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Customarily speaking, concepts of vocational and career training have been organised differently in Great Britain and the Federal Republic of Germany. Since the nineteenth century, vocation has been the "organising principle" of apprenticeship and vocational training in Germany, alongside of social security and other social forms. In Britain, however, a standardised system of vocational education and training does not exist. This paper seeks to shed light on a variety of systems for apprenticeship, vocational training, and career services in British and West German employment offices, as well as their effects on unemployment after the late 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses an English folding screen decorated with a collage of paper cut-outs and other design elements associated with the British arts and crafts movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Background information on the history of furniture design, collages as an art form, and the 19th-century historical context of industrialization and consumer society is provided. The motifs and composition of the collage are described and analyzed as indicators of historical and social aspects of interior design for the middle class in Victorian Britain.

Critically examining the social-historical assumption that urban and rural settlements separated in the course of the eighteenth century, this article analyses overlaps and interdependencies between town and countryside in the British Empire. The Jacobite rebellions after 1688, the American Revolution and the Irish Rebellion of 1798 deserve to be studied in terms of a growing anti-centralism and anti-globalism in Britain and the colonies. Many eighteenth-century uprisings were, in fact, transregional and transcended the traditional socio-cultural stratification of society. Although rural areas were often infrastructurally disadvantaged, they nevertheless participated in overarching concepts of nationhood and counter-global networks. Furthermore, the Sacheverell Riots of 1710 as well as the anti-Catholic riots of 1778 to 1780 suggest a great political relevance of the suburban space. As zones of transition and social mobility, the outskirts of eighteenth-century towns and cities were vital hubs of communication and radicalisation. A clearer physical and discursive separation of urban and rural cultures only emerged in the nineteenth century when economic and demographic change fostered unprecedented class-distinction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The NSA affair has, among other things, shown the dimensions to which commercial espionage and the outsourcing of information gathering have grown. From the early modernist's point of view, this is not as surprising as it might appear - the development seems to have early modern parallels. The article shows how espionage was organized around 1700, discusses the term and argues that informal, commercial actors were highly relevant. This is demonstrated by looking at the English government's initiatives to gain information about France during the War of the Spanish Succession. A striking example for an espionage network working on a commercial basis and cooperating with the English government, is Pierre Jurieu's and Etienne Caillaud's Rotterdam based spy network. It is shown how this network worked in practice and how it gathered political relevant information for the English government. In the conclusion, I try to answer the more general question what the existence of commercial espionage in the early modern as well as in the postmodern period can tell us about the history of espionage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the cyclical trajectory of the British coal miner from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. Within less than one generation, the miner turned from doomed industrial proletarian to self-assured embodiment of the future back to doomed proletarian. The renaissance of King Coal in the 1970s proved short-lived, and yet it needs to be taken seriously if one is to understand the nature of the coal strike of 1984/85 and the rundown of the industry that followed. Indeed, the figure of the miner offers a lens for reconfiguring our understanding of the 1970s and British contemporary history more generally, as the article seeks to demonstrate both empirically and conceptually. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]