Sound Speculators: Public Debates about Futures Trading in British India and Germany, 1880–1930

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
LAURA JULIA RISCHBIETER ◽  
CHRISTINA LUBINSKI
Keyword(s):  
World Economy ◽  
Futures Markets ◽  
Market Access ◽  
Social Ties ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
British India ◽  
Futures Trading ◽  
Futures Exchanges ◽  
Public Debates

Considerations about the legitimacy of futures trading have been ubiquitous in the highly integrated world economy since the late nineteenth century. This article compares two national debates in Germany and British India from the 1880s to the 1930s. Despite significant differences in the cultural and economic contexts of the two countries and in the emergence of futures trading, there are interesting similarities. In both countries, individual futures exchanges were organized and controlled by small privileged groups of traders. These minorities were glued together by social ties, de facto controlling (or profiting from) access to futures markets and facing criticism because of their privileged position. While contemporaries and historians often focus on futures trading as trading without intent to deliver, the historical analysis in this article shows that an equally important issue was the conflict over distribution and power between more and less privileged interest groups and their respective market access.

scholarly journals Market efficiency and government interventions in prewar Japanese rice futures markets

2016 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 325-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mikio Ito ◽  
Kiyotaka Maeda ◽  
Akihiko Noda
Keyword(s):  
Market Efficiency ◽  
Futures Markets ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Commodity Markets ◽  
Government Interventions ◽  
Vector Autoregression Model ◽  
Futures Exchanges ◽  
Autoregression Model ◽  
The Government ◽  
Quality Difference

This study analyzes how the colonial rice trade in prewar Japan affected its rice market, considering several government interventions in the two rice futures exchanges in Tokyo and Osaka. We explore the interventions in the futures markets using two procedures. First, we measure the joint degree of efficiency in the markets using a time-varying vector autoregression model. Second, we examine historical events that possibly affected the markets and focus on one event at a time. The degree of efficiency varies over time within our sample period (1881-1932). The observation, together with historical analysis, leads to the following conclusions: (1) the two major markets in Tokyo and Osaka were nearly efficient; (2) government interventions involving the delivery of imported rice from Taiwan and Korea often reduced futures market efficiency; finally, (3) this relationship continued as long as the quality difference between imported and domestic rice existed. The government interventions that promoted domestic distributions of the colonial goods resulted in confusion in the commodity markets, and decreased efficiency of the markets in the metropole.

Confucianism as a World Religion

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna Sun
Keyword(s):  
Vital Signs ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Chinese Government ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
World Religion ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
Thoughtful Reflection

Is Confucianism a religion? If so, why do most Chinese think it isn't? This book traces the birth and growth of the idea of Confucianism as a world religion. The book begins at Oxford, in the late nineteenth century, when Friedrich Max Müller and James Legge classified Confucianism as a world religion in the new discourse of “world religions” and the emerging discipline of comparative religion. The book shows how that decisive moment continues to influence the understanding of Confucianism in the contemporary world, not only in the West but also in China, where the politics of Confucianism has become important to the present regime in a time of transition. Contested histories of Confucianism are vital signs of social and political change. The book also examines the revival of Confucianism in contemporary China and the social significance of the ritual practice of Confucian temples. While the Chinese government turns to Confucianism to justify its political agenda, Confucian activists have started a movement to turn Confucianism into a religion. Confucianism as a world religion might have begun as a scholarly construction, but are we witnessing its transformation into a social and political reality? With historical analysis, extensive research, and thoughtful reflection, this book will engage all those interested in religion and global politics at the beginning of the Chinese century.

Local Color, World-System; or, American Realism at the Periphery

2019 ◽  
pp. 99-118
Author(s):  
Mark Storey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
World Literature ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sarah Orne Jewett ◽  
Local Color ◽  
The Core ◽  
Hamlin Garland ◽  
Peripheral Position

This chapter employs recent approaches to the study of world literature to offer a new reading of nineteenth-century American regionalism. The huge body of texts usually included in the regional or “local-color” genre often take rural communities as both subject matter and foregrounded setting, communities that are held in a structurally “peripheral” position within the combined and uneven world economy of the late nineteenth century. This chapter argues that such a position is registered in the genre’s distinctive oscillation between realist and “irrealist” literary modes—between the professionalized and ascendant cultural standard of the core and the persistence of nonrealist generic devices and registers. Calling on two of the genre’s quintessential representatives, Hamlin Garland and Sarah Orne Jewett, the chapter ultimately makes a case for reading local-color writing as a form of (semi)peripheral realism within world literature’s expanded geographical and temporal horizons.

