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Information about the annual general meeting of the British Ecological Society held at the University College in London on January 6-7, 1949 and its thirty-fourth annual meeting held at Bristol University in London on January 9, 1948 are presented. Various woods and rare plants in Great Britain were discussed in the 1949 event accompanied by exhibits of various photographs of species while the 1948 meeting was about hydrography and ecology.

The article offers information about the annual meeting of the British Ecological Society at the University College in London, England, on January 5-6, 1939. Professor Tansley explained how pressure of work had made him unable to prepare a speech, and how the Council had made arrangements for it to be read at a meeting at Easter. Resignation of Mrs. Hand was accepted and Elflyn Hughes was elected as a new member of the society.

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]

This article uses newspaper advertisements to chart the changes in speeds and fares of stage coaches, identifying the main periods of increasing speeds among London coaches as the 1760s-80s and 1810s-20s, separated by a period when speeds declined. It then measures productivity growth. Fares of London coaches in 1835-6 were about 27 per cent of what they would have been but for improvements in horses, vehicles, and roads from 1750, and the two main periods of productivity growth correspond to those of rising speeds. Speeds and productivity of regional coaches increased more smoothly. The rising productivity firmly identifies road transport as one of the modernizing sectors of the economy. New figures are put forward for the growing number of London and regional coaches, indicating rapid growth in passenger miles. While turnpike trusts had little impact before the 1750s, their increasing effectiveness, together with the use of steel springs and improved horses, was crucial to the rising productivity of the 1760s-80s, and even more so to that of the 1810s-20s. The cross roads were apparently poorer than London roads in the late eighteenth century, but thereafter the gap narrowed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Exploiting hitherto unexamined London port book data, this article shows that during the last quarter of the seventeenth century the coastal metropolitan corn import trade was twice the size that historians relying on the work of Gras have assumed it to have been. More significantly, it demonstrates that Gras's failure to examine the capital's grain trade other than in terms of aggregate corn imports has disguised the nature and extent of its contribution to the development of the London economy. By the 1680s, the coastal trade comprised two distinct strands of roughly equal size: one providing food and drink for the London population, the other fuelling the overland trade of the capital. It is argued that the former was unnecessary for the provision of the city other than in barren years, but that the latter may have been indispensable for the development of the overland transport infrastructure of the metropolitan region at the height of the late seventeenth-century commercial revolution. Thanks largely to the agency of southern English mariners commanding large coasters, London's demand for fodder crops after the mid-1670s drew most of the coast stretching from Berwick to Whitehaven into the orbit of the metropolitan corn market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Smallpox was probably the single most lethal disease in eighteenth-century Britain, but was a minor cause of death by the mid-nineteenth century. Although vaccination was crucial to the decline of smallpox, especially in urban areas, from the beginning of the nineteenth century, it remains disputed the extent to which smallpox mortality declined before vaccination. Analysis of age-specific changes in smallpox burials within the large west London parish of St Martin-in-the-Fields revealed a precipitous reduction in adult smallpox risk from the 1770s, and this pattern was duplicated in the east London parish of St Dunstan's. Most adult smallpox victims were rural migrants, and such a drop in their susceptibility is consistent with a sudden increase in exposure to smallpox in rural areas. We investigated whether this was due to the spread of inoculation, or an increase in smallpox transmission, using changes in the age patterns of child smallpox burials. Smallpox mortality rose among infants, and smallpox burials became concentrated at the youngest ages, suggesting a sudden increase in infectiousness of the smallpox virus. Such a change intensified the process of smallpox endemicization in the English population, but also made cities substantially safer for young adult migrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a reponse to Davenport, Schwarz, and Boulton's article, 'The decline of adult smallpox in eighteenth-century London'. It introduces new data on the parish of St Mary Whitechapel which casts doubt on the pattern of the age incidence of smallpox found by Davenport et al. However, it is concluded that there was a decline in adult smallpox in London, accompanied by a concentration of the disease among children under the age of five. Davenport et al.'s argument that the shift in the age incidence was due to the endemicization of smallpox in England is challenged, with an alternative view that these age changes can be accounted for by the practice of inoculation, both in the hinterland southern parishes of England and in London itself. A detailed discussion is carried out on the history of inoculation in London for the period 1760-1812. It is suggested that inoculation became increasingly popular in this period, rivalling in popularity the practice of vaccination. This was associated with a class conflict between the medical supporters of Jenner and the general population, with many of the latter being practitioners of the old inoculation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In most studies of early modern north-western Europe, England is regarded as the successor of the Netherlands in terms of economic leadership. Whereas related topics like institutional and technological change or changes in trade and capital flows have been incorporated into the research on the comparison of these two rival states, labour migration is usually omitted. This article aims to fill this lacuna by focusing on labour migration to the two core regions of the Netherlands and England: the Randstad and London. Two main research questions are raised in this article. First of all, in what way did the two cores and their hinterlands differ with regard to their demographic, economic, and spatial structures, and how did this contribute to different trends in labour migration over time? Secondly, what was the effect of the configuration of the demand and supply factors of London and the Randstad for their economies and for those who lived in them? By trying to answer these two questions this article aims not only to shed light on a hitherto largely unexplored topic in the comparative geographic, economic, and demographic history of the two countries, but also to contribute to the understanding of migration as a factor in the promotion of economic growth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is a discussion of the allocation of merchants' capital in early Tudor London among household furnishings, business inventories, debts, orphans' estates, landed property, and other forms of income. Previously, historians had to rely on either goods or income summary assessments in the enrolled subsidy returns to estimate wealth. These newly discovered valuations for 1535 provide quantitative evidence for the enormous importance of credit in trade, and show that merchants, as soon as they could, invested much of their wealth in property. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers an examination of the patterns and motivations behind parish apprenticeship in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century London. It stresses continuity in outlook from parish officials binding children, which involved placements in both the traditional and industrializing sectors of the economy. Evidence on the ages, employment types, and locations of 3,285 pauper apprentices bound from different parts of London between 1767 and 1833 indicates a variety of local patterns. The analysis reveals a pattern of youthful age at binding, a range of employment experiences, and parish-specific links to particular trades and manufactures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Settlement of Tithes of 1638 can be tested for biases in its London rents. Even so, it proves to be a relatively good source for seventeenth-century London, and for calculating associated median and mean rents, as well as a Gini coefficient of inequality for the distribution of resources. Through other evidence in the Settlement, rent/income ratios for London can be approximated, and from them estimates made of London's median income. Median rents and income also allow estimates of the percentage of Londoners in poverty. Though the last is inevitably disputable, the estimate holds up well to testing by other evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During Tawney's century, Kent was London's principal coastwise supplier of grain. This trade was concentrated in the ports of Milton, Faversham, and Sandwich, and largely controlled by merchant-oligarchs living in them, who played a pivotal role in fostering the development of market integration and regional agrarian specialization. In periods of shortage, urban merchants prioritized their own commercial interest, and the subsistence needs of their own resident poor, at the expense of the county's rural poor, and in opposition to policies advocated by their guardians on the county bench. The regional politics of dearth need to be analysed at least as much in terms of vertical as of horizontal fissures in the social structure, and against the background of the politics of plenty, for over-dependence on the London market provoked protest from producers following good harvests and hardened their attitudes to the poor when the situation was reversed. Some forms of popular protest usually assumed to embody plebeian critiques of the failures of local justices should in fact be read primarily as expressions of the unity that often bound governors and their client-poor in opposition to the rival subsistence claims of other little commonwealths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies middle-class income and spending patterns in Great Britain during the industrial revolution. Problems of income distribution and living standards; Nominal and real earnings of clerks employed in the London, England service of the East India Co. between 1760 and 1850; Index of living costs for middle-income earners.

