Suchergebnisse

This book engages in an interdisciplinary study of the establishment and entrenchment of gender roles in early modern England. Drawing upon the methods and sources of literary criticism and social history, this edited volume shows how politics at both the elite and plebeian levels of society involved violence that either resulted from or expressed hostility toward the early modern gender system. Contributors take fresh approaches to prominent works by Shakespeare, Middleton, and Behn as well as discuss lesser known texts and events such as the execution of female heretics in Reformation Norwic

This article is a history of the privatization of British Telecom. BT's privatization occupies a central position in histories of Thatcherism as a pivotal moment in Thatcherism's ideological focus on popular capitalism. These histories, however, overlook the important intersection of financial institutions and information technology policy in shaping BT's privatization. Financial institutions in the City of London formed a lobbying group, the City Telecommunications Committee, that pressured for BT's privatization and secured preferential treatment for the City from BT, ending a decades-long policy of uniform telecommunications services across Britain. Margaret Thatcher's government positioned BT's privatization as central to the success of two of Britain's information industries, electronics manufacturing and the City of London. Her government also cast BT's privatization as essential to an 'information revolution' that, through personal, networked computing, would further personal freedom and free markets. BT's privatization thus performed two important and related functions. First, it oriented Britain's telecommunications network to the City of London's needs, and secondly, it enacted an 'information revolution' that was portrayed as essential to the success of the City of London and British electronics. I label this fusion of City finance, neoliberal politics, and British telecommunications the 'London ideology', and this ideology shaped the broadly-held assumption that privatizing telecommunications was essential to reaching the 'information age'.

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's 1984 privatization of British Telecom was a landmark moment for neoliberalism. It served to popularize and vindicate the sale of state utilities around the world. This article shows how computer models of the future were central for British telecommunications', and thus for Britain's, transition from social democracy to neoliberalism, from monopoly to market. The British telecommunications network was a key interest in both the social democratic and neoliberal British state's plans for the digitalization of Britain. I argue that computers were crucial to the rise of neoliberalism, both as a managerial tool that simulated futures of free markets and as a technology that symbolized and supported the contraction of the British state. This article traces the history of the British telecommunications system's Long Range Planning Department, which was at the heart of British Telecom's privatization. In doing so, it argues that the history of technology is in a unique position to study how tools such as computers both forecast and symbolize the political power of the future.

SINCE THE COLLAPSE OF THE COMMUNIST (SOCIALIST UNITY PARTY OR SED) REGIME IN THE GDR, MUCH INTEREST HAS FOCUSED ON THE APPARENT ANOMALY OF THE REAPPEARANCE OF FASCISM IN WHAT HAD BEEN THE "ANTIFASCIST" GERMANY. AT THE IDEOLOGICAL LEVEL, ANALYSIS HAS CENTERED ON THE ADVERSE CONSEQUENCES OF THE REGIME'S ANTIFASCIST PROGRAMMATIC--THE PRESCRIBED OR IMPOSED ANTIFASCISM ("DER VERORDNETE ANTIFASCHISMUS") OF THE GDR. THIS ARTICLE ARGUES THAT AS NO EFFORT IS SPARED TO ERASE THE VISIBLE MEMORY OF THE GDR IT MAY BE USEFUL TO RECALL HOW CENTRAL ANTIFASCISM WAS BOTH TO THE ESTABLISHMENT AND THE LEGITIMATION OF THE SOCIALIST STATE. IT SUGGESTS THAT THE TOUGHEST WORK LIES AT THE LEVEL OF DEEP THEORY AND THAT SED FORMULATION OF FASCISM MAY NOW HAVE NOTHING TO OFFER. REPLACMEENT THEORY WILL HAVE TO ADDRESS SOURCES OF NEO-FASCISM, NOT MERELY THE PSEUDOHISTORICAL MANIFESTATIONS RE-ENACTED BY THE MORE OVERTLY HITLERITE GROUPS.

AbstractEarly nineteenth‐century demographic trends on sugar estates in Jamaica, the most important British Caribbean colony, are examined through the 1817–32 public slave registers. We seek evidence regarding the background to the island's 1831–2 popular insurrection, the immediate cause of the London parliament's vote in 1833 to abolish colonial slavery. Some historians argue that the revolt occurred as 'political' effect from a sudden upsurge of metropolitan anti‐slavery activism in 1830–1. They believe the uprising broke out despite improvement in enslaved people's material welfare, favoured by many slaveholders to secure population increase after the closure of the British transatlantic slave trade in 1808. Alternative 'economic' assessments judge that increasing workloads had been aggravating popular unrest before the revolt. Commercial pressures, and the imminent likelihood of emancipation, allegedly outweighed welfare concerns. The excess of slave deaths over births widened between 1817 and 1832. However, the registers show that demographic deficits resulted mainly from the ageing of the last Africa‐born cohorts. Jamaica‐born enslaved people became self‐reproducing. There was no general pre‐1831 regime deterioration. Most slaveholders sought to maintain their Jamaican assets for the long term through pro‐natalist measures, and did not expect emancipation. The revolt's causes were thus more 'political' than 'economic'.

AbstractAn older view among historians, predominant until about 1970, held that British West Indian slave maintenance standards were significantly improved or 'ameliorated' from the later eighteenth century. Subsequent research has disputed this consensus, although uncertainty remains on key details of slave diet, labour, and demography. As an alternative welfare measure, this study examines the reported heights of detained runaway slaves and ex‐slaves held between 1788 and 1838 at workhouses on Jamaica, the most important British West Indian colony. Analytical challenges arise through the limited age data. Also, a disproportionate share of the detainees had an urban background. However, these problems can be overcome with help from local estate records and from eastern Caribbean anthropometric evidence. The mean stature of Jamaica‐born adult detainees clearly rose during the period, and they gained a widening height advantage relative to their Africa‐born counterparts. This offers a useful indicator of trends for the enslaved population at large. The workhouse material confirms 'old school' judgements that substantive amelioration occurred, as a course of deliberate slaveholder policy.