Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'British economic history'
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1
Bekar, Clifford Thomas. "Two productivity puzzles in British economic history." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1999. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk1/tape7/PQDD_0027/NQ51841.pdf.
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O'Hara, Glen Stewart. "British economic and social planning 1959-1970." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 2002. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1317692/.
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This thesis attempts to trace the history of the politics, rhetoric and practice of British central government planning in the 1960s. As such, it attempts to answer a number of questions: why did 'planning' come back into fashion in the early 1960s? What meanings did it take on for those who espoused it? Did different groups have very different ideas about what it meant? Why was it adopted as such an all-encompassing reformist banner in this decade? Did it fail to achieve its ends, and if so, why? 'Planning' is therefore treated both as an idea and a practice in its own right, but also as a tool to answer wider questions about post-war British government and politics. How important were interest groups, for instance the 'social partners' of employers and trade unions, in the management of the economy? How central were provider and consumer interest groups in the planning and development of the Welfare State? How close together were the ideas and actions of the political parties? How powerfull was the central government, and what were the limits to its power? This thesis will use unpublished manuscript sources from the archives of the central government and the two main political parties, along with some personal papers, to attempt to answer these questions. It will conclude that planning failed because of a basic lack of agreement between the different 'planners', as well as the inability of the central government machinery to conduct such complex and testing work. It will also argue that the influence of political ideology and party-political conflict was much greater than has previously been thought.
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Wale, J. M. "Entrepreneurs and managers in the British coal industry, 1880-1914 : case studies in business history." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1986. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.305377.
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Sakkas, John. "British public opinion and Greece, 1944-1949." Thesis, University of Hull, 1992. http://hydra.hull.ac.uk/resources/hull:11246.
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Cal, Angel Eduardo. "Rural society and economic development: British mercantile capital in nineteenth-century Belize." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1991. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/185710.
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Nineteenth-century European industrialization increased the demand for raw resources available in sub-tropical regions. The eastern coast of Central America and the Bay of Campeche had an ample supply of dyewoods used in the textile industry, and mahogany, a durable and precious wood used in the production of railway cars and furniture. British mercantile capital linked the various peoples and activities that were involved in the extractive industry and in the short-lived sugarcane and banana industries. The pre-Columbian regional economic block based on resources such as salt was taken over by the Spaniards during the Contact period. But the tenuous Iberian hold gave way to persistent British buccaneers turned loggers. Eventually, though, British mercantile firms took over the business. These firms monopolized the land, credit and the import business, and exerted considerable influence on the local state. This enclave economy essentially "created" its society, bringing in African slaves and attracting laborers from the region: Garifuna, Miskito, Mestizo and Maya. The Caste War of Yucatan (1847-1901) also sent some 15,000 refugees mostly peasants into Belize. Indentured workers were imported from the 1860s. Except for the blacks, most of the workers and peasants established settlements in the rural areas. The relationship between capital and labor and between capital and the peasantry was marked by both conflict and accommodation. Whereas the firms tried to secure a reliable, cheap, and submissive labor force and tried to "proletarianize" the peasantry with the help of state-backed mechanisms, the nature of the industry: the cultural norms of the Maya peasantry, for example, the strategic alliances among the groups at the frontier and the limited supply of labor made it difficult for capital to have its way. In fact, the Maya's determination to block further British expansion in the northwest eventually undermined the level of business confidence necessary to operate in a turbulent frontier. Mercantile capital withdrew when faced by declining prices. Many workers were repeasantized.
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Johnman, Lewis. "The higher Civil Service, 'Treasury control' and British economic policy between the Wars." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 1987. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.286164.
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Kennedy, Andrew John. "British topographical print series in their social and economic context, c.1720-c.1840." Thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art (University of London), 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.265600.
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Varian, Brian. "The course and character of late-Victorian British exports." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2017. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3603/.
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In this dissertation, I examine the inter-temporal variation (course) and the composition (character) of late-Victorian British exports. The first substantive chapter focuses specifically on Anglo-American trade, which was the largest bilateral flow of trade during the first era of globalization, and finds that tariffs were the sole inter-temporal determinant of Anglo-American trade costs. The determinacy of tariffs for Anglo-American trade costs only becomes apparent when the tariff variable incorporates a measure of the bilateral American tariff toward Britain, which I purposely reconstruct. I conclude that Anglo-American trade represents a major qualification to any emerging consensus that foreign tariffs were of minor significance to the trade of late nineteenth-century Britain. The next chapter reassesses the empirical validity of the Ford thesis, which argued that a short-term causal relationship between British ex ante lending and British merchandise exports operated in the late nineteenth century. Using more recent data on bilateral British lending, I find evidence of a ‘lending-export loop’, with British ex ante lending preceding merchandise exports by a period of two years. A case study of New Zealand, which had an extraordinarily high share of Britain in its imports, reveals that the relationship was conditional upon the lending being allocated to social overhead capital. In the final substantive chapter, I construct indicators of revealed comparative advantage for British manufacturing industries for the years 1880, 1890, and 1900. In contrast with previous research, I argue that the manufacturing comparative advantages of late-Victorian Britain rested in the relatively labour non-intensive industries, and this finding remains robust even after controlling for human capital intensity. Furthermore, the manufacturing comparative advantages were neutral with respect to material intensity. While the share of inter-industry (Heckscher-Ohlin) trade in Britain’s total manufacturing trade declined throughout the late-Victorian era, it still accounted for the majority of Britain’s manufacturing trade in the 1890s.
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Rifai, Ghada Issa Said. "British economic policy in Palestine, 1919-1935 : the construction of Haifa harbour : a case study." Thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2017. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/24736.
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This dissertation addresses the question of how Britain was able to achieve its imperial goals in Palestine in spite of the limitation imposed by the League of Nations' mandate system. To do so, it investigates the construction of Haifa harbour as a case study. The crucial issue was that Britain as the mandatory power and as a founding member of the League of Nations was compelled to adhere to the open door clause and give foreign nationals access to economic opportunities in the mandated territories. Conformity with the mandate system provided the legitimacy necessary for the British government to control Palestine in the context of the new international law that emerged as a result of World War I, prohibiting annexation of acquired territories. Debates in Whitehall occurred about how to obtain economic and strategic benefits whilst keeping rivals away and without breaching the mandate system. Broadly speaking, the Colonial Office's position was to follow the traditional colonial approach while the Foreign Office insisted on adapting to the new global regulations. On several issues policy functioned: on the method of carrying out the harbour works; on the issuing of a loan for Palestine; and on efforts to convince the Iraq Petroleum Company to adopt a route for the oil pipeline from Iraq to terminate in Haifa. This was also made possible due to the British government's employment of an interventionist policy. With the completion of the construction at Haifa harbour, the British government was able to achieve a balance between its own interests and the requirements of the international community and the needs of the local inhabitants.
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Strachey, Antonia. "The Princely States v British India : fiscal history, public policy and development in modern India." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. https://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4bceba59-198a-4be8-b405-b9448fd70126.
