Anglo-Japanese Conference of Historians, 2009 

Junior sessions: Tokyo, 19 September 2009
2008. 12. 12

The AJC committee is delighted to announce that the following six young historians are selected to
read their papers at the junior sessions. Their proposals follow in alphabetical order of authors names.
Come and join us in the important, international triennial event!

日英歴史家会議 (AJC)   Senior speakers

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Mina Ishizu (University of Manchester)

Commercial finance during the Industrial Revolution: a study of local, national and international credit 1800-1837

 

The proposed paper re-examines the extent to which commercial finance determined the development pattern of British financial system during the early nineteenth century. It seeks empirically to evaluate the impact of transatlantic trade on the development of the financial system at local level as well as at national and international levels.

The paper accords with a growing emphasis on the mercantile origins of the Industrial Revolution. The theory concerning the impact of transatlantic economy on industrialisation appears relevant in explaining the pattern of industrialisation. In financial history, this factor remains poorly explored. Many aspects of the British financial system of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries tend to be explained from domestic, London-centred views. As a result, traditional scholarship has placed the emphasis on industrial and manufacturing finance in explaining the development of the British financial system. The consequence is that commercial trade finance remains much neglected. However, as recent studies have emphasised the impact of the transatlantic economy on British industrialisation, commercial trade finance needs to be taken into account by financial historians.

Understanding the transatlantic influence upon the development of the British financial system involves a geographical shift in research interest from the London-centred or manufacturing-region concentrated tradition of economic/financial history. Considering the growth of Liverpool as a hub of the domestic and the Atlantic economies during the period in question, the paper focuses upon textile trade finance in the port city of Liverpool and its hinterlands in Lancashire. By focusing upon bill finance, this thesis is able to examine the role of the Lancashire banks in financing transatlantic trade in greater depth, than, for example, T. S. Ashton and S. G. Checkland were able to achieve in their classical studies in the 1940s and 1950s.

The paper draws upon various source materials including a collection of bills received by Parker & Sons, the Manchester calico merchants; and business correspondence and ledgers of two large textile firms, Horrocks & Co of Preston and Lupton & Co of Leeds. The paper demonstrates that there occurred a re-route of textile bill circulation at a national level during the first three decades of the nineteenth century. It was likely that the long term shifts in credit terms in textile commerce acted as a cause in this diversion of textile bill discounting from London to northwest local money markets. The northern textile firms had enjoyed favourable credit terms provided by local goods suppliers. No doubt this had helped the firms to venture into new overseas markets in their goods exports. Overextend credit provision curtailed in the mid 1820s – more precisely the commercial crisis in 1825 – the textile merchants now faced the demand from their suppliers for cash payments: hence increased their reliance upon credit provision / bill discounting by local banking houses. This period saw the maturation of banking institutions in the northwest. The banks were more firmly linked with the national bill discounting system which met the growing demand from the local mercantile community for regular and large credit provision.

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Takeshi Nakamura (Osaka University)
Belisarius the counterfeit? Lord Cochrane and Westminster radicalism, 1807-1818

 

Thomas, Lord Cochrane, later the 10th earl of Dundonald (1775–1860), was one of the most prominent and romantic but controversial figures in early nineteenth-century Britain. As an audacious naval commander and a liberator of the South American countries, Cochrane was greatly acclaimed by his contemporaries and successive generations and became the source of inspiration for novelists such as C.S. Forester and Patrick O’Brian. However, his wayward genius and maverick character often got him into trouble with his superiors and the establishment. In particular, his involvement in the great stock exchange hoax of 1814, which cast a dark shadow on his fame as a naval hero, has long been a matter of debate amongst historians and his biographers. As a political radical, Cochrane was usually regarded as the most colourful and attractive character in that period, but his name has been curiously absent from the historiography of British radicalism; without in-depth investigations, historians have agreed that his contribution to parliamentary and popular politics is inconsequential.

