Mark Hewitson
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198787457
- eISBN:
- 9780191829468
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198787457.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History, Cultural History
Wars have played a fundamental part in modern German history. Although infrequent, conflicts involving German states have usually been extensive and often catastrophic, constituting turning points ...
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Wars have played a fundamental part in modern German history. Although infrequent, conflicts involving German states have usually been extensive and often catastrophic, constituting turning points for Europe as a whole. This volume is the first in a series of studies that explore how such conflicts were experienced by soldiers and civilians during wartime, and how they were subsequently imagined and understood during peacetime. Without such an understanding, it is difficult to make sense of the dramatic shifts characterizing the politics of Germany and Europe over the past two centuries. The studies argue that the ease—or reluctance—with which Germans went to war, and the far-reaching consequences of such wars on domestic politics, were related to soldiers’ and civilians’ attitudes to violence and death, as well as to long-term transformations in contemporaries’ conceptualization of conflict. Absolute War reassesses the meaning of military conflict for the millions of German subjects who were directly implicated in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Based on a re-reading of contemporary diaries, letters, memoirs, official correspondence, press reports, pamphlets, treatises, poems, and plays, it refocuses attention on combat and conscription as the central components of new forms of mass warfare. It concentrates, in particular, on the impact of violence, killing, and death on soldiers’ and civilians’ experiences and subsequent memories of conflict. War has often been conceived of as ‘an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds’, as Clausewitz put it, but the relationship between military conflicts and violent acts remains a problematic one.Less
Wars have played a fundamental part in modern German history. Although infrequent, conflicts involving German states have usually been extensive and often catastrophic, constituting turning points for Europe as a whole. This volume is the first in a series of studies that explore how such conflicts were experienced by soldiers and civilians during wartime, and how they were subsequently imagined and understood during peacetime. Without such an understanding, it is difficult to make sense of the dramatic shifts characterizing the politics of Germany and Europe over the past two centuries. The studies argue that the ease—or reluctance—with which Germans went to war, and the far-reaching consequences of such wars on domestic politics, were related to soldiers’ and civilians’ attitudes to violence and death, as well as to long-term transformations in contemporaries’ conceptualization of conflict. Absolute War reassesses the meaning of military conflict for the millions of German subjects who were directly implicated in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Based on a re-reading of contemporary diaries, letters, memoirs, official correspondence, press reports, pamphlets, treatises, poems, and plays, it refocuses attention on combat and conscription as the central components of new forms of mass warfare. It concentrates, in particular, on the impact of violence, killing, and death on soldiers’ and civilians’ experiences and subsequent memories of conflict. War has often been conceived of as ‘an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds’, as Clausewitz put it, but the relationship between military conflicts and violent acts remains a problematic one.
Claudia Siebrecht
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199656684
- eISBN:
- 9780191744563
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199656684.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History, Cultural History
The Aesthetics of Loss is a cultural history of German women’s art of the First World War that locates their rich visual testimony in the context of the civilian experience of war and ...
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The Aesthetics of Loss is a cultural history of German women’s art of the First World War that locates their rich visual testimony in the context of the civilian experience of war and wartime loss. Drawing on a fascinating body of visual sources produced throughout the war years, the book examines the thematic evolution of women’s art from expressions of support for the war effort to more nuanced and ambivalent testimonies of loss and grief. Many of the images are stark woodcuts, linocuts, and lithographs of great iconographical power that acted as narrative tools to deal with the novel, unsettling, and often traumatic experience of war. German female artists developed a unique aesthetic response to the conflict that both expressed emotional distress and allowed them to re-imagine the place of mourning women in wartime society. Historical codes of wartime behaviour and traditional rites of public mourning led female artists to redefine cultural practices of bereavement, question existing notions of heroic death and proud bereavement through art, and place grief at the centre of women’s war experiences. As a cultural, aesthetic, and thematic point of reference, German women’s art of the First World War has had a fundamental influence on the European memory and understanding of modern war.Less
The Aesthetics of Loss is a cultural history of German women’s art of the First World War that locates their rich visual testimony in the context of the civilian experience of war and wartime loss. Drawing on a fascinating body of visual sources produced throughout the war years, the book examines the thematic evolution of women’s art from expressions of support for the war effort to more nuanced and ambivalent testimonies of loss and grief. Many of the images are stark woodcuts, linocuts, and lithographs of great iconographical power that acted as narrative tools to deal with the novel, unsettling, and often traumatic experience of war. German female artists developed a unique aesthetic response to the conflict that both expressed emotional distress and allowed them to re-imagine the place of mourning women in wartime society. Historical codes of wartime behaviour and traditional rites of public mourning led female artists to redefine cultural practices of bereavement, question existing notions of heroic death and proud bereavement through art, and place grief at the centre of women’s war experiences. As a cultural, aesthetic, and thematic point of reference, German women’s art of the First World War has had a fundamental influence on the European memory and understanding of modern war.
