Suchergebnisse

In a time of great need for Britain, a small coterie of influential businessmen gained access to secret information on industrial mobilization as advisers to the Principal Supply Officers Committee. They provided the state with priceless advice, but, as "insiders" utilised their access to information to build a business empire at a fraction of the normal costs. Outsiders, in contrast, lacked influence and were forced together into a defensive "ring" or cartel - which effectively fixed prices for British warships. By the 1930s, the cartel grew into one of the most sophisticated profiteering groups of its day. This book examines the relationship between the private naval armaments industry, businessmen, and the British government defence planners between the wars. It reassesses the concept of the military-industrial complex through the impact of disarmament upon private industry, the role of leading industrialists in supply and procurement policy, and the successes and failings of government organisation. It blends together political, naval, and business history in new ways, and, by situating the business activities of industrialists alongside their work as government advisors, sheds new light on the operation of the British state. This is the story of how these men profited while effectively saving the National Government from itself.

Lord Weir, Sir James Lithgow and Sir Andrew Rae Duncan were three close friends who grew up within a few miles of each other in Victorian Glasgow, and who went on to have uncommonly successful careers in engineering, shipbuilding, steel and finance. Despite occupying only footnotes in political histories, Weir, Lithgow and Duncan also were uncommonly influential in defence planning during the First World War, as well as post-war industrial reorganization, disarmament, rearmament, and the Second World War. Indeed, at several critical junctures for imperial and particularly naval defence before and during rearmament, one or more of these three men played a central role in the direction and shape of policy. Moreover, this trio frequently interacted with one another to mutual benefit in the shipbuilding rationalization schemes of the 1930s, the purchase of naval or other armament manufacturing businesses, or in the Ministry of Supply during the Second World War. This article examines the operation of this network of influence through the decades of war and peace, and considers Weir, Lithgow and Duncan's crucial role in British policy making. By pulling together business and political records, it sheds new light on the operation of the British state and argues that this trio were unique among inter-war civilian businessmen as influencers of top-level defence policy.

A shadowy double to infrastructure expansion, resettlement, and urban development, the "transient" has long been a contradictory figure of permission and repression in imaginations of America, be it as Emerson's idealized "being-in-transience," the romantic freedoms of the "hobohemian," or the criminalized "stranger." What Public Enemies argues is that a crucial genealogy of thinking about transience and its antagonistic relationship to existing concepts of democracy has been carried out in the most local, seemingly private of scenes: lyric encounters between an "I" and a "you." While Walt Whitman was the first to put serial pressure on the relation between transient persons and lyric formation, a long history of twentieth-century poetic interlocutors—Robert Frost, Hart Crane, George Oppen, Robert Creeley, and Amiri Baraka—adapt his experiments in transient speech acts to challenge normative conceptions of personhood, masculinity, affiliation, publicity, and national belonging. To understand the social character and content of lyric speech, Public Enemies situates current debates in literary formalism and lyric theory within political, juridical, sociological, and queer theoretical accounts of transience in America. In turn, the project reframes a trajectory of modernist and postmodern American lyric poetry as both a critical and complicit interlocutor in defining who or what counts as a member of a democratic whole.