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Begin New Search Topic History Political Geography Europe Content Type Case Study Publication Year within 5 Years Publication Year within 25 Years

1. Rhodes Must Fall: The Legacy of Cecil Rhodes in the University of Oxford

Author:
Emma Day
Publication Date:
02-2023
Content Type:
Case Study
Institution:
Oxford Centre for Global History
Abstract:
On 9 June 2020, more than a thousand people gathered in central Oxford demanding that Oriel College remove the statue of imperialist and mining magnate, Cecil Rhodes. Congregating in defiance of the Covid-19 pandemic, protesters drew renewed attention to the long-standing struggle to decolonise education and tackle institutional racism at British and South African universities. They also knelt with fists raised for over nine minutes in tribute to George Floyd, a man whose recent murder at the hands of Minneapolis police marked only the latest atrocity in a long history of racialised violence in the United States. Amid the local and global reckonings over race and racism taking place in the wake of Covid-19 and Floyd’s murder, the 2020 Rhodes Must Fall protest marked the latest iteration in a fight to remove Rhodes from campuses that began over five years earlier.1 In 2014, after completing his master’s degree at the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa, Ntokozo Qwabe won a Rhodes scholarship to study a Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL) degree at Keble College, University of Oxford. Qwabe arrived in Oxford amid growing calls for the removal of the statue of Rhodes back home. UCT students argued that Rhodes’s monument embodied the pervasive white privilege at the university, and that tackling those problems required removing his oppressive figure from campus. On 9 March 2015, students accelerated their demands for change. Political science student Chumani Maxwele hurled excrement at Rhodes’s statue. Others occupied UCT offices and posted the hashtag #RhodesMustFall to publicise their campaign on Twitter. One month later, UCT removed Rhodes’s statue from campus, inaugurating the Rhodes Must Fall movement. Although Rhodes fell in Cape Town, he remained standing at the University of Oxford. The abundance of tributes to Rhodes at the university may have surprised South African students arriving in Oxford, left wondering why Cecil Rhodes still enjoyed such an outsized public representation at one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious universities. Moreover, with Oxford’s own issues of institutional racism rooted in colonialism and slavery, South African students questioned why the many monuments to Rhodes did not provoke anger among Oxford’s staff and student body. After demanding that Rhodes fall in Cape Town, and asking, why not in Oxford, Qwabe brought the anti-colonialist movement to his new university.
Topic:
Imperialism, Capitalism, History, and Cecil Rhodes
Political Geography:
Europe and England

2. Robert Maxwell’s Expectations Gap: Regulation and Reputation in the British Communications Industry, 1981-91

Author:
Charlie Harris
Publication Date:
02-2023
Content Type:
Case Study
Institution:
Oxford Centre for Global History
Abstract:
During Robert Maxwell’s turbulent lifetime, the world knew him as one of the most successful businessmen in Britain, presiding over a publishing and media empire in direct competition with that of Rupert Murdoch. In 1991, Robert Maxwell died – at which point the world discovered that he was, in fact, far beyond bankrupt. As banks called in their huge loans, accountants found that his empire boasted £2 billion in debt. When he drowned, various auditors and authorities were close to catching him in an enormous fraud. Maxwell had stolen around £460 million from his employees’ pension funds and committed extensive stock fraud in order to manipulate the share prices of his empire. Accusations of fraud and mismanagement dogged Maxwell’s career, but to little effect. Beginning with a single publishing house, he built a media empire. His rivalry with Rupert Murdoch – and perhaps his emotional state, which was notoriously volatile and competitive – drove him to expand at an unsustainable pace, which he supported with confidence trickery and enormous loans. His debts quickly outstripped his assets. Desperately scrambling to repay the loans, he turned to stock fraud and his employees’ pension funds. Still desperate for capital six months before his death, Maxwell floated his largest-ever venture – Mirror Group Newspapers – which successfully attracted £250 million in investment, despite the destitution of its parent company. Public autopsies concluded that the blame lay not just with Maxwell, but with advisers, regulators, and complicit financial institutions. Maxwell killed himself (though some still speculate he was murdered) shortly before a scheduled meeting that would have uncovered his fraud. Maxwell did not leave his family destitute, but they no longer had immediate access to the lifestyle to which they had become accustomed. His sons continued working in the City of London. His daughter, Ghislaine Maxwell, continued to circulate in high society. Her crimes are now better known than her father’s; she is famous for her work as Jeffrey Epstein’s right-hand woman, procuring victims (often under-age) for Epstein’s “prostitution ring” (something of a misnomer, as the term implies consent). Both scandals implicated some of the most powerful figures of their day, and in both cases, th
Topic:
Communications, History, Capitalism, Industry, and Robert Maxwell
Political Geography:
Britain and Europe

