scholarly journals The Economics of Badmouthing: Libel Law and the Underworld of the Financial Press in France Before World War I

2011 ◽  
Vol 71 (3) ◽  
pp. 616-653 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent Bignon ◽  
Marc Flandreau
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Capital Market ◽  
Theoretical Study ◽  
World War ◽  
New Evidence ◽  
Financial Press ◽  
The Way ◽  
Libel Law

This article analyzes the economics of “badmouthing” in the context of the pre-1914 French capital market. We argue that badmouthing was a means through which racketeering journals sought to secure property rights over issuers' reputation. We provide a theoretical study of the market setup that emerged to deal with such problems, and we test our predictions using new evidence from contemporary sources.“A newspaper that wishes to make its fortune should never waste its columns and weary its readers by praising anything. Eulogy is invariably dull—a fact that Mr. Alf had discovered and utilized.”A. Trollope, The Way We Live Now, 1875“And did you threaten him with the newspapers?”H. de Balzac, La maison Nucingen, 1837

‘Grey Dawn’ in the British Pacific: Race, Security and Colonial Sovereignty on the Eve of World War I

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

Very Serious Books

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Forster
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
World War I ◽  
Social Agency ◽  
World War ◽  
Home Office ◽  
Women’S Sexuality ◽  
Surplus Women ◽  
British Home ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Well Of Loneliness

This chapter draws on the records of the British Home Office to reconsider the censorship of two novels by women in the late 1920s: Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and the Norah James’s less well-known Sleeveless Errand. It argues that the suppression of these novels was a function of the way they were positioned and received as “serious” works, capable of effecting social change. The chapter argues that specific circumstances in the late 1920s also shaped the perception of the novels. A perception that World War I had radically imbalanced the British population by creating two million "surplus women" created an context where representations of women's sexuality were perceived as especially dangerous. Hall’s representation in The Well of Loneliness of the book as a medium with authority and social agency made both novels seem especially dangerous in this context, and thus, in the eyes of the Home Office, worthy of suppression.

Two Tolstoys and a Lenin—Temperance and Prohibition in Russia

2021 ◽  
pp. 25-52
Author(s):  
Mark Lawrence Schrad
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Russian Empire ◽  
Leo Tolstoy ◽  
World War ◽  
Joseph Stalin ◽  
State Revenue ◽  
State Finance ◽  
Leon Trotsky ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
The Way

Part I of the book—covering Europe’s continental empires—begins with Chapter 2 on the Russian Empire. The state’s overreliance on revenues from the imperial vodka monopoly is laid bare beginning with the temperance revolts of the 1850s, when the empire was almost bankrupted when peasants refused to drink. The understanding of temperance as opposition to imperial autocracy is traced through the antistatist teachings of Leo Tolstoy and early Bolsheviks, including the prohibitionists Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Despite official opposition to “subversive” temperance activism, at the outbreak of World War I in 1914 Tsar Nicholas II made Russia the first prohibitionist state, though the loss of state revenue paved the way for the revolutions of 1917. Lenin maintained a prohibition against the vodka trade, which was only undone after Lenin’s death by Joseph Stalin, who reintroduced the tsarist-era vodka monopoly in the interests of state finance.

scholarly journals The Image of Ion I. C. Brătianu in The Foreign Press of 1916

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 261-264
Author(s):  
Gheorghe Calcan
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
International Level ◽  
World War ◽  
National History ◽  
Military Camp ◽  
The Moment ◽  
The Military ◽  
National Borders ◽  
The Way

Abstract Our paper aims to highlight the way Ion I. C. Brătianu was presented outside national borders in a fundamental moment of our national history, namely the integration of Romania into the operations of World War I in 1916. At that landmark moment, Ion I. C. Brătianu was Prime Minister of the country and was perceived abroad as the most powerful personality in the Romanian decisionmaking space, on whom the very decision to enter the war was hanging on. Foreign observers considered that Brătianu would not integrate with the war other than besides the military camp and in the moment that would definitely ensure their final victory. In order to sketch his image at international level we mainly used the information provided by the French press of the time (especially newspaper “Le Figaro”).

scholarly journals Cultural Trauma – The Case of the Winner

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (s1) ◽  
pp. 65-80
Author(s):  
Zoltán Bretter
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Cultural Trauma ◽  
Trauma Studies ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Cultural Shock ◽  
Traumatic History ◽  
The Way

AbstractMy study is an analysis of the emergence of the “Golden Dream” narrative in Romania, right after World War I. Along the way, I make some theoretical contributions to cultural trauma studies. ‘Winner’ and ‘loser’ are terms used to define fixed situations. Usually, only the loser (the victim, defeated) might suffer a trauma, while the occurrence of trauma is denied for the winner (the perpetrator, victor). We shall dig a little deeper and wider, demonstrating that Romania, an overall winner of WWI, will face, right after victory, a ‘cultural shock’ which has to be repressed, as part of the “Golden Dream” narrative. Through a detailed, economic, social and political analysis, I’ll be trying to argue that a shattering trauma has engendered in Romanian society; yet another addition to a whole ‘traumatic history’. The ensuing orthodox ethnonationalism takes its root from this trauma. From time-to-time, we will take a comparative glance at the trauma of the loser, particularly when we will be discussing the omissions of an otherwise seamless narrative.

