The Bricks and Mortar of Revolutionary Administration

This article investigates office space during the French Revolution.It argues that material conditions played an important rolein configuring the post-Revolutionary state and its relationshipto the ‘public sphere’. In the 1790s, ministry employeesmoved from Versailles to Paris, from serving individual aristocratsto serving the Nation, from a state of operative obscurity toone of contentious publicity. Although an ideal regulation ofspace in new unified ministry buildings would invite the publicin and make government transparent (preventing a return to theOld Regime), Ministers had to balance this imperative with practicaloperational and financial concerns. By the Empire, ministrieswere consciously constructing antechambers to keep petitionerswaiting. Meanwhile, employees also engineered their physicalenvironment to protect their jobs, constructing corridors andmakeshift walls. The disjuncture between the aims and the outcomesof 1790s administrative reform developed out of the physicalimpossibility of making ‘transparent’ bureaucracywork.     

Noril'sk Nickel: A Global Company?

Two specialists on Russia's minerals industries examine the evidence supporting the argument that the Russian mining conglomerate Noril'sk Nickel can be viewed as a global company. Included among the criteria they assess are the geographic dispersion of the company's markets and operations, the diversified and multinational character of its ownership, whether it has matched the performance standards set by its major international competitors, and the effect of the company's ownership presence on the management style of its foreign operations. A particular focus is on how an ongoing conflict between two major Russian oligarch shareholders (Vladimir Potanin and Oleg Deripaska) has shaped Noril'sk Nickel's ownership and management structure, which is characterized by the continued (background) presence of the state, the lack of any organized policy for training a multinational management cohort, and the absence of a major block of foreign shareholders. In the end, they conclude that Noril'sk Nickel is not a genuinely global but rather a Tier-1 Russian company, albeit one with a global scale of operations.     

Materialism and history: Diderot and the Histoire des deux Indes

In the last years of his life, Diderot made a large number of anonymous contributions to Raynal's widely read Histoire des deux Indes. The identification of these passages over the last thirty years has led to a view of Diderot's later political thought as being far more radical than had previously been supposed. But his contributions in general are notable for their pessimism about the situation in France and in Europe generally. In part this was due to his belief in a cyclical view of history, but it was also due to his bringing to his understanding of history the materialist, and resolutely non‐providential, view of nature which he had developed earlier.     

Law, Patronage and Municipal Authority in Seventeenth-Century France: The Aftermath of the Lanturelu Revolt in Dijon

Popular uprisings have attracted the interest of early modernhistorians but the efforts of local elites to manage their consequencesremain largely unexplored. This article examines how Dijon’smunicipality negotiated the aftermath of the 1630 Lanturelurevolt. Following the uprising, Louis XIII curtailed Dijon’sprivileges, reorganized its municipality, and ordered it toindemnify the revolt’s victims. Over time, however, theavocats of Dijon’s municipal government successfully manipulatedthe Ancien Régime’s power networks—law, localinstitutions and clientage networks—to win a restorationof Dijon’s traditional city government, the reductionof damage claims, acknowledgement of the municipality’sinnocence and reaffirmation of its contested authority. Lanturelu’saftermath, often interpreted as an example of the early Bourbons’growing control over French cities, thus reveals that the lattercould remain dynamic political centres in the early seventeenthcentury and that the state’s expanding apparatus couldbe used to contest royal authority, as well as extend it.     

Oscar Heidenstam, The Mr Universe Contest, and the Amateur Ideal in British Bodybuilding

During Britain's so-called ‘golden age of bodybuilding’during the 1950s and 1960s, Oscar Heidenstam, through his NationalAmateur Bodybuilders Association (NABBA) and Health and Strengthmagazine, elevated the annual Mr Universe Contest in Londoninto the world's most prestigious physique competition. Whatmade this achievement so remarkable was Heidenstam's commitmentto the Victorian ideal of the gentleman amateur. Eventually,however, this outmoded approach prevented him from staying abreastwith the times and resisting countervailing societal forcesthat were commercial, American and modern. Tradition and parochialismprevailed as NABBA, the Mr Universe Contest, and British bodybuildingwent into ‘relative decline’ in the 1970s. And California,home of the rival Weider organization and Arnold Schwarzenegger,displaced London as center of the bodybuilders’ universe.     

