scholarly journals Inside and Outside the London Stock Exchange: Stockbrokers and Speculation in Late Victorian Britain

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-36
Author(s):  
JAMES TAYLOR
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Stock Exchange ◽  
Consumer Society ◽  
London Stock Exchange ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Financial Products ◽  
Innovative Methods ◽  
Alternative Perspective ◽  
History Of

The nineteenth-century growth of the London Stock Exchange and the development of the market for stocks and shares are familiar topics of study. This article provides an alternative perspective on them by decentering the London Stock Exchange and focusing instead on the activities of “outside stockbrokers”—those who operated outside the Stock Exchange and its rules. Often regarded as peripheral, these brokers were in fact instrumental in promoting investment and speculation to a mass market. The article examines their innovative methods, and seeks to explain why they were so successful, despite persistent—and sometimes justifiable—accusations of fraud. It suggests how perspectives from the history of consumer society provide fresh insights into the market for financial products. And it underlines the importance of looking outside formal markets by arguing that focusing on “fringe” markets can help scholars to rethink boundaries, relations, and practices in the history of capitalism.

The Unknowable

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. J. Mander
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Great Part ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
History Of ◽  
First Philosophy

This book presents a history of nineteenth century metaphysics in Britain, providing close textual readings of the key contributions to First Philosophy made by the key philosophers of the period (such as Hamilton, Mansel, Spencer, Mill, and Bradley) as well as some lesser known figures (such as Bain, Clifford, Shadworth Hodgson, Ferrier, and John Grote). The story focuses on the elaboration of, and differing reactions to, the concept of the unknowable or unconditioned, first developed by Sir William Hamilton in the 1829. The idea of an ultimate but unknowable way that things really are in themselves may be seen as supplying a narrative arc that runs right through the metaphysical systems of the period in question as, relative to this concept, these thought schemes may be divided into three broad groups which were roughly consecutive in their emergence but also overlapping as they continued to develop. In the first instance there were the doctrines of the agnostics who further progressed Hamilton’s basic idea that fundamental reality lies for the great part beyond our cognitive reach, but these philosophies were followed, immediately by those of the empiricists and, in the last third of the century by those of the idealists, both of whom—albeit in profoundly different ways—reacted against the epistemic pessimism of the agnostics. By presenting, interpreting, criticizing and connecting together their various contrasting ideas this book explains how these three traditions developed and interacted with one another to comprise the history of metaphysics in Victorian Britain.

Robert M. Young's Mind, Brain and Adaptation revisited

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Christopher Lawrence
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Experimental Psychology ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Unique Character ◽  
Philosophy Department ◽  
History Of ◽  
Science Community ◽  
Scientific Ideas

Abstract Robert Maxwell Young's first book Mind, Brain and Adaptation in the Nineteenth Century (1970), written from 1960 to 1965, still merits reading as a study of the naturalization of mind and its relation to social thought in Victorian Britain. I examine the book from two perspectives that give the volume its unique character: first, Young's interest in psychology, which he considered should be used to inform humane professional practices and be the basis of social reform; second, new approaches to the history of scientific ideas. I trace Young's intellectual interests to the Yale Philosophy Department, the Cambridge Department of Experimental Psychology and a new history and philosophy of science community. Although Young changed his political outlook and historiography radically after 1965, he always remained faithful to ideas about thought and practice described in Mind, Brain.

scholarly journals Itinerant Jewish and Arabic Trading in the Dene’s North, 1916-1930

2014 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-213 ◽  
Author(s):  
George Colpitts
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
First Nations ◽  
Contact Zone ◽  
Transport Systems ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
Canadian North ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth

In late nineteenth century and especially in the interwar years, “free traders” took advantage of better transport systems to expand trade with Dene people in the Athabasca and Mackenzie Districts. Well versed in fur grading and supported by credit in the expanding industrializing fur industry in the south, “itinerant” peddlers worked independently and often controversially alongside larger capitalized fur companies such as the Hudson’s Bay Company. A large number of these newcomers were Jews. This article suggests that Jews and, to a lesser extent, Lebanese and other Arabic traders became critical in the modernization of the Canadian North. They helped create an itinerant trader-Dene “contact zone” where the mixed meaning of credit, cash, and goods transactions provided northern Aboriginal trappers the means to negotiate modernism on their own terms in the interwar years. However, by the late 1920s, the state, encouraged by larger capitalized companies, implemented policies to restrict and finally close down this contact zone. The history of itinerant trading, then, raises questions about the long-term history of capitalism and co-related economic neo-colonialism in the Canadian north and their impact on First Nations.

