This chapter examines one aspect of the long history of the philosophical and political goals of constructing civil society, namely, the relationship between the colonial state and the building of civil society in India under British rule. In particular, it argues that concepts of civil society, as understood by both East India Company officials and Imperial administrators, were essential elements of British governing practices in India. Thus, unlike the classic position of civil society theory, in which civil society is independent of state authority, the creation of civil society in India was a project of British governance throughout the nineteenth century. A crucial element of this project was the reimagination and revivification of the ancient panchayat. As Imperial administrators attempted to integrate the panchayat into a vision of Indian civil society, the panchayat ideal was absorbed as well into the discourse and imaginary of the nascent nationalist movement. In both cases, however, the panchayat as imagined by both the British governors of India and Indian nationalists was an essential element of the foundation of modern Indian civil society.
Throughout the mofussil of the Bombay Presidency British judges and magistrates called upon panchayats, that is, caste or village councils, to help them administer justice. By the mid-nineteenth century, panchayats were being deployed by British justices not only to offer their advice to judges attempting to decide a case, but much more frequently to investigate crimes, including murder, assault, robbery, arson, forgery, rape, and property disputes. Moreover, the active participation of the panchayat in the administration of criminal law varied as much in form as in function. In different scenarios, the panchayat functioned as a coroner's court, a criminal investigation team, and a general witnessing agent for the courts. With very few exceptions, they almost always appear in a supporting role on the prosecution side of any case offering their opinions on the crime in question in written form. Judges, for their part, appear to have relied quite heavily upon these recommendations and there are very few instances in which the panchayat's opinions were either ignored or rejected. There thus developed a hybrid system of justice whereby judges and magistrates adapted, transformed, and incorporated the expertise and knowledge of the 'customary' panchayat to suit the needs of British governance and legal administration.
With relatively few exceptions, personal petitions from individuals have received much less attention from historians than those from groups in the public political sphere. In one sense, personal petitions adopted many of the same rhetorical strategies as those delivered by a group. However, they also offer unique insights into the quotidian relationship between the people and their rulers. This article examines surviving personal petitions to various administrators at different levels of government in western India during the decades surrounding the East India Company’s conquests. The analysis of these petitions helps to refine our understanding of the place of the new judicial system in the social world of early-nineteenth-century India, especially by illuminating the discourse of justice that petitioners brought to the presentation of their cases to their new governors. The conclusion of this article seeks to place the rhetoric of personal petitioning within the larger context of mass political petitioning in India during the early nineteenth century.
Purpose Billions of entrepreneurs at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) operate as small-scale producers within multi-tiered supply chain networks. Unfortunately, a majority of these entrepreneurs are simply unable to derive sufficient value from the network and are vulnerable to disasters and poverty. The purpose of this paper is to develop a typology that examines dynamic and triadic power relationships in order to create value chains for BoP producers. Design/methodology/approach This paper builds upon the available literature and a relevant historical case study to develop a typology. The validity of the typology is ascertained by examining and comparing two current BoP silk weaver communities in India. Findings The typology captures essential environmental variables and relates them to mediated and non-mediated forms of power which, in turn, shape the value derived from the supply chain network. Practical implications The typology provides specific recommendations for BoP producers, such as the formation of cooperatives, engaging in political unionization and ensuring that their social networks expand beyond local communities. Originality/value The typology brings together structuration theory and power and provides a framework for understanding supply value. This typology is generalizable to dynamic multi-tiered supply chain networks.
ABSTRACTThis article analyses the reception and understanding of the Indian village council (panchayat) among East India Company officials, British politicians, and Indian intellectuals during the first third of the nineteenth century. One of the several ways in which the panchayat was imagined was as an institution analogous to the English jury. As such, the panchayat took on significant meaning, especially for those influenced by the Scottish Orientalist tradition and who were serving in India. The issue became especially salient during the 1820s and 1830s as the jury system was debated and reformed in England. In this context, there was a transnational interplay of both ideas and policies that shaped both Company rule in India as well as the first generation of Indian nationalists.