The article focuses on the role of the London Stock Exchange in the British securities market from 1850 to 1914. This was not only at the level of the issues of governments or vast corporations but also throughout the range of securities available. Though located in London offices, a number of London Stock Exchange brokers and jobbers maintained constant and immediate communication with contacts on other exchanges, and acted in concert with them to ensure the existence of a continuous market in a growing volume and variety of stocks and shares. By the early twentieth century the securities market had become complex and sophisticated, offering an opening at the most appropriate place and level to all transferable securities, and providing a facility by which these securities could become known to the entire investing public when their size and nature warranted it. However, in the few years before World War I the functioning of this market was being circumscribed because the majority of members of the London Stock Exchange had lost the direct benefits they obtained from external contacts, and had failed to perceive the indirect benefits brought by an open market.

The article cites a study about the fire insurance policy registers accumulated by the Sun Fire Office in Great Britain in 1780. The present study, the first of its kind to endeavor to make use of the policy registers as a whole, examined the policies issued by the Sun in 1780. In that year the Sun was by far the largest insurance company in Great Britain, covering sums perhaps twice as large as the Royal Exchange Assurance. In 1796, with the Phoenix as another rival in the field, the Sun estimated its share as 38 percent of the market in London, England, and 60 percent of the provincial market, except in those few areas where local companies were active. For the purpose of the study, the latter was insignificant. Few of them were founded before 1780 and during the succeeding two decades they accounted for only about four percent of national policies. In 1780 the Sun issued about 15,000 new policies. Routine renewal policies were about seven times as numerous as new policies, but the available evidence suggests that the latter provide an acceptable sample of the whole.

The article discusses the highlights of the annual general meeting of the British Ecological Society on May 23, 1914 held in the Botanical Lecture Theatre at University College in London, England. Several officers were elected including professor F. W. Oliver, W. B. Crump and O. V. Darbishire. A general statement of the financial position of the Society up to December 31, 1913 was presented by the treasurer. Society president, A. G. Tansley, delivered an address citing the Society's achievements.

The article focuses on the National Industrial Relations Court in Great Britain that came into existence on December 1, 1971, with Commencement Order No. 3 under the Industrial Relations Act of that year. The Court began its life with a backlog of work in the form of 48 appeals from industrial tribunals concerning the Redundancy Payments Act-appeals which were then still waiting for a hearing in the High Court in London, England or in the Court of Session in Edinburgh, Scotland. It proceeded to dispose of the bulk of these with sittings in the new Industrial Court premises in London and Edinburgh. It also began to hear redundancy appeals lodged directly from December 1 onwards, so that it was with the Redundancy Payments Act rather than the Industrial Relations Act that the Court was primarily concerned in this period. Of the 34 new cases received in the 3 months December to February, no fewer than 31 were redundancy appeals. So far as the image of the court presented to the public was concerned, it must have seemed as if the policy of "non-co-operation" with the act was working.