‘Motherly Hate’: Gendering Anti–Semitism in the British Union of Fascists

Throughout the interwar period, Britain’s fascist movement was marked by anti–Semitism. That anti–Semitism was such a striking feature of the movement is well known, and studies of British fascism have consequently paid attention to the implications and effects of racial prejudice on Britain’s Jewish community, and on British society more generally. However, the history of women in Britain’s fascist movement has been less well known, and the narrative of racial politics and racial tensions in interwar Britain must now be modified by a consideration of gender relations and women’s activism on the extreme right. The first part of this article is thus concerned with the questions of how British fascist women gave vent to their racial hatreds, the particular tone of their rhetorical invectives against the Jewish community, and the distinctiveness of their expressions of anti–Semitism. From their support for Jew–baiting activities on the streets, to their high level of participation in an anti–war movement dedicated to keeping Britain out of the ‘Jews’ war’, to their choices to educate their young children in the principles of Jew–hating, British fascist women did, in fact, show themselves to be ‘Jew wise’. Their active expression of anti–Semitism certainly challenged the optimistic liberal supposition that the female sex was the more tolerant. The second part of this article is concerned with the theoretical implications of putting women back into the history of British anti–Semitism, and explores how the powerful gender paradigms of feminine tolerance, maternalism, and feminised pacifism were subverted to justify a seemingly incongruous sentiment of ‘motherly hate’.     

The Block of Tin Dredged up in Falmouth Harbour,and now in the Truro Museum

A campaign of excavations in advance of development in Greater London during the 1970s and 1980s has led to a major programme of post-excavation analysis and publication of the results. The background to this programme reflects the way in which archaeology in Britain has developed since the 1970s. A highly structured approach has been adopted to the programme, involving a series of stages and careful selection of material for detailed analysis and publication. Some twenty-five monographs and nineteen major articles will result from the work, covering prehistoric, Roman, Saxon, medieval, and post-medieval topics across Greater London. Prehistoric landscapes in West London, Roman Southwark, the Middle Saxon emporium of Lundenwic, medieval religious houses, and post-medieval industries in Southwark will be particular foci of attention. In addition, an archive guide giving summary details of all the excavations undertaken will be produced. The programme will make a substantial contribution to our knowledge of the archaeology of Greater London.     

Changes in the geographical distribution of the recruitment of apprentices to the London companies 1486–1750

By the late fifteenth century the migration field of apprentices to the London companies was very widespread, but from then until the eighteenth century there was a marked contraction. First, the proportion of apprentices coming from London itself increased considerably. Secondly, there were significant changes in the geographical origins of provincial recruits. An attempt has been made to measure this contraction, and it is shown that the average distance travelled by each provincial recruit fell during the period 1486–1750 from 212 km to 111 km. This contraction was due in part to changes in gild and corporation control, but was also affected by major demographic and economic trends. It is suggested that these produced a contraction of London's general migration field which continued until at least 1775.     

Municipal history and activities

The emergence of synthetic alkali production in Britain during the early nineteenth century was associated with pronounced regional growth. Three areas in particular developed an incipient soda industry: south‐west Lancashire, Tyneside and especially the central valley of Scotland. This paper sets out to evaluate the importance of raw materials and market structures as locational factors at a time when knowledge of this new technology was in the hands of the few and its diffusion was strongly channelled by an emerging chemical fraternity. In doing so some understanding of an industrial legacy which has proved difficult to change and impossible to obliterate is provided.     

Peopling the past

The author discusses the importance of studying past populations in order to more fully understand the present. The focus is on regional patterns of population growth and internal migration and their impact on urban social structure in nineteenth-century Great Britain. Aspects considered include patterns of movement, occupation and mobility, the labor and housing markets, dimensions of community, residential mobility, individual experience, and education and social change.     

