Reading the Market: Abstraction, Personification and the Financial Column of Town Topics Magazine

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (4) ◽  
pp. 1055-1075 ◽  
Author(s):  
PETER KNIGHT
Keyword(s):  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Main Section ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Public Property ◽  
Human Scale ◽  
Market Report ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Financial Capitalism

This article examines the role of the market report as a performative technology that does not merely reflect the emerging world of financial capitalism in late nineteenth-century America but actively shapes it. It takes as its case study the financial pages of Town Topics, the preeminent society gossip magazine in the 1880s and 1890s. Although at first sight the financial section seems far removed from the salacious gossip that the main section of the magazine traded in, there are close connections between the two. An analysis of the rhetoric of the financial pages of Town Topics uncovers a mixture of abstraction and personification in their depictions of market activity. In the same way that the society gossip column in effect created the very possibility of “society” as both exclusive and public property, the genre of the financial page helped create the idea of “the market” as both a human-scale drama and an abstraction that was beyond the control of any individual, or even government.

Sport and the Imperial Bond: The 1911 ‘All-India’ Cricket Tour of Great Britain

2013 ◽  
Vol 8 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 261-285
Author(s):  
Prashant Kidambi
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Public Diplomacy ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Colonial India ◽  
Key Points ◽  
Princely State ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Summary This article explores the interplay of sport, politics and public diplomacy through a case study of the first ‘Indian’ cricket tour of Great Britain in 1911, an extraordinary venture peopled by an improbable cast of characters. Led by the young Maharaja Bhupindar Singh, the newly enthroned ruler of the princely state of Patiala, the team contained in its ranks cricketers who were drawn from different Indian regions and religious communities. The article examines the politics of this intriguing cricket tour against a wider backdrop of changing Indo-British relations and makes three key points. First, it suggests that the processes of ‘imperial globalization’ that were presided over by the British in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries marked an important epoch in the evolving relationship between sport and diplomacy. In particular, it highlights the role of sporting tours as instruments of public diplomacy in the age of empire. Second, it shows how the organization of the 1911 tour reflected the workings of a trans-national ‘imperial class regime’ that had developed around cricket in colonial India from the late nineteenth century onwards. Finally, the article considers the symbolic significance that came to be attached to the tour, both in imperial Britain and in colonial India.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sue Fawn Chung
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sierra Nevada ◽  
American West ◽  
Chinese Immigrants ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Chinese Workers ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Chinese Labor

This book examines the role of the Chinese in the lumber trade in the American West during the late nineteenth century, with a focus on the Sierra Nevada in the 1870s to 1890s. It looks at Chinese laborers' contribution to the building of the American West by analyzing their migration, their communities and lifestyles, lived experiences, transnationalism, and their work in relationship to mining and railroad construction. It also considers the timber barons and companies that employed Chinese workers, their departure from the Sierra Nevada forests, and the anti-Chinese sentiment that they endured. It shows that Chinese immigrants new to North America were first attracted to mining, but they turned to other work, such as logging, when they met with resistance and opposition from miners. The book also challenges some of the popular stereotypes that developed during this period of emerging unionism, along with the assumption of “cheap Chinese labor” that has been used to interpret the Chinese experience in late-nineteenth-century America.

Combining Business and Pleasure? Cotton Brokers in the Liverpool Business Community in the Late Nineteenth Century

2008 ◽  
pp. 149-167
Author(s):  
Sari Mäenpää
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Business Community ◽  
Business Success ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Safety Nets ◽  
Social Prestige ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This final chapter examines the role of cotton brokers in the port of Liverpool in the late-Nineteenth century. It uses data compiled by the Mercantile Liverpool Project, census material from trade directories, and social documents such as biographies and obituaries to reconstruct the activities of the Liverpool cotton broker community between 1850 and 1901. It explores the attitudes toward the value of cotton trading as a vocation in Liverpool and provides a case study of cotton broker Samuel Smith, and Robert Rankin of ‘Rankin, Gilmour and Co’. It offers an analysis of cotton broking statistics; British in-migration to the port of Liverpool in pursuit of employment; and the overall business success of cotton broking in Liverpool, to determine that cotton broking was an unstable venture that lacked social prestige, and that successful cotton brokers often had safety nets in other trade ventures out of necessity.

