Colonial workers,imperial migrants and surveillance: policing in Le Havre, 1914–40

This article explores how the police and municipal authorities of Le Havre responded to the colonial others who passed through, or resided in, the Seine-Inférieure port between the outbreak of the First World War and the defeat of France in 1940. Interrogating how the police and urban authorities monitored migrants to the port, it reveals how Le Havre’s imperial and transnational space was distinctive in terms of the peoples who established themselves in the port, the ways in which they forged links with other peripheral locations throughout the French empire, and how the local authorities attempted to control migrants and incomers from the French overseas empire. It highlights particularities of Le Havre’s urban space – notably its lack of a university and prestigious lycées, its pre-1914 history of militant strike action, its role as France’s main transatlantic port, and the presence of a small colonial population with a narrow social-economic profile – and shows how these particularities resulted in the enactment and sometimes neglect of national policies and agendas according to specific local priorities.     

Turning to Nature in Germany. Hiking,Nudism, and Conservation, 1900–1940

David Rollison, The Local Origins of Modern Society. Gloucestershire 1500–1800 (1992), xvi + 319 (Routledge, £35.00).

Charles Carlton, Going to the Wars. The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638–1651 (1992), xii + 428 (Routledge, £25.00).

Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Ireland and Scotland, 1645–1653 (1992), xii + 584 (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, £40.00).

Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (1991), xxvii + 484 (Allen Lane Penguin, Harmondsworth, £25.00; paperback (1993), £8.99).

L. D. Schwarz, London in the Age of Industrialization: Entrepreneurs, Labour Force, and Living Conditions, 1700–1850 (1992), xv + 285 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £35.00).

Ted W. Margadant, Urban Rivalries in the French Revolution (1992), xvi + 511 (Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., £47.50, paperback £14.95).

Ann F. La Berge, Mission and Method: The Early Nineteenth‐Century French Public Health Movement (1992), xviii + 376 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £45.00).

Joseph P. Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central Georgia, 1800–1880 (1992), xiv + 360 (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill and London, $45.00).

Allan Greer and Ian Radforth (eds), Colonial Leviathan: State Formation in Mid‐Nineteenth‐Century Canada (1992), xii + 328 (University of Toronto Press, Toronto, US $62.00, paperback $25.95).

David Mitch, The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England (1992), xxiii + 340 (University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia n.p.).Patricia Anderson, The Printed Image and the Transformation of Popular Culture 1790–1860 (1991), xi + 211 (Clarendon Press, Oxford, £30.00).

Henrika Kuklick, The Savage Within: The Social History of British Anthropology, 1885–1945 (1991), 325 (Cambridge University Press, £30.00).

Maguelonne Toussaint‐Samat, History of Food (1992), xix + 801 (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, £25.00).

James Fentress and Chris Wickham, Social Memory (1992), xii + 229 (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, £35.00, paperback £11.95).     

Colonial Military Garrisons as Labor-Market Shocks: Quebec City and Boston, 1760–1775

The military occupation of Boston in 1768 shocked the city's labor market. The soldiers, who were expected to supplement their pay by working for local businesses, constituted an influx equal to 12.5 percent of greater Boston's population. To assess the importance of this shock, we use the case of Quebec City, which experienced the reverse process (i.e., a reduction in the British military presence from close to 18 percent of the region's population to less than 1 percent). We argue that, in Boston, the combination of the large influx of soldiers and a heavy tax on the local population in the form of the billeting system caused an important wage reduction, while the lighter billeting system of Quebec City and the winding down of the garrison pushed wages up. We tie these experiences to political developments in the 1770s.     

Migrant associations: the Spanish transatlantic experience, 1870–1970

This article offers some historiographical, theoretical and methodological reflections on Spanish migrant associationism in several countries (mainly, Latin America) during the period of mass migration that began in the 1870s and continued until the 1970s, which might also be extrapolated to other European cases. The discussion starts with a review of the literature on migrant associations in Iberian migration studies. Some of the limitations inherent in migrant associations as objects of study are then considered and problem areas that remain relatively unexplored are highlighted alongside a comparison with those approaches that are used in the analysis of other European immigrant groups in the USA and Latin America. Finally the article discusses the interaction of migrant elites, ordinary immigrants’ necessities and the influence of the host societies. The conclusions insist on the fact that associationism can offer an informative kaleidoscope through which to examine immigrant collectives, not just organized communities. Appropriate use of the sources produced by associations can shed light on settlement patterns, socio-professional composition, the social origin of elites, rootedness or image in the host country and the comparative history of migration.     

Physick and the Family: Health,Medicine and Care in Wales, 1600–1750

Steven Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250–1550. An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe (1980), xii+458 (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, £15.75).

Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman. A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (1980), viii+119 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, £7.50).

Edward Royle, Radicals, Secularists and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866–1915 (1980), xii+380 (Manchester University Press, Manchester, £19.50).

Gail Braybon, Women Workers in the First World War (1981), 244 (Croom Helm, £11.95).

Eric Cahm and Vladimir Claude Fisera (eds), Socialism and Nationalism, 3 vols (1978–1980), 116+132+132 (Spokesman, Nottingham, £2.50 each).

Harold Perkin, The Structured Crowd, Essays in English Social History (1981), xii+230 (Harvester, Brighton, £20.00).     

Female entrepreneurship: business,marriage and motherhood in England and Wales, 1851–1911

ABSTRACT

This article offers a new perspective on what it meant to be a business proprietor in Victorian Britain. Based on individual census records, it provides an overview of the full population of female business proprietors in England and Wales between 1851 and 1911. These census data show that around 30% of the total business population was female, a considerably higher estimate than the current literature suggests. Female entrepreneurship was not a uniform experience. Certain demographics clustered in specific trades and within those sectors employers and own-account proprietors had strikingly different age, marital status and household profiles. A woman’s life cycle event such as marriage, motherhood and widowhood played an important role in her decision whether to work, the work available to her and the entrepreneurial choices she could make. While marriage and motherhood removed women from the labour force, they had less of an effect on their levels of entrepreneurship. Women who had young children were more entrepreneurial than those who had none, and entrepreneurship rates rose with the arrival of one child and continued to rise the more children were added to the family.