Roy Morris
- Published in print:
- 1999
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780195126280
- eISBN:
- 9780199854165
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195126280.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
This book is a portrait of one of the most acerbic and distinctive voices in American literature, a complex individual at odds with his country, his family, his times, and himself. The only American ...
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This book is a portrait of one of the most acerbic and distinctive voices in American literature, a complex individual at odds with his country, his family, his times, and himself. The only American writer of any stature to fight in and survive the Civil War, Bierce discovered in the conflict a bitter confirmation of his darkest assumptions about man and his nature. Profoundly disillusioned, Bierce spent the next 50 years struggling to disabuse his fellow Americans of their own cherished ideals—be they romantic, religious, or political. His groundbreaking short stories of the war, including his most famous work, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, have had a lasting influence on every subsequent American author dealing with war. And the heartless, hilarious aphorisms in his caustic lexicon The Devil's Dictionary have entered, often uncredited, our national consciousness. This biography accounts for both the influential art that Ambrose Bierce made from a harsh and unforgiving vision, and the high price he had to pay for it in loneliness, rancour, and spiritual isolation.Less
This book is a portrait of one of the most acerbic and distinctive voices in American literature, a complex individual at odds with his country, his family, his times, and himself. The only American writer of any stature to fight in and survive the Civil War, Bierce discovered in the conflict a bitter confirmation of his darkest assumptions about man and his nature. Profoundly disillusioned, Bierce spent the next 50 years struggling to disabuse his fellow Americans of their own cherished ideals—be they romantic, religious, or political. His groundbreaking short stories of the war, including his most famous work, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, have had a lasting influence on every subsequent American author dealing with war. And the heartless, hilarious aphorisms in his caustic lexicon The Devil's Dictionary have entered, often uncredited, our national consciousness. This biography accounts for both the influential art that Ambrose Bierce made from a harsh and unforgiving vision, and the high price he had to pay for it in loneliness, rancour, and spiritual isolation.
Eli Rubin
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198732266
- eISBN:
- 9780191796579
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198732266.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, European Modern History, Cultural History
This book explores the construction of Marzahn, the largest prefabricated housing project in East Germany, built on the outskirts of East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, and touted by the regime as ...