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This dissertation examines how direct versus indirect rule shaped late colonial India through government finance. Fiscal policy has hitherto been overlooked in the literature on Indian economic history. This thesis considers how revenues were raised and spent in the Princely States compared with British India, and the welfare outcomes associated with these fiscal decisions. Part One examines the fiscal framework through the neglected public accounts. The key finding is that while the systems of taxation were broadly similar in both types of administration, patterns of public expenditure were dramatically different. The large Princely States spent more public revenue on social expenditure. This was made possible by lower proportionate expenditure on security and defence. Part one charts these trends empirically and unearths political and institutional reasons for the differences in fiscal policy between directly and indirectly ruled India. Part Two examines welfare. The study goes beyond previous anthropometric scholarship by assessing the impact of institutions and policies on biological living standards, deploying a new database of adult male heights in South India. Puzzlingly, heights were slightly lower in the Princely States, traditionally lauded for being more responsive to the needs of their populations, especially those of low status. The resolution to the conundrum is found in poorer initial conditions, and caste dynamics. Higher social expenditure and reduced height inequality occurred simultaneously in the States from the 1910s, suggesting policies directed at low status groups within the Princely States may have been successful. I also examine the consequences of Britain's policy of constructing an extensive rail network across the country. Importantly, the impact of railways differed by caste. Railways were good for High Caste groups, and bad for low status Dalit and Tribal groups. This suggests that railways served to reinforce the existing caste distinctions in access to resources and net nutrition.
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Huggins, Michael John. "'Monstrous game of speculation' : flat racing and British society c1790-1914; a social and economic history." Thesis, Lancaster University, 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.246128.
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Dowey, James. "Mind over matter : access to knowledge and the British industrial revolution." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2017. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3525/.
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This thesis argues that the British Industrial Revolution, which marked the beginning of sustained modern economic growth, was facilitated by the blossoming in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain of the world’s first infrastructure for commercial R&D, composed of a network of ‘Knowledge Access Institutions’ (KAIs): scientific societies, ‘mechanics institutes’, public libraries, masonic lodges and other organisations. This infrastructure lowered the cost of access to knowledge for scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs, raising the productivity of R&D and encouraging a sustained increase in R&D effort. This contributed to the acceleration in technological innovation that lay behind the transition to modern economic growth. First, I define the concept of KAIs and explain how they affected the rate of economic growth. Second, I present detailed data on the KAI infrastructure and estimate its effect on the rate of technological innovation during the British Industrial Revolution, using newly constructed spatial datasets on British patents between 1700 and 1852 and exhibits at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Third, I argue that KAIs were largely exogenous to industrialisation, rooted instead in the intellectual developments of the Scientific Revolution and European Enlightenment. Fourth, I show that the prevalence of Knowledge Access Institutions was correlated with the emergence of modern economic growth across countries in the late nineteenth century and that the cost of access to knowledge was a binding constraint to economic progress shared by many countries during this period. Finally, based on the case of late nineteenth century US manufacturing, I investigate the extent to which the emergence of modern economic growth depended on the incentives to innovate rather than the capabilities lent by access to knowledge and other factors. The thesis suggests that the sharp fall in the cost of access to knowledge that we are currently experiencing may give rise to an acceleration in the rate of technological innovation in the coming decades and that policymakers should direct some effort towards mitigating the potentially harmful effects of rapid technological change.
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Halamek, Julia R. "Mechanical Transformations: The Active Roles of Machines in British Industrial-Era Writings." Cleveland State University / OhioLINK, 2021. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1623615240511243.
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Sims, Peter. "Social networks and entrepreneurship : the British merchant community of Uruguay, 1830-1875." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2014. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3177/.
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This thesis provides an overview of the social and entrepreneurial careers and strategies of merchants during the first modern “commercial” era, 1830-75. It examines merchants as migratory entrepreneurs during the integration of peripheral regions into the transatlantic economy via commerce, technology transfer, and ideology. Merchants organized, operated and expanded overseas commerce, importing textiles and exporting pastoral products. They used a variety of strategies and firm structures to discover and exploit niches in a competitive, developing market. They also influenced the process of economic development and state building as capitalists and risk-bearers, financing both production and politics. Based on archival material from diverse collections in both the United Kingdom and South America, the research offers a qualitative account of the entrepreneurial activities of the British merchant elite in Uruguay. It uses case studies of British immigrant entrepreneurs, whose privileged access to capital and technology allowed them to expand the market for imported products and to exploit upstream opportunities in modernizing export production. Uruguay’s distinctive institutional and geographical characteristics allowed merchants to access markets, maximize their social and political connections, and to hedge political and market risks. British merchants used Montevideo as an alternative regional port to Buenos Aires, and the implications of this opportunity have been underexplored in the literature. In establishing and expanding their operations in Uruguay, merchants gained region-specific capital in the form of geographically fixed upstream investments, market knowledge, and positions in elite networks. The social connections of Anglo-Uruguayan merchants were essential in providing resources and influence for their entrepreneurial activities, but were also their point of entry into the contest over the economy and polity of the River Plate region. British merchants’ incentives changed towards engagement in the political and ideological struggles of the Uruguayan civil war, the guerra grande of 1839-51, as they contested political outcomes by acting as suppliers, financiers, and lobbyists. This involvement created an AngloUruguayan subset of River Plate merchants, who went on in subsequent decades to reshape the economy through investment and entrepreneurship.
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Abuhawa, Hatim Hassan Eltahir. "British enterprise, the state and economic development in the Arab Middle East Banks and cotton, 1864-1939." Thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2000. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.391670.
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Koerner, Stephen. "The British motor cycle industry, 1935-1975." Thesis, University of Warwick, 1995. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/2614/.
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Between 1935 and 1975, the British motor cycle industry declined from world supremacy to bankruptcy. The industry blamed its troubles on government policy, specifically taxation and regulation. These, it was maintained, had weakened and manufacturers' ability to effectively meet foreign competition, particularly after 1960 from Japan. The existing historiography has identified boardroom mismanagement as the main culprit. However, what the literature lacks is a wider perspective, especially one which extends to the period before 1945. Those years are critical to understanding the nature of the industry. This dissertation provides such a perspective combined with an analysis based on extensive primary research, particularly amongst recently opened trade and company records, as well as government documents at the Public Records Office. Although no single factor was entirely responsible for the industry's downfall, this dissertation will offer several explanations of varying importance. The failure to develop a cheap, lightweight motor cycle is particularly significant. This, in turn, reflected a 'management culture' which prevailed within many company boardrooms. The 'culture' was closely related to and influenced by a deep seated dedication to motor cycle sport and resulted in a narrow view of the market and the 'typical' consumer, both in Britain and abroad.
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Peplow, Stephen. "What causes a cabinet to change its mind? the British farmer and the state 1818-2004." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2007. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/895.
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The two centuries from 1818 to 2004 cover profound social and economic
changes in what was, for much of the period, the most powerful country in the
world. Britain led the way in moving capital and labour out of agriculture and into
newer industries, such as coal-mining, textiles and transportation. The changes
were accompanied by deep institutional changes, especially in the franchise. The
rate of change is remarkable: within seventy years Britain was almost completely
democratic, in contrast to the 'rotten boroughs' and virtual feudalism of the pre-
1832 unreformed Parliaments. The changes are mirrored in the role given to
agriculture within society, and in particular the amount and type of economic rent
transferred from the consumer and the taxpayer to the farmer. This thesis uses
two centuries of data and 'survival analysis' statistical techniques to show that
Olson's celebrated theory of collective action can be substantiated in a dynamic
context. I show that as the share of farmers in the workforce diminishes, and their
relative wealth shrinks, the probability of the Cabinet increasing protection grows.