This paper attempts to consider Cochrane’s political career and the scope of restorative/romantic radicalism in the Napoleonic period with special attention given to both the cultural significance of the Georgian navy and popular politics in the City of Westminster. Few historians have noticed the fact that Westminster was one of the most important sites of naval commemoration since the American war: distinguished admiral heroes, including Cochrane, were successively elected for this popular constituency. Despite this, there was a profound difference between Cochrane and his predecessors; whilst political admirals in pre-radical Westminster, for example, Lords Hood and Gardner, were supporters of the Pitt administration, resulting in their political posture being characterized as loyalist, Cochrane turned a radical and condemned the ‘Old Corruption’. To study the Westminster electoral culture and London-centric radicalism, we should not neglect the continuity and discrepancy in the conventions of naval representatives, which can constitute an integral part of metropolitan political culture.

In order to understand the significance of naval hero in radical Westminster, this paper chronologically examines the following points: (1) the negotiation and contestation of the language of ‘independence’ and the image of ‘Jack Tar’ in the 1807 Westminster election, (2) the construction of Cochrane’s popularity as a ‘Second Nelson’ at the time of military debacles and corruption and (3) the correlation between naval heroics, patriotism and the cause of liberty in the post-Napoleonic period. This paper subsequently reveals the way in which popular attitudes, anticipations and beliefs were shaped and mediated in the presence of naval hero in metropolitan politics. In fact, Cochrane could not only secure support from his electorates owing to his double character as a naval officer and a radical but was also successful in mounting an effective and inimitable radical opposition to the establishment. Furthermore, even after the Napoleonic wars, the cultural and political significance of the navy continued to be enhanced and disseminated among the political nation because of Cochrane’s standing in Westminster.

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Hiroaki Osawa (King’s College London)

Logics of humanitarianism: Wesleyan Methodists and the Bechuana question in the 1880s

 

Were Christianity and imperialism/colonialism compatible? Lively debates have revolved around this question recently amongst scholars of the British Empire. It was once taken for granted that British Christian churches (particularly overseas missionaries) were unequivocal agents of the empire, but the recent revisionist studies by Brian Stanley (The Bible and the Flag, 1990), Andrew Porter (Religion versus Empire?, 2004), Norman Etherington ([ed.] Missions and Empire, 2005), and others, have emphasised more subtle and complex interrelationships between religion and empire. In this view, Wesleyan Methodists’ bearings on the Bechuana question in the 1880s, a theme that has never been seriously considered in both British and South African historiographies, and their “humanitarianism” (critical responses to overexploitation of the colonised by the colonisers) in particular, provides an interesting and fresh perspective on the question.

In the 1880s, the question of Bechuanaland (today’s Botswana and the northern Cape) aroused much public interest. In the wake of the first Anglo-Boer War (1880-1), Afrikaners of the Transvaal Republic took advantage of the confused state of affairs and sought to acquire new lands in the Republic-Bechuanaland border region. Meddling with internal disputes amongst the indigenous Tswana, the Afrikaners crossed the border and openly asserted dominion over Bechuanaland. Afrikaner expansionism met with angry protests. Wesleyans in Britain and South Africa vehemently condemned the coercive dispossession of the Tswana by the Afrikaner “freebooters” and, along with other organisations and individuals that had stakes in South Africa, subscribed to a South African Committee, a united pressure group formed to call for Britain’s humanitarian intervention, whose chairman, William McArthur, was a prominent Wesleyan layman. Interestingly, Wesleyans argued that the Afrikaners’ ambition could only be baffled by the establishment of direct British rule in Bechuanaland, which was eventually realised in 1885.

   Various motives propelled Wesleyans into the agitation against the Afrikaners’ colonisation project in Bechuanaland. Their concern for mission interests was surely crucial. They feared that their flourishing Bechuana mission would be jeopardised by the rule of the Afrikaners, whose treatment of non-white people was notorious and whose hostility to British missionaries was well-known. Meanwhile, “worldly” interests seem to have mattered too. Amongst influential Wesleyan laymen were successful merchants, whose business would have been seriously threatened if Bechuanaland had been taken by the Afrikaners. Since Bechuanaland was the only open trade route linking the Cape Colony to Central Africa, businessmen were desperate to secure it from other foreign power in the age of devastating economic slump and Protectionist European rivals’ imperial expansion. The economic aspect of the Bechuana question must have been significant to men like William MacArthur, who was an affluent merchant, an ex-Lord Mayor of the City, and a council member of the London Chamber of Commerce, another organisation vocally campaigning for British annexation of Bechuanaland. In this paper, I will explore, with the recent trends of religious and economic history of the British Empire in view, the nature of Wesleyans’ humanitarian responses to the Bechuana question by looking into its secular as well as religious foundations in imperial context.