Politics of the Frontier: Henri IV, the Marechal-Duc De Bouillon and the Sovereignty of Sedan

This article re-examines the Bouillon affair of 1602–1606,a dispute between the maréchal-duc de Bouillon and HenriIV which was finally resolved through a royal show of forceand Bouillon’s apparent capitulation. Portrayed in royalpropaganda as a resounding victory, this episode has traditionallybeen viewed as a decisive step in the reassertion of royal authority.More recently, the affair has been analysed in the light ofearly-modern codes of honour and masculinity. The present articleoffers a reinterpretation of these events which pays due attentionto the motivations and objectives of Bouillon himself, too oftencaricatured as a self-serving aristocrat, lacking in seriouspurpose. Thus, attention is drawn to the significance of Bouillon’sinternational dynastic and confessional concerns, and, in particular,to the role of his female relatives throughout the affair. Aboveall, however, it is argued that Bouillon’s relationshipwith the crown can only be properly understood if it is examinedin the context of the efforts made by Bouillon and his predecessorsto establish and gain recognition of their own sovereign authorityat Sedan. The Bouillon affair was not just about royal honourand authority, it was also a debate over the sovereignty ofa frontier territory. The manner in which the affair was concluded—througha treaty of protection which recognized Bouillon’s sovereigntyat Sedan—indicates that, far from being an unqualifiedroyal victory, the settlement was a compromise which satisfiedBouillon’s foremost objective.     

Judicial Politics, War Finance and Absolutism: The Parlement of Besancon and Venality of Office, 1699-1705

During the War of the Spanish Succession, how was Louis XIVable to extract badly needed funds from France’s privilegednoble judges without inciting serious resistance? This articleanswers this question by examining the monarchy’s successfulefforts to expand venal officeholding in the Parlement of Besançon.It argues that Louis XIV’s achievement depended largelyon the skilful management of judicial politics. The Bisontinparlementaires long opposed the expansion of venality. The king’sministers and their local agents were able to overcome theiropposition by fashioning an effective strategy of divide andrule that convinced the majority of the judges to support thecrown’s policies while simultaneously marginalizing thosedetermined to resist. This strategy established a model forthe royal government’s political management of the sovereigncourts. Louis XIV’s successors, however, permitted thismodel to decay at their peril.     

The Limits of Napoleonic Centralization: Notables and Local Government in the Department of the Isere from the Consulate to the beginning of the July Monarchy

The law of 28 Pluviôse VIII (17 February 1800), whichinstalled a new administrative regime in France, appeared toestablish an extremely centralized system in which the notablesfulfilled no more than an honorific function. The Napoleonicperiod is thus regarded as the apogee of administrative centralization.On the basis of a study of the Isère from the Consulateto the July Monarchy, however, this article seeks to show thereality of elite participation in local affairs, the existenceof a ‘système des notables’ from the timeof Napoleon onwards, and the fundamental continuity in thisrespect with succeeding regimes. The notables did not hesitateto lobby the government in order to defend the interests ofthe department when this was necessary. They also played anessential role in the conduct of local administration and exerciseda decisive influence over the choice of local officials beforethe advent of elections in the 1830s.     

Oligopoly and the structural paradox of retail TNCs: an assessment of Carrefour and Wal-Mart in Japan

This research focuses on the case of international chains facingsignificant competition from domestic chains in advanced industrializedeconomies. In this article, I question the assumptions behindthe perceived, simultaneous process of globalization and retailconcentration by taking the cases of the world's two largestretailers, Wal-Mart and Carrefour, entering the Japanese marketin the early 2000s. Both retail TNCs have so far failed to meetinitial high expectations for their performance. I argue thatthere is a structural paradox inherent among retail TNCs, whichis expressed as contradictory forces between standardizationand localization. Empirical evidence is provided on how theseforces complicate retail TNCs’ front-end (store-front)and back-end (distribution) operations in the case of Japan.Emphasis is placed on the role of oligopoly in the retail sectorand how its absence affects retail TNCs’ operation inforeign markets.     

Bad Language and BBC Radio Four in the 1960s and 1970s

In the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a new intensityto complaints from listeners to BBC Radio about the strong languagethey heard on the air. There had long been a public expectationthat the BBC had some form of ‘guardianship’ overthe English language, but there was also now a desire from manyproducers within the BBC to reflect contemporary society moreclosely than it had done in the past, and the use of demoticspeech in dramas and documentaries was one dimension of thischange. Such a desire was part of a broader move towards ‘decensorship’in literature, film, theatre, and popular mores in Britain inthis period. The tension this caused between broadcasters andlisteners was especially acute on Radio Four—the main‘broad brow’ speech network of BBC Radio, and onecharacterized by a fiercely conservative audience. Through previouslyunpublished records of its internal discussions between c.1968and c.1979, this article explores the response of the BBC tolisteners’ complaints and press coverage about swearing.It suggests that BBC Radio reacted strongly to audience concern,but that wider anxiety about the reputation of the BBC as awhole also affected decisions over language. In so doing, itillustrates a previously neglected dimension to the BBC's taskof negotiating a precarious consensus on matters of taste anddecency.     