The reverse is also the case, showing that the Cabinet responds positively to
pressures from a group whose utility was diminishing.
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Machin, Stephen. "The impact of unions on economic performance : empirical tests using British micro-data." Thesis, University of Warwick, 1988. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/106625/.
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To date, most applied econometric work analysing the effects of British trade unions has concentrated on their effect on relative wages. However, a considerable body of U.S. evidence suggests that unions significantly influence other economic variables. This thesis attempts to explore some of these issues using British data and uses econometric techniques to consider the effects of unions on productivity, profitability and the relationship between unionism and schemes which link workers' pay to performance. As the tendency in recent years has been for collective bargaining to take place at the level of the plant or Arm in Britain the study prefers to use micro-economic data and several such data sources are accessed. The main finding is that trade unions certainly exert a significant influence on the behaviour of plants and firms in Britain in the early 1980's. Unions are found to reduce productivity in larger firms but have no impact in small firms in a sample of engineering firms. Using data on large British firms the union impact on profitability is observed to be negative but more marked in situations of market power so that unions effectively re-channel excess profits from capital to labour. The union impact on the financial performance of two large cross-sections of British establishments is also found to be negative and again more marked where these plants are able to exert some degree of product market power. Finally, union presence is positively related to the incidence of share ownership and profit sharing schemes unless strong unions are present when such schemes are no more likely to be present than in non-union workplaces. These results are of considerable interest and. despite the underlying macroeconomic and political climate, union activity is observed to have important economic effects in Britain in the early 1980's.
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Davies, Timothy. "British private trade networks in the Arabian seas, c.1680-c.1760." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2012. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/56346/.
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This thesis explores the networks of British private trade based in the Arabian Seas, between c.1680 and c.1760, with a focus on the period between 1700 and 1740. It draws from the extensive records of the East India Company and numerous collections of private papers to look at how this mercantile trade was shaped, organised and constrained by the particular circumstances of the western Indian Ocean region. The unusual constellation of economic and political factors within the world of the Arabian Seas affected British private trade in significant ways during the pre-colonial period: political turmoil, piracy and commercial competition placed constraints on the successful operation of commerce. Shifting regional dynamics also underpinned the growth and greater success of private trade in the second half of the period under review. The thesis is therefore concerned with how British merchants conducted trade as part of a global commercial empire, whilst remaining embedded in specific local economic and political settings. Challenging and moving beyond existing work that has concentrated on the Bay of Bengal and Coromandel Coast regions, this study emphasises the regional specificity and unevenness of the British private trade system across maritime Asia. It makes use of, and builds upon, a number of theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches from recent work on maritime trade and early modern merchant networks in both the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds.
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Tait, Irvine Wallace. "Voluntarism and the state in British social welfare 1914-1939." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 1995. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/5065/.
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The New Right's critique of the welfare state has generated considerable interest in the history of alternative forms of welfare provision. Recent work has focused upon the continued existence of voluntarism alongside the growth of twentieth century state welfare. In doing this, it has reacted against the tendency of post-war social welfare writing to concentrate exclusively on the statutory social services. This thesis, therefore, adds to a growing body of writing on inter-war voluntary social action. However, it differs from the work of others by focusing upon the interplay of voluntary and statutory sectors in the face of war, industrial unrest and mass unemployment: in other words the upheavals of the early twentieth century. The main body of the research not only deals with the part played by both sectors in the delivery of social services, but also places voluntarism in a wider social context by exploring its ideological response to working-class assertiveness. Indeed, the belief in a British national community with interests that transcended class or sectional divisions was a common feature in voluntarism's attitude towards the above challenges and their implications for social stability. Thus, by highlighting the class objectives of the middle-class volunteer, this thesis avoids treating voluntary groups as simply the deliverers of social services in partnership with the state. As middle-class organisations operating within civil society, the charities covered in the pages ahead are placed alongside the state and capital in the defence of the existing economic and social order. Differences may have existed amongst charities over the correct mix in the statutory-voluntary welfare mix, but, as this thesis seeks to prove, this should not blind us to voluntarism's commitment to an over riding class interest.
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Huf, Benjamin. "Making Things Economic: Theory and Government in New South Wales, 1788-1863." Phd thesis, Canberra, ACT : The Australian National University, 2018. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/154253.
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This thesis is a study of the invention and
consolidation of a domain of knowledge and government we today
denominate as the ‘economic’ in the particular context of the
British colonisation of New South Wales. Two lines of argument
are pursued. The first recovers the idea of British imperialism
in New South Wales as an ‘economic’ project, in which
phenomena that have been typically assumed as essential to
colonial development – convict work, land settlement, wool
growing, migration and their impact on Aboriginal societies –
came to be classified, organised and administered as distinctly
economic problems. As imperial and colonial authorities
increasingly appropriated the ‘constitutive metaphors’ of
Ricardian political economy in their reports, inquiries and
correspondence, they re-narrated these phenomena from discrete
problems of state to integrated dynamics of production,
distribution and wealth-accumulation. This economic project is
studied in distinction from, even as it intersected with, the
paradigms of democratisation, settler colonialism and
legal-positivist statism with which historians have tended to
frame the colony’s political and intellectual history in the
first half of the nineteenth century. Its legacies, in the
identities it forged and projects it legitimated, have been as
enduring as the colonial constitution but less closely assessed.
The second line of argument, arising from this reading of
colonial history, revises the significance of nineteenth-century
political economy as an emergent political vocabulary in a
nascent Australian political culture, and in English-speaking
Anglophone culture more generally. In appropriating political
economy as an official discourse, imperial authorities not only
helped insulate the ‘economic’ as a domain of knowledge, but
consolidated a new, reductive framework for interpreting,
governing and debating social interaction, regulated by the
imperatives of supply and demand, profits and wages. Together,
these two lines of argument are offered as a critical exercise in
recovering and recognising the historical functioning of economic
language in official, public and everyday speech. They provide a
fresh perspective on aspects of the colonial past, and recover
legacies which continue to shape our world today.
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Nahum, Andrew. "World War to Cold War : formative episodes in the development of the British aircraft industry, 1943-1965." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2002. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3568/.
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This thesis studies the evolution of the aircraft industry as it emerged from the Second World War and its relationship with the State, running through to the re-evaluation of this State-industry relationship from the late 1950s and into the 1960s. It takes, for this purpose, major formative events which, it is argued, had a defining influence on the shape of industry and its relationship with government, beginning with the reconstruction plans for the huge war-time industry, formulated within the Ministry of Aircraft Production with a powerful input from Sir Stafford Cripps. Thus considerable attention is given to the development of the Whittle jet engine and its effect on British aviation. A new assessment stresses the importance of the jet to hopes in Britain for the capability of the industry, but also discusses and uncovers the reasons for the strains in the war-time relationship between Whittle and the MAP which nearly proved fatal to the project. The role of the government research at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough, which was crucial to the industry during the competitive contest of Cold War aeronautical development, is also examined. Detailed case studies of the progress of civil and military engine and aircraft programmes are used in this period to examine the nature of the government/industry relationship and its changing pattern over time. This study takes the position that the progress of the British aircraft industry in the post-war period must be explained not only in terms of evolving national defence objectives and technological developments, but also in terms of day-today institutionalised government policy and episodic major political shifts. This analysis therefore represents the intersection of a history of technology with a socio-cultural and political account.
