The British Fertiliser Manufacturers’ Association: Struggle for Survival 1870‒1930

Most firms in the British fertiliser industry of the 19th century were small and combined other activities, such as seed merchants, millers, manufacturers of sulphuric acid and in one case explosives. In the heyday of high farming there was almost no co-operation and no attempt to achieve economy of scale through merger and amalgamation. In 1875 just before the onset of the depression the Chemical Manure Manufacturers’ Association was formed to fix prices and address the challenges posed by proposed Government regulation of what was after all a noxious industry. This story mirrors much of British industry, where implicit (price-fixing) cartels failed and individual firms rejected collaboration in favour of what seems an irrational commitment to a free market ideology that was transparently misplaced.

Innovation in the British Video Game Industry since 1978

This article examines the evolution of the video game industry in Britain from its start in 1978. The industry originated with passionate hobbyists and amateurs who benefited from the national broadcaster's campaign to expand computer literacy. Unlike the regional clustering of the industry in the United States and Japan, the British industry was dispersed geographically, consisting of mini-clusters with porous boundaries. During the 2000s, the fragmented British industry was largely acquired by U.S. and Japanese multinational companies and became part of global value chains, but the development of mobile gaming and digital distribution provided opportunities for a new generation of start-ups to emerge in Britain.

Shiny Black and Layers of White: Japanned Papier Mâché, Race and the British Empire

Race, class and empire in nineteenth-century England inflected understandings of japanned papier mâché, influencing both its brief popularity and its abrupt demise in the 1860s. Although the material was rarely used as an explicit signifier in nineteenth-century literature or theory, or indeed mentioned at all, its inclusion in the Great Exhibition suggests its cultural and industrial centrality. This article proposes that this disparity results not from an absence of meaning, but from too great a complexity and too clear a set of implications. As an imitation of an East Asian form, japanned papier mâché represented an Orientalizing fantasy; as a shiny black surface, japanned papier mâché tapped into both desires and anxieties surrounding racial Blackness; as a backdrop for depictions of recognizably British landscapes and architecture; and as a distinctively British industry, japanned papier mâché offered a kind of national identity-fashioning. Tying a ubiquitous but understudied material of the English mid-nineteenth century to broader histories of the British empire, this article demonstrates the tidy encapsulation of the fraught and complex 1850s and 1860s into the materiality, forms and failure of japanned papier mâché.

CHURCHILL'S DEFEAT IN DUNDEE, 1922, AND THE DECLINE OF LIBERAL POLITICAL ECONOMY

This article uses Churchill's defeat in Dundee in 1922 to examine the challenges to liberal political economy in Britain posed by the First World War. In particular, the focus is on the impact of the war on reshaping the global division of labour and the difficulties in responding to the domestic consequences of this reshaping. Dundee provides an ideal basis for examining the links between local politics and global economic changes in this period because of the traumatic effects of the war on the city. Dundee depended to an extraordinary extent on one, extremely ‘globalized’, industry – jute – for its employment. All raw jute brought to Dundee came from Bengal, and the markets for its product were scattered all over the world. Moreover, the main competitive threat to the industry came from a much poorer economy (India), so that jute manufacturing was the first major British industry to be significantly affected by low-wage competition. Before 1914, the Liberals combined advocacy of free trade with a significant set of interventions in the labour market and in social welfare, including trade boards. The Dundee case allows us to examine in detail the responses to post-war challenges to these Liberal orthodoxies.