The East India Company: How a trading corporation became an imperial ruler | History Extra

Officers of the East India Company being entertained by musicians and dancers, depicted in an Indian image from around 1820. (Werner Forman/Universal Images Group/Getty Images)

Featured in BBC One’s new period drama Taboo as a company with huge influence and power – and one which is unafraid to further its interests by nefarious means – the East India Compa…

Source: The East India Company: How a trading corporation became an imperial ruler | History Extra

Blockade 7: Coal – Digging For The Enemy?

First World War Hidden History

Thanks to the secret Contraband Committee, trade between neutral nations and Norway, Sweden and Denmark flourished as never before. Despite the blockade that nominally operated in the North Sea, the scandalous decisions of the Contraband Committee in London meant that trade in the supplies, commodities and material vital to the continuation of the war continued virtually unchecked for over two years and Scandinavia prospered. From the very first days of war, merchants and importers in Stockholm, Oslo, Copenhagen, Helsingborg and Malmo found themselves inundated with orders from Germany to supply thousands of tons of animal feed, foodstuffs, ores, cotton and coal. Purchased from the Americas, North and South, from Britain and the British Empire, from other neutral countries world-wide these imports literally bounced from the quay-sides and dockyards to the goods trains and canal boats that ferried them to their final destination. Germany.

Scandinavian merchants made profits beyond their wildest…

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Old English Occupation: Knocker-Up Keeping Employees Working

Although this article I have re-blogged here talks about knocker-uppers lasting until the 1920s, they actually continued, as Pete Johnson comments below, into the 1950s, possibly beyond.

Originally posted on Genealogy Research Network

Many old and honorable occupations that no longer exist have their origins deeply rooted in history when people worked many varying trades.  Some of these professions are not what historians or genealogists might consider to be mainstream work, but over the years these various lines of work have provided great stories that can be passed down to future generations.

One of these jobs was that of the knocker-up also sometimes referred to as a knocker-upper.  This profession was prevalent in both England and Ireland having started during the early days of the Industrial Revolution and lasted into the beginnings of the 20th Century as late as the 1920s.  Before alarm clocks were both affordable, and reliable, it was the job…

via Old English Occupation: Knocker-Up Keeping Employees Working | Genealogy Research Network.