scholarly journals Child Labour, Parental Neglect, School Boards, and Teacher Quality: School Inspector Reports on the Supply and Demand of Schooling in Mid-nineteenth-century Sweden

Author(s):  
Germund Larsson ◽  
Johannes Westberg

By examining the state school inspector reports of 1861–1863, which provide rich insights into the local conditions of schooling in Sweden, this article sheds further light on the wide range of factors that weakened school enrolment and attendance in nineteenth-century Sweden. In terms of parental demand, these included child labour on farms, at manors, and in industries; the transformation of the servant system among rural households; and religious practices, such as the confirmation and the beliefs of Protestant sectarian groups. On the supply side, factors that school inspectors reported included the inability of Swedish teacher seminars to examine enough teachers and the problematic behaviour of local school boards. As a result, this article provides additional input into the debate in educational history regarding the role of the state, religion, rural elites, and parents in the rise of mass schooling, while simultaneously providing further qualitative evidence to a quantitatively oriented research field in economic history on the determinants of schooling.

Author(s):  
Germund Larsson ◽  
Johannes Westberg

By examining the state school inspector reports of 1861–1863, which provide rich insights into the local conditions of schooling in Sweden, this article sheds further light on the wide range of factors that weakened school enrolment and attendance in nineteenth-century Sweden. In terms of parental demand, these included child labour on farms, at manors, and in industries; the transformation of the servant system among rural households; and religious practices, such as the confirmation and the beliefs of Protestant sectarian groups. On the supply side, factors that school inspectors reported included the inability of Swedish teacher seminars to examine enough teachers and the problematic behaviour of local school boards. As a result, this article provides additional input into the debate in educational history regarding the role of the state, religion, rural elites, and parents in the rise of mass schooling, while simultaneously providing further qualitative evidence to a quantitatively oriented research field in economic history on the determinants of schooling.


1979 ◽  
Vol 13 (3) ◽  
pp. 353-375 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. G. Jones

The role of the State in promoting Indian economic development in the nineteenth century is one of several aspects of modern Indian economic history which have been ‘re-interpreted’ in recent years. The conventional wisdom once portrayed the policy of the British government in India as one essentially geared to serving British economic interests. By means of ‘discriminatory interventionism’ in economic affairs, it was argued, the Government encouraged the development of a primary commodity export economy, with all its attendant defects, in India. However, over the last two decades the reputation of the Government of India has undergone a rather noticeable transformation. Economic imperialists became, first, benevolent nightwatchmen, and then ‘development-orientated’ officials formulating an embryonic unbalanced growth model for Indian development. Parallel with this improvement in the Government of India's reputation has been a deterioration in the economic reputations of certain other governments in nineteenth-century developing economies, governments whose performances used to be favourably compared with that of the British in India. In the cases of Japan and Tsarist Russia, for instance, both the extent and effectiveness of State intervention in the economy has been questioned, and there has been an increasing recognition of the primacy of non-governmental factors in the economic growth of those countries. Given the ideological and organizational parameters limiting the range of possible activity by any nineteenth century government in its economy, the performance of governments in other developing countries of the period, and the political constraints imposed by being a subordinate section of a world-wide Empire, it is no longer possible regard the actions of British officials in India as wicked, and many would now regard them as almost respectable.


Author(s):  
Kevork Oskanian

Abstract This article contributes a securitisation-based, interpretive approach to state weakness. The long-dominant positivist approaches to the phenomenon have been extensively criticised for a wide range of deficiencies. Responding to Lemay-Hébert's suggestion of a ‘Durkheimian’, ideational-interpretive approach as a possible alternative, I base my conceptualisation on Migdal's view of state weakness as emerging from a ‘state-in-society's’ contested ‘strategies of survival’. I argue that several recent developments in Securitisation Theory enable it to capture this contested ‘collective knowledge’ on the state: a move away from state-centrism, the development of a contextualised ‘sociological’ version, linkages made between securitisation and legitimacy, and the acknowledgment of ‘securitisations’ as a contested Bourdieusian field. I introduce the concept of ‘securitisation gaps’ – divergences in the security discourses and practices of state and society – as a concept aimed at capturing this contested role of the state, operationalised along two logics (reactive/substitutive) – depending on whether they emerge from securitisations of the state action or inaction – and three intensities (latent, manifest, and violent), depending on the extent to which they involve challenges to state authority. The approach is briefly illustrated through the changing securitisation gaps in the Republic of Lebanon during the 2019–20 ‘October Uprising’.


2019 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-42
Author(s):  
Soni

AbstractTo this day, the history of indigenous orphans in colonial India remains surprisingly understudied. Unlike the orphans of Britain or European and Eurasian orphans in the colony, who have been widely documented, Indian orphans are largely absent in the existing historiography. This article argues that a study of “native” orphans in India helps us transcend the binary of state power and poor children that has hitherto structured the limited extant research on child “rescue” in colonial India. The essay further argues that by shifting the gaze away from the state, we can vividly see how non-state actors juxtaposed labour and education. I assert that the deployment of child labour by these actors, in their endeavour to educate and make orphans self-sufficient, did not always follow the profitable trajectory of the state-led formal labour regime (seen in the Indian indenture system or early nineteenth-century prison labour). It was often couched in terms of charity and philanthropy and exhibited a convergence of moral and economic concerns.


