Spinners and the Law: Regulating Yarn Standards in the English Worsted Industries, 1550–1800

Abstract

The Worsted Acts, passed between 1777 and 1791, established semi-official industrial police forces in nearly a third of the counties of England, charged with detecting and prosecuting fraudulent reeling of worsted yarn by hand spinners. The Acts have been interpreted as the response of late eighteenth-century employers to new and growing problems of labour discipline associated with the putting-out system. But frauds by spinners in reeling yarn were not new. They had characterised the worsted industry since its rapid expansion began at the end of the sixteenth century. Over the subsequent two centuries, employers addressed the problem repeatedly. How they tackled it depended crucially on the way the different regional worsted industries were organised and on dramatic changes in the willingness and capacity of the state to regulate manufacturing. The Worsted Acts emerge as the product of a distinctive eighteenth-century approach to industrial regulation, reactive and particularistic, but bureaucratically innovative.     

Models of war 1770–1830: the birth of wargames and the trade-off between realism and simplicity

The first sophisticated wargames (military board games) were developed between 1770 and 1830 and are models of military conflict. Designers of these early games experimented fruitfully with different concepts that were formulated in interaction with the external dynamics of the military systems that they tried to represent and the internal dynamics of the design process itself. The designers of early wargames were confronted with a problem that affects all models: the trade-off between realism and simplicity, which in the case of wargames amounts to the trade-off between realism and playability. I try to show how different game concepts were developed as an answer to this problem, and how these seemingly arcane concepts form a relevant topic of investigation in the history of ideas. Moreover, a direct offshoot of this conceptual experimentation between 1770 and 1830 was the ‘free’ German wargame (Kriegsspiel), which became an integral part of German operational planning in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, thus adding another chapter to the story of the influence of ideas on human history.     

Epistemic Ignorance and the Indonesian Killings of 1965–1966: Righting the Wrongs of the Past and the Role of Faith Community

ABSTRACT

This study demonstrates how ignorance works in the Indonesian massacres of 1965–1966. This atrocity, which claimed roughly five hundred thousand lives, is one of the most forgotten human tragedies of the twentieth century. For many years, the massacres were hidden from public view. Ignorance was reinforced by the New Order under the presidency of Suharto. Drawing on contemporary political philosophers’ studies on the epistemology of ignorance, I contend that ignorance, like knowledge, has structures, criteria, and practices. Ignorance, thus, is not merely a “lack of knowledge” or a state of not knowing, but epistemic and political. By appropriating the epistemology of ignorance, I seek to show how the Indonesian people remember the historical wrongs and how Christian theology provides resources for right remembrance. To confront the epistemic ignorance of the Indonesian mass killings, I argue that the churches must assert their identity as the community of memory and lament.     

Breton woodworkers in the immigrant communities of south-west England, 1500–1550

SUMMARY: The paper assembles documentary evidence which shows that there was a substantial community of immigrants in south-west England in the early 16th century. In Cornwall these people came largely from Brittany; in Devon their origins were more varied. They included a surprising number of carpenters and carvers — many Breton, some ‘Dutch’. Various examples of ecclesiastical and domestic woodwork surviving in the region, including some of the finest examples of craftsmanship of the period, are attributed to these immigrants, and stylistic and technical features are proposed for distinguishing their output from local English work.