Trinovantum — the evolution of a legend

One aspect of that legendary ‘British history’ which was accepted as fact almost without question by historical writers until the early seventeenth century, and in popular and literary tradition much longer, was the story of the foundation of London, as Trinovantum or ‘New Troy’, by a group of exiled Trojans, long before the Roman conquest of Britain. In considering the relevance of this medieval story to the problems of London's actual origin, this paper traces its sources and development. Ambiguities in the Latin of Julius Caesar and Orosius led later writers, including probably Bede, to assume that there had once existed a British city called Trinovantum. The British writers, represented by Nennius, invented a Trojan origin for their people on well-tried models. These two independent traditions were combined in the twelfth century by Geoffrey of Monmouth, who identified Trinovantum as Troia Nova, and made the further identification of this city with London. Later Londoners-were well aware of this ‘Trojan foundation’, and found in the story a source of pride and a reason for the pre-eminence of their city.     

Politics and the London 2012 Olympics: the (in)security Games

This article traces the emergence of security at the Olympic Games as a key concern of host governments and of the Olympic movement and analyses the implications of this heightened concern for the delivery of the Games, the local host community and for national security policy. It is argued that the Olympic Games, as a high profile media event, provide an increasingly attractive political opportunity structure for a range of political actors—an attraction that is intensified when the Games are held in a world city such as London. Since the 9/11 attacks in New York there has been a sharp increase in security expenditure for the Olympic Games, arguably significantly out of proportion to the likely risk. The cost of security has risen from approximately $108 million in 1996 (Atlanta) to an estimated $1.99 billion in 2012 (London). It is argued that the period since 2001 has been characterized by hyper‐insecurity and a culture of intense risk aversion based not on probability but on the possibility of attack. Among the consequences of this development is a desensitization of host nations to the increased securitization of their cities. It is also argued that the impact on the local UK host community of Newham will be significant not only as a result of the intense level of policing, but also owing to the redevelopment associated with the Games and the use of the surveillance infrastructure to create a virtual gated community in the post‐Games athletes' village. The article concludes by discussing some of the longer‐term implications of the increased securitization of the Olympic Games, including the normalization of intense surveillance, the further encroachment on civil liberties and the growing tension between the values espoused by the Olympic movement and the reality of a successful delivery of the Games.     

山东省跨世纪人口增长模式研究

人口数量的巨大压力是当前区域人地关系失调从而制约可持续发展的重要原因。本文建立了年龄链式人口仿真模型,对山东省人口增长过程中存在的问题进行了分析,并对未来变化进行了仿真模拟。本文指出当前山东省人口仍处于高速增长时期,增长趋势将持续到下世纪20年代。本文提出了山东省跨世纪人口增长模式,即到2020年人口由快速增长模式向零增长模式过渡,总人口规模峰值出现在2020年左右,峰值人口可控制在一亿人以内,2020年后可选择适度负增长模式。     

Family stories,public silence: Irish identity construction amongst the second‐generation Irish in England

Formal narratives of history, especially that of colonial oppression, have been central to the construction of national identities in Ireland. But the Irish diasporic community in Britain has been cut off from the reproduction of these narratives, most notably by their absence from the curriculum of Catholic schools, as result of the unofficial ‘denationalisation’ pact agreed by the Church in the 19th century (Hickman, 1995). The reproduction of Irish identities is largely a private matter, carried out within the home through family accounts of local connections, often reinforced by extended visits to parent/s ‘home’ areas. Recapturing a public dimension has often become a personal quest in adulthood, ‘filling in the gaps’. This paper explores constructions of narratives of nation by a key diasporic population, those with one or two Irish‐born parents. It places particular emphasis on varying regional/national contexts within which such constructions take place, drawing on focus group discussions and interviews for the ESRC‐funded Irish 2 Project in five locations — London, Glasgow, Manchester, Coventry and Banbury.     

‘Everything is made of atoms’: the reprogramming of space and time in post-war London

From the middle of the Second World War until the early 1950s, architects, planners and designers in Britain made an unprecedented investment in reforming the built environment as a means to ensure a stable and secure post-war society. This essay considers the importance of movement, trajectory and repetition within this reconstruction vision and how the organisation of these things provided a basis for imagining a new form of consensual urban community. The essay begins by exploring how the County of London Plan (Abercrombie and Forshaw, 1943) and the Greater London Plan (Abercrombie, 1945) articulated a set of spatio-temporal logics, based on the prescribed trajectory of the individual embedded within a programme of quotidian repetitions. These logics suggested that urban space could be built to foreclose the possibility of historical conflict. The essay then explores the material design of two post-war exhibitions, Britain Can Make It (1946) and the Festival of Britain's South Bank Exhibition (1951), which offered visitors an experiential taster of what these new urban choreographies would feel like. To end, the essay explores the recurrent figure of the atom within post-war public pedagogy. Within this briefly ubiquitous mechanistic image lay an unacknowledged assurance about how hierarchical structures of movement and repetition sustained the material world, just as these things were being invoked to secure London's position across a range of scales from the local urban neighbourhood to the post-war Commonwealth.     

