“Wholly an Australian Industry”? Establishing British Multinational Manufacture at the Bryant & May Empire Works, 1909–1914

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Emma Robertson ◽  
Charles Fahey
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
British Empire ◽  
World War ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Ideal Position ◽  
Local Politicians ◽  
Day To Day Operations ◽  
Local Company

The Bryant & May company is well known for its operations in Britain. Historians have paid less attention to the actions of the company overseas. The opening of a new Australian subsidiary factory in 1909 marked an early venture in multinational manufacturing within the British Empire. This article uses business records and newspapers from both the British and Australian archives to examine the day-to-day operations of this multinational, with a particular focus on the human dimension of the interactions between London and Melbourne. The Bryant & May case study reveals the evolving, sometimes tense, relationship between the “home” and “subsidiary” branches in the context of British imperialism and Australian federation in the years preceding World War I. Business, personal, and imperial relationships intertwined. While business historians have developed theoretical frameworks to understand why companies embark on multinational operations, work remains to be done on the longer-term operations of companies in particular political, social, and cultural contexts. We examine the building of the Empire Works match factory in Melbourne, the nature of transnational management, labor relations, and key production challenges up to the Interstate Commission of 1914. We reveal how Melbourne managers, sometimes against the inclinations of the London directors, were prepared to drive a hard bargain with local politicians and workers. Bryant & May successfully, and sometimes controversially, gained competitive advantage as a “local” company with access to preferential tariffs. This placed the firm in an ideal position to prosper when international trade was disrupted during World War I.

Press Propaganda and Subaltern Agents of Pan-Islamic Networks in the Muslim Mediterranean World prior to World War I

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Odile Moreau
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
World War I ◽  
North Africa ◽  
World War ◽  
Subaltern Studies ◽  
Resistance Movements ◽  
The Press ◽  
Mediterranean World ◽  
History Of

This chapter explores movement and circulation across the Mediterranean and seeks to contribute to a history of proto-nationalism in the Maghrib and the Middle East at a particular moment prior to World War I. The discussion is particularly concerned with the interface of two Mediterranean spaces: the Middle East (Egypt, Ottoman Empire) and North Africa (Morocco), where the latter is viewed as a case study where resistance movements sought external allies as a way of compensating for their internal weakness. Applying methods developed by Subaltern Studies, and linking macro-historical approaches, namely of a translocal movement in the Muslim Mediterranean, it explores how the Egypt-based society, al-Ittihad al-Maghribi, through its agent, Aref Taher, used the press as an instrument for political propaganda, promoting its Pan-Islamic programme and its goal of uniting North Africa.

Global Pests, National Pride, Local Problems, and the Crisis of Hungarian Wine, 1867–1914

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Robert Nemes
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
World War ◽  
Folk Culture ◽  
Wine Production ◽  
National Imagination ◽  
Local Problems ◽  
History Of ◽  
Trade And Exchange ◽  
Rich History

Abstract Hungary has a long, rich history of wine production. Historians have emphasized wine's importance to the development of both the Hungarian economy and Hungarian nationalism. This article ties together these historiographical threads through a case study of a small village in one of Hungary's most famous wine regions. Tracing the village's history from the 1860s to World War I, the article makes three main claims. First, it demonstrates that from the start, this remote village belonged to wider networks of trade and exchange that stretched across the surrounding region, state, and continent. Second, it shows that even as Magyar elites celebrated the folk culture and peasant smallholders of this region, they also cheered the introduction of what they saw as scientific, rational agriculture. This leads to the last argument: wine achieved its place in the pantheon of Hungarian culture at a moment when the local communities that had grown up around its production and stirred the national imagination were undergoing dramatic and irreversible change.

