Search

This article tracks how a trope of middle-class household thrift, grounded on the autarchic Aristotelian oikos, has long fueled derogatory discourses in Britain aimed at low-income urban residents who practice quite different forms of thrift. Since the 1970s this trope has migrated across scales, proving a potent metaphor for national economic policy and planetary care alike, and morally and economically justifying both neoliberal welfare retraction compounded by austerity policies and national responses to excessive resource extraction and waste production. Both austerity and formal recycling schemes shift responsibility onto consumer citizens, regardless of capacity. Further, this model of thrift eclipses the thriftiness of low-income urban households, which emerges at the nexus of kin and waged labor, sharing, welfare, debt, conserving material resources through remaking and repair and, crucially, the fundamental need for decency expressed through kin care. Through a historicized ethnography of a London social housing estate and its residents, this paper excavates what happens as these different forms and scales of household thrift coexist, change over time, and clash. Ultimately, neoliberal policy centered on an inimical idiom of thrift delegitimizes and disentitles low-income urban households and undermines their ability to enact livelihood practices of sustainability and projects of dignity across generations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers how literary and cinematic constructions of Essex noir expose the darker, chaotic sides to working-class embourgeoisement: initially via post-War suburbanisation and later, via Margaret Thatcher's attempt to encourage competitive individualism and entrepreneurship. Noir angles a 'dark mirror' to suburban Essex and develops a distinctive aesthetics of social and cultural change, while also puncturing myths of social mobility and suburban security. The paper points to both affinities and breaks between noir's bleak pessimism and Walter Benjamin's understanding of history as overcoming the concept of progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

London today hosts more than 200,000 Italian people. A traditional point of arrival for Italian migrants since the nineteenth century, London is a setting characterised by the presence of the ‘old’ classic economic migration – of those who left Italy mainly in the 1950s and 1960s, and the ‘new’ migration, made up mainly of highly-educated people in the professional, academic and arts sectors. These two groups differ as regards their time of arrival, socio-economic characteristics and educational background, and they rarely have the chance or find the need to interact. This paper is based on interviews with representatives of Italian institutions and associations, and with ‘old’ and ‘new’ Italian migrants; participant observation of Italian events happening in London; and some elements of discourse analysis. By means of this empirical material, I aim to show that, besides their well-known differences, the ‘old’ and ‘new’ communities present striking similarities in their migration narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This essay introduces a special issue of the BJHS on communities of natural knowledge and artificial practice in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London. In seeking to understand the rise of a learned and technical culture within a growing and changing city, our approach has been inclusive in terms of the activities, people and places we consider worth exploring but shaped by a sense of the importance of collective activity, training, storage of information and identity. London's knowledge culture was formed by the public, pragmatic and commercial spaces of the city rather than by the academy or the court. In this introduction, we outline the types of group and institution within our view and acknowledge the many locations that might be explored further. Above all, we introduce a particular vision of London's potential as a city of knowledge and practice, arising from its commercial and mercantile activity and fostered within its range of corporations, institutions and associations. This was recognized and promoted by contemporary authors, including natural and experimental philosophers, practical mathematicians, artisans and others, who sought to establish a place for and recognition of their individual and collective skills and knowledge within the metropolis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The data collected by the New Survey of London Life and Labour between 1928 and 1932 is one of the most significant resources of detailed household information for the interwar period, with data extracted for almost 30,000 households, providing detailed information including birthplaces, hours of work, and wages. This article assesses the process of the original data collection, highlighting issues that mean users of the extracted data must proceed with a measure of caution. In particular, it demonstrates that one investigator employed by the survey, who provided information for around a fifth of households, appears to have regularly submitted generic and estimated information that problematizes the dataset. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Historians usually analyze changing gender constructions in the criminal courts after World War I through cases involving men and women. Using a different analytical lens, this article explores two well-publicized murder trials involving war veterans and illegitimate children, one of a soldier who murdered his wife's daughter from an adulterous affair and one who killed his own son. Although notions of masculinity had changed, the police, courts, and Home Office used traditional factors to assess punishments, including the degree of provocation, the behavior of the women involved, and the issue of deterrence. The press, however, was more sympathetic to the veterans, regarding them as victims of circumstances, much like women who committed infanticide. This new presentation did not succeed with the Home Office, especially as the war moved further into the past. By 1925, men's war service had less influence on punishment than Victorian ideas of gender and criminal responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Housing history has been part of the mix of articles in The London Journal from its inception in 1975. The housing articles cover a wide period of London's history from early modern times to the contemporary city, and they track the major changes in historical method and sources that have become available over the last forty years. As has been noted by others, the contemporary has fallen out of the coverage, which is a pity since the housing debate in the capital has become more insistent, and it would seem that housing history has much to offer, not in the way of answers, but with strategies from the past for dealing with a perennial and intransigent problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on quantitative and descriptive data from Robert Campbell's manual for prospective apprentices, The London tradesman (1747), to demonstrate the responsiveness of apprenticeship premiums in mid-eighteenth-century London to market forces of supply and demand. It first shows that Campbell's data on mid-eighteenth-century journeymen wages, apprenticeship premiums, and masters' set-up costs in London are consistent with other sources. It then applies instrumental variable regressions to estimate the elasticity of apprenticeship premiums with respect to journeymen wages and set-up costs, using Campbell's education and ability requirements by trade to instrument for wages. We find an elasticity of one with respect to wages, and of 0.25 with respect to set-up costs, both statistically significant at a p-value less than 0.1%. We interpret these findings as supporting the thesis that apprenticeship played an important role in adapting the English workforce to the skill requirements of the industrial revolution in its early stages, insofar as the institution of apprenticeship in London was representative of other parts of England. Furthermore, by demonstrating the internal and external consistency of Campbell's observations, our findings should encourage their use as an unparalleled source of detailed, trade-specific wage data from the early years of the industrial revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a contribution to the fortieth anniversary celebrations of The London Journal, this article provides an overview of the twenty-seven articles which it has published about crime and criminal justice since its inception. While few articles were published in its early years, there has been a big increase in articles published in the last decade, pushing the Journal into the forefront of the historiography on these topics. A survey of the recurring themes in articles about crime, policing, justice, and punishment leads to the conclusion that what is distinctive about London crime is not its severity or frequency, but the depth of evidence the records of its prosecution provide about the distinctive features of metropolitan life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers how the image of the enemy was deployed by parliamentarian activists in civil war London. It focuses on the 'malignant party' identified in parliamentary discourse as guilty of dividing crown and parliament and precipitating civil war. Endorsing the reality of this party became a means for activists to assert their status as those most 'well-affected' to parliament, and to legitimise their own political agency within the terms of parliamentary discourse. By learning to speak the language of parliament, these activists were able to participate in the construction of the parliamentary cause, and to shape its future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]