Review of periodical literature for 2021

Occasionally, several articles published in the same year converge upon a quite specific theme. Sometimes, the convergence may be attributed to newly available data, for example, from population censuses, or to a significant anniversary, for example, the centenary of the First World War. Other times, it may arise from an ambitious programme of research having come to fruition. Yet, especially for the heavily studied period from 1850 to 1945, there are occasions when the clustering of articles around a closely circumscribed theme happens, seemingly, by chance. These serendipitous convergences afford readers of economic and social history a more comprehensive treatment of topics than would have been expected. One of the purposes of this review (and one of the joys of the reviewer) is to bring these convergences to the attention of economic and social historians. In 2021, no less than five articles converged, serendipitously, on the topic of British emigration to Australasia. These articles spanned six authors and three journals, viz. Australian Economic History Review, Historical Research, and Social History of Medicine. Relying on shipping records, Ward estimates that, during the period from 1852 to 1915, approximately 20 per cent of British emigrants to the colony of Victoria eventually returned to Britain. The returning migrants, who were mostly women, were strongly influenced by social networks. Ward's article includes both quantitative analysis and biographical vignettes of returning migrants. One of these migrants was Annie Martlew, who emigrated from Liverpool to Melbourne in 1884, only to return two decades later as a widow with five young children, motivated by the existence of a stronger support network in Britain. Social networks are a potential explanation for a paradox identified by Hatton in his study of emigration from the United Kingdom to the Anglosphere during the late nineteenth century. Surprisingly, he finds that emigrants to Australia and New Zealand were, on average, more skilled than emigrants to Canada and the United States, despite wages exhibiting a higher skill premium in North America. Hatton speculates that the lower skill content of emigrants from the United Kingdom—importantly, including Ireland—to the United States (vis-à-vis migrants to Australasia) might be due to the presence of greater networks of previous migrants there. Leaving aside the skill content of migrants, the sheer number of migrants to Australasia was positively influenced by colonial governments offering assisted passages to the Antipodes. In the early 1860s, Queensland promoted immigration, not through assisted passages but through the granting of a land order worth £30 to each fare-paying adult immigrant. Queensland's immigration policy is discussed in an article by Morgan, who contends that the policy was substantially revised and improved by Queensland's first Emigration Commissioner and Agent-General in London, Henry Jordan; initially, the policy was subject to such abuses as immigrants selling their land orders for cash and then moving on to other colonies. Tomkins and Coleborne consider a particular class of highly skilled British emigrants to New Zealand: medical professionals. They argue that the dislocating experience of migration contributed to the mental distress suffered by this group, who resorted more to alcoholism than did medical professionals in Britain. Robinson investigates the condition of disabled veterans of the First World War who emigrated from Britain to Australia. This study of ‘imperial pensioners’ reveals a contrast between Australia's relatively generous system of support for disabled veterans and Britain's system of support, which was more orientated toward the limitation of public expenditure. The First World War has continued to attract the interests of social historians in particular. A couple of articles concerned ad hoc arrangements prompted by war-induced labour shortages. Fraser describes how, amid fears over Britain's food supply in 1917, several hundred policemen were seconded to agricultural work and contributed to a year-on-year increase in the harvest. Meanwhile, McKay argues that the enlistment of criminals into the military—it was believed that their violent character would prove useful on the battlefield—alleviated the need to remove skilled labourers from the workforce, while also reducing the cost of operating prisons. Another feature of wartime British society was the public's conflation of Germans and Jews, which, according to Seketa, left Jewish-founded businesses susceptible to attacks and boycotts. In response, these businesses went to tremendous lengths to assert their ‘Britishness’, including through their branding. Koren explores a little-known episode arising from the First World War: Britain's ‘coal trade surplus’ payment to Norway. The payment resulted from an Anglo-Norwegian informal agreement that Britain would not profit from its coal exports to Norway and, subsequently, the realization that Britain had set the price of coal too high, that is, well above actual costs. When the coal trade surplus payment was made to Norway in 1919, Britain demanded that a portion of the payment be allocated for the benefit of Norwegian seafarers, who had been vital to Britain's capacity to export coal, especially across the English Channel. In countless ways, the catastrophe of the First World War influenced both economy and society during the interwar era, and several articles published in 2021 addressed various aspects of the war's legacy. Flores Zendejas evaluates investors’ treatment of so-called League loans: private loans promoted by the League of Nations on behalf of central and eastern European governments that had previously been excluded from international capital markets in the aftermath of the war. During the 1931 financial crisis (but not before), these loans exhibited lower risk premia than did non-League loans; although the League loans did not bear a legally senior