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Rather than focusing on either bounded conceptions of migrant assimilation or unbounded transnational linkages, this paper situates migrant experiences in broader "routes of identity." In the case of Malay ex-seamen in Liverpool, UK, all of whom are now in their seventies or eighties, this has meant tracing life geographies extending back well over half a century. During the middle decades of the twentieth century when these men arrived in Liverpool, the city was a major seaport with longstanding maritime connections to Southeast Asia and across the Pacific. Drawing upon fieldwork carried out in Liverpool and Southeast Asia between 2003 and 2008, the paper gives attention to four geographical dimensions of the shifting identities of Liverpool-based Malay ex-seamen: (1) the always-already fluid and mobile nature of their identifications which preceded long-distance migration; (2) shifting political geographies of identity (re)formation, particularly the establishment of post-colonial national boundaries which cut across prior modes of identification; (3) historically variable constitutive geographies of long-distance interconnection, most notably the transition from maritime socioeconomic networks to a post-maritime period; and (4) social sites through which individual and collective identities are emplaced. The intention is to sketch these four different dimensions in such a way as to allow them to speak critically to issues of transnationalism and migrant identity beyond the specific case of Malays in Liverpool. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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) continuous 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. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper examines the rich possibilities for social history opened up by the cultural turn. Focusing on the interplay of myth, memory, and place, it begins with the Kymin, a hillside site outside the Welsh border town of Monmouth. In about 1800 this site was carefully remodelled to invest it with a series of meanings—urban/rural, enlightened/romantic, Welsh/English/British—through which those who visited it were able to explore and express their ambivalent identities. The eighteenth-century spa of Bath was also "symbolic territory," and in one of its iconic structures, the Circus, myth, memory, and place combined to allow the elite to examine similar issues of identity to those at the Kymin. Central to the mythical element in both sites was the notion of the hero. It was an idea that was to resurface on a grand scale in late Victorian and Edwardian Bath, as the city's historic fabric was reconfigured as a "mausoleum" to Britain's Georgian imperial heroes. The paper concludes by arguing that the identities examined in the paper were closely tied to ones of social class, and that the way forward for social history is a fusion of the cultural and the structural that emphasizes the interaction between the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]