Policing the Factory is a wonderfully insightful book based upon much detailed work in the local sources of the Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cheshire worsted industry, and informed by the theories and...
Reviewed by: The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700–1850 James Jaffe (bio) The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700–1850. By Joel Mokyr. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009. Pp. x+564. $45. Any historian must delight in the publication of a new work by Joel Mokyr. His earlier works on British and Irish economic history have always been filled with new insights, rigorous methodologies, and an unquantifiable wry wisdom. The Enlightened Economy has all of that and more. As the title suggests, this book seeks to explore and explain the connections between the eighteenth-century Enlightenment movement and the economic development of industrial Britain. The drive of the philosophes to collect, codify, and disseminate “useful knowledge” in order to promote social, political, and economic progress, Mokyr argues, was essential and indeed a foundational element of the Industrial Revolution. The Enlightenment’s impact on economic development can be viewed in a myriad of ways, but perhaps most significant for this study are the institutional structures that arose out of its shadows. Foremost among these, perhaps, was what Mokyr labels the “Baconian program,” that is, the adoption of a set of values that prized research into practical problems and the public dissemination of its results. Examples of this cultural shift in attitudes toward science and publicity include not only the well-known creation of scientific societies and clubs, but also the publication of numerous practical manuals and scientific treatises across the full range of contemporary “pure” and “applied” sciences. Of equal significance was the adoption of new cultural attitudes toward the relationship between the state and economic development, which led to far-reaching institutional changes as well. The Enlightenment project created new approaches to free trade and open markets, valuing the beneficent power of doux commerce to promote peace and economic development. British human capital also possessed unique institutional advantages over European and Asian counterparts. The decline of guilds, the evolution of apprenticeship, and the institutional form of the English Poor Laws allowed for a degree of the transference of skills and knowledge unknown elsewhere. [End Page 821] In true Enlightenment fashion, this book is a virtual encyclopedia of the most prominent issues that have been debated by economic historians during the last several decades. In each case, competing claims for primacy in the struggle to claim the preeminent role in initiating the Industrial Revolution are put to the test by Mokyr’s analytical and intuitive acumen. In most cases, these claims are wanting at best. The once-popular idea that an “agricultural revolution” was a necessary precondition to the Industrial Revolution does not pass Mokyr’s muster since, in his estimation, neither the data on agricultural productivity nor that of output matches the claims made for its revolutionary effects. In a similar manner, the claim that Brit-ain’s technological development was somehow directly tied to its acquisition of imperial markets withers under Mokyr’s gaze. The relatively small percentage of foreign trade accounted for by colonial markets and the significant disruptions to trade caused by both the American and French Revolutionary Wars during the period of industrialization militate against this interpretation. While such claims to primacy may not have been made for other sectors of the economy, such as the service sectors of retail, medicine, banking, or finance, Mokyr nevertheless finds these sectors permeated by the same spirit of the Enlightenment. Each in its own way adopted measures that reflect the drive to collect information and disseminate it widely and to pursue policies that in their own way suggest a commitment to the Enlightenment ideals of progress and openness. Midway through, however, this interpretive scheme begins to unravel as each topical chapter, such as those on productivity, demography, and, to a lesser extent, gender, the family, and the state, become historiographical rather than historical essays. More important, many will undoubtedly question several of the heroic assumptions Mokyr makes. For example, his emphasis on the pervasiveness of free and open markets is contradicted by the very real existence of a myriad of employers’ organizations during this period, the most famous being that of the Durham and Northumberland coal owners, which is not mentioned. Similarly...