MacDonald's Parties: The Labour Party and the 'Aristocratic Embrace', 1922-31

The article tests the claim that certain Labour MPs and ministersin the 1920s succumbed to an ‘aristocratic embrace’.It begins with a short account of debates in the early LabourParty over social mixing, which culminated in the 1924 disputeover the wearing of Court Dress by some Labour ministers. Theextent of ‘embrace’ is assessed through the examinationof who wore Court Dress (and why), who was offered and acceptedhonours, and of patterns of residence, income and wealth, andparticipation in London Society, measured by club membershipsand appearances in the Court & Social columns of The Times.The article concludes by examining the usefulness of the ideaof ‘aristocratic embrace’ in explaining the defectionof J.R. MacDonald and others from the Labour Party in 1931.     

JAPANESE REAL ESTATE INVESTMENT IN CANADIAN CITIES and REGIONS, 1985–1993

The location and type of Japanese property investments in Canada are examined as a case study of the increasing globalization of property markets and the remarkable rise of Japanese international investors in the late 1980s. Unpublished official statistics and company interviews indicate investment patterns had uneven implications for Canada's cities and regions. Even though Toronto is often seen as Canada's world city, Japanese investors as a whole overlooked the commercial potential of its property markets. The majority of their real estate investments took advantage of Japanese tourism growth in Pacific Canada and were associated with hotels and golf courses in Vancouver and its surrounding region. The author stresses the importance of Japanese perceptions, as well as local opportunities and constraints, in shaping the geography of Japanese real estate investment in Canada. L'emplacement et le type des investissements japonais au Canada sont examinés comme étude de cas sur la globalisation croissante des marchés de biens et la mon-tée remarquable des actionnaires internationaux japonais à la fin des années 80. Les statistiques officielles non-publiées montrent des implications inégales dans les villes et les régions du Canada. Bien que Toronto soit considéré souvent comme la ville mondiale du Canada, les actionnaires japonais dans ?ensemble ont négligé son potentiel commercial. La majorité des investissements sur les biens immobiliers ont pris avantage de la croissance du tourisme japonais au Canada Pacifique, et fut liee aux hotels et terrains de golf à Vancouver et dans les environs de la ville. ?auteur souligne ?importance des perceptions japonaises, aussi bien que les occasions et contraintes locales, en façonnant la géographie de leur investissement de biens au Canada. Mots-clés: investissement de biens au Canada; actionnaires japonais; investissements immobiliers     

Reviews

Ingrid and other studies P. G. W. ANNSIS(Ed)
Sea studies: Essays in honour of Basil Greenhill, C.B., C.M.G., on the occasion of his retirement
Underwater archaeology 1. Archeologia IX. Acta Universitatis Nicolai Copernici JERZY, OLCZAK and GERARD WILKE (Eds)
Compagnie des Indes 1720–1770:Vol. 1—Vaisseaux, hommes, voyages, commerces; vol. 2—Boullongne, vaisseau 600 tx. 1759–1761 JEAN BOUDRIOT
The twilight of Welsh sail ALED EAMES     

The London Broadcasting Company (LBC) and Independent Radio News (IRN) Archive

UK commercial radio was formally launched in October 1973 whenLBC went on air. Its sister station, IRN, began providing anews service at the same time for the growing number of ‘IndependentLocal Radio’ stations. During the period 1973–1996these two organisations assembled an archive of over 7,000 reel-to-reeltapes which now represent the largest commercial radio archivein Britain. For historians of the media, and of the twentiethcentury more generally, the collection is a rich and variedsource of social, cultural and political evidence. Media historians,including historians of journalism, can hear examples of a morepopulist and innovative style of reporting (or ‘reportage’)than was to be heard on the BBC. For the first time the phone-inwas an integral part of the schedule and a more opinionatedstyle of presentation was pioneered by Brian Hayes and others.The archive, soon to be digitised and made available online,contains a radio history of the period which started slightlybefore Margaret Thatcher's election as Leader of the ConservativeParty and finished a few years after the end of premiership.New clips, current affairs series like Decision Makers, parliamentarydebates (made by the LBC parliamentary unit) and phone-ins allcovered the major news stories of the time. There are, to takea notable example, 62 tapes on the Falklands War including 778individual news items. The archive is an important and hithertolargely neglected source for future historians of the period.     

The Decline of the Empire and the Economic 'Decline' of Britain

In the 1950s and 1960s, decolonization coincided with the ‘goldenage’ of British capitalism, with record rises in popularliving standards. Economic historians have understandably usedthis coincidence to suggest that by this period the BritishEmpire was no longer offering substantial economic benefitsto the mass of the metropolitan population. Yet there were linksbetween economic performance and the decline of the Empire.First, despite the good performance, profoundly pessimistic‘declinist’ accounts of British society and theeconomy abounded in the early 1960s, and these had a major impacton policy formation. A key underpinning for such accounts wasthe ‘culture of decline’ intimately linked withthe loss of imperial status. Secondly, while it has become acommonplace of discussion of post-war Britain to assume thatreversing ‘decline’ and modernizing the economyrequired a re-orientation of policy away from the Empire andCommonwealth towards Europe, such a reorientation was not aconstant feature of modernization strategies. Indeed, a centralfeature of the initial period of Wilsonian ‘modernization’after 1964 was its attempt to use closer links with the Commonwealthto achieve this objective.     

