Leisure and urbanism in nineteenth-century nice

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W. Brass) and fertility and religion in Northern Ireland (by P. Compton). In fact, the coverage presented here is wider than these newsworthy items would allow and this carefully edited volume presents a generally scholarly, well written and thoughtprovoking set of essays on a variety of themes. The collection has its origin in the 18th Annual Conference of the Eugenics Society held in London in 198 1. As the editorial preface suggests, no previous book has been devoted primarily to the demography of immigrants and other minorities in the U.K. Most of the twelve chapters are concerned with patterns of immigrant settlement and adaptation over the last 30 years with, inevitably, an overwhelming emphasis on populations of New Commonwealth and Pakistani ethnic origin. Whilst it is not appropriate to comment here in detail on these essentially contemporary analyses. they do emphasize three points. First. the large. predominantly coloured immigration may already be seen as of long-term cultural significance. Secondly, and notwithstanding the first observation, there are clear historical precedents for both anti-immigrant feeling and for adaptation of immigrants in British society. Thirdly, despite the inevitable limitations of sources for the study of past populations, there is much to learn from the meticulous approaches here employed by, for example. Brass on the future dimensions of the New Commonwealth population. Thompson on differential fertility among ethnic minorities or Benjamin on mortality variations. In addition, there are three essays which raise specifically historical issues. The first by Colin Holmes provides a general review of immigration to Britain since 1870. paying particular attention to Jewish immigration before 1914 and to New Commonwealth movements since 1945. He is nevertheless at pains to emphasize the variety of movement at all periods: for example before the First World War of Irish, French, German. Italian. Russian and Chinese immigrants; or of Poles and other Europeans after 1945. As he observes, each new immigration has triggered hostility and occasional violence against minorities has been a recurring feature in Britain for most of the last century. Holmes also illustrates the similarities at different periods in the imagery of opposition to immigration and shows how the “past has been used to interpret the present and to justify contemporary reactions”, as for example in the National Front’s use of its journal Spravhrud to emphasize the tradition of racialist thought in Britain. The essay by Kosmin takes up specifically the question of nuptiality and fertility patterns among British Jewry between 1850 and 1980. In a carefully argued chapter, he explains how and why demographic characteristics of immigrant Jews rapidly converged with the Anglo-Jewish and national patterns, involving declining family size, widespread use of birth control and low rates of synagogue marriage. Finally. the chapter by Spencer traces the structure and dynamics of the Catholic population of the British Isles “the archipelago” in his terminology since 1840, presenting in turn data for England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The theme throughout this book is on methodical, dispassionate analysis. There could. indeed. be no more persuasive a plea for such an approach than the dedication ot Spencer’s chapter to a former student murdered in Londonderry whilst carrying out her duties as an enumerator in the 1981 census.

C. JAMES HAUG, Leisure and Urban&l

in NirleteerltIl-Cerztur~’ Nice (Lawrence: Regents 1982. Pp. xviii + 167. $19.95) JOHN K. WALTON, The English Seaside Resort: u Social Historic 1750-1914 (Leicester: Leicester University Press. New York: St Martin’s Press. t 983. Pp. xii + 265. E25.00 and $37.50) Press of Kansas,

Holiday resorts in the nineteenth century were a special breed of town. Their population fluctuated wildly over the course of the year, for they had at least two populations the

