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964.More information
AbstractDuring the 1930s, the British army suffered a shortage of recruits despite the depression. This study explores the response of the War Office to the crisis, which undermined the army's ability to undertake its peacetime and wartime roles. The study is important in helping to elucidate the army's place in society, as the War Office had to examine itself and its public image to understand the reasons for the shortage. The War Office concluded that its image as a bad employer, an inefficient military force and as the object of pacifist propaganda played a crucial role in deterring recruits. Despite intense, and partially successful, efforts to improve its public relations structure and measures to combat the bad image, the main reasons for the improvement in recruiting from the fall of 1937 were the lowering of the physical standards required of recruits and the improving conditions in the service. The army remained a source of public pride, but one that was separated from society and whose recruits tended to be attracted by economic incentives.
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965.More information
AbstractIn some respects, we know more about the anthropology of Amerindian groups in the early modern period than we do about the working European seamen with whom they interacted. We do know that negotiated wages or shares were but part of the economic culture of early modern mariners. Portage, also known in specific forms as “privilege” or “venture”, was a right European mariners once had to carry cargo, on their own account, for private sale. This hardly made them “merchants in the forecastle” but the practice of portage does make it difficult to accept, entirely, early modern mariners as a maritime proletariat. An examination of portage, both in the records of specific legal cases and in the body of maritime law, sheds some light on the historical anthropology of maritime life.
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968.More information
AbstractDuring the second half of the nineteenth century, the occupation of shipmaster was transformed. It was remade as a profession ofandfor the middle class. This development followed from the specialization and division of labour in the shipping industry, and reflected the social divisions of an increasingly class-stratified society. The thesis advanced in this paper assigns a key role in this process to the dynamic of industrial capitalism. The paper argues that class-specific recruitment to the shipmaster's occupation put the values of the professional middle classes to the service of shipowners in the extension of their control over labour. The study examines several facets of this transformation: the state's contribution in the abandonment of mercantilist regulation of maritime labour and the introduction of masters' and mates' certificates of competency in the midnineteenth century; the role of the technological change from sail to steam on the nature and organization of the workforce; the owners' efforts to reduce the shipmaster to a wage employee whose self-interests and self-image made him distinctfrom other workers; and the structural changes in both the shipping industry and the systems of recruitment and training which ensured that the profession of shipmaster would gradually emerge as a middle-class preserve.The remaking of the profession of shipmaster illuminates the larger processes of social differentiation and cultural/ideological production associated with the division and specialization of labour in Victorian Britain. Examining this case in detail advances our understanding of class division in industrial society, particularly as it relates to the important, but singularly neglected, middle-managment professions.