Digital Sources, Access and 'History of a Nation'?

Every ten years a frisson passes through the diasporic world of British family history when the manuscript census forms compiled a hundred years earlier become available to the modern historian. The 1911 manuscript census was released unexpectedly early — and online — in January 2009. Overnight, and with relative ease, family historians could take the next step along the trail of their own micro-history. For other historians too the release of these records was exciting and significant. The 1911 census was the site of a battle in the campaign for women's suffrage: militant suffrage organizations called for members and supporters to boycott the census. Jill Liddington and Elizabeth Crawford have used the enumerators' forms to examine the suffragette claims of its success, and to detail the distinction between evasion (going somewhere to avoid being counted) and resistance (refusing to supply information on the census form, perhaps with the words 'No Vote No Census'). Their essay, 'Women do not count, nor shall they be counted', suggests that support for the suffrage boycott was more widespread than political membership implies; at the same time they open up the wider issue of the politically tense relationship among feminists between the campaign for the vote and the promise of welfare reform, which had shaped the 1911 census.

The census and family reconstitution figure in 'Secrets and Lies', Tanya Evans's enthusiastic exploration of recent Australian national history. Family historians who follow a paper trail to reconstruct their ancestors' lives believe they are filling in gaps left by academic history, whereas in fact their work creates new evidence and raises questions which may challenge academic narratives. No eighteenth or nineteenth-century white settler family in Australia, apparently, was without its convict member or aboriginal encounter; each family history is messy, complicated, and throws up the unexpected. Cumulatively family reconstitution, by exposing the 'snags' in founding stories of a white settler nation, has provoked a complex reworking of the Australian past, Evans argues, and she makes a plea for more cross-fertilization of ideas and material between the academic and the family historian, and for removal of barriers to archives and sources — the tools of the historians' trade. Family and kin figure in several other articles in this issue. Becky Taylor and Martyna Śliwa, for instance, in 'Polish Migration', use oral history to establish the continuities of migration (whether forced by state policies of urbanization or boundary changes, or following family custom in the manner of Mary Chamberlain's Barbadian families) in state building in the second half of the twentieth century; while Amy Erickson, in her study of London's eighteenth-century milliners, uses the detailed records of guild apprenticeships to expose links with extended kin as well as the range of women's respectable trade and independent commercial enterprises.

Individual lives, families and kin are the key to the economic understanding of 'Working London' at different moments in the eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries. Despite incomplete company records, the numbers of female milliners in City trading companies, Amy Erickson argues, force us to rethink the relative weight of the female enterprise and of women's independence in the eighteenth-century London economy. Donna Loftus, in 'Dynamism and Decline', opens up the economic categories of homework, sweating and subcontracting among Charles Booth's small masters, by a close reading of their testimony to Booth's researchers (available online), and shows how family and household decisions about consumption permitted flexible adjustments within and between trades. Booth himself, Loftus suggests, was amazed (or confused) by the diversity and proliferation of small masters and workshops, which seemed to perpetuate poverty, defy the categories of economic progress and point to decline, and was forced to rethink character and consumption in the London trades as means of survival and profit — categories which did not fit the parameters of marginal economics. The intricate workings of seasonality and casualism, and the adaptability and flexibility of the small entrepreneur in London's industries which Loftus reconstructs, are also exemplified by David Day's entrepreneurial family of swimmers, the 'Beckwith Frogs'. These characteristics of the London economy continued...