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This book explores the construction of Marzahn, the largest prefabricated housing project in East Germany, built on the outskirts of East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, and touted by the regime as the future of socialism. It also focuses especially on the experience of East Germans who moved, often from crumbling slums left over as a legacy of the nineteenth century, into this radically new place, one defined by pure functionality and rationality—a material manifestation of the utopian promise of socialism. Employing methodologies from critical geography, urban, architectural, and environmental history, and everyday life, the book asks whether their experience was a radical break with their personal pasts and the German past. More directly: can a dramatic change in spatial and material surroundings also sever the links of memory that tie people to their old life narratives, and if so, does that help build a new socialist mentality in the minds of historical subjects? The answer is yes and no—as much as the East German state tried to create a completely new socialist settlement, divorced of any links to the pre-socialist past, the massive construction project uncovered the truth buried—literally—in the ground, which was that the urge to colonize the outskirts of Berlin was not new at all. Furthermore, the construction of a new city out of nothing, using repeating, identical buildings, created a “panopticon”-like effect, enabling the Stasi to undertake more complete surveillance than they had previously.Less
This book explores the construction of Marzahn, the largest prefabricated housing project in East Germany, built on the outskirts of East Berlin in the 1970s and 1980s, and touted by the regime as the future of socialism. It also focuses especially on the experience of East Germans who moved, often from crumbling slums left over as a legacy of the nineteenth century, into this radically new place, one defined by pure functionality and rationality—a material manifestation of the utopian promise of socialism. Employing methodologies from critical geography, urban, architectural, and environmental history, and everyday life, the book asks whether their experience was a radical break with their personal pasts and the German past. More directly: can a dramatic change in spatial and material surroundings also sever the links of memory that tie people to their old life narratives, and if so, does that help build a new socialist mentality in the minds of historical subjects? The answer is yes and no—as much as the East German state tried to create a completely new socialist settlement, divorced of any links to the pre-socialist past, the massive construction project uncovered the truth buried—literally—in the ground, which was that the urge to colonize the outskirts of Berlin was not new at all. Furthermore, the construction of a new city out of nothing, using repeating, identical buildings, created a “panopticon”-like effect, enabling the Stasi to undertake more complete surveillance than they had previously.
Matthew Walker
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- November 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198746355
- eISBN:
- 9780191808913
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198746355.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Early Modern History, Cultural History
Architects and Intellectual Culture in Post-Restoration England charts the moment when well-educated, well-resourced, English intellectuals first became interested in classical architecture in ...
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Architects and Intellectual Culture in Post-Restoration England charts the moment when well-educated, well-resourced, English intellectuals first became interested in classical architecture in substantial numbers. This occurred after the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660 and involved people such as John Evelyn, Robert Hooke, Sir Christopher Wren, and Roger North. The book explores how these figures treated architecture as a subject of intellectual enquiry, either as writers, as designers of buildings, or as both. In four substantial chapters it looks at how the architect was defined as a major intellectual figure; how architects acquired material that allowed them to define themselves as intellectually competent architects; how intellectual writers in the period handled knowledge of ancient architecture in their writing; and how the design process in architecture was conceived of in theoretical writing at the time. In all, the book shows that the key to understanding English architectural culture at the time is to understand how architecture was handled as knowledge, and how architects were conceived of as collectors and producers of such knowledge. It also makes the claim that architecture was treated as an extremely serious and important area of intellectual enquiry, the result of which was that, by the turn of the eighteenth century, architects and architectural writers could count themselves amongst England’s intellectual and cultural elite.Less
Architects and Intellectual Culture in Post-Restoration England charts the moment when well-educated, well-resourced, English intellectuals first became interested in classical architecture in substantial numbers. This occurred after the Restoration of the Monarchy in 1660 and involved people such as John Evelyn, Robert Hooke, Sir Christopher Wren, and Roger North. The book explores how these figures treated architecture as a subject of intellectual enquiry, either as writers, as designers of buildings, or as both. In four substantial chapters it looks at how the architect was defined as a major intellectual figure; how architects acquired material that allowed them to define themselves as intellectually competent architects; how intellectual writers in the period handled knowledge of ancient architecture in their writing; and how the design process in architecture was conceived of in theoretical writing at the time. In all, the book shows that the key to understanding English architectural culture at the time is to understand how architecture was handled as knowledge, and how architects were conceived of as collectors and producers of such knowledge. It also makes the claim that architecture was treated as an extremely serious and important area of intellectual enquiry, the result of which was that, by the turn of the eighteenth century, architects and architectural writers could count themselves amongst England’s intellectual and cultural elite.
G. A. Bremner (ed.)
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198713326
- eISBN:
- 9780191781766
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198713326.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History, Cultural History
The built environment is important to how we experience and negotiate our daily lives, both past and present. In the post-colonial world today, buildings, monuments, parks, streets, avenues, entire ...
