Cotton Capitalists

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael R. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Ethnic Networks ◽  
American Jewish ◽  
Financial Relationships

Jewish merchants created a niche economy in the United States’ most important industry—cotton—which positioned them at the forefront of capitalist expansion for much of the second half of the nineteenth century. This book analyzes that niche economy and asks how it came to be. It argues that timing mattered, alongside a host of other structural factors, which created the conditions that allowed Jewish merchants to succeed in this particular capitalism. But it also argues that, within this milieu, the Jewish merchants’ status as a minority fueled their niche economy by fostering ethnic networks of trust. Trust served as the cornerstone of financial relationships, and it was frequently cultivated by shared ethnicity. While this book investigates the ways in which both structural factors and ethnic networks mattered in the emergence of this particular niche economy, it also acts as a case study that explores how ethnicity mattered in the development of global capitalism. The story of these American Jewish merchants is far more than the story of American Jewish success and integration—it is the story of how ethnicity mattered in the development of global capitalism.

‘A Routh O’ Auld Nick-Nackets’ – the antiquarian collection of John Rae

2015 ◽  
Vol 36-37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Context ◽  
Moral Education ◽  
The United States ◽  
Representative Case ◽  
National Museums ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The University

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael R. Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Competitive Advantage ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Global Capitalism ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Cotton Industry ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Jewish

The conclusion reaffirms how the history of Jewish merchants in the American cotton industry is not only a story of American Jewish success that accounts for a golden age for Jews during the Reconstruction era. It is also a more universal case study that speaks to niche economies and minority entrepreneurship more broadly, revealing the ways in which ethnicity mattered in the development of global capitalism. It suggests that the economic milieu in which a niche economy emerged was critical, and any explanation of how niche economies function must begin with a rigorous understanding of that particular capitalism. But within the confines of those structural factors, ethnicity fostered trust in the economic transactions upon which a particular capitalism relied. These forces worked together to provide minority groups such as Jews a competitive advantage that fueled their niche economies.

Antislavery Orthodoxy: Isaac Nelson and the Free Church of Scotland, c. 1843–65

2015 ◽  
Vol 94 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Ritchie
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
Irish Nationalism ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
Christian Fellowship ◽  
High Esteem

The ‘Send back the money’ controversy between the Free Church of Scotland and zealous abolitionists was one of the most important events in nineteenth century Scottish religious history. The Revd Isaac Nelson of Belfast is best remembered for his anti-revivalism and his advocacy of Irish nationalism. What has often been forgotten is the centrality of antislavery to the making of Nelson's controversial reputation, even though he was held in high esteem by abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic. Accordingly, this article examines his opposition to the Free Church's receipt of monies from and extension of christian fellowship to the slaveholding churches in the United States. It highlights his critique of leading ecclesiastical statesmen, including Thomas Chalmers, William Cunningham and Robert S. Candlish. The essay also considers the sophisticated intellectual critique of chattel slavery that under-girded Nelson's opposition to the policy of the Free Kirk, as well as his evaluation of the nature of proslavery religion in America. By means of a biographical case study of an interesting outsider, this article seeks to provide a lens through which one of the most tragic incidents in Scotland's ecclesiastical past can be freshly examined.

Mythological Pedagogies, or Suicide Clubs as Eugenic Alibi

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen M. Brian
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political

During the final two decades of the nineteenth century, newspapers reported that dozens of “suicide clubs” were operating in the United States. By restoring and pursuing the uncertainty that marked these reports, as well underscoring the ultimate unknowability of the men who became the stories’ main protagonists, this chapter argues that such reports served as mythic pedagogies for naturalizing a quickly consolidating eugenics rationale. The power to mythify entailed not only the bleeding out of biography and history but also the replenishing infusion of politically useful alternatives. In this particular case study, the hemorrhage was necessitated by the political urgency surrounding the labor question and by capitalists’ need for a different story. They needed a different “sense of life” that would reframe material realities, and they did so by ventriloquizing a handful of men who died by suicide.