Englishness, Empire and Nostalgia: A Heterodox Religious Community's Appeal in the Inter-War Years

2018 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 374-392
Author(s):  
Jane Shaw
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Belief Networks ◽  
Healing Ministry ◽  
World War ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The World ◽  
Sense Of Identity ◽  
The Rich

This article looks at the ways in which the Panacea Society – a heterodox, millenarian group based in Bedford during the inter-war years – spread its ideas: through personal, familial and shared belief networks across the British empire; by building new modes of attracting adherents, in particular a global healing ministry; and by shipping its publications widely. It then examines how the society appealed to its (white) members in the empire in three ways: through its theology, which put Britain at the centre of the world; by presuming the necessity and existence of a ‘Greater Britain’ and the British empire, while in so many other quarters these entities were being questioned in the wake of World War I; and by a deliberately cultivated and nostalgic notion of ‘Englishness’. The Panacea Society continued and developed the idea of the British empire as providential at a time when the idea no longer held currency in most circles. The article draws on the rich resource of letters in the Panacea Society archive to contribute to an emerging area of scholarship on migrants’ experience in the early twentieth-century British empire (especially the dominions) and their sense of identity, in this case both religious and British.

The Empires of Western Asia and the Assyrian World Empire

2021 ◽  
pp. 73-110
Author(s):  
Gojko Barjamovic
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Fragmentation ◽  
The Third ◽  
Western Asia ◽  
Third Millennium Bce ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Empire

The history of empire begins in Western Asia. This chapter tracks developments in the second and first millennia BCE as imperial control in the region became increasingly common and progressively more pervasive. Oscillations between political fragmentation and imperial unification swung gradually toward the latter, from just a few documented examples in the third millennium BCE to the more-or-less permanent partition of Western Asia into successive imperial states from the seventh century BCE until the end of World War I. The chapter covers about a dozen empires and empire-like states, tracing developments of territoriality and notions of imperial universality using Assyria ca. 2004–605 BCE as a case study for how large and loose hegemonies became the normative political formation in the region.

Ostmark

2021 ◽  
pp. 268-287
Author(s):  
Helen Roche
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Third Reich ◽  
World War ◽  
Terrorist Activity ◽  
Religious Buildings ◽  
Security Services ◽  
The Third ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Third Reich

Following Austria’s annexation by the Third Reich, the NPEA authorities were eager to pursue every opportunity to found new Napolas in the freshly acquired territories of the ‘Ostmark’. In the first instance, the Inspectorate took over the existing state boarding schools (Bundeserziehungsanstalten/Staatserziehungsanstalten) at Wien-Breitensee, Wien-Boerhavegasse, Traiskirchen, and the Theresianum. Secondly, beyond Vienna, numerous Napolas were also founded in the buildings of monastic foundations which had been requisitioned and expropriated by the Nazi security services. These included the abbey complexes at Göttweig, Lambach, Seckau, Vorau, and St. Paul (Spanheim), as well as the Catholic seminary at St. Veit (present-day Ljubljana-Šentvid, Slovenia). This chapter begins by charting the chequered history of the former imperial and royal (k.u.k.) cadet schools in Vienna, which were refashioned into civilian Bundeserziehungsanstalten by the Austrian socialist educational reformer Otto Glöckel immediately after World War I. During the reign of Dollfuß and Schuschnigg’s Austrofascist state, the schools were threatened from within by the terrorist activity of illegal Hitler Youth cells, and the Anschluss was ultimately welcomed by many pupils, staff, and administrators. August Heißmeyer and Otto Calliebe’s subsequent efforts to reform the schools into Napolas led to their being incorporated into the NPEA system on 13 March 1939. The chapter then treats the Inspectorate’s foundation of further Napolas in expropriated religious buildings, focusing on NPEA St. Veit as a case study. In conclusion, it outlines the ways in which both of these forms of Napolisation conformed to broader patterns of Nazification policy in Austria after the Anschluss.

Exploring the Concept of a “Legacy” Collection: A Study on German World War I Paper Textiles at the National Museum of American History

Collections ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-46
Author(s):  
Kathleen King
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
American History ◽  
Mission Statement ◽  
Manufacturing Processes ◽  
National Museum ◽  
World War ◽  
Tough Question

Using a collection of surplus German military objects composed of woven paper from World War I in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History as a case study, this article questions the value of keeping objects that no longer support the current mission statement of a museum, or if they ever did. It does not aim to answer definitively such a tough question, as a multitude of factors and stakeholders are involved with such a decision, but rather it seeks to bring this subject matter to the fore of collections and curatorial management, to explore best practices, and to examine if such best practices are being readily followed. The objects’ history, manufacturing processes, materiality, conservation concerns, and significance are explored in an effort to build context around the objects and to determine the appropriateness of their occupancy within the museum.