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The built environment is important to how we experience and negotiate our daily lives, both past and present. In the post-colonial world today, buildings, monuments, parks, streets, avenues, entire cities even, remain as witness to Britain’s once impressive if troubled imperial past. This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the architectural and urban transformations that took place across the British empire between the seventeenth and mid-twentieth centuries. With extensive chronological and regional coverage, by leading scholars in the field, this volume will quickly become a seminal text for those who study, teach, and research the relationship between empire and the built environment in the British context. It provides an up-to-date account of past and current historiographical approaches toward the study of British imperial and colonial architecture and urbanism, and will prove equally useful to those who study architecture and urbanism in other European imperial and transnational contexts. Divided in two main sections, over twelve chapters, the first part of the volume deals with overarching thematic issues, including building typologies, major genres and periods of activity, networks of expertise and the transmission of ideas, the intersection between planning and politics, as well as the architectural impact of empire on Britain itself. The second section builds on the first by discussing these themes in relation to specific geographical regions, teasing out the variations and continuities observable in context, both practical and theoretical. In addition to being fully referenced, each chapter includes a select bibliography of key scholarly sources.Less
The built environment is important to how we experience and negotiate our daily lives, both past and present. In the post-colonial world today, buildings, monuments, parks, streets, avenues, entire cities even, remain as witness to Britain’s once impressive if troubled imperial past. This volume provides the first comprehensive overview of the architectural and urban transformations that took place across the British empire between the seventeenth and mid-twentieth centuries. With extensive chronological and regional coverage, by leading scholars in the field, this volume will quickly become a seminal text for those who study, teach, and research the relationship between empire and the built environment in the British context. It provides an up-to-date account of past and current historiographical approaches toward the study of British imperial and colonial architecture and urbanism, and will prove equally useful to those who study architecture and urbanism in other European imperial and transnational contexts. Divided in two main sections, over twelve chapters, the first part of the volume deals with overarching thematic issues, including building typologies, major genres and periods of activity, networks of expertise and the transmission of ideas, the intersection between planning and politics, as well as the architectural impact of empire on Britain itself. The second section builds on the first by discussing these themes in relation to specific geographical regions, teasing out the variations and continuities observable in context, both practical and theoretical. In addition to being fully referenced, each chapter includes a select bibliography of key scholarly sources.
Saliha Belmessous
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199579167
- eISBN:
- 9780191750717
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199579167.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, World Modern History, Cultural History
Assimilation was an ideology central to European expansion and colonization, an ideology which legitimized colonization for centuries. This book shows that the aspiration for assimilation was not ...
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Assimilation was an ideology central to European expansion and colonization, an ideology which legitimized colonization for centuries. This book shows that the aspiration for assimilation was not only driven by materialistic reasons but also motivated by ideas. The engine of assimilation has to be found in the combination of two powerful ideas, namely the European philosophical conception of human perfectibility and the idea of the modern state. Europeans wanted to create, in their empires, political and cultural forms which they valued and wanted to realize in their own societies but which did not yet exist. This book examines three imperial experiments—seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New France, nineteenth-century British Australia, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century French Algeria—and reveals the complex interrelationship between policies of assimilation, which were driven by a desire for perfection and universality, and the greatest challenge to those policies, namely, discourses of race, which were based upon perceptions of difference. Neither colonized nor European peoples themselves were able to conform to the ideals given as the object of assimilation. Yet, the deep links between assimilation and empire remained because at no point since the sixteenth century has the utopian project of perfection—articulated through the progressive theory of history—been placed seriously in question. The failure of assimilation pursued through empire, for both colonized and colonizer, reveals the futility of the historical pursuit of perfection.Less
Assimilation was an ideology central to European expansion and colonization, an ideology which legitimized colonization for centuries. This book shows that the aspiration for assimilation was not only driven by materialistic reasons but also motivated by ideas. The engine of assimilation has to be found in the combination of two powerful ideas, namely the European philosophical conception of human perfectibility and the idea of the modern state. Europeans wanted to create, in their empires, political and cultural forms which they valued and wanted to realize in their own societies but which did not yet exist. This book examines three imperial experiments—seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New France, nineteenth-century British Australia, and nineteenth- and twentieth-century French Algeria—and reveals the complex interrelationship between policies of assimilation, which were driven by a desire for perfection and universality, and the greatest challenge to those policies, namely, discourses of race, which were based upon perceptions of difference. Neither colonized nor European peoples themselves were able to conform to the ideals given as the object of assimilation. Yet, the deep links between assimilation and empire remained because at no point since the sixteenth century has the utopian project of perfection—articulated through the progressive theory of history—been placed seriously in question. The failure of assimilation pursued through empire, for both colonized and colonizer, reveals the futility of the historical pursuit of perfection.