scholarly journals Cosmotopia Delineated: Rammohun Roy, William Adam, and the Calcutta Unitarian Committee

Itinerario ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 446-470
Author(s):  
Clare Midgley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
The United States ◽  
Woman Question ◽  
Christian Mission ◽  
Early Colonial ◽  
Unique Approach ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis article seeks to establish the value of the concept of cosmotopia to historians of intercultural connections through presenting a case study of the Calcutta Unitarian Committee, which was active between 1821 and 1828. In tandem, it aims to enhance understanding of the origins of one particularly sustained set of intercultural connections: the interfaith network which developed between an influential group of Hindu religious and social reformers, the Brahmo Samaj, and western Unitarian Christians. The article focusses on the collaboration between the two leading figures on the Committee: Rammohun Roy, the renowned founder of the Brahmo Samaj, who is often described as the Father of Modern India; and William Adam, a Scottish Baptist missionary who was condemned as the “second fallen Adam” after his “conversion” to Unitarianism by Rammohun Roy, and who went on to cofound a utopian community in the United States. It explores the Calcutta Unitarian Committee's activities within the cosmopolitan milieu of early colonial Calcutta, and clarifies its role in the emergence of the Brahmo Samaj, in the development of a unique approach to Christian mission among Unitarians, and in laying the foundations of a transnational network whose members were in the vanguard of religious innovation, radical social reform, and debates on the “woman question” in nineteenth-century India, Britain, and the United States. In conclusion, the article draws on the case study to offer some broader reflections on the relationship between utopianism, cosmopolitanism, and colonialism.

John Labatt Blows In and Out of the Windy City: A Case Study in Entrepreneurship and Business Failure, 1889–1896

2021 ◽  
Vol 102 (s2) ◽  
pp. s498-s518
Author(s):  
Matthew Bellamy
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Business Failure ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Pull Factors ◽  
Push And Pull Factors ◽  
Geographic Expansion ◽  
Push And Pull ◽  
Entrepreneurial Factors

The Labatt brewery of London, Ontario, just 200 kilometres from the Canada–United States border, was the first Canadian brewery to attempt a strategic expansion into the United States. The paper examines the reasons why John Labatt decided to expand into the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. It analyzes both the “push” and “pull” factors that caused him to attempt to sell his ales, porters, and stouts in Chicago. The paper argues that while entrepreneurial factors played a central role in Labatt’s geographic expansion into the United States, structural factors were more important as a factor in the ultimate inability of Labatt to capture a share of the Chicago market.

Gendered differences in emigration and mobility perspectives among European researchers working abroad

2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Scheibelhofer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Qualitative Research ◽  
Qualitative Study ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
The United States ◽  
Research Strategy ◽  
The Future ◽  
Highly Skilled

This paper focuses on gendered mobilities of highly skilled researchers working abroad. It is based on an empirical qualitative study that explored the mobility aspirations of Austrian scientists who were working in the United States at the time they were interviewed. Supported by a case study, the paper demonstrates how a qualitative research strategy including graphic drawings sketched by the interviewed persons can help us gain a better understanding of the gendered importance of social relations for the future mobility aspirations of scientists working abroad.

Thinking About Scots Law

1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Rodger
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
United States Of America ◽  
Case Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Memorial Lecture ◽  
University Of Edinburgh ◽  
The University

This article is the revised text of the first W A Wilson Memorial Lecture, given in the Playfair Library, Old College, in the University of Edinburgh, on 17 May 1995. It considers various visions of Scots law as a whole, arguing that it is now a system based as much upon case law and precedent as upon principle, and that its departure from the Civilian tradition in the nineteenth century was part of a general European trend. An additional factor shaping the attitudes of Scots lawyers from the later nineteenth century on was a tendency to see themselves as part of a larger Englishspeaking family of lawyers within the British Empire and the United States of America.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document