Malthus to Modernity: England’s First Fertility Transition, 1760-1800

English fertility history is generally regarded as having been composed of two re-gimes: an era of unregulated marital fertility, from at least 1540 to 1890, then the modern era, with regulated marital fertility, lower for higher social classes. We show there were in fact three fertility regimes in England: a Malthusian regime which lasted from at least 1500 until 1780, where fertility was substantially higher for the rich, an intermediate regime from 1780 to 1890 with fertility undifferentiated by class, and finally the modern regime. Wealthy English men produced substantially fewer children within a generation of the onset of the Industrial Revolution, over 100 years before the classic demographic transition. At the same time the fertility of the poor increased. Determining what triggered this change, however, and why it coincided with the Industrial Revolution, will require further research.Demographic Transition in England

Class of 1890 photographs and memorabilia

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Ex-corporation: on male birth fantasies

Between 1890 and 1933, male birth fantasies became a widespread phenomenon in European culture. One of the key examples of male birth fantasies is Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “African” novel Mafarka the Futurist. The novel’s protagonist, Mafarka, gives birth to a child by his will power and by drawing on diverse formations of knowledge, from alchemy to theories of evolution. In addition to the consideration given the psycho-historical, cultural, and scientific contexts of male birth fantasies in the avant-garde, the contribution reflects on sibling encryptment within the relationship to the mother as one more aspect of a span of genealogy one might term “Maternal Modernity.” Christine Kanz is Professor of German Literature at Ghent University in Belgium. Her contribution refers to her 2009 book Maternale Moderne. Männliche Gebärphantasien zwischen Kultur und Wissenschaft, 1890- 1933. In addition she edited several collections and authored another book on Ingeborg Bachmann, and numerous articles and reviews in the area of interdisciplinary studies. Before entering the Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe, class of Daniel Roth, in 2008, Adam Cmiel trained in various media in Bad Dürkheim, Hamburg, Mannheim, and Trier. He has participated in nine exhibitions since the onset of his studies in Karlsruhe

Socialist antisemitism and its discontents in England, 1884–98

Virdee's essay explores the relationship between English socialists and migrant Jews amid the new unionism of the late nineteenth century: a cycle of protest characterized by sustained collective action by the unskilled and labouring poor demanding economic and social justice. Reading this labour history against the grain, with a greater attentiveness to questions of race and class, helps to make more transparent both the prevalence and structuring force of socialist antisemitism, as well as English and Jewish socialist opposition to it. In particular, the essay suggests that the dominant socialist discourse was intimately bound up with questions of national belonging and this directly contributed to a racialized politics of class that could not imagine migrant Jews as an integral component of the working class. At the same time, such socialist antisemitism was also challenged by a minority current of English Marxists whose conceptions of socialism refused to be limited by the narrow boundaries of the racialized nation-state. And they were joined in this collective action by autonomous Jewish socialist organizations who understood that the liberation of the Jewish worker was indivisible from that of the emancipation of the working class in general. With the help of Eleanor Marx and others, these latter strands entangled socialist politics with questions of combatting antisemitism, and thereby stretched existing conceptions of class to encompass the Jewish worker

Growth, profits and technological choice: The case of the Lancashire cotton textile industry

Using Lancashire textile industry company case studies and financial records, mainly from the period just before the First World War, the processes of growth and decline are re-examined. These are considered by reference to the nature of Lancashire entrepreneurship and the impact on technological choice. Capital accumulation, associated wealth distributions and the character of Lancashire business organisation were sybiotically linked to the success of the industry before 1914. However, the legacy of that accumulation in later decades, chronic overcapacity, formed a barrier to reconstruction and enhanced the preciptious decline of a once great industry

Social and family constructions of marital endogamy in 19th Century Eastern Belgium

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Twisted Tales: Insights into Genome Diversity of Ciliates Using Single-Cell 'Omics.

The emergence of robust single-cell 'omics techniques enables studies of uncultivable species, allowing for the (re)discovery of diverse genomic features. In this study, we combine single-cell genomics and transcriptomics to explore genome evolution in ciliates (a > 1 Gy old clade). Analysis of the data resulting from these single-cell 'omics approaches show: 1) the description of the ciliates in the class Karyorelictea as "primitive" is inaccurate because their somatic macronuclei contain loci of varying copy number (i.e., they have been processed by genome rearrangements from the zygotic nucleus); 2) gene-sized somatic chromosomes exist in the class Litostomatea, consistent with Balbiani's (1890) observation of giant chromosomes in this lineage; and 3) gene scrambling exists in the underexplored Postciliodesmatophora (the classes Heterotrichea and Karyorelictea, abbreviated here as the Po-clade), one of two major clades of ciliates. Together these data highlight the complex evolutionary patterns underlying germline genome architectures in ciliates and provide a basis for further exploration of principles of genome evolution in diverse microbial lineages

'In Glasgow but not quite of it’? Eastern European Jewish Immigrants in a Provincial Jewish Community from c.1890 to c.1945

This article makes use of autobiographies and oral interviews in order to explore the lifestyles of the first generation of immigrants within one particular provincial Jewish community – the Gorbals in Glasgow – between 1890 and 1945. The experience of this generation of immigrants was characterised by diversity to an extent that was not true of the second generation. Thus, the community cannot be described in terms of either ‘assimilation’ or ‘separation’. Instead, an alternative description has been coined: ‘variegated acculturation’ in order to encompass the complexity of the lives of the immigrants