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residents and the visitors. Services to visitors were the towns’ main economic interest and arguments over which visitors were wanted their most important social and political one. Social or health disorders were to be avoided at all costs, for news of either could destroy a resort’s appeal: that surely is why Margate’s doctors two years after a major cholera outbreak denied the existence of epidemic diseases in the town, rather than the general complacency to which Walton attributes it? The doctors of Nice, after all, generally behaved in much the same way. Yet they were also towns like any other, with the issues of land allocation and building, the provision of municipal services, social relations and conflicting economic interests shaping the urban world of what were no more than frivolous and ever-changing playgrounds in which outsiders could restore their health or their spirits. As Maurice Crubellier has expressed it, “le XIXe siecle a invente la ville qui fournit le remtde a la ville” (Histoire de lu Frunce Urbaine, vol. 4, 1983, p. 407). The historical study of seaside resorts is now escaping from the constraints set by either town biography or the history of leisure, and these two works emphasize their subjects as a part of urban history. The style of the books differs. C. James Haug’s precise and readable account of the development of Nice from a restrained environment for often aristocratic visitors seeking calm and warmth in the winter months to a lively and worldly resort for wealthy hivernants concentrates on the attempts of the local authorities to plan the town’s development, their commitment to these visitors and neglect of the permanent residents many of whom gained little from the influx, and the faltering and only gradually successful attempts to tackle the problems of water supply, sanitation and public health. If the visitors had come in the summer. then the sanitary squalor of the Old Town, segregated from the hivrrnants within its own Italianate yuartier, might have received attention. A conflict between the needs of the tourists (often as interpreted by either commercial interests or local government, and in Britain it was often difficult to differentiate between the two) and the concerns of many permanent residents was thus prominent in Nice. It was probably so in English seaside resorts, but we are told little about this in John K. Walton’s generally excellent work of synthesis. The art of pulling together an excess of detailed local case studies is a rarely perfected one, and if Walton at times descends into a bewildering variety of different examples, he generally succeeds in laying out the main features of English seaside resort development as it moved from an exclusive pattern not unlike that of Nice (except that it perforce concerned mostly summer visitors), to a broad middle-class appeal in the early and mid-Victorian period which saw the flourishing of the family resort, and on to that later nineteenth-century explosion of lower middle and working-class excursions and holidays by the sea. Walton moves confidently through the character of demand, the differences between the types of resorts, landownership and planning, entertainment, and local government, which was increasingly involved in regulating and investing, so that by the end of the century it was the focal point for those endless contemporary arguments over social tone. This generally meant no more than a battle over which market they were aiming at, and how to protect it. Walton is least helpful on the social structure of the resorts themselves, where his analysis is limited to a detailed presentation of census and directory data that are not used as the springboard for a plunge into those internal social relationships within the towns themselves that we glimpse in disputes over rates, regulation, and the need to provide for the tourists. The seem all too often to have divided propertied classes especially the petite bourgeoisie on such issues, and the resident working class (in contrast to the turbulent excursionists) barely appear. A social history of resorts should have told us more about these matters. Why some resorts succeeded and others failed was a complicated business Spittal’s three manure factories should surely have prevented it reaching the First World War larger than the obsessively respectable Frinton but more important than such internal differences are the broad features of resort development revealed in these complimentary books: the determining role of landownership patterns, the increasing need for municipal rather than market regulation of land use in such a sensitive spatial economy (the Sardinian-appointed NiGois council saw this very early), and the social tensions created by

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the need for each urban economy to have a specific market appeal yet also to have the protection of diversity. Seaside resorts became substantial capitalist enterprises, and provided an early example of the use of municipal government to protect and then shape the environment for business. Haug’s precise and brief case study, and Walton’s valuable and wide-ranging analysis, are significant for far more than the history of leisure. University

qj’ Essex

GEOFFREYCROSSICK

M. R. JARMAN,G. N. BAILEYand H. N. JARMAN(Eds), Earl-v European Agriculture: Its Foundations and Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Pp. x + 283. E25.00) Like geography, archaeology has undergone a revolutionary transformation in its aims and methods during the last few decades. In Britain, the “new archaeology” burst upon the academic scene slightly later than the “new geography” and indeed it drew a good deal of its intellectual stimulus from the geographical revolution of the sixties. For both disciplines Cambridge was the primary focus of innovation, though both also owed an intellectual debt to prior methodological developments across the North Atlantic. With the benefit of hindsight, two major new fields of archaeological enquiry can be seen to have emerged at Cambridge in the late sixties: one, pioneered by David Clarke, focused on spatial analysis and model-building (and owed a direct debt to the new geography); the other, led by the charismatic figure of Eric Higgs, developed a new approach to the study of prehistoric subsistence economies under the auspices of the British Academy Major Research Project in the Early History of Agriculture which began in 1967. By a sad coincidence, both of these archaeological pioneers died in 1976, leaving a younger generation of scholars to build on the foundations they had laid. Early European Agriculture represents the third and last volume to stem from the British Academy Project, and the only one for which Eric Higgs was not directly responsible. It existed “only as a sketchy outline” at the time of his death, and is now offered-by three of his principal lieutenants--as a tribute and memorial to him. The first point to stress in this brief review is that the title is somewhat misleading. In emphasizing the European context of the case studies included in the book, the editors are over-modest, because, although the geographical frame of reference is exclusively European, the concepts and methodology used are much more widely applicable. The title does not prepare the reader for the fact that the first three of the seven major chapters that make up the book are devoted to theoretical discussion. Many readers, especially those who are not primarily concerned with European prehistory, will find these opening chapters of greatest interest. In the first, the underlying philosophical position of the “Higgs school” is stated -broadly that of evolutionary biology, with archaeology regarded as essentially the study of past human behaviour (rather than of the material remains of the human past) -and the nature and interaction of the three basic variables that condition human subsistence -resources, technology and population ~ are discussed. In the second chapter, on territories and mobility, we are on the familiar Higgsian ground of “catchment analysis” and its later refinement “territorial analysis”. Most of the criticisms that have been levelled against the early uses of the essentially empirical technique of site-catchment analysis are rebutted, and a convincing case is made for the application of the more theoretically robust technique of territorial analysis to relatively simple subsistence economies. The valid point is also made that such geographical models as central-place theory are not appropriately applied at this level of socio-economic organization but only to more complex societies with hierarchical settlement patterns. The third theoretical chapter moves from general discussion of the principles governing the subsistence behaviour of humans and other animals to their study in the prehistoric