Kevin James
Supported by The William Lind Foundation
Kevin James is Professor of History, Director of the Centre for Scottish Studies, and holder of the Scottish Studies Foundation Chair at the University of Guelph. A graduate of McGill and Edinburgh Universities, he has written widely on Scottish and Irish economic and social history, initially with a focus on textiles, and now centres his research on the history of Scottish tourism. He is co-editor, with Eric G.E. Zuelow, of the Oxford Companion of Tourism History and, with Leith Davis, of the forthcoming collection to be published by Edinburgh University Press entitled Shaping Jacobitism, 1688 to the Present: Memory, Culture, Networks. Kevin has a long-standing research interest in Scottish urban history. He has held national research awards and fellowships at universities in Scotland, Ireland, and the United States.
This project explores the history of Glasgow’s City Business Club between the Club’s establishment in 1912 and its dissolution in 1964. The Club advocated for the interests of commerce and industry in the city. Charitable activity in the wake of World War I, such as its leadership of the annual Poppy Day Appeal, and efforts to find positions for former enlisted men, became vehicles through which the Club projected a civic philanthropic presence in the public arena. This project explores its lobbying activities aimed at lowering local rates and ‘red tape’ at the national level; its trade promotion programme; its central role in building a national network of business clubs in Scotland from 1934; its role in sponsoring a regional extension of clubs in the West of Scotland; its critical role as a ‘clearing house’ for information and debate at regular luncheon meetings; and its alliance with other organisations against municipal socialism in the 1920s and ‘Home Rule’ in the 1930s. It illuminates how the structure of capital and labour in Glasgow—and in particular the dominance of specific large employers within industrial business bodies and within the Chamber of Commerce—created space for interests to develop an institutional base through the City Business Club.
This University of Glasgow Library Visiting Research Fellowship, generously supported by the Lind Foundation, allows me to explore and share with scholars and the wider community the history of an important actor in Glasgow’s business landscape – a body that had an important advocacy role, as well as a prominent position in broader civic life. I am deeply grateful for the support of the University and the Lind Foundation, which will enable me to shed light on the history of the City Business Club.