Reading Pottery: Literature and Transfer-Printed Pottery in the Early Nineteenth Century

The use of illustrations from literary sources, specifically fiction, on transfer-printed earthenwares in the early nineteenth century is addressed through an example of a household dump in Buckinghamshire, England. This paper examines such ceramics in terms of the nature of fiction and the reading public in Britain during this period and how the production and consumption of literary ceramics is connected to the changing perception of fiction and its accompanying illustrations. The paper argues that the use of literary scenes as patterns on transfer-printed vessels had to mediate both changing perceptions of fiction and ideals of the picturesque and suitable subjects for transfer print patterns.     

‘Rivalling the Metropolis’: cultural conflict between London and the regions c.1967–1973

ABSTRACT

As a contribution to this special issue on conflict and cultural production in twentieth century Britain, this article examines the relationship between London and the English regions in the second half of the 1960s. It argues that an excessive historical focus on the capital has been to the detriment of the regional scene. This was caused initially by journalistic accounts written in the period under consideration, which were dismissive of the regional city’s contribution and which subsequent historians have reproduced in their narratives. This article moves beyond the capital to revisit the regional city of the period in order to examine the extent to which it contained the features demonstrated by London in the mid-to-later 1960s. Both the ‘swinging’ period of 1964–1967 and the concomitant underground (1965–1973) are considered here and the argument made that the regions rather kept pace with the capital to an extent not seen before this decade. Journalistic accounts of the cities written in the period itself were symptomatic of London-based prejudice and a regional declinist paradigm, but the reality, as far as nightlife and experimental culture were concerned was rather more positive.     

Dividing Societies: The Socio‐Political Spatial Implications of Restructuring in Australia

This paper reviews trends over the last two to three decades in the socio‐economic divisions in Australia, focusing on their spatial dimensions. It provides empirical evidence that our society is dividing on multiple dimensions – including shifts in industry and occupational structure, income distribution, the incidence of poverty. And it demonstrates that the differentiations across space in socio‐economic phenomena also have complex multiple dimensions, which are explained inadequately by a ‘city/bush’ dichotomy popularly espoused by politicians and reported in the media. Processes of globalisation, economic restructuring and employment shifts, and changing patterns of population movement are combining to create stark differentials between places both within the major cities as well as in regional Australia. As demonstrated by the recent One Nation phenomenon, voter backlash is strong, and it too has specific spatial characteristics.     

Mortality and sanitary conditions in the "best governed city in the world"--Birmingham, 1870-1910.

The growth of population in nineteenth-century Britain has often been attributed to the decline in mortality during that period. Here the relationship between improvements in sanitary conditions and the fall in disease mortality is considered for one particular city in the period 1870–1910. Medical Officer of Health reports are used to show the spatiotemporal patterns of both a selection of fatal diseases and sanitary conditions in Birmingham in the 1880s. This evidence suggests that administrative developments in hospital provision, for instance, need to be combined with public health improvements in any explanation of mortality decline. Further, that poverty, as reflected by back to back housing, is more closely associated with high mortality than variables measuring sanitary conditions.     

Die Emigration der Kulturwissenschaftlichen Bibliothek Warburg und die Anfänge des Universitätsfaches Kunstgeschichte in Großbritannien

Aby M. Warburg (1866- 1929) the famous art historian, critic and great promoter of cultural history collected a unique research library which became a semiofficial part of the newly founded University of Hamburg called ?Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg”? in 1920. At the end of 1933 this library and its staff left Germany in order to prevent the Nazis from destroying this Jewish foundation. Great Britain gave home to it and at the end of 1944 London University incorporated the library now named The Warburg Institute. The Warburg Institute efficiently helped to promote art history as an academic discipline in Great Britain though its actual aims are of interdisciplinary nature and go far beyond art history as it has been the case since the days of Warburg.     

