Smallpox Violence in Victorian Britain

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
The Poor ◽  
House Of Lords ◽  
Adequate Care

In contrast to North America, far fewer incidents of individual or collective acts of cruelty and violence were inflicted against smallpox victims in Britain. But similar to North America’s lines of conflict, the English aggressors were the wealthy and their butts of cruelty, the smallpox impoverished. Instead of direct action, the English approach to closing smallpox hospitals and preventing the poor receiving adequate care rested on lawsuits and judicial injunctions, reaching as high as the House of Lords, which allowed the privileged in districts such as Hampstead and Fulham to shut their smallpox hospitals, prevent smallpox victims from entering their districts, and renege on their civic responsibilities.

scholarly journals Bertram Neville Brockhouse. 15 July 1918 – 13 October 2003

2005 ◽  
Vol 51 ◽  
pp. 51-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Cowley
Keyword(s):  
Civil Engineer ◽  
North America ◽  
Working Conditions ◽  
Domestic Animals ◽  
Small Farm ◽  
Local School ◽  
Simple Arithmetic ◽  
Learning To Read ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Southern Alberta

Bertram Neville Brockhouse was born on 15 July 1918 in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. His grandfather was a miner who emigrated to North America from England. He became active in a strike to unionize the mines and to protest against the poor working conditions; as a result he had to leave mining. He then, with his son, Israel Bertram Brockhouse, went homesteading in Southern Alberta with a small farm and domestic animals, where his son married Mabel Emily Brockhouse (née Neville), who had grown up in Illinois and belonged to a family of English Americans. They had a family of four, the eldest of whom was Bertram Neville, known to his friends and family as Bert. He had a sister, Alice, and two younger brothers, Robert, who died in infancy, and Gordon, who became a civil engineer for the railroad. The homestead was on the Milk River close to the Canada–USA border and the local school was a one–room elementary school a couple of miles from the farm. Bert was a nominal attendee at this school but did not remember learning to read or to do simple arithmetic there.

scholarly journals Structural violence and the nature of cemetery-based skeletal reference collections

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-103
Author(s):  
Greer Vanderbyl ◽  
John Albanese ◽  
Hugo F. V. Cardoso
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Historical Data ◽  
Structural Violence ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Low Ses ◽  
Burial Practices ◽  
Socio Economic Status ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

The sourcing of cadavers for North American skeletal reference collections occurred immediately after death and targeted the poor and marginalised. In Europe, collections sourced bodies that were buried and unclaimed after some time in cemeteries with no perpetual care mandate, and may have also targeted the underprivileged. The relationship between socio-economic status (SES) and abandonment was examined in a sample of unclaimed remains (603 adults and 98 children) collected from cemeteries in the city of Lisbon, Portugal, that were incorporated in a collection. Results demonstrate that low SES individuals are not more likely to be abandoned nor to be incorporated in the collection than higher SES individuals. Furthermore, historical data indicate that the poorest were not incorporated into the collection, because of burial practices. Although the accumulation of collections in North America was facilitated by structural violence that targeted the poor and marginalised, this phenomenon seems largely absent in the Lisbon collection.

scholarly journals A RETURN OF CLASS STRUGGLE WITHOUT CLASS? MORAL ECONOMY AND POPULAR RESISTANCE IN BRASIL, SOUTH AFRICA AND PORTUGAL

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 469-493
Author(s):  
Ruy Braga
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Direct Action ◽  
Moral Economy ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Protective Capacity ◽  
Popular Resistance ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Basic Services ◽  
South Portugal

Abstract Since the emergence of the crisis of capitalist globalization in 2008, the deconstruction of the Fordist wage relationship and the rising unemployment in various countries have stimulated the growth of labour informality, distancing workers from labour protection, intensifying turnover and stimulating intermittent employment. Collective bargaining has become increasingly rare and decentralized, and jobs increasingly precarious and individualized, undermining the protective capacity of the ‘moral economy of the poor’ and transforming direct action - that is, popular action without the mediation of unions and traditional political parties - into perhaps the only credible alternative for ‘precarious workers’ to express their demands in a world marked by the commodification of labour, basic services and housing. A return to the era of the ‘class struggle without class’? This is the conjecture that this article sets out to evaluate, comparing the class experience of poor and precarious workers in three countries from the so-called Global South: Portugal, South Africa and Brasil.

Industrial Emigration in Early Victorian Britain

1953 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-192 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wilbur S. Shepperson
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Complete Understanding ◽  
Historical Explanation ◽  
Victorian Britain ◽  
British People

Since the days of Queen Elizabeth, emigration has been a habit with the British people. But it was the nineteenth century, when almost seventeen million persons emigrated, that witnessed the United Kingdom's most extensive exodus: approximately eighty per cent of the emigrants went to North America. A broad, historical explanation of the forces that motivated British subjects to abandon their homeland can be found in numerous works. Therefore, this paper is an attempt to view in greater detail one small facet of a not uncommon, yet entangling, subject. A series of specialized studies producing greater exactness of information would perhaps lead to a fuller and more complete understanding of a topic that has been open to much conjecture.

Emptiness in the Colonial Gaze: Labor, Property, and Nature

2011 ◽  
Vol 79 (1) ◽  
pp. 161-174 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert L. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Urban Poor ◽  
Labor History ◽  
Rural Poor ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Rich People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Way

Many who study colonialism have noted that the same words used by the colonizer to describe the colonized—“dirty,” “backward,” “uncultured,” and “possessing an improper understanding of the value of work and property”—were often identical to those that rich people used to describe the poor. They were the terms the “modern” used to describe the “not yet modern”; the urban the rural; the educated the uneducated. To use a British example: Those who wrote from positions of power (the urban, educated bourgeoisie) looked down upon, first, the urban poor, then the rural poor, then the Scottish, then the “half-civilized” Natives of North America; then, finally, they squinted from on high upon the Aborigines of Australia. All of these groups fell short of the “norm,” the way the colonizer understood the very height of modern progress. All of these groups were “lacking” something. Thus, in sometimes surprising ways, colonialism merely seems to be another manifestation of the exertion of power over the powerless, a relationship much closer to that of “class” than many expect. This is especially so in a field that produces much of the best work in cultural history, and where anything hinting at old-fashioned “labor history” is gauche (no pun intended). Yet, as the authors of the books under review argue, understandings of labor and property, and the manner with which they are tied to an understanding of nature, are more fundamental to the history of modern colonialism than, for example, race, the latter a category almost always invoked by the colonizer in a completely instrumental fashion.

III. Parliamentary Radicals and the Reduction of Imperial Expenditure in British North America, 1827–1834

1968 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 446-461 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Burroughs
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
North America ◽  
Poor Relief ◽  
Napoleonic Wars ◽  
National Debt ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
British North America ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Modern Politics ◽  
Post War

Although retrenchment, with its overtones of efficiency and its implied attack on corruption, is a familiar watchword of modern politics, it is difficult today to appreciate the deep ethical and constitutional significance of the issue of economy during the early nineteenth century, or the strong hold which the concept exerted over the attitudes and actions of British politicians and administrators in the decades following the Napoleonic Wars. Twenty-three years of costly war with France had increased Britain's national debt from £228 million in 1793 to £876 million in 1815, and the laborious process of eliminating this deficit at the rate of a few millions a year by means of a sinking fund was aptly described as ‘the attempt of a wooden-legged man to catch a hare’. The propertied classes in the post-war period considered themselves excessively burdened with taxation, and until the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 had been effectively put into operation, they were also called upon to meet the costs of an expensive and inefficient system of poor relief.

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