A Critical Review of Estimates of Net Income from Agriculture for 1880 and 1900: New Hampshire, a Case Study

1977 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 634-654 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Glenn Munyon
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Hampshire ◽  
Regional Distribution ◽  
State Level ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Net Income ◽  
Nineteenth Century America ◽  
Substantial Progress ◽  
Late Nineteenth

During the past twenty-five years American economic historians have made substantial progress in improving the quantitative measures of the nation's economic performance in the nineteenth century. Using New Hampshire as a case study, this paper attempts to build on this earlier research in the area of late-nineteenth-century American agriculture; the primary focus is on Richard Easterlin's estimates of state and regional income. The research reported here suggests that Easterlin's estimates need to be revised on the basis of state-level analysis and that in their present form his figures may lead to erroneous conclusions about the regional distribution of service income in late-nineteenth-century America.

Illustrated Media, the Built Environment and Identity Politics in Fin-de-siècle Catalonia: Printing Images, Making the Nation

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-135
Author(s):  
Lucila Mallart
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Built Environment ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Constitutive Relationship ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This article explores the role of visuality in the identity politics of fin-de-siècle Catalonia. It engages with the recent reevaluation of the visual, both as a source for the history of modern nation-building, and as a constitutive element in the emergence of civic identities in the liberal urban environment. In doing so, it offers a reading of the mutually constitutive relationship of the built environment and the print media in late-nineteenth century Catalonia, and explores the role of this relation as the mechanism by which the so-called ‘imagined communities’ come to exist. Engaging with debates on urban planning and educational policies, it challenges established views on the interplay between tradition and modernity in modern nation-building, and reveals long-term connections between late-nineteenth-century imaginaries and early-twentieth-century beliefs and practices.

Disruptions of the Local, Eruptions of the Feminine: Local Reportage and National Anxieties in Egypt’s 1890s

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilyn Booth
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Gender Roles ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Images ◽  
The Feminine ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Advocacy Role ◽  
Representations Of Women ◽  
Gendered Expectations

This chapter demonstrates that inscriptions of female images in Cairo’s late nineteenth-century nationalist press were part of a discursive economy shaping debates on how gender roles and gendered expectations should shift as Egyptians struggled for independence. The chapter investigates content and placement of ‘news from the street’ in al-Mu’ayyad in the 1890s, examining how these terse local reports – equivalent to faits divers in the French press – contributed to the construction of an ideal national political trajectory with representations of women serving as the primary example in shaping a politics of newspaper intervention on the national scene. In this, an emerging advocacy role of newspaper correspondents makes the newspaper a mediator in the construction of activist reader-citizens.

Pater's Parerga: Framing the Imaginary Portraits

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-135
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Formal Structure ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Liminal Space ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Similar Operation ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Relationship

Walter Pater's late-nineteenth-century literary genre of the imaginary portrait has received relatively little critical attention. Conceived of as something of a continuum between his role as an art critic and his fictional pursuits, this essay probes the liminal space of the imaginary portraits, focusing on the role of the parergon, or frame, in his portraits. Guided by Pater's reading of Kant, who distinguishes between the work (ergon) and that which lies outside of the work (the parergon), between inside and outside, and contextualised alongside the analysis of Derrida, who shows how such distinctions have always already deconstructed themselves, I demonstrate a similar operation at work in the portraits. By closely analysing the parerga of two of Pater's portraits, ‘Duke Carl of Rosenmold’ (1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), focusing on his partial quotation of Goethe in the former, and his playful autocitation and impersonation of Heine in the latter, I argue that Pater's parerga seek to destabilise the relationship between text and context so that the parerga do not lie outside the text but are implicated throughout in their reading, changing the portraits constitutively. As such, the formal structure of the parergon in Pater's portraits is also a theoretical fulcrum in his aesthetic criticism and marks that space where the limits of, and distinctions between, art and life become blurred.

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