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Von, Brescius Meike. "Private enterprise and the China trade : British interlopers and their informal networks in Europe, c.1720-1750." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2016. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/86042/.
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Access to China and its wealth of manufactured goods was long sought by the European ‘monopoly Companies’, yet a direct and regular trade between Europe and the South China coast was only established around the turn of the eighteenth century. By focusing on the private trade and interloping activities of British-born China traders, this thesis shows how this branch of commerce took root and expanded within a transnational European trading arena between c.1720 to 1750. Interlopers, or free agents, I argue, played a highly integrative role for the development of European markets for Chinese goods and the networks of supply and capital that underpinned the trade. British-born Canton traders, who were operating in the smaller interloping East India Companies established close connections between Britain and the continent and between the different ‘national’ East India Companies. Private trade records, merchant letters, and East India Company materials form the large source base of this study and are used to analyse the ways in which cross-border mobility encouraged the transfer of expertise, capital, and information between different East India ventures. Methodologically, this work draws on, and builds upon the extensive scholarship on networks and the transnational. It is not biographical, yet follows a number of key individuals and their largely overlapping networks in order to shed light on the question how Canton traders (and British-born interlopers in particular) operated in the European market place – not merely as collective importers of foreign consumer goods, but as independent merchants, whose trade in Chinese goods ranged from wholesale buying and selling, brokering, smuggling, and the fulfilment of special commissions for clients across Europe.
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Gent, John. "Abundance and scarcity : classical theories of money, bank balance sheets and business models, and the British restriction of 1797-1818." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2016. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3435/.
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The thesis looks through the lens of bank balance sheet accounting to investigate the structural change in the British banking system between 1780 and 1832, and how classical quantity theorists of money attempted to respond to the ensuing financialisation of the wartime economy with its growing reliance on credit funded with paper-based instruments (the ‘Vansittart system’ of war finance). The thesis combines contributions to three separate fields to construct a holistic historical example of the challenges faced by monetary economists when ‘modelling’ financial innovation, credit growth, ‘fringe’ banking, and agent incentives – at a time of radical experimentation: the suspension of the 80-year-old gold standard (“the Restriction”). First, critical text analysis of the history of economics argues that the 1809-10 debate between Ricardo and Bosanquet at the peak of the credit boom, bifurcated classical theory into two timeless competing policy paradigms advocating the ‘Scarcity’ or ‘Abundance’ of money relative to exchange transactions. The competing hypotheses regarding the role of money and credit are identified and the rest of the thesis examines the archival evidence for each. Second, the core of the thesis contributes to the historical literature on banking in relation to money by reconstructing a taxonomy of bank business models, their relationships with the London inter-bank settlement system, and their responses to the Restriction - drawing on some 17,000 mostly new data points collected from the financial records of London and Country banks. The final section contributes to the economic history of money by constructing aggregated views of total bank liabilities from the firm-level data, scaled to recently available British GDP estimates. These are examined to establish (with hindsight) the relative merits and lacuna of the competing theoretical hypotheses postulated by political economists. It was the period of deleveraging after 1810 that revealed the lacuna of both paradigms.
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Geiger, Till. "Studies in the political economy and economic impact of British defence expenditure and American military aid to Britain, 1945-1955." Thesis, University of Aberdeen, 1998. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.302297.
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This dissertation examines political aspects and the economic impact of the British defence effort during the period of the first cold war (1945-1955). The study consists of nine case studies which are grouped under three headings - Studies in the Political Economy of British Defence Expenditure, Studies in the Economic Impact of British Defence Expenditure, and Studies in the Political Economy of American Military Aid to Britain. These case studies stress the historical contingent nature of the British defence effort reflecting the experience of the second world war. Aware of the country's military and economic vulnerability, policy-makers remained determined to maintain a global presence and a high level of military preparedness. However, policy-makers failed to assess critically whether this policy was appropriate for the nuclear age and the cold war. As a consequence, the governments' foreign and defence policy imposed considerable costs on the economy and society. For example, its defence procurement policy led to subsidising under-employed defence production capacity in order to preserve the military production base for another global war. During the Korean war the commitment to this defence procurement strategy induced an over-commitment to defence production which reduced British economic growth in this period. This over-commitment of resources to defence contributed to the relatively slower growth of the British economy from the early 1950s onwards. During the Korean war, the British government embarked on an arguably excessive defence programme, because ministers sought to insure a lasting American commitment to the defence of western Europe. As a consequence, Britain paid the price for its military and economic vulnerability in terms of slower economic growth.
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Klingensmith, James Meade Jr. "Reinventing Britain: British National Identity and the European Economic Community, 1967-1975." Oberlin College Honors Theses / OhioLINK, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=oberlin1337116642.
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Miller, Emma. "British television coverage of the global South : case studies in content and audience reception." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2003. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/6867/.
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The starting point of this thesis is that British television coverage of the developing world is increasingly limited, both in terms of quantity and the lack of background information. There tends to be very little coverage of developing countries, and what there is doesn't explain them very well. This thesis aims to use this starting point as a basis for exploring ways in which television coverage might be improved in order to develop public knowledge and enable audiences to place issues affecting developing countries in a wider context of globalisation. Television is the focus of this research because it remains the key source of news information in Britain. A key aim is to assess how far the neo-liberal ideology that supports globalisation is replicated in television reporting of the South. The other side of this assessment is the availability of alternative views and explanations. The analysis will examine these questions empirically. The empirical work undertaken for this research involved a detailed examination of television coverage of the global South, and of audience responses to it. One of the aims here is to identify the contextual information that helps make sense of such world affairs. To do this, the thesis is divided into three parts. Part One will discuss the context of capitalist globalisation, including economic, political and cultural aspects. The second part of this thesis examines how television covers the majority world and how it explains events and their relation to globalisation. Part Three consists of the audience reception component of this research.
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Purdie, Gavin Ernest. "The British Agency House in Malaysia and Nigeria : evolving strategy in commodity trade." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2018. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/9021/.
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The thesis compares the business activities of a particular type of British overseas trading company, the Agency House, in two former British colonies, Malaysia and Nigeria. The thesis charts the commercial and political circumstances that heralded the arrival of the Agency House in each colony and the companies’ rapid business growth thereafter while trading under the relative security offered by the British Empire. The thesis then examines the firms’ development in the aftermath of empire as the selected companies struggled to survive in independent nations. Here, each of the London-domiciled boards faced a very different set of commercial conditions overseas, which were largely shaped by politics both home and abroad. Each firm was forced into tough decisions on trade strategy to safeguard interests overseas and thereafter placate an increasingly hostile host regime. After independence, the Agency House, as obvious and symbolic reminders of imperialism, became targets for punitive legislation aimed at redressing imbalances in the private sector and achieving the repatriation of corporate wealth in each of the selected nations. The commodity trade was the basis for the development of the Agency House in each former colony. In Malaysia, a British-financed estate industry spread rapidly in response to escalating demand for rubber at the start of the 20th century. By the 1950s, for a number of reasons, the estate industry moved from rubber to oil palm cultivation, which quickly became a catalyst for a huge expansion in the plantation industry, the evidence of which is etched across the nation’s topography today. In Nigeria, the production of (although not trade in) commodities always remained the remit of indigenes only which was enshrined in law, both colonial and nationalist, despite the lobbying by resident British traders. This was one of a number of factors examined in the thesis to understand why trade there could not keep pace with the British estate development taking place in Malaysia and despite Nigeria’s long history in the export of commodities like palm oil. Examining the commodity trade of each nation helps to explain the growth of the British Agency House to become commercial powerhouses in each nation. The thesis therefore looks at the strategy of each firm, the trade they were engaged in and thereafter how each attempted to survive when confronted by increasingly hostile nationalist legislation. It will also explain why only one of the Agency Houses examined here continues to trade today.