3. Making Money: Mathew Boulton and the Industrial Revolution in Coins

Author:
Michael Leger
Publication Date:
12-2022
Content Type:
Case Study
Institution:
Oxford Centre for Global History
Abstract:
When John Wilkinson could not amass enough small-change coins to pay his workers, he set up a tab and a “pay-table” at a local alehouse and instructed his employees to drink several pints until they whittled their wages down.1 Due to coin shortages, workers drank their wages away until their boss had the correct amount of change to give. With nearly one thousand employees, Wilkinson was one of Great Britain’s largest employers at the beginning of the First Industrial Revolution. 2An iron specialist, he invented a machine for boring cast iron, which was instrumental to the development of cannons and the steam engine. Arranging pay-tables at pubs was just one of a handful of ways that industrialists like Wilkinson managed to pay their workers when there was a severe shortage of coins in circulation. Other common methods included long-pay and group-pay, where workers were given high-value coins less frequently, or high-value coins that had to be split among several families. In both cases, figuring out how to break down payment into smaller portions was a hassle. At times, Wilkinson also provided housing and coal in lieu of money. The small change shortage meant it was not only cumbersome for individuals to get paid, but it threatened to stall the economic momentum of the Industrial Revolution. The Royal Mint, for a variety of reasons, failed to supply enough coins for the economy to function. Eventually, Wilkinson, along with a few other leading industrialists, took the initiative and minted their own coins. To pay their workers, industrialists got into the business of literally making money. This marked the beginning of the commercial coin industry that blossomed in the 1780s and 1790s in Great Britain.
Topic:
History, Capitalism, Currency, and Industrial Revolution
Political Geography:
Europe and England

4. The “A1” Reputation of the Lloyd’s Register of Shipping

Author:
Charlie Harris and Christopher McKenna
Publication Date:
11-2019
Content Type:
Case Study
Institution:
Oxford Centre for Global History
Abstract:
For over two hundred years, Lloyd’s Register has surveyed and classified ships. Founded in 1760 in a coffeehouse on London’s busy Lombard Street, the company then known as the Society for the Registry of Shipping, surveyed and classified the seaworthiness of ships. For the first time, underwriters and merchants could gain an idea of the condition of the vessels they insured and chartered while ship builders and shipowners could demonstrate seaworthiness. Lloyd’s classified the best as “A1.” This term would become the Register’s greatest contribution to the popular lexicon and, ever since, the phrase “A1 at Lloyd’s” connotes the highest quality. As the Second Industrial Revolution took hold in the nineteenth century, new concerns about standardization arose and, with them, battles to decide what organisations had the authority to dictate standards. Victory was generally determined by some combination of reputation, expertise, luck, timing, state sanction, and the quality of the standard proposed. Lloyd’s Register was able to set the standard for how ships should be built. While the Register technically only classified how ships should be insured, this financial motive (tied to safety and reliability) was a fitting starting point from which to define how maritime safety could be codified and guaranteed.
Topic:
History, Capitalism, Trade, Insurance, and Shipping
Political Geography:
United Kingdom, Europe, and Global Focus