2020 ◽  
pp. 1-29
Author(s):  
ADITYA RAMESH

Abstract The nineteenth century witnessed a major expansion in the construction of public works including canals, roads, and railways across the British empire. The question that colonial governments faced during the nineteenth century was on how to finance public works. Focusing specifically on irrigation works and the rivers of southern India, this article shows how different experiments were attempted, including raising capital and labour from local communities as well as corporate investment in irrigation works through London capital markets. The article argues that by the latter part of the nineteenth century, a definitive answer had emerged, i.e. irrigation projects on rivers would be financed through state debt. An enormous body of scholarship in Britain and India debated the relationship between public works and public debt. This article rethinks this scholarship as a technological and environmental history. The article argues that colonial modes of raising capital were dependent on speculating on Indian rivers. Historiography wise, in contrast to scholarship which takes for granted the role of the state in building large dams, it suggests that the emergence of the state as the builder of large dams was part of a more fundamental relationship between rivers, technology, and colonial capital that emerged in the nineteenth century.


Author(s):  
Jim Tomlinson

This chapter falls into two unequal parts. The first charts, broadly chronologically, the shifting understandings, historical and historiographical, of the role of the state in economic life. The second focuses on debates about the performance of the economy, especially notions of ‘decline’ which have been central to those debates since the late nineteenth century. Variegated but overlapping senses of ‘decline’, originating in very specific historical circumstances, have overshadowed much writing on the modern British economy, with, it will be argued, often detrimental effects on our understanding. Such notions need to be historicized—placed firmly in the intellectual, ideological, and above all political contexts within which they arose.


1970 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 117-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abraham Rotstein

Karl Polanyi's studies in economic history were concerned with an unusually wide range of economies and societies. Aristotle's Greece, the ancient Near East and Hammurabi's Babylonia, pre-colonial West Africa, and the laissez-faire economy of the nineteenth century were among the areas which he explored. The main focus of his work might well be summed up by the title of the present conference, “The Organizational Forms of Economic Life and Their Evolution,” and equally well by the subtitle, “Non-Capitalistic Organization.” To talk of organizational forms (in the plural) and of non-capitalistic organization is to focus attention on different kinds of economic institutions and on ways of distinguishing among them. To raise this question in an evolutionary context is to suggest a departure from a notion of unilineal development that would tend to see earlier economies as miniature replicas or potential versions of our own market economy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 213-219
Author(s):  
Serediuk V. V.

The article reveals the theses of neoliberalism - a complex philosophical and scientific course, as well as social practices concerning a new understanding of the role and purpose of the state in the twentieth century. The results of the study are based on an analysis of the works of representatives of German and American neoliberalism. The strong role of the state in the economic sphere, as well as the humanitarian, social and security purpose of the state are described. Neoliberalism was formed in the fields of economics, political science, jurisprudence, international law, philosophy as scientific fields of knowledge and embodied in the economic, social and cultural policy of Western democracies, including the reflection of its doctrinal provisions in the constitutions of European states. Therefore, neoliberalism can be defined as a set of doctrinal currents and social practices, characterized by economic, political, legal and ideological components. Representatives of neoliberalism tried to redefine the role, significance and tasks of the state according to the interwar and postwar economic and political conditions. At the same time, their ideas concerned individual rights and freedoms, the legal social order, as well as the worldview and methodological foundations on which all currents of neoliberalism were based. In August 1938, a conference of neoliberal economists, known as the Lippmann Colloquium, was held in Paris, at which a new concept of the state was essentially formulated. It consisted of the following provisions. First, the state must determine the system of rules within which economic activity is formed, and guarantee their implementation. Secondly, it was recognized at the conference that the market mechanism does not provide automatic self-regulation and balance, and therefore requires some government intervention.The third provision of the conference established that the state had to take only those measures that would ensure the support of free competition. Fourth, the restriction of monopolies was recognized. This idea underlies at the basis of antitrust laws in USA. The fifth point of neoliberalism was the limited intervention of the state in economic relations. It was allowed only temporarily and in cases when the flexibility of supply and demand was violated and the balance on the basis of the price mechanism was lost. The state should not set the price on the market, but should influence the magnitude of supply or demand, thus equalizing prices and preventing sharp fluctuations. As a result, the state in neoliberalism has a strong influence on the economic system by eliminating market monopolies, ensuring free competition, regulating excess supply and demand. Also, one of the leading roles of the state is to carry out activities that do not provide profit in the near future (humanitarian, scientific, medical, environmental spheres). Having created conditions for sustainable economic development, the state has to embody social and security tasks. Keywords: neoliberalism, state, role, order, intervention, economy, law, peace, security, humanitarian and social tasks.


1999 ◽  
pp. 118-138
Author(s):  
Michael Lavalette

This chapter, written by Michael Lavalette, presents interpretations for the decline of child labour in the period 1880-1920 and addresses the role of the state in the handling of child welfare. Throughout the chapter, Lavallette stresses how dangerous it is to think that the issue of child labour is resolved. Instead, he emphasises the importance of recognising the ways that child labour and exploitation can be restructured and disguised in today’s society.


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