Original Documents

The end of Roman London has too often been discussed using models that are poorly rooted in empirical evidence. This paper utilizes data from archives and commercial contractors to plot the distribution of activity in London at the end of the fourth century. This challenges the notion that much of the Late Roman city was deserted. However, a brief consideration of Early AngloSaxon London and Southwark demonstrates that by the late fifth century the City and Southwark were abandoned.     

Institutionalising Future Geographies of Financial Inclusion: National Legitimacy Versus Local Autonomy in the British Credit Union Movement

In Great Britain, financial infrastructure withdrawal and community economic decline have focused attention on the capacity of locally "alternative" financial institutions to combat social and financial exclusion. This paper examines one such institution, the residential or "community" credit union, which provides a low-cost source of credit for members drawn from a common bond area usually based upon place of residence and/or work. Although community credit unions have traditionally been seen as providing individuals and communities with the opportunity to access credit and savings facilities in areas where there has been contraction in bank and building society provision (the financial "mainstream"), ongoing attempts exist to move away from the traditional role of community credit unions. This transition has set up three main challenges for the British credit union movement, discussed in this paper as follows: (1) a struggle over the attempt to redefine the "model" credit union within the national credit union movement; (2) the changing regulatory context for credit union development, including attempts to embrace credit unions within New Labour policies on social exclusion; and (3) a "local" challenge, including the incorporation of credit unions into community economic development initiatives. The paper considers how these challenges feed into wider understandings about the social relations, categorisation and autonomy of locally "alternative" financial institutions. We argue that future research on geographies of financial inclusion focusing on "alternative" institutions and their relationship to the financial mainstream needs to pay close critical attention to potential contradictions and tensions operating at different, yet intersecting spatial scales.     

Printing,Publishing, and Book Culture in Premodern China

Abstract

After a lull in scholarship on the history of the Chinese book during the mid-twentieth century, there has been a reemerging surge of scholarly interest since the 1980s. This article accesses the expanding field of Chinese book history by focusing on two recently published volumes, which represent the newest approaches to the study of Chinese printing in the first significant phase of its development from the tenth to the fourteenth century and its long-term role in Chinese social and intellectual history after 1800, respectively. Placing them in the broader historical context, it further seeks to flesh out recent research trends and future prospects in the field, in particular the changing social and intellectual engagement with printed texts, the increasing impact of printing and publishing on cultural production, and the dynamic interaction between print and other media.     

East End immigrants and the battle for housing: a comparative study of political mobilisation in the Jewish and Bengali communities

Twice in the recent history of the East End of London, the fight for decent housing has become part of a bigger political battle. These two very different struggles are representative of two important periods in radical politics – the class politics, tempered by Popular Frontism, that operated in the 1930s, and the new social movement politics of the seventies. In the rent strikes of the 1930s the ultimate goal was Communism. Although the local Party was disproportionately Jewish, Communist theory required an outward looking orientation that embraced the whole of the working class. In the squatting movement of the 1970s political organisers attempted to steer the Bengalis onto the path of black radicalism, championing separate organisation and turning the community inwards. An examination of the implementation and consequences of these different movements can help us to understand the possibilities and problems for the transformation of grass-roots activism into a broader political force, and the processes of political mobilisation of ethnic minority groups.     

‘Decision not to decide’: a new challenge for planning

This article examines how the policy-maker’s ‘decision not to decide’ affects different levels of internal organization and how it is reflected in the residential patterns of different population groups. The article explores the dynamics of residential patterns in two case studies: the Collective behaviour of the Sylheti community along Whitechapel Road in Eastern London and the Group Action of the ‘Kol-Torah’ Community in Zangwill Street, Jerusalem, where Inner-markets activities create clear property lines around/within their boundaries and result in a similar homogeneous pattern. Identifying the main engines of organized neighbourhood change and the difficulties of planning and dealing with individuals in the housing market shed light on similar processes occurring in other city centres with diverse population groups.