The First Serious Optimist

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Kumekawa
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
The Elderly ◽  
The State ◽  
Carbon Taxes ◽  
World War ◽  
John Maynard Keynes ◽  
Role Of Government ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Way

This book is an intellectual biography of the British economist A. C. Pigou (1877–1959), a founder of welfare economics and one of the twentieth century's most important and original thinkers. Though long overshadowed by his intellectual rival John Maynard Keynes, Pigou was instrumental in focusing economics on the public welfare. And his reputation is experiencing a renaissance today, in part because his idea of “externalities” or spillover costs is the basis of carbon taxes. The book tells how Pigou reshaped the way the public thinks about the economic role of government and the way economists think about the public good. Setting Pigou's ideas in their personal, political, social, and ethical context, the book follows him as he evolved from a liberal Edwardian bon vivant to a reserved but reform-minded economics professor. With World War I, Pigou entered government service, but soon became disenchanted with the state he encountered. As his ideas were challenged in the interwar period, he found himself increasingly alienated from his profession. But with the rise of the Labour Party following World War II, the elderly Pigou re-embraced a mind-set that inspired a colleague to describe him as “the first serious optimist.” The story is not just of Pigou but also of twentieth-century economics, the book explores the biographical and historical origins of some of the most important economic ideas of the past hundred years. It is a timely reminder of the ethical roots of economics and the discipline's long history as an active intermediary between the state and the market.

The Business of War

2020 ◽  
pp. 22-38
Author(s):  
David A. Rennie
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Publishing Industry ◽  
John Dos Passos ◽  
Literary Marketplace ◽  
World War ◽  
The Public ◽  
Cultural Forces ◽  
The Way

War writing was implicated in and shaped by wider cultural forces. During the war, patriotic bestsellers flooded the literary marketplace, censorship suppressed certain anti-war writing, while authors participated in the CPI’s propaganda machine. After the war, changes in the publishing industry, allied to a growing awareness of the importance of advertising, shaped the way war writing was presented to the public. Hollywood, meanwhile, provided opportunities for writers to supplement their income, either by writing for the studios or by sanctioning adaptations of their work. Discussing the work of Guy Empey, John Dos Passos, and E. E. Cummings, this chapter considers the ways the content of American World War I texts—and the formats in which they were presented to the public—were influenced by these factors.

Epilogue

2020 ◽  
pp. 206-216
Author(s):  
Aaron Shaheen
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Paradigm Shift ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
World War ◽  
The Way

The epilogue analyzes Johnny Got His Gun, Dalton Trumbo’s 1939 novel about a soldier who is so pulverized in World War I that he is more machine than man—and yet largely beyond the reach of prosthetic improvement. Like Dadists such as Raoul Hausmann, the novel rebukes the meliorist myth that as long as a disabled soldier has a functioning brain and a firm will, he can use prosthetics to live a life of spiritual and material purpose. As one whose corporeality has been reduced to little more than a brain, Joe Bonham anticipates a complete paradigm shift in which the very notion of the human soul gives way to cybernetics. Published at a time when mechanized warfare had paved the way for nuclear annihilation, Johnny Got His Gun shows that Bergson’s hope for the spiritualization of matter had collapsed at last into the mechanization of spirit.

LABOR SQUADS OF STUDENTS AS A FORM OF REALIZATION OF YOUTH POLICY DURING THE WORLD WAR I

2015 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-147
Author(s):  
Букалова ◽  
Svetlana Bukalova
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
The State ◽  
Royal Family ◽  
World War ◽  
Youth Policy ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
Labor Resources ◽  
The Way

The article is devoted to the analysis of the experience of the organization and activity of labour squads during the World War I. It can help to work out in details of state youth policy in the different historical stages of its development. The mission of those squads was to help the farmsteads, which stayed without workers because of their mobilization to the war. using the archive sources from the Orel province and data from other regions the author comes to theconclusion that labour squads were a form of mobilization of labor resources by the state. At the same time it was the way of socialization of youth and a form of state youth policy. Describing the system of labour squads management, the article says about participation of members of the royal family, provincial authorities, local self-governance, charity organizations and the public in it.

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