The Nineteenth-Century Fisheries of the Hudson's Bay Company Trading Posts on Lake Superior: a Biogeographical Study

Trading post personnel maintained records of natural and cultural phenomena, including data on fish and fishing. The Hudson's Bay Company posts on the north shore of Lake Superior developed a diverse fishery based on a rather complex association of species and stocks, especially lake trout, whitefish, and herring. In part learning from the Indians, the fishermen gained a fairly sophisticated understanding of the seasonal and spatial occurrences of fish aggregations. These are here summarized in text and table form and provide baseline data for fisheries which since the 1800s have been degraded and changed.
Les employés des comptoirs consignaient régulièrement les divers phénomènes culturels et naturels, y compris ceux qui relevaient des poissons et de la pêche. Les comptoirs de la Compagnie de la Baie d'Hudson au littoral nord du lac Supérieur ont développé une industrie de la pêche diversifiée basée sur des rapports assez complexes entre les espèces et les stocks de poissons, surtout de touladi, de grand corégone, et de cisco de lac. Tirant leurs connaissances en partie des Indiens, les pêcheurs ont réussi à bien comprendre les détails des occurences spatiales et saisonnières des aggrégations de poissons. Les données de leurs observations se présentent dans ce travail sous forme de textes et de tableaux, et fournissent les renseignements de base pour les pêcheries qui, depuis le 19^e siècle, subissent des transformations et tiennent aujourd'hui une place moins importante dans l'industrie de la pêche.     

A Good Job for a Girl? The Career Biographies of Women Graduates of the University of Liverpool Post-1945

The opponents of women’s higher education in the nineteenthcentury feared that a university education for women would radicallyalter the ‘separate spheres’ and ultimately leadto a sexual revolution. This article suggests that in termsof the career biographies of university-educated women, theyneed not have feared. Drawing on a range of data sources, thearticle documents the limited, gendered career options thatfaced graduate women post-1945, despite the increase in botheducational and employment opportunities. There remained astoundingpersistence in sexist assumptions about women’s life-plans;even for the academic elite, the role of wife and mother wasnever lost sight of. Graduate women negotiated the labour marketwithin the confines of a discourse that emphasized a ‘goodjob for a girl’ as opposed to a career for a woman.     

Mass Politics and the Techniques of Leadership: The Promise and Perils of Propaganda in Weimar Germany

This paper traces the development of ideas about ‘professional’and ‘scientific’ publicity during the Weimar era,and their gradual absorption by mainstream politicians and officialsfrom the late 1920s onwards. The unprecedented wartime effortsto influence domestic morale and the scandalous revelationsof misinformation afterwards greatly increased popular awarenessof the ability of élites to manipulate public opinion,and generated intense interest in the problems of communicatingwith mass publics. Nowhere was this fascination greater thanin Germany, where many attributed their defeat primarily tosuperior enemy propaganda. The result was a wide-ranging postwardiscourse about the power of this modern ‘weapon’and its unavoidability as a part of modern political and commerciallife. Far from learning the so-called ‘lessons of thewar’, government self-representation efforts were steadilycriticized by journalists and advertisers as both quantitativelyand qualitatively inadequate. Whereas most republicans regarded‘propaganda’ as mendacious and unstatesmanlike,many of the radical parties’ publicity efforts clearlyreflected the basic tenets of the concurrent propaganda discourse,in particular the emphasis on emotional appeal and ritualisticsymbols. During the crisis of the early 1930s, amidst the visiblesuccess of the Nazis’ advertising-inspired campaigning,the spread of this discourse across the political spectrum helpedto hollow out democratic conceptualizations of leadership andpublic opinion from the very centre of Weimar political life.     

Growth Cultures: the global bioeconomy and its bioregions * Philip Cooke

As a consequence of reviewing books for journals, I now readacknowledgements and prefaces with a degree of interest thatis perhaps unwarranted by normal standards, but which I havefound increasingly important when seeking to understand whathas inspired scholars in their work and how they develop theirideas. This is especially evident in Phil Cooke's new book GrowthCultures that brings together several years worth of researchon the bioeconomy—as the commercial exploitation of thelife sciences is now commonly defined. It is well worth readingthe preface to this volume to ground the rest of the book inthe evolving thinking about this important ‘industry’. Growth Cultures collects together in one volume much of Cooke'sprolific output from the late 1990s onwards