Stuart Banner
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- March 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780199930296
- eISBN:
- 9780190254575
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:osobl/9780199930296.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, Cultural History
The impact of antitrust law on sports is in the news all the time, especially when there is labor conflict between players and owners, or when a team wants to move to a new city. And if the majority ...
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The impact of antitrust law on sports is in the news all the time, especially when there is labor conflict between players and owners, or when a team wants to move to a new city. And if the majority of Americans have only the vaguest sense of what antitrust law is, most know one thing about it—that baseball is exempt. This book illuminates the series of court rulings that resulted in one of the most curious features of our legal system: baseball's exemption from antitrust law. The book provides a history of the game as seen through the prism of an extraordinary series of courtroom battles, ranging from 1890 to the present. The book looks at such pivotal cases as the 1922 Supreme Court case which held that federal antitrust laws did not apply to baseball; the 1972 Flood v. Kuhn decision that declared that baseball is exempt even from state antitrust laws; and several cases from the 1950s, one involving boxing and the other football, that made clear that the exemption is only for baseball, not for sports in general. The book reveals that for all the well-documented foibles of major league owners, baseball has consistently received and followed antitrust advice from leading lawyers, shrewd legal advice that eventually won for baseball a protected legal status enjoyed by no other industry in America.Less
The impact of antitrust law on sports is in the news all the time, especially when there is labor conflict between players and owners, or when a team wants to move to a new city. And if the majority of Americans have only the vaguest sense of what antitrust law is, most know one thing about it—that baseball is exempt. This book illuminates the series of court rulings that resulted in one of the most curious features of our legal system: baseball's exemption from antitrust law. The book provides a history of the game as seen through the prism of an extraordinary series of courtroom battles, ranging from 1890 to the present. The book looks at such pivotal cases as the 1922 Supreme Court case which held that federal antitrust laws did not apply to baseball; the 1972 Flood v. Kuhn decision that declared that baseball is exempt even from state antitrust laws; and several cases from the 1950s, one involving boxing and the other football, that made clear that the exemption is only for baseball, not for sports in general. The book reveals that for all the well-documented foibles of major league owners, baseball has consistently received and followed antitrust advice from leading lawyers, shrewd legal advice that eventually won for baseball a protected legal status enjoyed by no other industry in America.
Kim Christian Priemel
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- October 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199669752
- eISBN:
- 9780191801020
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199669752.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, World Modern History, Cultural History
At the end of World War II the Allies faced a threefold challenge: how to punish perpetrators of appalling crimes for which the categories of ‘genocide’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ had to be ...
