Excavating Racial Capitalism in London's West India Docks

Focusing on the construction of London's West India Docks in 1802, I argue that this project established a feedback loop with conditions of production in the Caribbean. Through an analysis of committee minutes, letters, parliamentary papers and visual art, I move beyond economic accounts of slavery's impact to demonstrate how geographies of security and surveillance—first developed on the sugar plantation—were imported into the design and function of London's port. As such, I argue that London's docks produced a geography of segregation which offers a unique insight into the workings of racial capitalism and its exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities. Positioning my discussion alongside London's contemporary landscape, I excavate Britain's repressed memories of slavery to illustrate how they still scar the urban environment.     

宗教改革与近代早期伦敦葬礼的变迁

近代早期英国经历了曲折的宗教改革,大部分伦敦居民的死亡观念和葬礼实践随之发生了变化.在灵魂得救上,他们接受了"因信称义",摈弃了炼狱观念.在墓地的选择上,由于宗教改革缩小了教区墓地的面积,中间阶层与精英阶层争夺教区内最神圣的墓地--教堂,普通市民不得不葬入郊外新建的墓地.在葬礼仪式上,减少了许多天主教性质的仪式,世俗机构纹章院对葬礼的控制进一步加剧了葬礼仪式的世俗化.归根结底,新教的"入世禁欲"观念极大地推动了葬礼的变迁,同时,节俭、谋利的资本主义精神贯穿葬礼变迁之始终.     

The Multiple Meanings of Troy in Early Modern London's Mayoral Show

Abstract

This paper examines the cultural, scientific and poetic life of ambergris in the seventeenth century, in the context of contemporary theories about smell, and changing attitudes to style and expression. Most widely used as an ingredient in perfumery, this mysterious substance (now known to be the pathological secretion of a sperm whale) attracted significant interest: natural philosophers speculated on its origin, and imaginative writers used it as a trope for the exotic and the powerfully ephemeral. In surveying the appearance of ambergris in natural philosophical writings (including the proceedings of the Royal Society, and works by Browne and Boyle), as well as in botanical treatises, recipe books, travellers’ narratives, and lyric poetry, this paper seeks to recover a sense of the forgotten olfactory codings of the past. It ends with an attempt to place ambergris within the highly nuanced vocabulary of scent employed by Robert Herrick, the most distinguished nose of the early modern age.     

The quality of (in)justice in London's magistrates' courts

Concerns about structural racism and policing have fuelled public demands in the US, UK and elsewhere to ‘defund’ and demilitarize the police. However, given the interlinked nature of the entire criminal justice system – the police, courts and prisons – further thought needs to be given to how the system should be reformed. This article summarizes research on the nature of injustice experienced in magistrates’ courts in London from the point of view of defendants from black, Asian and ethnic minority communities and ‘the precariat’.     

Putting the crisis to work: The real estate sector and London's housing crisis

The idea of ‘crisis’ plays an important role in academic and policy imaginations (Heslop and Ormerod, 2020), particularly since the global financial crisis. Across major western cities, at the same time as policy-makers have had to respond to ‘the (economic) crisis’, many have also experienced intense ‘housing crises’ and the acute divergence of average incomes and house prices. In response, cities such as London have become central sites in debates around housing acquisition by the ultra-wealthy, land value extraction and growing levels of unaffordability. However, much critical geography research on housing crises is state-centred or focused on civil society impacts, with relatively little reflection on the real estate sector and the work that crisis does as a narrative in shaping institutionalised and actor-centred practices. In this paper, we draw on in-depth research with developers, investors, and advisors in London to argue that crisis-driven policy responses have created political risk which is differentially experienced by actors across the sector, with large housebuilders and advisors benefitting whilst smaller niche developers move out. Moreover, we show how consultants, investors and developers have used the crisis situation to create new geographies, products and investor types in the housing market. These, in turn, require regulatory support and demonstrate the inherently political nature of crisis narratives' use. We use the London case to broaden understandings of the impact that conceptualisations of ‘crisis’ have on urban and regional planning practices, and how these influence and shape processes of contemporary urban development.     

