Abolition and Imperial Law, 1790–1820

Historians have represented the movement for the abolition of the slave trade as a turning point in international law, either characterising the formation of mixed commissions to adjudicate slave ship captures as elements of early human rights law or interpreting the treaty regime supporting the ban on the slave trade as marking a decisive shift towards positivism in international law. A closer look at the legal history of abolition suggests that such perspectives omit an important dimension: the ties between abolition and imperial legal consolidation. In exploring such ties, the article first examines prize law and its direct and indirect influence on calls for intra-imperial regulation of the slave trade, especially its effective criminalisation. Across the empire, efforts to ban the slave trade reflected and reinforced pressures to strengthen imperial legal authority by regulating and restricting planter legal prerogatives.     

British Framework Knitters in New England: Technology Transfer and Machine Knitting in America, 1820–1900

Abstract

The emphasis on the cataclysmic nature of industrialization espoused by mid-twentieth-century economic historians has more recently given way to a realisation that continuity was as important as discontinuity in the social and economic development of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Various branches of the textile industries provide good examples of such continuity. The purpose of this paper is to examine the documentary evidence to try to discover for how long handloom weaving survived in Wiltshire and Gloucestershire after the introduction of the power loom. It will also attempt to determine the motivation of a group of people who resisted being drawn into the factory system. The authors conclude that there is evidence that some homes remained workplaces at least until the 1870s in some villages, especially in Wiltshire.     

From “Spitsbergen” to “Svalbard”. Norwegianization in Norway and in the “Norwegian Sea”, 1820–1925

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to enhance our understanding of the Norwegian acquisition of Spitsbergen/Svalbard by using the concept of Norwegianization as a tool for analyzing the political and diplomatic background for the Spitsbergen treaty of 1920, and comparing the Norwegianization polar politics with the Norwegianization concept used to analyze the internal colonization in the Sami districts of northern Norway during the same period. The paper concludes that the politics of Norwegianization on the main islands in the North Ocean – renamed the Norwegian Sea by Norwegian oceanographers in the 1870s – was an offensive policy of expansionism, motivated by historical and geographical considerations and alleged rights to re-establish the Medieval Norse empire.