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At the end of World War II the Allies faced a threefold challenge: how to punish perpetrators of appalling crimes for which the categories of ‘genocide’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ had to be coined; how to explain that these had been committed by Germany, of all nations; and how to reform Germans. The answer to this triple conundrum was the application of historical reasoning to legal procedure. In the Nuremberg trials held between 1945 and 1949, a concerted effort was made to punish key perpetrators while at the same time analysing the Nazi state and recounting German history. Building on a long debate about Germany’s divergence from a presumed Western path of development, Allied prosecutors sketched out how Germany had betrayed the Western model. The prosecutors laid out how private enterprise, academic science, the military, and the civil service, which looked ostensibly similar to their opposite numbers in the Allied nations, had been corrupted in Germany even before Hitler’s rise to power. While the argument, depending on individual protagonists, subject matters, and contexts, met with uneven success in court, it offered a final twist against the backdrop of the Cold War: although Germany had lost its way, it could still be brought back into the Western fold. The first comprehensive study of the Nuremberg trials, The Betrayal explores this process and sheds light on how history underpins transitional trials as we encounter them in today’s courtrooms from Arusha to The Hague.Less
At the end of World War II the Allies faced a threefold challenge: how to punish perpetrators of appalling crimes for which the categories of ‘genocide’ and ‘crimes against humanity’ had to be coined; how to explain that these had been committed by Germany, of all nations; and how to reform Germans. The answer to this triple conundrum was the application of historical reasoning to legal procedure. In the Nuremberg trials held between 1945 and 1949, a concerted effort was made to punish key perpetrators while at the same time analysing the Nazi state and recounting German history. Building on a long debate about Germany’s divergence from a presumed Western path of development, Allied prosecutors sketched out how Germany had betrayed the Western model. The prosecutors laid out how private enterprise, academic science, the military, and the civil service, which looked ostensibly similar to their opposite numbers in the Allied nations, had been corrupted in Germany even before Hitler’s rise to power. While the argument, depending on individual protagonists, subject matters, and contexts, met with uneven success in court, it offered a final twist against the backdrop of the Cold War: although Germany had lost its way, it could still be brought back into the Western fold. The first comprehensive study of the Nuremberg trials, The Betrayal explores this process and sheds light on how history underpins transitional trials as we encounter them in today’s courtrooms from Arusha to The Hague.
Mark Roodhouse
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199588459
- eISBN:
- 9780191747564
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199588459.001.0001
- Subject:
- History, British and Irish Modern History, Cultural History
Due to rationing and price control, Britain’s underground economy experienced a mid-century boom during the 1940s and early 1950s as producers, traders, and professional criminals helped consumers to ...
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Due to rationing and price control, Britain’s underground economy experienced a mid-century boom during the 1940s and early 1950s as producers, traders, and professional criminals helped consumers to get ‘a little bit extra’ ‘on the side’, ‘from under the counter’, or ‘off the back of a lorry’. And yet widespread evasion of regulations designed to ensure ‘fair shares for all’ did not undermine the austerity policies that characterized those years. This book draws upon a wide range of source material, including recently declassified documents, to argue that all these little bits did not amount to a lot because Britons showed self-restraint in their illegal dealings. The means, motives, and opportunities for evasion were not lacking. The shortages were real and felt, regulations were not watertight, and enforcement was haphazard. Fairness, not patriotism and respect for the law, is the key to understanding this self-restraint. By invoking popular notions of a fair price, a fair profit, and a fair share, government rhetoric stymied black marketeering as would-be evaders had to justify their offences to themselves and others in terms of getting their fair share at no one else’s expense. The book emphasizes the importance of fairness to those seeking a richer understanding of economic life in modern Britain, and reminds us that all trade is fair trade and all consumers are ethical consumers, at least according to their own lights. We just need to discover what those lights are.Less
Due to rationing and price control, Britain’s underground economy experienced a mid-century boom during the 1940s and early 1950s as producers, traders, and professional criminals helped consumers to get ‘a little bit extra’ ‘on the side’, ‘from under the counter’, or ‘off the back of a lorry’. And yet widespread evasion of regulations designed to ensure ‘fair shares for all’ did not undermine the austerity policies that characterized those years. This book draws upon a wide range of source material, including recently declassified documents, to argue that all these little bits did not amount to a lot because Britons showed self-restraint in their illegal dealings. The means, motives, and opportunities for evasion were not lacking. The shortages were real and felt, regulations were not watertight, and enforcement was haphazard. Fairness, not patriotism and respect for the law, is the key to understanding this self-restraint. By invoking popular notions of a fair price, a fair profit, and a fair share, government rhetoric stymied black marketeering as would-be evaders had to justify their offences to themselves and others in terms of getting their fair share at no one else’s expense. The book emphasizes the importance of fairness to those seeking a richer understanding of economic life in modern Britain, and reminds us that all trade is fair trade and all consumers are ethical consumers, at least according to their own lights. We just need to discover what those lights are.
