Previous scholars, with few exceptions, have almost entirely neglected the role that timber bridges played in the development of British and Irish railways. It was thought that timber bridges were ...constructed in only limited numbers and out of economic necessity. A new database compiled by the author, which documents all known timber bridges, has dispelled these myths and provides new evidence for how the British and Irish railway networks were constructed over the 30-year period from 1840 to 1870.
This paper demonstrates that timber bridges were constructed in their thousands across the British Isles. It presents the findings of a statistical analysis which reveals how timber construction varied with time for different applications. It discusses the types of timber species used and the different structural forms adopted, noting the variation in technical complexity over time. Using these findings, the paper presents a re-examination of the factors that influenced material selection, demonstrating that economy was not the sole reason for using timber.
In the early 1890s, black performer Bob Cole turned blackface minstrelsy on its head with his nationally recognized whiteface creation, a character he called Willie Wayside. Just over a century ...later, hiphop star Busta Rhymes performed a whiteface supercop in his hit music video "Dangerous." In this sweeping work, Marvin McAllister explores the enduring tradition of "whiting up," in which African American actors, comics, musicians, and even everyday people have studied and assumed white racial identities.Not to be confused with racial "passing" or derogatory notions of "acting white," whiting up is a deliberate performance strategy designed to challenge America's racial and political hierarchies by transferring supposed markers of whiteness to black bodies--creating unexpected intercultural alliances even as it sharply critiques racial stereotypes. Along with conventional theater, McAllister considers a variety of other live performance modes, including weekly promenading rituals, antebellum cakewalks, solo performance, and standup comedy. For over three centuries, whiting up as allowed African American artists to appropriate white cultural production, fashion new black identities through these "white" forms, and advance our collective ability to locate ourselves in others.
In the nineteenth century, firms operating in the Anglo-Indian tea trade were organized using a variety of ownership forms, including partnership, joint-stock, and a combination of the two, known as ...the managing agency. Faced with both an increasing need for fixed capital and high agency costs caused by the distance between owners and managers, the firms adapted and increasingly adopted the hybrid managing agency model to overcome these problems. Using new data from Calcutta and Bengal Commercial Registers and detailed case studies of the Assam Company and Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co., this article demonstrates that British entrepreneurs did not see the choice of ownership as a dichotomy or firm boundaries as fixed, but instead drew innovatively on the strengths of different forms of ownership to compete and grow successfully.
The early nineteenth-century factory laws are usually seen as the first steps towards the abolition of industrial child labour. It is here asked whether such appears to be the case only with ...hindsight, given that we know that industrial child labour eventually disappeared in the West. In all of nineteenth-century Finland no legislator spoke up for the abolition of industrial child labour, despite the fact that they were well informed about the relevant laws in the leading European countries and even used them as a model when passing in 1889 the first Labour Protection Act. It is argued below that part of the explanation lies in the fact that in a poor agricultural country, such as Finland then was, industrial child labour appeared as a remedy to pauperism and the "idleness" of urban boys. At a more general level it is also suggested that the increasing productivity-consciousness of employers may have been a principal reason for their declining interest in employing children.
The mid-nineteenth century saw the establishment in Java of one of the world's major sugar industries. Indeed, prior to the Great Depression of the 1930's, which reduced it to a shadow of its former ...opulance, the Java industry was second only to that of Cuba as a producer of cane sugar for the world's markets. It was essentially the creation of nineteenth-century Dutch colonialism. Sugar manufacture on a commercial scale had already been underway in Java a full two centuries earlier. However, the modern industry of large, centralized units of production and a massive ‘peasant’ workforce dated only from the inauguration of the state-sponsored Cultivation System by Governor-General Johannes van den Bosch in the 1830's. From then on, progress was rapid. Within less than a quarter century, some hundred or so sugar ‘factories’, solid stone places full of European machinery and Javanese ‘coolies’, had been established in the lowlands of Eastern and Central Java, and twenty-seven thousand hectares of peasant farmland requisitioned to provide them with cane. The whole enterprise dug deep into the innards of rural Java. As well as peasant land, the labour of the rural population was commandeered in unprecedented quantities. By the early 1860's, when sugar production under the auspices of the Cultivation System was reaching its peak, some 100,000 Javanese peasants were engaged in growing cane for the industry, and nearly that many again employed for between three and five months of the year, as cane-cutters, carters and factory hands during the manufacturing season or ‘Campaign’.
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