5.4 Dundee, jute and empire This unit focuses on the economics of empire, and, in particular, of the British Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century. The theme of producers and consumers is central. The unit starts by introducing some of the debates surrounding the economics of British imperialism. It then goes on to explore how empire and imperial trade shaped economic structures and urban society in late nineteenth-century Britain. To access this material click on the unit link below. It leads
References 3.3.1 Summary Claims about who is poor are rooted in shared and contested ideas about the basic necessities of life. The experience of poverty is both relative and relational. It is defined by what people have, and what they can do, relative to the opportunities of others.
Poverty carries derogatory meanings, so it does not easily provide a basis for collective identity. 3.3 How others see us The relative nature of poverty is an old theme in social science. Adam Smith, the eighteenth century writer who is often regarded as the founding father of economics, put it this way: ‘By necessaries I understand not only the commodities that are indispensably necessary for the support of life, but whatever the custom of the country renders it indecent for creditable people, even the lowest orders, to be without’ (Smith, 1776, quoted in Sen, 1981). Ideas of what it is to be poor are 3.2 Urban unrest: the case of the French urban periphery ‘France had a rebellion of its underclass’, argued American social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein (2005). He was referring to the ‘unrest’ or ‘riots’ which began on Thursday 28 October 2005 in Clichy-sous-Bois, a large public housing estate, or banlieue, on the outskirts of Paris, and then spread to a number of other areas across urban France. The riots were sparked by the accidental deaths of two young boys fleeing the police. The boys were subsequently referred to by the Acknowledgements Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following sources for permission to reproduce material in this unit: Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Licence 2 Note taking from an audio visual text The first important point to make is that note taking is more than a process of summarising everything that you see; it must be an active process of engaging with the material and thinking it through for yourself. In the videos, the multidimensional nature of the visual images and the stories they convey means that you will not be able to take in everything on first viewing. The videos allow us to present visual as well as audio information and in a form that makes it easier for you to revisi 4.1 Family and meanings? We have considered the difficulties of pinning down family definitions and meanings. We now ask whether it is indeed important to explore and unravel these complexities. Do the varieties of family meanings – or the meaning of ‘family’ itself – matter, or do they just provide a minor intellectual diversion? You may like to pause here for a moment to consider how you would answer this question for yourself. Do you think they matter, and if so, in what ways? We consider this questi 2.4 The slippery language of ‘family’ Most fundamentally, however, we need to understand how language is used, and what ‘work’ it does as we interact with others in our everyday lives. As the sociologist and philosopher, Alfred Schutz (1954) argued, it is important to pay careful attention to the relationship between sociological and everyday concepts, since everyday concepts express the meanings by which social interactions are framed. So how do people themselves understand, encounter, interpret and evoke the very slippery c Acknowledgements The content acknowledged below is Proprietary (see terms and conditions) and is used under licence. Cartoon: "We all want to crack down on crime" David Austin Figure 1: Croall, H. (1998) Crime and Society in Britain, Addison Wesley Longman Ltd; 6 Further resources Gilleard and Higgs (2000) more fully develop some of the ideas explored by Giddens (1994) in their useful and comprehensive introduction to post-structural readings of older age. Elder's (1977) life history account offers compelling insights into the intersections of class and gender through a socialist lens, and represents an early and interesting example of the life history and biographical method. Chamberlayne et al. (2000) provide comprehensive and thoughtful insights into biographical me 4.3 Reconstituting older people's personal lives in uncertain times The multiplicity of different ‘work-endings’ at the close of the twentieth century, combined with the increasing mobilisation of older people through pensioner and ‘third age’ movements, effectively destabilised the institution of retirement and the associated orthodoxy that older age began at the age of 60 or 65 years. However, voices from within the pensioner movement were marginalised in the process of reconstitution that ensued. A neo-liberal redrawing of the boundari 4.1 Introduction The 1970s marked a period in which the cessation of the ‘normal’ period of full-time employment at 60 or 65 years had become the accepted orthodoxy. The personal lives of older people had thus become constituted outside the domain of paid employment and within the arena of public and private welfare. As we illustrated in the preceding section, pensions, organised around fixed ages of retirement based on chronological measurements of age, played a crucial role in this process. Further, as References 3.5 Birth control The fertility decline in Britain was not the direct result of social policy aimed at reducing the birth rate. The deliberate use of birth control was widely condemned as unnatural and immoral by the medical profession, the church and a wide range of conventional opinion, even though doctors and vicars were the first to limit their own families. There was widespread ignorance about the mechanics of human reproduction and how to control it, but for those in the know there were many methods of c 3.1 Introduction In this section the focus turns towards the supply side of the market, towards firms and industries, exploring the importance of costs and technological change in the organisation of production. The objective is to understand some of the different kinds of change in industrial structure, namely changes in the number and size of firms in an industry. One such change saw the emergence of Ford, initially one among many similar firms jostling for position in the US automobile industry, as the ind 3.1 The impact of information technology Having discussed the radical and pervasive effect that inventions in previous eras have had on economy-wide productivity, and how they have even defined entire periods, we shall now ask how the rise of information technology compares to these previous revolutions. During the early growth phase of PC use, a leader article in Fortune magazine did not hesitate to compare the rise of the PC to previous technological revolutions. 1 Technological advancement Everything that can be invented has been invented. (The Commissioner of the United States Office of Patents, 1899, recommending that his office be abolished, quoted in The Economist, 2000, p. 5) There is nothing now to be foreseen which can prevent the United States from enjoying an era of business prosperity which is entirely Learning outcomes After studying this unit you should be able to: understand the relationship between technological change and industrial revolutions; appreciate the pervasive effect that new technologies can have on the economy and, in particular, on productivity; understand how industry dynamics can be analysed using the ‘industrial life cycle’ model; use data and historical examples to support economic arguments.
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