status, creditors were pricing the loans as though they did. An article in The Economic Journal by Lopez and Mitchener analyses the relationship between economic policy uncertainty and hyperinflation in European countries during the early 1920s. For a panel of 10 countries, the authors construct a monthly measure of uncertainty as the realized volatility in the daily spot exchange rate of each country's currency. They find that, in Germany, Austria, Poland, and Hungary, uncertainty exerted a strong effect on inflation, whereas uncertainty had hardly any effect on inflation in the other countries. In early 1920s Britain, the shipbuilding industry suffered a collapse in demand due to the near cessation of orders from the Admiralty for warships, coinciding with a downturn in demand for merchant ships. As Miller and Murphy relate, the industry underwent a period of rationalization, involving reductions both in the number of shipbuilding firms and in aggregate capacity. The pernicious consequence of rationalization was a price-fixing cartel, the Warship Group, which profited immensely during rearmament. As for organizations in the immediate aftermath of the war, White chronicles the brief existence, from 1919 to 1923, of Britain's National Association of Landswomen (a quasi-successor of the wartime Women's Land Army), which managed to accomplish a lot, including the formation of a health insurance scheme for female agricultural labourers. The Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, specifically the British operations thereof, is covered in a piece by Beers, who claims that the organization was a sphere in which both Liberal and Socialist women collaborated in pursuit of common causes. By the early twentieth century, women had become ubiquitous within Britain's investing public. Drawing on a dataset of nearly one-half million observations of investors in British railways, Acheson et al. determine that women comprised 30–40 per cent of shareholders. The authors also identify several noteworthy characteristics of female investors; compared with men, women were more likely to invest locally and to invest individually (i.e., not as a joint shareholder), but their portfolios were less diversified. The increased independence of women in the early twentieth century extended to the sociopolitical realm, as well as the financial. With regard to the campaign for women's suffrage in Britain, Miller claims that the longstanding practice of petitioning came to be reinvented as ‘a flexible, mutable tool that was used by all shades of the suffrage movement because it underpinned a broader repertoire of activism and fostered political cultures’ (p. 355). From their reading of nine diaries, Pooley and Pooley conclude that young British women were highly mobile within society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, while Wildman discusses how the increased geographic mobility of working-class women coincided with social anxiety over shoplifting in interwar Manchester. Bradley and Rowland find that, before (and even after) women were admitted to the legal profession in 1919, female factory inspectors and social workers functioned as makeshift legal agents, dispensing advice to women who would otherwise not receive it. Glew's article concerns three successive organizations of female clerical workers in the civil service, and it points out that these organizations refused to collaborate with male-dominated organizations in an attempt to preserve both their autonomy and their commitment to women's causes, such as equal pay. Another association claiming to represent working-class women was the Women's Co-operative Guild. In a study highlighting the internationalist character of this association, Hellawell relies, among other sources, on the minute books of its Darlington branch, which was just one of the 1819 branches in operation by 1939. Within the milieu of Irish Catholicism, a number of women worked in laundries attached to Magdalen asylums, which purported to reform fallen women. As Harrison notes, when the Factory and Workshop Bill of 1895 was debated, pressure from Irish nationalist members of parliament (MPs) ensured that charitable laundries were exempted from the regulations and inspections which would apply to for-profit laundries. Under the Factory and Workshop Act of 1907, charitable laundries did become regulated, but the regulations were more relaxed for charitable laundries; for example, charitable laundries were permitted to select their own inspectors. Harrison's analysis of the Magdalen laundries concludes that their legislative treatment affirmed the belief that the laundries served a reformatory purpose, that is, a public good, and that the privacy of the religious communities operating the laundries should not, therefore, be infringed. Elderly women deemed to be respectable were the sort of individuals admitted to St. Joseph's Asylum for Aged and Virtuous Females in Dublin. Frehill's article in Irish Economic and Social History explores various facets of this institution, including the reasons why women decided to enter it. Death in Ireland was often an occasion accompanied by payments to the church, taking the form of funeral offerings and Mass bequests in last wills and testaments. Doyle and Roddy challenge the too simplistic belief that these payments imply either the donor's lack of agency or coercion by the church. Although the enactment of the new poor law in 1834 preceded the interval of this review, it remained in effect well into the twentieth century. As ever, the poor law and its leading manifestation, the workhouse, were a popular topic among economic and social historians publishing in 2021. Brown's article in Business History investigates the functioning of poor law unions as customers within their communities. While the new poor law aimed to standardize the provision of relief, procurement remained one of the few areas left to the discretion of the poor law union's guardians. 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