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Akiko Shimbo (Meiji Gakuin University)

Two groups of readers: ‘interactive’ use of furniture pattern books in England, c. 1750-1850

 

Recent historical studies of reading have paid attention to readership and the practice of reading. Nevertheless, details of readership are difficult to establish, and reading practice is similarly difficult to prove, because of the lack of sources. While some studies have demonstrated that there was ‘collective’ reading among some social groups, it is more difficult to find evidence of ‘interactive’ reading between different groups of readers.

   Furniture pattern books, which developed during the period 1750-1850, varied in format, but most included not only illustrations of furniture and interior design but also descriptions of design and often technical instructions. There had been few furniture pattern books before 1754, when Thomas Chippendale’s Gentleman and Cabinet-Makers’ Director was published. Most books were architectural books written by architects, and even if furniture designs were included they were marginalised and not practical. After Chippendale, however, a new genre of furniture pattern books emerged, written by furniture-makers.

     While these sources have often been used in the history of decorative arts and architecture, mainly to provide illustrations, they have been strangely overlooked in studies of other subjects. However, they deserve attention, because they contain important information not only for studies of social, cultural, and economic history, but also for historical studies of reading, providing another way of reading practice in the past.

   While the main readers of furniture pattern books were craftspeople, some books also expressed the expectation that there were prospective clients among the readers. Indeed, it appears that Chippendale’s Director was aimed at not only producers but also at consumers, explaining that the book was planned to ‘assist the one in the choice, and the other in the execution of the designs.’ Other pattern books also implied a process of ‘interactive’ reading between producers and customers, encouraging their readers to consider the budget of customers, suitability for their house, and the harmony of the room, all of which required discussion.

   Setting furniture pattern books in the discussion of the history of reading, this paper analyses the role of pattern books as an intermediary between producers and customers. The paper firstly outlines the emergence of furniture pattern books in the 1750s, and examines ‘intended’ and ‘possible’ readers through not only the text but also the size, appearance and price of the books. The paper then explores two groups of readers: craft producers and consumers, comparing pattern books with other printed media. Attention will focus on the extent to which these means of communication involved ‘participation’ on the part of readers. Some pattern books imply not only ‘collective’ reading among craftspeople but also ‘interactive’ reading between producers and customers. The final section of the paper, therefore, assesses ‘interactivity’ in the use of pattern books, by interpreting texts and correspondence between a furniture-making firm and its customers. Through the discussion of readership, this paper argues that pattern books were not just used as training manuals for craftspeople and as catalogues for consumers but were also used as the means of communication between them both.

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Miu Sugahara (Birkbeck College, London)

Livery Companies’ management of grammar schools in the suburbs of London in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries

 

It is known that there was a remarkable augmentation of educational facilities in sixteenth and seventeenth century England. Upon this phenomenon, a large number of studies have been made from various viewpoints, such as its relation to the Reformation, humanists’ ideas, a notion of social control and awareness of childhood, its impact on the literacy rate and so on. Nonetheless, the question of who contributed the educational expansion has not been fully considered yet. Especially, the role of townspeople in this trend has been underestimated though their enormous contribution is acknowledged. This distortion can be most clearly seen in the historiography of grammar schools, a considerable number of which the members of the livery companies of London founded and managed.

As to the management of the grammar schools by the livery companies of London during the period, while W. K. Jordan and I. W. Archer point out its geographical extensiveness, going even beyond the English border, its eagerness and reliability have been questioned by most scholars. In contrast, J. P. Ward, who studies the management of provincial grammar schools, suggests, though being circumscribed by distance and locality, the company governors in London struggled to manage their schools with support of the local clergy and people, and emphasises their responsiveness to the local needs. This disagreement among scholars about the Londoners’ involvement in education demands further research in actual cases within the particular local context.