‘Our passion for legality’: international law and imperialism in late nineteenth-century Britain

2008 ◽  
Vol 34 (3) ◽  
pp. 403-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
CASPER SYLVEST
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
South African ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Congo Free State

AbstractThis article deploys a historical analysis of the relationship between law and imperialism to highlight questions about the character and role of international law in global politics. The involvement of two British international lawyers in practices of imperialism in Africa during the late nineteenth century is critically examined: the role of Travers Twiss (1809–1897) in the creation of the Congo Free State and John Westlake’s (1828–1913) support for the South African War. The analysis demonstrates the inescapably political character of international law and the dangers that follow from fusing a particular form of liberal moralism with notions of legal hierarchy. The historical cases raise ethico-political questions, the importance of which is only heightened by the character of contemporary world politics and the attention accorded to international law in recent years.

Conflicting obituaries: the Abyssinian ‘outlaw’ Debeb as treacherous bandit and romantic hero in late nineteenth-century Italian imagination

Modern Italy ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 405-419
Author(s):  
Stephen C. Bruner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
National Character ◽  
The Other ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Romantic Hero ◽  
Public Persona ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Folk Hero ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Nineteenth

In 1886 the Abyssinian chief Debeb became a public figure in Italy as a rapacious colonial bandit. However, over the next five years he acquired additional public personas, even contradictory ones: as a condottiero ally, a ladies’ man, a traitor, a young Abyssinian aristocrat and pretender to an ancient throne, a chivalrous warrior, and a figure representing the frontier and an Africa mysterious and hidden to Europeans. Upon his 1891 death in combat, he was the subject of conflicting Italian press obituaries. For some commentators, Debeb exemplified treacherous and deceitful African character, an explanation for Italy's colonial disappointments and defeats. However, other commentators clothed him in a romanticised mystique and found in him martial and even chivalrous traits to admire and emulate. To this extent his persona blurred the line demarcating the African ‘other’. Although he first appeared to Italians as a bandit, the notion of the bandit as a folk hero (the ‘noble robber’ or ‘social bandit’, Hobsbawm) does not fit his case. A more fruitful approach is to consider his multi-faceted public persona as reflecting the ongoing Italian debate over ‘national character’ (Patriarca). In the figure of Debeb, public debates over colonialism and ‘national character’ merged, with each contributing to the other.

The Moghia Menace, or the Watch Over Watchmen In British India

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 751-779 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANASTASIA PILIAVSKY
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Systemic Change ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
British India ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Indigenous Governance

AbstractThis paper contributes to the history of ‘criminal tribes’, policing and governance in British India. It focuses on one colonial experiment—the policing of Moghias, declared by British authorities to be ‘robbers by hereditary profession’—which was the immediate precursor of the first Criminal Tribes Act of 1871, but which so far altogether has passed under historians’ radar. I argue that at stake in the Moghia operations, as in most other colonial ‘criminal tribe’ initiatives, was neither the control of crime (as colonial officials claimed) nor the management of India's itinerant groups (as most historians argue), but the uprooting of the indigenous policing system. British presence on the subcontinent was punctuated with periodic panics over ‘extraordinary crime’, through which colonial authorities advanced their policing practices and propagated their way of governance. The leading crusader against this ‘crisis’ was the Thuggee and Dacoity Department, which was as instrumental in the ‘discovery’ of the ‘Moghia menace’ and ‘criminal tribes’ in the late nineteenth century as in the earlier suppression of the ‘cult of Thuggee’. As a policing initiative, the Moghia campaign failed consistently for more than two decades. Its failures, however, reveal that behind the façade-anxieties over ‘criminal castes’ and ‘crises of crime’ stood attempts at a systemic change of indigenous governance. The diplomatic slippages of the campaign also expose the fact that the indigenous rule by patronage persisted—and that the consolidation of the colonial state was far from complete—well into the late nineteenth century.

‘Business Culture’ and Entrepreneurship in British India, 1860–1950

2000 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-348 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.-M. Misra
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Business Culture ◽  
Large Firms ◽  
Eastern India ◽  
British India ◽  
Industrial Economy ◽  
Corporate Organization ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Trading Economy

In the late nineteenth century British expatriate enterprise enjoyed extraordinary success. A few large firms effectively dominated the external trading sector and the modern industrial economy of Eastern India. Based in Calcutta, these firms have been credited with the introduction into India not only of modern industry, but also of modern corporate organization. However, having reached a peak of dominance in the early 1900s, British enterprise seemed to lose its dynamism and became increasingly associated with the old and declining sectors of the Indian industrial and trading economy.

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