Social History

doi: 10.1080/03071021003651183pmid: N/A

De Munck, Bert

doi: 10.1080/03071020903491724pmid: N/A

This article examines the nature and impact of late medieval and early modern guilds through the lens of the master–apprentice relationship. Starting from a conceptual distinction between the ‘guild ethos’ and ‘civil society’, it is shown that Antwerp craft guilds stopped being ‘brotherhoods’ and ‘substitute families’ and retreated into a sphere separate from household and family. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, masters can no longer be considered to have wielded a type of corporative mandate and to have acted in loco parentis. While parents had the final word in matters of discipline, masters' sons had gradually lost their privileged entrance (i.e. they stopped being ‘born’ within the guild), thus suggesting that the private sphere of the family prevailed over the public sphere of the guilds. The guilds' costumes and collective activities, moreover, respectively disappeared or became obsolete. From at least the ‘long sixteenth century’ onwards, Antwerp guilds appear to have transformed from confraternities or brotherhoods into juridical and institutional instruments, which did not aim at disciplining or socializing apprentices into an organized social group. In the end, the relationship between masters and apprentices was based on (oral and other) contracts rather than guild rules (whether formal or informal).

Snell, K. D. M.

doi: 10.1080/03071020903491732pmid: N/A

Detective fiction has been little considered by historians of the British inter-war village. This is despite the phenomenal publishing and sales in this literary genre. Agatha Christie is the bestselling writer of books of all time, and millions of people world-wide have learnt about English villages by reading her. This article discusses why inter-war fiction is instructive to social historians. It concentrates on the so-called ‘Golden Age’ of this fiction: notably the authors Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh and G. K. Chesterton. The subject is approached through a number of themes, which address the genre, county house settings, the nature and morphology of the detected village, representations of villagers and the poor, the literary detectives (notably Miss Marple and Lord Peter Wimsey) and their relation to village life, the local role of gossip, depictions of the clergy, the fictional uses of material culture, senses of the past, the detection of ‘evil’ and issues of inter-war village renewal. A binding strand throughout is how the English village community is handled and interpreted in this fiction. The article argues that the detective genre is important and highly revealing to social and rural historians, and deserves extended analysis.

Bakhle, Janaki

doi: 10.1080/03071020903542286pmid: N/A

In March 1910, after two years of sustained surveillance by the colonial government, a young Indian revolutionary nationalist, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966), was arrested in London and extradited to India for trial. Among the charges he faced was the curious one of sedition. Using Savarkar as the starting point – and concluding with Gandhi's own encounter with sedition – this essay argues that sedition law had a critical, and extended, life in the colonial context, allowing the use of what were seen as dangerous words to be evidence of conspiracy long after the metropole had abandoned the practice. The colonial state's response to revolutionary nationalism gave rise to two principal colonial weapons against anti-colonial nationalism (whether manifested in Savarkar's call for armed rebellion or Gandhian nonviolent noncooperation). The first weapon was surveillance, a developing technology of state control that placed an increasingly large number of young ‘revolutionaries’ under systematic monitoring. They were placed under surveillance to monitor not just what they were doing, but also what they were thinking, writing, and speaking. The second and perhaps more important weapon of the colonial state in India was sedition law. While sedition had a long history in Britain, the modern history of sedition was in fact inextricably linked to colonial rule. The history of colonial surveillance and the development of sedition law strongly suggests that the real danger posed by all nationalists, revolutionary and otherwise, lay in a violence that was far more rhetorical and symbolic than physical, for what was really at stake was the fundamental legitimacy of colonial rule.

Sartori, Andrew; Sweeney, Dennis; Pollard, Lisa; Allen, Margaret; French, John D.; Arias, Desmond; Birn, Anne-Emanuelle; Dworkin, Dennis; Hudson, Pat; Shepard, Alexandra; Kooi, Christine; van der Heijden, Manon; van Eijnatten, Joris; Morrissey, Susan K.; Poiger, Uta G.; Lybeck, Marti M.;