Ludwig Knoop, ‘The Arkwright of Russia’

Abstract

Piece-rate arrangements in the British cotton weaving industry were anomalous in that they prescribed a weekly wage based on output. Although, to some extent, output reflected the work done by the weaver, it was also governed by technical and other factors which were beyond the weaver's control. A wage system which emphasized the repair of broken threads and the replenishment of empty shuttles would have been preferable since these were the principal elements of the weaver's work. The absence of a clear relationship between effort and reward confounded attempts to increase productivity in cotton weaving between the wars, and was a particular obstacle to the adoption of the 'more-looms' systems. This article explores the anomalies and the issues to which they gave rise, both at industry level and in a local context characterized by the manufacture of diverse fabric types. It concludes that there was an uncritical acceptance of traditional wage arrangements, reinforced by a fear that fundamental change would destabilize an already fragile system of industry level (that is, across the cotton weaving industry as a whole) bargaining.     

The ‘Evidence’ of sex,the ‘Truth’ of gender: Shaping children's bodies

This paper is about the body, specifically a child's body, as a site where identity becomes contested. It is also about a surface or space where we lay claim—a site of vested interest. In April 2004, the Australian Family Court ruled that a 13-year-old child (Alex) had gender identity dysphoria and decided to allow reversible hormonal treatment. The Court ruling produced considerable legal, medical and public reflection over whether these decisions were in Alex's best interests, whether Alex was able to make such a decision at his age, and to assess Alex's competency. These debates also aimed to fix sex and gender through the deployment of a nature and nurture framework. The purpose of this paper, using the example of Alex, is to illustrate the various ways that these claims over a child's body, undermine the possibility for rethinking sex and gender.     

The history of ‘Social Technology’, 1898–1930

Since the term was first coined, in the late nineteenth century, ‘social technology’ has had a mixed fate. Whereas ‘technology’ has become one of the keywords of the twentieth century, ‘social technology’ never quite seemed to settle in the vocabulary of social theory. In this article, we focus on the early history of ‘social technology’, tracing its spread from its origin in the sociology department at the University of Chicago, and describing the increasing competition from the term ‘social engineering’ starting in the 1920s. We argue that this shift in terminology is significant, because it is an index of changing ideas about the demarcation of sociology, about the application of science in the betterment of society and about the nature of technology.     

The wives of the ‘first troubadour’, Duke William IX of Aquitaine

The sources which offer insights into the life of Duke William IX of Aquitaine, the ‘first troubadour’, are few and disparate in nature. This study focuses on the conclusions which have been drawn from Anglo-Norman chroniclers' accounts of his clashes with the Church, reportedly over the issue of his adultery, and on Latin poems in praise of the bishop who excommunicated William and whom the duke persecuted. While it is generally believed that the duke married twice, close investigation shows this to be based largely on an error in a nineteenth-century secondary source: it is probable that Philippa of Toulouse was William's only wife. A new reading is proposed of the major Latin verse-compositions referring to the duke's excommunication (1114-17) and it is suggested that the historical evidence concerning the Poitevin claim to the country of Toulouse does not match well with the notion that William attempted to repudiate his wife Philippa, on whom this claim depended.     

The Fluidity of the ‘Farming Ladder’: The Experience of the Duffin Family,Yorkshire, 1870-1950

This article examines the nuances of the ‘farming ladder’ through a case study of the Duffin farming family. It explores the circumstances in which they flourished and faltered; the internal and external determinants affecting their ability to maintain a grip on the ‘farming ladder’; and the fluidity of the ladder. Drawing upon the personal archive of the family and complementary sources, the variable position of the family on the ‘farming ladder’ as they progress from agricultural labourers to farmers and then back to labourers is charted within wider historical and geographical frameworks. The social and spatial relationships forged are identified as being particularly important in the operation of the ‘farming ladder’.     

The vanity of dogmatizing: The three ‘versions’

This essay reevaluates the Weimar writings of Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss, specifically, their intellectual efforts to replace the political authority of Kantian liberalism with, respectively, a ‘political theology’ and ‘Biblical atheism’ derived from the thought of early-modern state theorists like Hobbes and Spinoza. Schmitt and Strauss each insisted that post-Kantian Enlightenment rationality was unraveling into a way of thinking that violently rejected ‘form’ of any kind, fixated myopically on material things and lacked any conception of the external constraints that invariably condition the possibilities of philosophy, morality and politics. They considered Kantian reason and liberal politics to pose serious threats to ‘genuine’ expressions of rationality and as dangerous obfuscations of the necessity of political order—of the brute fact that human beings stand in need of ‘being ruled,’ as such.     

The writings of Ademar of Chabannes,the Peace of 994, and the ‘Terrors of the Year 1000’

The belief that apocalyptic expectations existed at the turn of the first millennium is no longer widely held, even though some recent scholars have suggested they did. This paper seeks to confirm the notion that, at least in the monastic milieu, belief that the Last Judgement was imminent did exist in the decades around the year 1000. To support this argument, this paper will examine the writings of the monk, Ademar of Chabannes. In his work of history and the sermons he wrote near the end of his life, Ademar reveals his own eschatological mentality. His history, it will be argued, contains numerous accounts of prodigies and signs that indicated Ademar and his contemporaries thought that they were living in the Last Days. Ademar's apocalypticism is revealed even more fully in his sermons, which were organised along the lines of salvation history. His account in the sermons of the Peace of God council of 994, which also appears in the history, clearly demonstrates his eschatological sensibility. His record of this council, written over 30 years after the event, it will be argued, is apocalyptic in both form and content. The structure of his account is arranged in the tradition of apocalyptic literature, and the events he records are described in language drawn from the Revelation of John and the book of Isaiah. Ademar also drew on the idea of the refreshment of the saints found in the writings of Jerome and of Bede in his explanation of the events of 994. Ademar's writings, therefore, reveal the existence of apocalyptic expectations at the turn of the first millennium.     