Standing on Common Ground: The Making of a Sunbelt Borderland

2016 ◽  
Vol 90 (1) ◽  
pp. 119-129
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Tandy Shermer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Labor Market ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Nineteenth Century United States

The best work in the new “history of capitalism” field borrows from the tool kits of social and cultural historians and rests on the assumption that states, societies, and markets cannot be treated separately from one another. That central observation feeds the contemporary impulse to reconnect subfields, such as business, labor, and politics, which had drifted apart since the 1970s. Already this methodology has returned scholarship on the nineteenth-century United States to the topics of slavery's relationship to capitalism and the realization of selfhood either through manumission, the labor market, or finance.

THEORY AND HISTORY OF FINANCIAL CRISES: EXPLAINING THE PANIC OF 1873

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-240 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christoph Nitschke
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Financial Crises ◽  
Stock Exchange ◽  
Theoretical Models ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
Joint Application ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Financial Panic ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

This article demonstrates the value of a joint application of the theory and history of financial crises of 1873. It weaves together concepts of financial and banking panic theory with a narrative explanation of the causes and triggers of the Panic of 1873. Basic concepts of economic theory, it suggests, can act as both a framework and a starting point to the historical interpretation of a financial panic.Employing such theory, however, ultimately reinforces the need for contextual cultural explanations of financial panics. A theoretically grounded view of the cultural history of capitalism—and its sudden crises—can help explain why and how some structures of exchange systematized and conditioned human confidence within specific historical contexts.Drawing together theoretical models of banking panic and historical evidence, this article thus emphasizes the importance of Gilded Age money-making culture for understanding the impact of Philadelphia financier Jay Cooke upon the causes of the Panic of 1873. Cooke's sudden and unexpected bankruptcy caused the deconstruction of confidence on the stock exchange and throughout the country. The cultural idiosyncrasy of Cooke's outstanding position in all matters of American finance multiplied the asymmetry that occurred in the wake of a major information shock.

A HISTORY OF “RATIONALISM” IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN

2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOSHUA BENNETT
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
Sources Of Knowledge ◽  
Specific Term ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Subject ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Intense Debate

“Rationalism” became the subject of intense debate in nineteenth-century Britain. This article asks why this was so, by focusing on the usage and implications of the term in contemporary argument. Rationalism was successively defined and redefined in ways that reached to the heart of Victorian epistemological and religious discussion. By treating rationalism as a contextually specific term, and examining how its implications changed between the 1820s and the early twentieth century, the article brings new perspectives to bear on the development of nineteenth-century freethought and countervailing religious apologetic. It underlines the importance of history, and constructions of intellectual lineage, as ways of establishing the relationship between rationality and religion in a progressively wider-ranging Victorian debate about the sources of knowledge and value.

scholarly journals “No-Body’s Watch”: Nineteenth-Century Capitalism, Temporality, and the Figure of the Loafer

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karin Hoepker
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

This article outlines the rather obscure ascent and fall of the loafer as a cultural figure. Beginning with the emergence of the term and its ambivalent semantics of idleness, I will sketch its subsequent racialization and regionalization, as it was appropriated by abolitionist writers who associated with whiteness, poverty, and southern masculinity. The significance of the term lies in the way it combines criticisms of capitalism and racism in a figure of idleness. A figure of idleness, both in its romanticized and disparaging connotations, the loafer alerts us to the fact that US nineteenth-century temporality is closely and inseparably entangled in the history of capitalism and slavery.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Body Type ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
Pacific World ◽  
History Of The Body ◽  
History Of ◽  
Conducting Research

This Introduction applies broad brushstrokes to place the story of Hawaiʻi’s nineteenth-century indigenous migrant workers in the context of Hawaiian and Pacific historiography, as well as theories of labor history, environmental history, the history of capitalism, and the history of the body. The introduction explores the discursive construction of the “kanaka” as a racialized and gendered laboring body type; the concept of a “Hawaiian Pacific World”; and the unique characteristics of nineteenth-century Hawaiian capitalism. The introduction also explores the methodological and ethical issues involved in conducting research in Native Hawaiian history, and includes concise chapter summaries.

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