Reviewed by: Learning on the Shop Floor: Historical Perspectives on Apprenticeship James Jaffe (bio) Learning on the Shop Floor: Historical Perspectives on Apprenticeship. Edited by Bert De Munck, Steven L. Kaplan, and Hugo Soly. New York: Berghahn Books, 2007. Pp. ix+232. $80. This collection seeks to break new ground for the further study of the history of apprenticeship, guild regulation, and the social context of work training. In a narrow sense, the essays presented here collectively contribute toward that goal. There are several interesting insights to be gained as well as important revisions to our understanding of these issues. However, as is more than ably pointed out in coeditor Steven L. Kaplan's concluding essay, this book also leaves many larger questions either insufficiently formulated or entirely untouched. In part, this apparent weakness is a common result of the collected-essay genre. The essays cover an exceedingly wide range of time periods, a broad swath of geography, and an array of manufacturing trades. Thus a brief case-study of apprenticeship in the late-twentieth-century Japanese confectionery trade shares space with a broad-based discussion of guilds and trades in late-medieval Flanders, which itself shares space with a case study of a brewing firm in late-nineteenth-century England. Such an approach does indeed have its benefits, especially highlighting the common elements shared by apprenticeship practices at different times and in different cultures. However, in this case, one also gets the sense that some of these voices present a distraction from the focus of the book that gravitates toward the ancien régime both in the Netherlands and protoindustrial central Europe. This imbalance is not terribly surprising considering the fact that, as [End Page 495] Kaplan notes, the unstated objective of the book appears to be the repudiation of received notions of work and life in the ganze Haus. The ganze Haus paradigm posits the existence of a pre- and protoindustrial household generally unique to central Europe and distinctly different from the French and British concept of the nuclear family. Unlike the situation in those Western countries, the household and not the family was the basic unit of social organization and, therefore, the ganze Haus denoted the inclusion of servants and apprentices under the authority, care, and guidance of the head of the household. Indeed, it has been argued that the Western notion of "family" did not begin to make its appearance in Germany until the eighteenth century. Moreover, as has been further suggested, the ganze Haus structure played a key role in the promotion of social stability, especially through the transfer of paternalistic and often authoritarian values throughout society. Several essays in this collection, therefore, are intended to prove either that the stability and paternalism associated with this model of the intimate connection between the transfer of skills and the broader organization of society is more apparent than real, or that the social and economic history of apprenticeship has a much broader and deeper history in the context of the market rather than the home and paternalism. Certainly, two of the more interesting revisions to our historical understanding of apprenticeship are the enormous variations exhibited among different trades and the different forms of mobility that characterized apprenticeships. In contrast to the pre-nineteenth-century British legal standard of seven-year apprenticeships, with trades as diverse as the Antwerp cabinet makers and the English brewers, apprenticeships were often as short as six months and sometimes as long as twelve years. In many cases, the standard apprenticeship hovered between two and three years rather than the English seven. Moreover, as Annemarie Steidl shows here for several Viennese trades, apprenticeships often were terminated before their completion. Among locksmiths, to take the most extreme example, 57 percent of apprenticeships were terminated before their completion date; most termination rates were between 20 and 30 percent. Peter Stabel's essay on late medieval Flanders shows that the success rate for apprentices—that is, those who succeeded in becoming masters—was astonishingly small. In Bruges it was only 22.5 percent. This apparent volatility in the world of apprentices perhaps was compounded by a closer relationship between masters and markets than heretofore recognized. Coeditor...