Crises and Responses: Government Policies and the Machine-Building Cartels in Hungary, 1919–1949

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-131
Author(s):  
MÁRIA HIDVÉGI
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Interesting Case ◽  
Machine Building ◽  
Government Policies ◽  
Building Industry ◽  
Substantial Part ◽  
World War ◽  
East Central Europe

What impact have government policies had on the private sector’s response to economic crises, in particular on its decisions for restructuring and adaptation? The Hungarian machine-building industry from 1919 to 1949 provides an interesting case study for these interrelations between business and politics. The study focuses on the role of cartels in organizing responses to crises. The case study is based on a survey of the cartel agreements and investigates why cartels provided solutions only to short-term crises, if they provided solutions at all. The hypothesis is that government policies played a substantial part in the story, as they did not provide enough incentives for coordinated responses to structural change. The years 1919 to 1949 encompass the crises caused by the territorial and political change in East Central Europe after World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II and its aftermath. Depicting the responses of the machine-building industry through the experience of one of its key companies and its cartels—Ganz & Co.—this article analyzes the influence of the institutional framework on short- and long-term adaptation to crises.

Z. K. Sentongo and the Indian Question in East Africa

1997 ◽  
Vol 24 ◽  
pp. 309-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Twaddle
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
East Africa ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Residential Segregation ◽  
Agricultural Land ◽  
Test Case ◽  
British Colonialism ◽  
World War ◽  
Public Meetings ◽  
The World

East Africa is really what one may call a ‘test case’ for Great Britain. If Indians cannot be treated as equals in a vacant or almost vacant part of the world where they were the first in occupation—a part of the world which is on the equator—it seems that the so-called freedom of the British Empire is a sham and a delusion.The Indian question in East Africa during the early 1920s can hardly be said to have been neglected by subsequent scholars. There is an abundant literature on it and the purpose here is not simply to run over the ground yet again, resurrecting past passions on the British, white settler and Indian sides. Instead, more will be said about the African side, especially the expatriate educated African side, during the controversy in Kenya immediately after World War I, when residential segregation, legislative rights, access to agricultural land, and future immigration by Indians were hotly debated in parliament, press, private letters, and at public meetings. For not only were educated and expatriate Africans in postwar Kenya by no means wholly “dumb,” as one eminent historian of the British Empire has since suggested, but their comments in newspaper articles at the time can be seen in retrospect to have had a seminal importance in articulating both contemporary fears and subsequent “imagined communities,” to employ Benedict Anderson's felicitous phrase—those nationalisms which were to have such controversial significance during the struggle for independence from British colonialism in Uganda as well as Kenya during the middle years of this century.

scholarly journals Mixed Marriages in Late Nineteenth to Early Twentieth Century: Comparing Russia and Norway

2020 ◽  
pp. 036319902094521
Author(s):  
Elena Glavatskaya ◽  
Gunnar Thorvaldsen ◽  
Iulia Borovik ◽  
Elizaveta Zabolotnykh
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Religious Affiliation ◽  
Prisoners Of War ◽  
Middle Urals ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
World War ◽  
Industrial City ◽  
Mixed Marriages ◽  
New Religions

This article compares interethnic and interreligious marriages in Russia and Norway during the decades around 1900. State churches dominated religious life in both countries with over 90 percent of the population but both were losing influence during the period we focus on—rapidly in Russia after the 1917 Revolution. The part on Norway employs nominative and aggregate census material which from 1865 asked questions about religious affiliation, while the Russian case study utilizes the database of church microdata being built for Ekaterinburg—a railway hub and an industrial city in the Middle Urals, in Asia—in addition to census aggregates. Our main conclusion is that religion was a stronger regulator of intermarriage than ethnicity. Religious intermarriage was unusual in Ekaterinburg, even if official regulations were softened by the State over time—the exception is during World War I, when there was a deficit of young, Russian men at home and influx of refugees and Austro-Hungarian Prisoners of War (mostly Catholics and Lutherans). The situation was also affected by the 1917 Revolution creating equal rights for all religious denominations. The relatively few religious intermarriages in Norway were mostly between members of different Protestant congregations—nonmembers being the only group who often outmarried. We conclude that representatives of ethnic minorities and new religions seldom outmarry when religion was important for maintaining their identity.

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