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Anderson, Matthew. "The British Fair Trade Movement, 1960-2000 : a new form of global citizenship?" Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2009. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/512/.
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This thesis is concerned with the development of a Fair Trade social movement in Britain between 1960 – 2000. It situates the analysis of Fair Trade within the context of historical debates about political consumption. It examines the role of the ethical consumer as a political activist and questions whether Fair Trade has led to a new understanding of the meaning of global citizenship. It is argued that contemporary questions about the limitations of Fair Trade as a model for international development should be grounded in an informed understanding of the intellectual and applied origins of the movement. Revisiting the origins of Fair Trade is not only an important academic exercise but provides the movement with an opportunity to reassess its core values. The intellectual origins of the movement are considered with reference to the nineteenth century thinkers and consumer campaigns. Although building on the politics of the past, the messages and organisational structure of Fair Trade represented a new and distinctly modern approach to campaigning more closely aligned with the ‘new social movements’ than traditional labour or consumer politics. The roles of the main actors are explored, including development non-governmental organisations, religious groups, consumer organisations, co-operatives and supermarkets. While acknowledging the consumer at the heart of the Fair Trade movement, it is argued that what is needed is a more nuanced approach to our understanding of ethical consumerism.
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Kanwar, Ranvir Singh. "States, firms, and oil : British policy, 1939-54." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2000. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/55809/.
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New evidence from the records of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now British Petroleum) and Shell for the period, 1939-45 supplements accounts of British oil relations based on state archives. This historical account demonstrates the continuity between the interwar industry cartel and the Allied wartime collaboration orchestrated through industry committees. The companies made use of their quasi-official position to manage crisis of prewar arrangements aggravated by the war which presaged the rapid expansion of postwar Middle East production. The companies then shaped the Anglo-American Oil Agreements of 1944 and 1945, establishing a basis for remaking their position in the Middle East, expanding the web of interfirm relations. The nationalisation of Anglo- Iranian in 1951 threatened the web and the companies were able to embargo nationalised Iranian oil and thus bankrupt the state. This society of oil majors was constituted by shared understandings and interests cultivated by the companies. Structures of private governance may be quite significant factors for states allied to them. The United Kingdom was more closely tied into the system of private governance that prevailed in international oil in the middle decades of the century than was the United States and consequently was able to call on more resources to resist United States initiatives during this period. British influence persisted in the oil issue-area, in spite of greater United States resources overall, because of this close working relationship between state and companies. Close examination of the relationship reveals the extent of penetration by the companies into both the decision-malting and implementation of foreign relations. The `national' interest was thus articulated through an interplay of Governmental and corporate agendas, and this supports a general argument that `national' power is not exercised solely by the state, but by the state in cooperation with other powerful social institutions. Non-state actors and their archives may enrich the study of foreign relations.
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Velkar, Aashish. "Markets, standards and transactions : measurements in nineteenth-century British economy." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 2008. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/109/.
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This thesis is concerned with measurements used in economic activity and investigates how historical markets managed transactional problems due to unreliable measurements. Existing literature has generally associated the problems of measurements in historical markets with the lack of uniformity in weights and measures. This thesis shows that metrological standardization was not sufficient to ensure reliability of measurements. Markets developed mensuration practices that enabled markets to address specific transactional issues in micro-contexts. This involved, in addition to the use of standardized metrology, improved governance of transactions, third party monitoring and guaranteeing, and other institutional solutions. Historical institutional arrangements were altered or replaced as a result of changing or standardizing mensuration practices. The thesis also makes a conceptual contribution in terms of understanding the process of standardization. It shows how, while standards can be inflexible and rationalized (i.e. limited in number), standardized practices can incorporate a number of such standards and be flexible in terms which standard to be used in a given context. Analytically, standardized practices are institutional objects that are determined endogenously and are formed in 'packages' that create interlinks between standards, other artefacts, rules and people. These arguments are developed by studying three detailed cases of mensuration practices in the British economy during the nineteenth-century. The case of the London Coal Trade examines how altered mensuration practices gave buyers greater assurance that the amount of coal they received was actually the amount they purchased. The case of the wire industry illustrates the struggles to define a uniform set of wire sizes that could overcome the disputes arising from incompatible and multiple ways of measuring wire sizes. The case of the wheat markets illustrates the complexity involved in developing standards of measurements such that quality could be reliably measured ex-ante. Through these case studies, the thesis shows how markets developed different mensuration practices to manage measurements in a given context.
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McKillip, James D. "Norway House: Economic Opportunity and the Rise of Community, 1825-1844." Thèse, Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/20520.
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This dissertation argues that the Hudson’s Bay Company depot that was built at Norway House beginning in 1825 created economic opportunities that were sufficiently strong to draw Aboriginal people to the site in such numbers that, within a decade of its establishment, the post was the locus of a thriving community. This was in spite of the lack of any significant trade in furs, in spite of the absence of an existing Aboriginal community on which to expand and in spite of the very small number of Hudson’s Bay Company personnel assigned to the post on a permanent basis. Although economic factors were not the only reason for the development of Norway House as a community, these factors were almost certainly primus inter pares of the various influences in that development.
This study also offers a new framework for the conception and construction of community based on documenting day-to-day activities that were themselves behavioural reflections of intentionality and choice. Interpretation of these behaviours is possible by combining a variety of approaches and methodologies, some qualitative and some quantitative. By closely counting and analyzing data in archival records that were collected by fur trade agents in the course of their normal duties, it is possible to measure the importance of various activities such as construction, fishing and hunting. With a clear understanding of what people were actually doing, it is possible to interpret their intentions in the absence of explicit documentary evidence.
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Ellerby, Clive Richard. "British interests in the Falkland Islands : economic development, the Falkland lobby and the sovereignty dispute, 1945 to 1989." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1990. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:9b49beee-e54f-4190-8f0b-403289776cba.
