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This paper investigates whether high borrowing costs deterred investment in sanitation infrastructure in late nineteenth-century Britain. Town Councils had to borrow to fund investment, with considerable variation in interest rates across towns and over time. Panel regressions, using annual data from more than 800 town councils, indicate that higher interest rates were associated with lower levels of infrastructure investment between 1887 and 1903. Instrumental variable regressions show that falling interest rates after 1887 stimulated investment and led to lower infant mortality. These findings suggest that Parliament could have expedited mortality decline by subsidizing loans or facilitating private borrowing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite a wealth of academic research focusing on the origins and development of association football in Britain during the nineteenth century, academics have failed to reach a consensus regarding the early history of the game with the emergence of contrasting ‘orthodox’ and ‘revisionist’ interpretations. Much of the current research has focused on tackling the subject on a national level and this has resulted in many towns, cities and regions across the country being overlooked when sports historians discuss the origins of modern football. One such region is North Staffordshire, more commonly referred to as The Potteries, which, despite having played a key role in the formation of the Football League, possessing one of the oldest professional football clubs in the country and an early county football association, has never been the subject of an in-depth academic study. Using a range of archival sources this paper provides an overview of the origins and early development of association football across The Potteries from the 1850 to 1870s, emphasizing the influence of Stoke City Football Club and provides a fact based resolution to the debate surrounding the club’s origin and formation. The wider development of the game in The Potteries is also explored, tracing the early informal football activities taking place at fairs, fetes and the wakes holidays to the establishment of a football culture in the 1870s following the formation of organized football clubs and the Staffordshire Football Association. This paper concludes that neither the orthodox nor the revisionist interpretations of the game’s origins can fully explain the region’s football development and that further research into the region is required to understand the significance of The Potteries in relation to the national picture. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article continues research into social mobility in England in the nineteenth century by examining the links with different occupational structures, socio-economic and industry/occupation, for a specific location. This allows an examination of the impact of the characteristics of these structures on occupational and thence on social mobility. Occupational mobility has long been recognised as a major determinant of social mobility and has been the subject of a number of papers, usually to determine how much a specific variable affects the level and type of mobility observed. Rarely do these analyses consider the location’s occupational structure, and its changes, as a determinant of the level of mobility. This paper finds that much of the variability of occupational mobility of a locality is determined by the characteristics of the different industries and occupations in that location. Industries and occupations provide a context within which other factors, such as literacy, operate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses U.S. nationalism in relation to the civil rights of American sailors and prisoners of war in British prisons during the War of 1812, and it mentions national identity and loyalty to the U.S. The treatment of captured Americans at the Dartmoor Depot prison in England is examined, along with the impact of disease, poor food, and overcrowding on American prisoners in Great Britain. Reuben Beasley, the American Agent for Prisoners of War in England, is assessed.

This article argues that research into preventive and pre-emptive crime control in the United Kingdom has marginalized the historical persistence of the power to arrest and convict on justified suspicion of intent. It traces the genesis of this power in statute law (particularly the Vagrancy Act of 1824) and demonstrates its consistent use in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It shows how this pre-emptive power was fiercely defended by police authorities, particularly during the rise of the 'civil liberties' agenda during the 1930s, only losing ground when use of these powers became entangled with debates about race relations in the 1970s. Overall, the article argues that 'pre-emptive' arrest and conviction on suspicion of intent have been a significant component of UK police powers since the later eighteenth century, and seeks to demonstrate the value of historical criminology in problematizing contemporary debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A biography of the 19th century British naturalist Mrs. Margaret Gatty is provided. She was born in Essex, England on June 3, 1809 and married Reverend Alfred Gatty in 1839. Particular focus is given to her study of sea-weeds, including her 1863 book "British Sea-Weeds: Drawn From Professor Harvey’s ‘Phycologia Britannica’ With Descriptions, an Amateur’s Synopsis, Rules for Laying out Sea-Weeds, an Order for Arranging Them in a Herbarium, and an Appendix of New Species." Her relationship with phycologist William Henry Harvey is discussed.

Virdee's book adds enormously to our understanding of two interconnected processes: the ways in which racism and nationalism in England/Britain became totally intertwined and embedded in working-class views of the world, and how at certain key moments those racially cast out from that depressing maelstrom may become the champions of an anti-racist internationalism. I am fractionally less negative than the author about the seemingly total hold of racism/nationalism on the whole working class, and less certain about racialized ‘outing’ as the key to the DNA of universalist anti-racists. Using the Garibaldi mobilizations of 1862–64, I suggest he may have underestimated the potential and reasons for ‘insider’ working-class resistance to racism/nationalism, and suggest greater caution in arguing an association between ‘racialized outsiders’ and internationalist views. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the public attitudes of various religious commentators in Britain towards emigrants and emigration in the mid-Victorian decades. These figures include bishops, Anglican clergy (but also those of some other denominations), those directly involved in ministry to emigrants, and lay proponents of emigration. It also contrasts their views with those of more secular commentators influenced by political economy. The article argues that while religious commentary proposed emigration to be a good thing, for emigrants and for the expansion of Christianity and the British empire, this contrasted with a more sceptical attitude towards steerage immigrants by Thomas Malthus. It also contrasted with a focus on amelioration of conditions for emigrants by those in emigration ministry, who saw emigrants as assisting the extension of the Church rather than the empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

W. E. B. Du Bois noted that the nineteenth-century US slave plantation corresponded with the factory in its worst conceivable form. This article expands upon Du Bois's insight to consider the emergence of the English working class in correspondence with American settler slavery and colonial projects within the British Empire. From above, elites theorized about the exploitation of labor as a world historical project to compare the enslaved, the colonized, and the English worker against one another. From below, proletarian intellectuals imagined the freedom of English laborers through the condition of the enslaved in the American South and Jamaica and the colonized in South Asia. By placing these histories from above and below together, this article argues that it is impossible to conceive of the English working class making itself and being made at remove from the enslaving and colonizing projects of global capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]