Timothy L. Alborn

Senses of Belonging: The Politics of Working‐Class Insurance in Britain, 1880–1914*

The social history of British working people has traditionally been framed by two categories, community formation and consumerism, which are usually assumed to be either mutually exclusive or openly at odds. E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class showcased a rich variety of ritual without pausing to consider the extent to which consumption patterns were interwoven into workers’ efforts to build a vibrant community. Consumerism, for him, was a process to be wished away as a bourgeois obstacle to the search for a uniquely working-class culture. And when Richard Hoggart attacked the new habits of mass consumption that he saw emerging in the 1950s, he did so by ascribing to them the erosion of a purer community marked by neighborliness and family values. His approach more directly recognized the presence of consumerism in the lives of working people, but it failed to extend that recognition to the working-class subjects who filled his pages; for these subjects, any consciousness of the commodity was doomed to be delusory.1 Successors to these pioneering contributions have added sophistication to their arguments without moving much beyond either overlooking the existence of working-class consumption or identifying it as a form of false consciousness.2 Historians have only recently started to revisit working-class spending patterns with an eye to the important sense in which consumption itself assisted in the formation of distinctive communities—in studies ranging from “co-operative culture” to male fashion, and from “the cultural meanings of food” to the invention of local variants of “populism.”3

Age and Empire in the Indian Census, 1871-1931

The age returns in the British-administered Census of India between 1871 and 1931 were problematic. Owing to low levels of numeracy and poor records of births and deaths in India, census officials resorted to a number of technical innovations to generate useful statistical regularities out of the imperfect data. In the process, they came to realize that even so putatively a universal category as age might be impossible to determine accurately in a culture that lacked certain assumptions about time, and in a state that lacked the resources to tabulate when people began and ended their lives.

A Plague Upon Your House: Commercial Crisis and Epidemic Disease in Victorian England

The transfer of metaphors does not only take place between well-defined sciences: it is also a commonplace of what another contributor to this volume has called “everyday” language.1 Within that realm, however, the problem of transfer and the meaning of metaphors take on different dimensions. This paper, in discussing nineteenth-century uses of epidemic language to describe commercial crises, demonstrates some of these differences. For one thing, the strong claim that metaphor transfer plays a generative role in discovery is more difficult to sustain when the participants in a debate are interested in implementing policy (for example) rather than in forming new theories. The commercial reformers described below used metaphors to enrich the meaning of their new forms of action, but the actions themselves derived at least as much from professional interests and perceptions as from the intellectual content of the borrowed language. Related to this claim is the idea that everyday language, to a greater degree than self-consciously “scientific” discourse, is embedded in a more general moral discourse. As a result, the meaning of the metaphors is not as stable as in the more formal language of science, the purveyors of which at least make an effort to shelter themselves from wider moral concerns. Although instability of meaning is also present in the more restricted domain of “science,” its significance becomes more apparent as one descends from more to less technical discourse. As a result, the meaning of the metaphors is not a stable as in the more formal language of science, the purveyors of which a least make an effort to shelter themselves from wider moral concerns.

Quill-Driving: British Life-insurance Clerks and Occupational Mobility, 1800–1914

For the clerks who worked in British life-insurance companies during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, occupational mobility was both an opportunity that motivated effort and a generator of wide disparities in pay and status. Ambitious clerks learned math in the hope of becoming actuaries. By the end of the nineteenth century, this pattern had changed, owing to the rise of branch networks and accompanying bottle-necks in the promotion process. Insurance companies tried to divert clerks’ ambition by offering them opportunities to engage in sports and other leisure activities, and by enhancing their financial security through staff pension schemes. Although these strategies only succeeded in retaining around half of all entering clerks for more than a few years, the activities added meaning to the lives of those clerks who stayed on and made vital contributions to the rapid growth of one of Britains most important financial services.