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The aim of the thesis is to study the circumstances which influenced the policy of the British Government towards the decolonization of the Falklands from 1945 to 1989. A comprehensive approach to the subject enabled an examination of the inter-relationship between the various forces which defined the nature of the dilemma. The themes included economic development, the form of landownership in the Colony, Falkland politics, the strategic value of the Islands, Anglo- Argentine trade and the Antarctic dimension. The thesis presents an original interpretation of how volatile and unpredictable pressures defined the dispute. A pattern emerges which shows that Government policy consisted of responses to different situations. The structure is based on a chronological approach which concentrates on the seven major turning-points in the dispute and how they were perceived in Britain and the Falklands. It also includes three original case studies. First, there is a socio- economic study of the peculiar approach to the colonization of the Falklands in the nineteenth century which provides a background to later developments. Secondly, the 1982 Conflict shows how the problems of the last British colonial territories can be in inverse proportion to their size. Thirdly, the examination of the Falkland Lobby gives a detailed account of how a successful British pressure group is organized. The primary sources used were Foreign and Colonial Office files at the Public Records Office (Kew) for the period up to the 1950s, and the archives of the Falkland Islands Association for the period from the mid-1960s. These were supplemented by private papers, the records of the Falkland Islands Company in London, interviews with prominent people, contemporary newspapers, official documents and secondary sources.
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Rose, Diana. "Representations of madness on British television : a social psychological analysis." Thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science (University of London), 1995. http://etheses.lse.ac.uk/3178/.
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This thesis attempts to describe and delineate the ways in which madness is represented on British television. The empirical analyses are guided by two theoretical approaches. These are social psychology, particularly the theory of social representations, and media studies. The central findings are that madness is very strongly associated with violence on British television; that nearly all representations are negative; that there is a lack of explanation and accounting for madness; that psychiatric experts are tinged with the same negative evaluations and even violence that characterises the representations of those who are mentally distressed; that there is multiplicity and confusion in the representations and that filming styles mark off the mad person as different to other characters who appear in the data. These findings lead to the argument that the mad person is constituted as Other on British television. The empirical data are compared to the theoretical frameworks and it is proposed that, in terms of the theory of social representations, mental illness is not represented in the same way as other social objects. Madness does not obey the laws of representation as proposed by social psychologists. Rather the mad person resists safe classification and thereby is constructed as a fearful Other. The thesis also attempts to integrate theoretical ideas from social psychology and media studies. It is suggested that there is scope for this around the concepts of narrative structure, cardinal news values and dramatic form although integrating postmodernist approaches is more difficult. The methodological contribution of the thesis consists in the attempt to combine quantitative and qualitative means of analysis and to eschew the search for underlying meanings or deep structures. Future work will build on current analyses of audience responses to media representations of mental illness and will also look at those responsible for television productions. It is argued that the symbolic environment of television has an impact on social attitudes towards mental illness and may adversely affect the policy of caring for mentally distressed people in community, social settings.
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Motono, Eiichi. "Chinese-British commercial conflicts in Shanghai and the collapse of the merchant-control system in late Qing China, 1860-1906." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1994. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:27ae2da8-a15b-40e1-a0b2-bc33fc8ecbaa.
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During the 1860s, Chinese merchants reestablished their commercial organizations which are recorded as Guilds (hanghui) in the sources compiled under the guidance of the Qing local government officials. From the decade until the end of the 1880s, English sources emphasized the solidarity of the commercial organizations of Chinese merchants and their superiority to the British mercantile community in the commercial conflicts in which they were engaged. However, from the 1890s, English sources ceased to complain the strength of the commercial organizations of Chinese merchants, and, at the same time, Chinese sources emphasized the existence of a crisis in which Chinese merchants were losing their solidarity. Moreover, the Qing local government officials endeavoured to maintain their control over the commercial organizations of Chinese merchants, an attempt which led to the birth of Chinese chambers of commerce in the early twentieth century. Former studies, which dealt with the superiority of the Chinese merchants' organizations to the British mercantile firms in the 1860s and the 1870s, or the birth of the Chinese bourgeoisie and the activities of their commercial organizations in the early twentieth century, have not been able to reveal what happened in the commercial organizations of the Chinese merchants during the late nineteenth century. The solidarity of the Chinese merchant organizations was maintained by the rule that no one could claim the privilege of doing business without paying the Lijin tax imposed upon it, and the collapse of their solidarity began with when some Chinese compradors and merchants found it possible to do their business without keeping this rule by means of cooperating British mercantile firms, who enjoyed key privi- leges under the Treaties as regards non-payment of the Lijin tax and investment on the basis of limited liability. By intensively analyzing three commercial conflicts between prominent Chinese merchant organizations and British mercantile firms that took place in Shanghai between the end of the 1870s and the end of the 1880s, this study reveals how, and under what conditions some Chinese compradors and merchants could do their business without observing the afore-mentioned rule governing the Chinese merchants' organizations, what happened when British mercantile people became aware what their compradors or cooperative Chinese merchants had doing behind their back, and how these developments contributed to the end of the old-style merchant class, and the beginning of a bourgeoisie. By bringing these facts to the surface for analysis, this study shows a little known aspect of the Chinese society and tries on the basis to re-evaluate an aspect of concept of "China's response to the Western impact."
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Dempsey, Timothy A. "Russian Rule in Turkestan: A Comparison with British India through the Lens of World-Systems Analysis." The Ohio State University, 2010. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1275340850.
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Satsuma, Shinsuke. "Ideas about the economic advantages of colonial maritime war and their impact on British politics and naval policy, 1701-1729." Thesis, University of Exeter, 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10036/104516.
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In early modern England (after 1707, Britain), there was an argument that war at sea, especially war in Spanish America, was an ideal means of warfare for England. This argument, whose origin can be traced back to the glorious memory of Elizabethan maritime war, revived at the beginning of the War of the Spanish Succession. This thesis examines this pro-maritime war argument, by focusing on its connection with its supposed economic advantages, and investigates its impact on British politics and naval policy during the war, and changes after the war. It reveals that this argument received support from politicians of different political stances because of its alleged economic advantages; colonial maritime war was expected to damage enemy financial resources while enriching Britain, and help to recover the Spanish American market where French merchants were making a rapid advance. At the same time, it makes clear that different political affiliations of the supporters created two types of pro-maritime arguments with different political functions. The thesis also shows that the supporters of colonial maritime war in the government as well as in the opposition tried to implement pro-maritime war policy by naval operations such as capture of Spanish silver fleets and colonial expeditions, and by legislation such as the American Act of 1708. However, their attempts were frustrated by diplomatic considerations, incapacity of naval administration, and by conflicting interests between several groups concerned in the West Indian colonies and Spanish American trade. After the South Sea expedition planned by the South Sea Company in 1712 did not materialise due to similar difficulties, the government focused on protection of the Spanish American trade, and refrained from taking aggressive action against Spanish colonies partly because of considerations for the interests of the company which started the Asiento trade. On the other hand, by the late 1720s the opposition, which championed the interests of private merchants, gradually came to advocate pro-maritime war policy, which eventually led up to propaganda campaigns against the Walpole ministry in the period of the War of Jenkins’s Ear.
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Russell, Bernard. "The trend to standardization : product development in the British motor cycle industry 1896-1916." Thesis, City University London, 1985. http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/14789/.
