refers back to Ricardo in two ways, though both incorrectly. First, the wage-fund itself is apparently drawn straight from Ricardo, but by shifting the analysis from a single commodity corn economy, the assimilation of means of subsistence to capital becomes a mystification; second, the same analytic shift to a multi-commodity economy means that the reference to Ricardo's notion of the decreasing fertility of land acting as a brake on capital growth is equally illegitimate. The wage-fund theory also invokes Malthus more directly as the exponent of population as an absolute limit to progress than, as with Ricardo, providing a mechanism which adjusts population to the means of subsistence. The wage-fund theory was not merely a freak thrown up in a particular social crisis by a pamphleteer who had got his Ricardo wrong. It reappears practically unmodified in J. S. Mill's Principles twenty years later; for though Mill was prepared to admit 'custom' as a modifying force on the operation of competition, he felt that in England especially it could be practically disregarded, and anyway Political Economy was a science only to the extent that it recognized the principle of competition.1' Not until the i86os was any effective challenge made to the wage-fund theory within the discourse of Political Economy itself in articles by W. T. Thornton and T. E. Cliffe Leslie.12 The grounds for disposing of the theory 10 [J. R. McCulloch], An Essay on the Circumstances which determine the Rate of Wages, and the Condition of the Labouring Classes (Edinburgh, i82.6). 11 Mill, Principles of Political Economy, ii, chs iv and xi. 12 W. T. Thornton, 'What determines the price of labour or rate of wages', Fortnightly Review, New Series I (Jan.-June I867), 55i-66; T. E. Cliffe Leslie, 'Political Economy and the rate of wages', Fraser's Magazine, LXXVIII (July-December I868),
12 citations
TL;DR: The Population History of England 1541-1871: a reconstruction (1981), xv+779 (Edward Arnold, £35) and as discussed by the authors (E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, 1981).
Abstract: E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schofield, The Population History of England 1541–1871: a reconstruction (1981), xv+779 (Edward Arnold, £35).
12 citations
TL;DR: Gordon, Gordon, Richard Edwards and Michael Reich, Segmented work, divided workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (1982), xii + 288 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £20.00, Paperback £6.95) as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: David M. Gordon, Richard Edwards and Michael Reich, Segmented Work, Divided Workers: The Historical Transformation of Labor in the United States (1982), xii + 288 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £20.00, Paperback £6.95). Craig R. Littler, The Development of the Labour Process in Capitalist Societies (1982), x + 226 (Heinemann Educational Books £14.50, paperback £6.50). Charles F. Sabel, Work and Politics: The Division of Labor in Industry (1982), xiii + 304 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £17.50).
TL;DR: In this paper, the separation of the soldier from the citizen was discussed in the British Army, 1790-1815, and the role of corporal punishment in this separation was discussed.
Abstract: (1983). Separating the soldier from the citizen : Ideology and criticism of corporal punishment in the British armies, 1790–1815. Social History: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 19-35.
TL;DR: This literature has enabled us to understand the problematic nature of social reform between the late-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries as a whole and to come to grips with some though not all the connections between changes in socioeconomic structure and the generation of new and powerful bodies of knowledge and expertise.
Abstract: There is now a small but impressive body of work concerned with relationships between scientific and medical knowledge, the professionalization of that knowledge, and the development of institutions to house inmates and patients believed to require punishment and treatment in post-enlightenment Europe and America.' This literature has enabled us to understand the problematic nature of social reform between the late-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries as a whole and to come to grips with some though not all the connections between changes in socioeconomic structure and the generation of new and powerful bodies of knowledge and expertise.2 It has also allowed us to ask questions about the relationship between the process of proletarianization and that putative 'collapse of community' under early capitalism about which we still know so little.3 What have not yet been
TL;DR: In this article, coal, class and culture: Labour relations in a Scottish mining community, 1650-1750, were discussed. But the focus was not on coal, but on coal-mining communities.
Abstract: (1983). Coal, class and culture: Labour relations in a Scottish mining community, 1650–1750. Social History: Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 1-18.
TL;DR: In this paper, a new sub-title, Social history in Australia in 1981, was proposed, with the title Social History: Vol. 8, No. 2, pp 211-228.
Abstract: (1983). Labour History's new sub‐title: Social history in Australia in 1981. Social History: Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 211-228.
TL;DR: The National Socialist seizure of power in the Province of Bavaria in the time of National Socialism is described in this article, where the authors present a case study of a city turning brown.
Abstract: Teil A. Herausgegeben von Martin Broszat and Elke Frohlich, Bayern in der NS‐Zeit II. Herrschaft und Gesellschaft im Konflikt (1979), xxv+515 (Oldenbourg, Munchen, DM 38). (Bavaria in the Time of National Socialism. Power and Society in conflict). Bernd Burkhardt, Eine Stadt wird braun. Die nationalsozialistische Machtergreifung in der Provinz. Eine Fallstudie. Mit einem Geleitwort von Heinrich August Winkler (1980), 160 (Hoffmann und Campe, Hamburg). (A City Turns Brown. The National Socialist Seizure of Power in the Province. A Case Study.)
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss the trends in modern and early modern social history writing in Denmark after 1970, and present a survey of the literature in the field of social history.
Abstract: (1983). Trends in modern and early modern social history writing in Denmark after 1970. Social History: Vol. 8, No. 3, pp. 375-381.