Pivoting 1874 in the Classroom

This article applies the idea of pivoting to teaching British history and cultural studies, both by focusing on a pivotal year’s watershed events and by artfully telling a before-and-after story about a less noteworthy event. My teaching tool in this case was the year 1874, which was pivotal in the first sense of the word owing to Benjamin Disraeli’s defeat of William Gladstone and the subsequent decline of laissez-faire and rise of imperialism. I discuss how I use that event as a pivot by referring back to the culture of voluntarism that had promoted Gladstone’s popularity and to blind spots in Gladstonian liberalism that rendered him politically vulnerable in 1874. I then turn to my experience teaching a one-week unit on the British annexation of Fiji, which also occurred in 1874. In this unit I assigned some students to report on the career of the first governor of Fiji, Arthur Gordon, who governed five other British colonies before and after 1874, and I asked other students to present group reports on four different perspectives on Fiji that accompanied annexation, by a company promoter, a tourist, a missionary, and an adventure novelist.

King Solomon’s Gold: Ophir in an Age of Empire

Contemplating King Solomon’s enormous importation of gold from the mysterious land of Ophir filled Victorians with vicarious pride and glutted their pedantic appetite with no end of tempting antiquarian puzzles concerning the identity of his trading partners. This article provides details and context regarding the various putative Ophirs proposed by British travellers during the nineteenth century, which ranged from Sumatra to the Gold Coast. It concludes in the latter decades of the century, when the legend of King Solomon’s mines converged with the discovery of gold in South Africa. As scholars have noted, the mid-century discovery of ancient ruins in present-day Zimbabwe by the German explorer Karl Mauch rekindled the Ophir debate and focused most people’s attention on South Africa as its location. This was also the immediate context to Rider Haggard’s fascination with ancient African civilization in his immensely popular novel King Solomon’s Mines. Numerous subsequent explorers, adventure novelists, a...

Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility (review)

creating a dilemma for Zuberi with regard to his stated goal of “deracializing the logic of social statistics.” Where does one start? He identiaes the two contemporary positions on “the proper response to racial data” (are these the same as “racial statistics?”): the advocates of “race-blind” analysis, or “race conscious” statistics (120). He admits, “By employing racial data in their arguments, without challenging the basis of the construction of race, public policy advocates of both camps may have legitimated inequalities based on race. In the future, we may be better off if we phase out the use of racial data.” But he retreats from this position, noting that a “arst step could be to change how we interpret racial statistics . . . recasting them for racial justice” (121). Zuberi is not alone on the horns of this dilemma.2 The controversy sparked by the 2000 round of censuses in the United States and elsewhere on just this point have been furious.3 To resolve it, Zuberi offers “a corrective to the faulty logic involved in the analysis of racial statistics” (xi), but the “corrective” that he proposes is neither logical nor rooted in the history of statistics and social science. The goals of the book are laudable. In the end, however, Zuberi does not succeed. We hope that there will be other books.

The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society (review)

alfway into Regenia Gagnier’s critical commingling of neoclassical economics and aesthetic theory, between a capsule summary of Auguste Comte and a lingering tribute to Oscar Wilde, she settles down to confront that dinosaur of cultural despair, Matthew Arnold. Arnold, she argues, has been given an unfair shake by those who see him as “representative of narrow and elite notions of culture” (109). Instead, he should be viewed as a prophet who strove to preserve space for “the cultivation of the individual under mass market conditions.” Along with a handful of similarly far-sighted critics, he recognized what was at stake as the Western World approached its (nineteenth) fin de siècle—namely, “the future of individualism itself: the bourgeois individual regulating herself for the social good or the selfinterested, self-maximizing individual of ‘hedonic’ consumer society” (107). This passage in The Insatiability of Human Wants illustrates both the central problem which Gagnier wrestles with throughout its pages—how to develop a new aesthetic capable of confronting the hegemonic power of commodification and “market discourse”—and the strange bedfellows she collects as putative allies in her struggle. Besides Arnold, she takes on board such unfashionable thinkers as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, and John Ruskin and William H