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The thesis is a historical study of the first twenty years of the British motor cycle industry in terms of the development of its product. The main theoretical issue is standardization, not in its usual sense as a forma l activity aimed at the setting up of standards, but as a trend the effect of which is for products to become more and more alike across the industry as a whole. Standardization in this sense is to a large extent an unintended consequence of the wish on the part of producers to design products which operate more efficiently, which can be produced more cheaply, and which have the widest possible appeal in the marketplace; and of the preference, on the part of the majority of consumers, for products which are familiar and of known reputation and performance, as against those which are new and untried. The trend to standardization is analysed into its main components , functional efficiency, production efficiency, and marketing efficiency, and these are used as the basis of a number of propositions which make it possible to consider in more depth the development of the product during the three phases of industry development : experimental, developmental, and standardization . The more substantive chapters of the thesis are organized around three main themes, the development of the industry as a whole, and the development of the product from a technical point of view, and from a consumer point of view. The main conclusion is that the development of its product into a standard form--one on which newcomers to the industry can base their own products and which consumers can recognise as reliable and worthy of purchase-is the most critical stage in the development and consolidation of a new industry.
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Hicks, Michael Edward. "The recruitment and selection of young managers by British business 1930-2000." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2004. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d95e6fb3-1717-48c3-a160-c7ebd395e474.
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A pervasive critique argues that the educational and social background of senior managers, determined largely by recruitment policies and practices, was an important contributor to the relative economic decline of Britain. The current thesis argues that this critique, even in nuanced form, suffers from serious flaws. For example, long term results of recruitment are confused with information on recruitment processes. In fact, corporate performance can only be judged by understanding the challenges that faced companies, and the limits of the options available to them. The objective of the work, then, is to outline the steps sensible recruiters should have taken to secure their needs for bright young entrants, and to describe and measure what in fact happened. Key findings are that: the criteria used by companies to define high-flier entrants – intelligence, certain personal skills, and signs of character - have remained fundamentally unchanged even if emphasis has moved. Business pursued these attributes through proxies, the most important of which was that of educational qualifications. Business was rightly slow, until the 1950s, to recruit graduate entrants because most bright young people did not attend university. Although British peculiarity in terms of non-vocationalism has been exaggerated, a lesser focus on ‘relevant’ qualifications for non-technical positions was not an economic disadvantage. Proxies for personal qualities were less robust but, over time, were replaced by better direct measurement of individual qualities. The solution found in Britain to bring educated young people together with employers through regional and national recruitment institutions, including the graduate milkround, has proven highly successful. The selection of entrants has been approached at least as well as abroad, and notably unreliable tools were avoided. Business obtained an ever growing proportion of young talent, and did so by integrating educated young people from new social strata to an extent unmatched abroad.
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Szpakowicz, Błażej Sebastian. "British trade, political economy and commercial policy towards the United States, 1783-1815." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2012. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.610189.
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St, John Ian. "A study of the problem of work effort in British industry, 1850 to 1920." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1998. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:72e07126-716e-47d1-9d97-04725e128098.
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The thesis investigates the factors determining the effort put forth by industrial workers in Britain during the second half of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. Why was so much energy and of such kinds put into work, and neither more nor less? What was the contribution of culture and institutions? And in which ways, if any, did the conduct of labour change over time? Labour effort contributes significantly to productivity differentials, between factories and across nations, and its study thus sheds light on that slackening of Britain's economic performance which historians have detected in the late Victorian period. Yet it is, additionally, a subject of interest in its own right. Work was the preponderating element in a man's daily experience, and much of the wide range of factory life found reflection in the matter of how hard he laboured and in what way. Indeed it is the contention of this thesis that an explanation of the level and forms of effort in the late nineteenth century must make reference to the workshop environment and its associated customs and social relationships. These arguments are illustrated by detailed studies of the shoe and flint-glass trades. Despite obvious contrasts between these industries, important similarities are found to exist in the issues surrounding labour effort. In both industries operatives limited output; shoe and glass employers alike contributed to the failure to fully realise the productive potential of their establishments; the social equilibrium of both industries was subject to mounting competition from overseas - a challenge compounded in the shoe trade by rapid technical change; and in each case these disruptive tendencies eventuated in industrial confrontations which, however apparently successful for employers, left the fundamental characteristics of industrial organisation unchanged. These themes were common, not merely to glass and shoe manufacture, but to a range of major industries. The culture of output limitation was, we conclude, widespread in industry in this period, and emerged from similar reasons out of similar contexts.
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Gladkikh, Tatiana. "Erosion of national identity? : the role of the international business environment in shaping the national identities of British and Russian business people." Thesis, University of Birmingham, 2011. http://etheses.bham.ac.uk//id/eprint/3164/.
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The essence of globalisation has been its influence on every aspect of post-modern social reality. However, little empirical research has considered how globalisation affects people’s perception of their national attachments. This study explores the interrelation between the international business environment and international business travellers’ understanding and construction of their national identity. By using data from 60 qualitative interviews with British (English and Scottish) and Russian business people actively involved in international business travel, the nature of their national belonging is compared and contrasted. The research identifies what constructs are employed in the research participants’ national identity claims and analyses differences and similarities in their articulations of their national belonging. Particular attention is paid to the role of the increasingly globalising international business environment in shaping the respondents’ local and cosmopolitan orientations. The study suggests that globalization affects the international business travellers’ perception of national self in two ways: while becoming more cosmopolitan they also grow more aware of their national belonging.
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Downing, Phoebe C. "Fabians and 'Fabianism' : a cultural history, 1884-1914." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:425127c1-94c1-4d20-ba58-fdd457c1f6b8.
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This thesis is a cultural history of the early Fabian Society, focusing on the decades between 1884, the Society’s inaugural year, and 1914. The canonical view is that ‘Fabianism,’ which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as the ‘doctrine and principles of the Fabian Society,’ is synonymous with State socialism and bureaucratic ‘efficiency.’ By bringing the methods of cultural history to bear on the Society’s founding members and decades, this thesis reveals that ‘Fabianism’ was in fact used as a dynamic metonymy, not a fixed doctrine, which signified a range of cultural, and even literary, meanings for British commentators in the 1890s and 1900s (Part 1). Further, by expanding the scope of traditional histories of the Fabian Society, which conventionally operate within political and economic sub-fields and focus on the Society’s ‘official’ literature, to include a close examination of the broader discursive context in which ‘Fabianism’ came into being, this thesis sets out to recover the symbolic aspects of the Fabians’ efforts to negotiate what ‘Fabianism’ meant to the English reading public. The Fabians’ conspicuous leadership in the modern education debates and the liberal fight for a ‘free stage,’ and their solidarity with the international political émigrés living in London at the turn of the twentieth century all contribute to this revised perspective on who the founding Fabians were, what they saw themselves as trying to achieve, and where the Fabian Society belonged—and was perceived to belong—in relation to British politics, culture, and society (Part 2). The original contribution of this thesis is the argument that the Fabians explicitly and implicitly evoked Matthew Arnold as a precursor in their efforts to articulate a kind of Fabian—latterly social-democratic—liberalism and a public vocation that balanced English liberties and the duty of the State to provide the ‘best’ for its citizens in education and in culture, as in politics.
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Connors, Duncan Philip. "The rôle of government in the decline of the British shipbuilding industry, 1945-1980." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2009. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/1276/.