So, what was the particular situation with which the contemporary Londoners were faced? Both centuries are known not only for the growth of education but also for the growth of London. Its population increased more than tenfold between 1500 and 1700, which was mainly caused by the flood of immigrants swarming outside the city wall. The relationship between this growing suburbs and the city has been one of the major topics of discussion. While some insist a social and ideological schism between them or political fragmentation of the capital from the early seventeenth century onwards, others appreciate the capacities of the existing organisations in the city, including the livery companies, to regulate the suburbs and to create a capital-wide unity through their activities until at least the Restoration. Thus, opinions diverge on the relationship between the city and the suburbs during the period, which requires a further study.

To explore these unsettled issues, this paper discusses the management of two suburban grammar schools, Coopers’ Company’s School at Stepney and Dame Alice Owen’s School at Clerkenwell and Islington, governed by the Coopers’ and Brewers’ Companies of London respectively. By analysing the company records and other related sources, the paper examines how both companies ran their schools, being situated in the different settings from the Ward’s cases, and how they negotiated with other authorities concerned, like the diocesan agents and the locals. The paper also clarifies the meanings of their management of the schools in the said circumstances of the growing metropolis.

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Satoshi Tsujimoto (University of Cambridge)

Military incompetence? Wartime services of the garrisons in Restoration England

 

Between 1660 and 1688 about thirty permanent garrisons were maintained in England. Throughout the period, they were engaged in a variety of ‘King’s services’. Defence of the respective stations was, of course, their primary duty, but not the sole one. They performed wide-ranging constabulary activities, such as putting down urban disturbances, policing smuggling and regulating religious dissent. They also undertook intelligence and ceremonial work. Perhaps most notable was their political function: a great majority of the garrison governors ― and in some cases their inferior officers too ― were actively involved in local politics on behalf of the central government, as seen most apparently in the 1680s.

                    These services, however, have attracted very little attention from historians. Although there are a few important works on the Restoration army, including John Childs’s The Army of Charles II and The Army, James II and the Glorious Revolution, only a few pages are spared for the garrisons. Parts of their activities, especially those that were political or constabulary, are mentioned in some biographical studies of specific governors or local histories of garrisoned towns, but none of these analyses is more than fragmentary. Particularly remarkable is the lack of research on the military aspect of the garrisons. This seems to be mainly due to the incorrect presumption that the garrison forces, especially their own independent troops, were militarily incompetent ― Childs depicts them as ‘static and highly ineffective units’ ― and therefore their services should have been trivial. But were they?

                    This paper aims to reconsider the military roles of the Restoration garrisons by looking closely at their wartime services. It will show that they made two important contributions. First, they served as the bases for an effective military expansion. Every time war broke out, many garrison officers raised new troops within their stations and neighbouring regions. Not only enlisting soldiers but also impressing seamen was their responsibility. This work was made possible only through the family and local connections of the garrison officers, their diligent recruitment efforts and considerable financial burden. Second, garrisons played a vital role in achieving civil/military collaboration in local defence. Although wartime reinforcement of the garrisons often caused tensions between soldiers and civilians, there is much evidence from both national and local records that the garrisons generally kept close contact with the local communities and through their support successfully mobilised men, money and other local resources. This cooperative relationship made the government’s war effort smooth and effective.

                    These contributions reflect two essential features of the Restoration garrisons. First, their services were, because of the limited administrative and financial abilities of the central government, highly dependent upon the performance of the individual commanders. Second, garrisons were inseparable parts of the local communities where they existed as well as being the agents of the central government. They needed, therefore, to keep good relations with their civilian neighbours or at least to minimise their opposition, if their services were to be effective enough. Despite the widely accepted assumption that the Restoration garrisons were centre-controlled institutions and persistent enemies of local autonomy, they had in fact a quite personal and locally based existence. Their relations with the localities were not one-way oppression. Rather, they generally acted with sufficient flexibility in the dynamics of the centre/local interactions.

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日英歴史家会議 (AJC)
Senior speakers