The security of Africans beyond borders: migration,remittances and London's transnational entrepreneurs

This article provides an overview of selected aspects of how the economic security of growing numbers of Africans is linked to international migration. It first examines the emergence since 2005 of a new international policy discourse emphasizing the positive economic benefits of migration through remittance flows, the transfer of ideas and inward investment by migrants. The article outlines European policy responses to the recent upsurge in illegal Africa migration across the Mediterranean and examines the reaction of African governments and the Africa Union to increased migration and the enhanced dependence of African economies on remittance flows. The final section highlights the way in which the accelerated settlement of Africans in the UK prefigures longer term changes in the UK's relationship with Africa.     

‘Unfortunate Objects’: London's Unmarried Mothers in the Eighteenth Century

Unmarried mothers in eighteenth‐century London captivated the public imagination in unprecedented ways. Using the petitions for admission into London's Foundling hospital, this article argues that unmarried mothers did not have to conform to a model of female sexual passivity, of ‘respectable illegitimacy’, in order to receive charitable relief in the eighteenth‐century metropolis. The governors of the Foundling Hospital could be indiscriminate in the petitions that they passed. This did not mean, however, that petitioners were unaware of how best to represent their case in their attempts to find a home for their child. But throughout the eighteenth century, ‘proper objects of charity’ included petitioners with many different stories to tell. These were determined by the concerns and questions of the Foundling Hospital's authorities and were not unproblematic representations of poor women's mental maps, but this piece emphasises that the circumstances of their lives rarely required embellishment to convince others of their necessity. Economic need rather than shame was the all‐important criterion in the admission of a child into the Foundling Hospital. Women's accounts of their lives provided overwhelming evidence that they, rather than the fathers of their babies, were the ‘unfortunate sex’, but they were neither hopeless nor without desire. The language of the petitions was intimately related to the everyday lives of London's poor. What framed most of the accounts presented by petitioners was not seduction, shame or secrecy but misfortune.     

Smoking and health in London's East End in the first half of the 19th century

Abstract

The harmful effects of smoking are now proven, but to what extent can tobacco use be identified in 19th-century skeletal remains? The full osteological analysis of 705 individuals from the cemetery of St Mary and St Michael (open 1843–54) in Whitechapel, London, revealed a high prevalence of pipe smoking amongst the male population. In addition to a lower life expectancy, the smokers were found to have increased levels of skeletal evidence for lung disease when compared to the remainder of the sample. This has implications for the health, social structure and cohesion of this Irish migrant population.     

"We have a little bit more finesse, as a nation": Constructing the Polish Worker in London's Building Sites

Abstract:  This paper examines how male Polish builders in London construct themselves relationally to English builders as they negotiate their place within the labour hierarchies of the building site and in the London labour market. This is based on semi-structured interviews and participant photographs taken by Polish migrants arriving in the aftermath of the European Union expansion in May 2004, and now working in building sites across London. These buildings sites are mundane elements of a global city which employ transnational labour, and where differences between Polish and English builders become significant discursive tools of survival in a competitive labour market. The paper illustrates how Polish workers mark themselves as "superior" to English builders through the versatility of their embodied skills, work ethic, artistic qualities, and finesse in their social interactions on the building site. This paper thus provides new ways of understanding the meanings of work and the complexity of identity politics within the spaces of low-paid manual work in a global city.     

‘Mr Bourne's dilemma’. Consumer culture,property speculation and department store demise: the rise and fall of Bourne and Hollingsworth on London's Oxford Street

This paper explores the twentieth-century rise and fall of the traditional department store Bourne and Hollingsworth in London's Oxford Street as a means of re-examining the historical geographies of metropolitan consumption cultures. The research moves away from a preoccupation with urban retail's novelty and spectacle towards a consideration of the more conventional and conservative kinds of consumption that have been a vital part of the retail ecology of many major cities in the twentieth century. The paper analyses the intersections of different dimensions of the history of metropolitan consumption: with a culturalist focus on consumer identity and urban microgrographies; but also an examination of this as a family-owned, paternalistic business, and as a material space, both as a building designed and refurbished by its owners, management, architects and shopfitters, and as a particular site within the routes and flows of the West End. The final approach to Bourne and Hollingsworth as urban property, as a distinctive form of capital asset in the city, allows a new understanding of the vulnerability of this kind of retailing by the later twentieth century. The study shows that an emphasis on the significance of cultures of consumption provides at best a partial explanation for changes in the landscapes of consumption: it is argued that cities are the sites of complex intersections between cultural practices and other kinds of geography, in this case those of asset values and opportunities for property speculation.