Wandering scholars? Academic mobility and the British World, 1850–1940

At the Allied Colonial Universities Conference, held in London in 1903, delegates from across the universities of Britain's settler empire professed the existence of a British academic community, defined not by location, but by shared culture, shared values and shared ethnicity. This article examines the extent to which these claims reflected actual patterns of academic mobility in the settler empire between 1850 and 1940. By mapping the careers of the 350 professors who served at the Universities of Sydney, Toronto, and Manchester during this period, it concludes that, between 1900 and 1930 especially, there existed a distinctly British academic world within which scholars moved frequently along different migratory axes. Though not as united, extensive and uncomplicated as that in which the 1903 Conference delegates believed, this world nonetheless shared more in common with their vision of an expansive British academic community than it did with the image of an unconnected and isolated periphery that has characterised portrayals by subsequent university historians.     

The making of the Gibraltar-Spain border: cholera,contraband, and spatial reordering, 1850–1873

The Anglo-Spanish controversy over Gibraltar has generated a good deal of research in international law and diplomatic history, but little insight into the historical dynamic that forged the British territory's permanent de facto sovereign border with Spain during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. The transformation of a loosely defined neutral zone into a clearly marked line had little to do with statecraft or expansionism, as typically assumed, but rather was a local response to a series of external challenges that increasingly militated for some agreement among local authorities on a precise demarcation. These included broad administrative and fiscal reforms on the part of the British Empire and Spain's liberal governing coalition, the rise of revolutionary Republicanism in Spain, a dramatic uptick in human mobility and migration in the Mediterranean, and the third cholera pandemic.     

Industry builds the city: the suburbanization of manufacturing in the San Francisco Bay Area, 1850–1940

The San Francisco Bay Area demonstrates how industrial dispersal had created the sprawling form of the American metropolis. Neither change in transport modes nor residential suburbanization is principally responsible for shaping the outward spiral of urbanization. Manufacturing began its outward march from the outset of the city's industrialization, establishing peripheral nodes of employment and working class residence within San Francisco, then beyond the city limits in South San Francisco and especially the East Bay. The main cause of decentralization has been industrial shifts; the outbreak of new activities in new places, normally in the form of industrial districts at various spatial scales. A second cause has been the orchestration of development by business leaders through property ownership and political manoeuvring guided by a general vision of metropolitan expansion, whether in co-operation or competition with one another.