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The early emergence of the entrepreneur in the English cloth industry was commemorated by early modern writers such as Skelton, Leland, Deloney, Aubrey, Fuller and Defoe but remains neglected in recent studies exploring industrial expansion and innovation c. 1500–1700. In response to the gap in the current historiography, this article examines the emergence of entrepreneurship, the growth of organizational experimentation and the short-lived development of the proto-factory in the Berkshire towns of Reading and Newbury. It explores the entrepreneurship of industrial capitalists such as John Winchcombe (the illustrious ‘Jack of Newbury’), Thomas Dolman, Thomas Aldworth and William Kendrick and the nature of their achievement and motivation. It assesses the impact of market forces, locational advantages, product specialization and social attitudes in unleashing and shaping entrepreneurial investment from the expansion of cloth-making in the towns in the fifteenth century to de-industrialization in the seventeenth century.

Using a new source of evidence we explore the mobility of mid-nineteenth century seamen. Among seamen born outside London, the tall, the literate and those who could remember the exact day, month and year when they were born, characteristics that we suggest mark them out as men with more choices in life, were more likely to migrate to London. Contrary to what might be inferred from contemporary descriptions of urban disamenities or from persistent differentials in mortality, London appears as a desirable destination for those who could choose. The conclusion must be that London was not so bad, and we should adjust our perception of the problems of urbanisation accordingly, with implications for the wider debate on the standard of living during the industrial revolution. The paper's methodological interest is the use of height as an explanatory variable in the analysis of migration. Although correlated with other variables that are routinely used in anthropometric studies to indicate life chances, such as literacy and the ability to know and recall date of birth, height has empirical advantages over these alternatives in that it exhibits higher levels of significance. Moreover while literacy and heaping are in essence binary variables, height is a (near) continous one, and one that allows us to test for linear and non-linear responses, as we do with interesting results in this paper. Perhaps the most fruitful use of height in historical analyses may turn out to be as an explanatory variable; at the very least such a research strategy provides anthropometric historians with further opportunities.

The Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945 has not been sufficiently understood as a narrative in its own right, but rather, as a transitional conflict between Nationalist and Communist rule. The examination of the visual imagery of warfare disseminated through newsprint and books is one way to reinterpret the history of this period. Through a close reading of images printed in a Shanghai newspaper, Zhonghua ribao, during the final days of the battle for the city in 1937, we see how the news was shaped to impose a narrative of order with a positive teology at a time when China was plunged into chaos with no guarantee of the eventual outcome of the war. The nature of this narrative is explored through examination of images of the body, as well as the positioning of images in the context of the printed page. The conclusion then contrasts these images with a pictorial history of the Sino-Japanese War published during the Civil War, in 1947. It suggests that although this book is able to bring narrative closure to the earlier conflict, its own narrative is imbued with an unease caused by the reality of the new war that had broken out within months of the ending of the war against Japan, and suggests that narrative closure is never truly obtained.

Catholic culture is popularly supposed not to be conducive to curiosity. Yet the Austrian Enlightenment, which reached its peak in the 1780s but had intellectual and institutional roots earlier in the eighteenth century, encouraged curiosity - sometimes unofficial - in many areas. The three here examined are: the study of the Bible and Church history; natural science; and ethnography, or the description of foreign peoples, a genre which developed from travel literature and became fully established at the end of the century.