The Church of England and the Durham coalfield, 1810–1926. Clergymen, capitalists and colliers. By Robert Lee. (Regions and Regionalism in History, 8.) Pp. xii+340 incl. 54 tables and 3 figs. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007. £50. 978 1 84383 347 5; 1742 8254 - Volume 60 Issue 2
Reviewed by: Perceptions of Retailing in Early Modern England James Jaffe (bio) Perceptions of Retailing in Early Modern England. By Nancy CoxKarin Dannehl. Aldershot Hants, and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007. Pp. xi+214. $99. Anthropologists long have been aware that the exchange process possesses multiple meanings. Familiar market-based exchanges, for example, exhibit not only fundamental economic features of a given society, such as systems of production and distribution; they also express less tangible cultural values such as wants, desires, and even dreams. Moreover, those cultural values inscribed in wants and desires never are created in vacuo. Instead, [End Page 1050] there is a continuous exchange of information between the factors of production and the desires of consumption. It is in this sense that anthropologists, sociologists, and historians speak of a society’s market culture. For historians dealing with past eras, it is a notoriously difficult task to identify, define, and analyze these elements of a market culture because there is a great risk of ascribing to previous generations our own assumptions, dreams, and fears. This is especially true when and where the historical evidence is vague, inchoate, or erratic. Nevertheless, this is the sizable task undertaken by Nancy Cox and Karin Dannehl, the authors of this volume. As the title indicates, their goal is to explicate the ways in which early modern retailing and retailers were perceived by contemporaries, and they employ the term“ perception” both in the sense in which retailing was physically seen and in which retailing was understood and comprehended. As they show, both of these forms of perception were comprised of important cultural elements that served to illuminate aspects of early modern English society. One prominent theme is the pronounced distinction between rural and urban England. The authors argue that perceptions of retailing were molded, if not necessarily constituted, by cultural notions surrounding the value of landed society. This is especially apparent in the manner in which shops, shopkeepers, and itinerant tradesmen appear or, more accurately, do not appear in the literature and art of the era. More generally, the authors further argue that there was a great deal of ambivalence apparent in the responses to retailing and retailers. While their contributions to prosperity and consumption were often applauded, their potential threat to the traditional social order was far less welcomed. Somewhat less tangible than these physical manifestations of retailing is the cultural context of communication that permeated the exchange of information between retailers and producers. In this aspect of their research, the authors rely on the insights of modern work on communications and advertising, arguing, simply put, that early modern advertising was comprised of numerous signals intended both to relay specific information about individual products and to locate these products within a hierarchy of fashion and style. These signals necessarily were also products of contemporary culture. Unfortunately, this book suffers from the lack of either a strong narrative thread or a uniform authorial voice. Cox and Dannehl admit that their joint enterprise represents the merger of two distinct research projects rather than a unified effort. The result is that the book is best described as a collection of essays and, as such, exhibits both the strengths and weaknesses of that genre. The chapters do not always fit together well, and there is an unnecessary amount of repetition as similar or identical information, especially concerning historiographic issues, appears and reappears in several different chapters. [End Page 1051] More serious, however, is the way in which the theoretical foundations of the book suffer from this same lack of focus, so much so that the theme of “perceptions” often becomes lost or marginalized. Consumption theory, communications theory, Marxisant social theory, cognitive theory, linguistics, and spatial theory all vie with one another for interpretive significance. Most problematic is that actual consumer perceptions of retailing are not very much in evidence here. By necessity, much of the evidence is taken from trade cards and other forms of advertisement. This leads to the question of whether the authors actually are dealing with “perceptions” of retailing or its “projections.” A significant portion of this book is based on a potentially valuable searchable database of historical terms used in trade that the...
Herbert H. Kaplan. Nathan Mayer Rothschild and the Creation of a Dynasty: The Critical Years, 1806–1816. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. Pp. xxiv+185. $40.00 (cloth). - Volume 46 Issue 1
Harold James. Family Capitalism: Wendels, Haniels, Falcks, and the Continental European Model. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. xii + 434 pp. ISBN 0-674-02181-9, $39.95 (paper). - Volume 7 Issue 4
Doreen Arnoldus. Family, Family Firm, and Strategy: Six Dutch Family Firms in the Food Industry, 1880–1970. Amsterdam: Aksant Academic Publishers, 2002. 448 pp. ISBN 90-5260-024-4, $54.95 (paper). - Volume 5 Issue 1
John F. Wilson and Andrew Popp, eds. Industrial Clusters and Regional Business Networks in England, 1750–1970. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2003. x + 288 pp. ISBN 0-7546-0761-5, $84.95 (cloth). - Volume 5 Issue 4
Patrick Duffy. The Skilled Compositor, 1850-1914: An Aristocrat among Working Men. (Modern Economic and Social History.) Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate. 2000. Pp. xii, 231. $79.95. ISBN 0-7546-0255-9. - Volume 34 Issue 4