Pleasure: ‘The Choice of Hercules’

In this article I contend that John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism has been widely misunderstood, and hence the importance of his philosophical project has been diminished. This misunderstanding arises primarily from misconceptions regarding Mill’s definition of pleasure. However, these misconceptions may be successfully resolved by reflecting on Mill’s educational roots and his commitment to Greco-Roman philosophy. In particular, I hold that a deeper understanding of Mill’s philosophical progenitors (i.e., Aristotle and Epicurus) would lead us to conclude that for Mill the “pleasures” of the Utilitarian project are in the final analysis nothing other than the “pleasures” of the mind and conscience. Thus, by following Mill’s line of reasoning and adhering to some of the salient points of his work, specifically in Chapter 2 of Utilitarianism, we may reach a richer and more nuanced understanding of his impressive philosophical project.     

The Unhelpful Notion of ‘Renaissance man’

The current journalistic use of the term ‘Renaissance man’ to describe someone whose work straddles boundaries between today's specialisms is a hindrance to understanding almost any aspect of the culture of the Renaissance — a culture within which both ‘art’ and ‘science’ had meanings different from those they have now, the most significant intellectual division being between the learned and the practical traditions. We look first at the learned tradition of the universities (where teaching was in Latin). The people considered include William Harvey, Johannes Kepler, Galileo Galilei, Nicolaus Copernicus, Regiomontanus and (very briefly) Isaac Newton. Within the practical tradition, centred on workshops, we consider the state shipyards in Venice (where Galileo claimed to have learned much), workshop practices in general and the emergence of the notion of ‘Fine Arts’. The individuals considered include Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti and Raphael, as well as the famous clockmaker Jost Bürgi (who taught Kepler about algebra). We conclude by considering the transfer of skills between these two traditions. There are several areas of overlap, but here we concentrate attention on the story of algebra. Algebra was invented by al-Khwarizmi (whose name gives us the term ‘algorithm’) in the ninth century, within learned mathematics, in Baghdad. In the West, elementary algebra, derived from al-Khwarizmi's work but in the simplified form of problems, became part of ‘practical mathematics’. Slowly, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries, developed forms of algebra crossed over into the learned tradition. This is as much a matter of crossing social barriers as of crossing intellectual ones. Eventually, the practical tradition as a whole became absorbed as an elementary part of the learned one.     

The ‘Social Construction’ of David Schneider as ‘A Giant of Anthropology’

David Schneider is widely regarded as one of the great anthropologists of our times. This article questions this opinion. First it shows that his fieldwork on the Micronesian island of Yap evidences ethnographic insensitivity, particularly on the matter of an alleged ignorance of physiological paternity, thus calling into question his supposed concern with getting at native understandings. The alleged ignorance forms the ethnographic basis for his later critique of established kinship studies. This, plus his ignorance of lexical marking, invalidates the critique. Even worse is his study of American kinship and its related theory of culture, both consisting mostly of top-of-the-head impressions unrelated to specific operations.     

‘The Best Laid Plans’: The Development of British Battle-Fleet Tactics, 1919–1942

This paper provides a fresh overview of the much-debated Leith-Ross mission to China in 1935–6, in which Britain assisted the Chinese government's efforts to establish a new currency. It demonstrates that the mission should be understood primarily as an attempt to revive Britain's economic and political stake in East Asia. It argues that, while the government in London undoubtedly wished to see the amelioration of the tense relationship with Japan, the history of the mission demonstrates that it was not prepared to make significant sacrifices that would undermine British interests in China. It thus criticises the contention that the mission should be understood primarily as an exercise in appeasement and contends that in practice it constituted a challenge to Japan's claim to regional domination.     

The ‘She-Land,’ social consequences of the sexualized construction of landscape in North Patagonia

This article voices a perspective founded in gender geography and regional history, through the study of the symbolic constitution of core and peripheral areas inside Chile and Argentina. This analysis focuses upon the Patagonian territory and aims to reveal the use of female stereotyped metaphors as the basis for territorial subalternity. At this point, revision of Patagonian history shows that this construction of landscape is related to territorial integration, and could have been seen as gender ideology because of the metaphors involved in the State's arguments. This idea is illustrated with an ongoing nationalist discourse established in Patagonia since the 1930s, which operates as a permanent patriarchal reference and allows the projection of gender metaphors in land. It also takes the particular experience of Patagonian women to question the recognition of the problem behind the construction of landscape and the geographical and historical patriarchal order. As a result of this process, the possibility to argue against the subordination of the region emerges from highlighting feminine metaphors of land and feminine praxis, which nowadays confront both the landscape's official interpretation and an unequal access to resources.     

The husbandry,perception and ‘improvement’ of turkeys in Britain, 1500–1900

The introduction of the turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) to Britain is documented during the first half of the 16th century. These birds initially featured on the tables of the powerful and served as living garden ornaments or pets. Shifting human perceptions, driven in part by the ‘ethic of improvement’, affected turkey husbandry methods and animal-human relationships as well as the bird’s symbolic role. This transition was complicated; the turkey remained a palimpsest of attributes throughout 1500–1900, with different associations assuming prominence over time.