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This thesis studies the interrelationship between government and the shipbuilding industry in the United Kingdom during the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of economic growth between 1945 and 1973. It argues that actions of government in the 1960s and 70s aimed at arresting the decline of shipbuilding as an industry instead acted first as a brake on the industry’s development and second as one of the principal agents of its decline. It does this by demonstrating that the constant government led introspection into the shipbuilding industry between 1960 and 1966 delayed investment decisions by companies that were uncertain about which direction the government would take or whether it would provide funding. This thesis also demonstrates that the Wilson Labour governments’ instruments of modernisation and change, the Shipbuilding Inquiry Committee and the Shipbuilding Industry Board, chose and imposed technical and organisational solutions on the industry that did not reflect the prevailing orthodoxy of shipbuilding in competitor nations such as Japan and Sweden. This fatally damaged the industry during a time of demand for newly constructed vessels; the cheap price of crude oil in the 1960s led to a very high demand for very large crude carriers, supertankers, capable of transporting between one quarter and one half a million tons of crude oil from the Middle East to the industrial nations of North American and Europe. However, as the case studies of the Harland and Wolff and Scott Lithgow companies in this thesis demonstrates, British shipyards were ill equipped and poorly prepared to take advantage of this situation and when finally the shipyards were positioned to take advantage of the situation, the 1973 Yom Kippur War and subsequent OPEC oil embargo took away the demand for supertankers. This was when the British government dealt the now nationalised shipbuilding industry a fatal blow, subsidising supertankers no longer in demand for purchase at a heavily subsidised price by shipping lines that would place the vessels into immediate and long-term storage. In short, this thesis illuminates the complex relationship between government and industry that led to the demise of the British shipbuilding industry.
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Rørtveit, Tore. "An imperial tradition offering more faith than science : 70 år med britisk imperiehistorie : en historiografisk analyse av behandlingen av Det østindiske handelskompanieti tre britiske historieverk på 1900-tallet /." Bergen : Department of Archaeology, History, Cultural Studies and the History of Religions, University of Bergen, 2008. https://bora.uib.no/bitstream/1956/2915/1/45488517.pdf.
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Gottwald, Carl H. "The Anglo-American Council on Productivity: 1948-1952 British Productivity and the Marshall Plan." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1999. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc279256/.
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The United Kingdom's postwar economic recovery and the usefulness of Marshall Plan aid depended heavily on a rapid increase in exports by the country's manufacturing industries. American aid administrators, however, shocked to discover the British industry's inability to respond to the country's urgent need, insisted on aggressive action to improve productivity. In partial response, a joint venture, called the Anglo-American Council on Productivity (AACP), arranged for sixty-six teams involving nearly one thousand people to visit U.S. factories and bring back productivity improvement ideas. Analyses of team recommendations, and a brief review of the country's industrial history, offer compelling insights into the problems of relative industrial decline. This dissertation attempts to assess the reasons for British industry's inability to respond to the country's economic emergency or to maintain its competitive position faced with the challenge of newer industrializing countries.
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Davies, Aled Rhys. "The city of London and British social democracy, c. 1959-1979." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:d45f1e5b-ca50-403d-a3d9-e802c78de9ba.
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This thesis considers the position of the British financial sector in the economic strategy of social democracy during the 1960s and 1970s. In doing so it attempts to shed light on a broader question – what caused the collapse of the postwar social democratic project in Britain during the final quarter of the twentieth century? It contends that the social democratic project faced a variety of challenges to its principles, assumptions, and practices in the two decades prior to the election of Margaret Thatcher as a result of changes to the financial system. These challenges offered opportunities for the advance of social democracy beyond the norms established following the Second World War, but the capacity to pursue these was constrained in a number of ways. The emergence of institutional investment, and the breakdown of the postwar banking settlement, undermined the social democratic methods for managing and controlling credit and investment, yet also offered the opportunity to advance the State’s capacity to intervene in the economy. However the ability of the left to renew and rebuild the social democratic economic project along more advanced, interventionist lines was limited by new material constraints which made extensive reform of the financial system and the domestic economy extremely difficult. Structural changes to the international financial system following the breakdown of the Bretton Woods settlement, combined with the severe economic crisis of the 1970s, imposed new limits on the freedom of governments to engage in domestic-focused macroeconomic management. As the methods and techniques of social democratic economic strategy became less effective, the ideal of developing an advanced industrial economy through State coordination faded. In its place a new conception of the British economy was promoted which sought to revive its historic liberal and internationalist role in which the City of London was at its heart.
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Smallwood, Amy Lynn. "Shore Wives: The Lives of British Naval Officers’ Wives and Widows, 1750-1815." Wright State University / OhioLINK, 2008. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=wright1216915735.
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Brown, Ruth Katharine. "The rise of the leisure painter : artistic creativity within the experience of ordinary life in postwar Britain, c. 1945-2000." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2014. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:4f9bec84-094e-4ec9-b36a-3b66e9330076.
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Since John Ruskin and William Morris's protestations against mass production in the nineteenth century, critics of mass consumption thought that it not only reduced the necessity, but also the desire, to make things for personal use and enjoyment. The history of leisure painting in art societies and adult education, and of the amateur artist’s consumption of art materials and self-help literature, shows that, on the contrary, affluence both inspired and facilitated a quest for self-actualisation amongst the rank and file. Creative activities such as drawing and painting served this quest at little financial cost to the individual. Following the Second World War, a significant increase in the take-up of leisure painting was encouraged by the state as part of the broader postwar settlement. The pursuit of personal wellbeing through creative activity was regarded as a public good, of benefit not only to individuals but also to the communities of which they were a part. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, state support for recreational pursuits such as leisure painting was pared back: in the shift from collectivist social democracy towards individualist market liberalism, personal enjoyment was recast as a private affair for which the consumer must pay. Painting continued to grow in popularity, supported by expanding consumer markets in self-help literature and affordable art materials. Yet while consumerism sustained the popularity of amateur art-making, the ways in which amateur artists participated in the arts changed. Personal creativity emerges here as an inherently social activity: the private experience of creativity is mediated and structured by society. Consumerism was not bad for personal creativity per se, but the replacement of a communitarian approach with a consumerist model restricted the breadth and reach of creative aspiration nurtured as part of the postwar settlement. By the end of the century, most amateurs were painting alone.
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Busse, Michele Conrady. "Got Silk?: Buying, Selling, and Advertising British Luxury Imports During the Stamp Act Crisis." Thesis, University of North Texas, 2007. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc3993/.
Full textAbstract:
Despite the amount of scholarship on the Stamp Act Crisis, no study has used advertisements as a main source. This study attempts to show that a valuable, objective source has been overlooked, through the quantitative analysis of 5,810 advertisements before, during and after the Stamp Act Crisis from five port cities: Boston, Charleston, Philadelphia, New York, and Portsmouth. The findings reveal the colonists' strong connection to imported British luxury goods, and a lack of interest in American-made goods, especially before and after the boycott. Advertisements also demonstrate that the decision of many merchants to place the needs and expectations of their community before their own personal gain offered a rare economic opportunity for others. The colonists' devotion to imports tested the strength of the boycott, especially among Boston merchants, who continued to advertise imported goods a good deal more than any other city. This lack of dedication to the boycott on the part of the Boston merchants shows disunity among the colonies, at a time when many argue was the first instance of colonial nationalism. Capitalism challenged and undermined a commitment to communal sentiments such as nationalism. Moreover, if Americans did share a sense of nationhood during the Stamp Act Crisis, it cannot be gauged by a rejection of "Englishness."