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Lancashire and the “Undeveloped Estates”: The British Cotton Growing Association Fund-Raising Campaign, 1902–1914

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2015

Jonathan Robins
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Abstract

This article revisits the idea of “cotton imperialism” in Britain, showing that metropolitan support for cotton projects in the British Empire was uneven. Using the records of the British Cotton Growing Association's (BCGA) fund-raising campaign of 1902–1914, the article shows that “empire cotton” did not receive widespread support in Britain. In Lancashire, some cotton capitalists financed the movement for empire cotton, but many others refused to participate. Investors were uninterested in the BCGA's business model despite their interest in other cotton projects. To make matters worse, the BCGA became a tool for politicians on both sides of the Tariff Reform controversy. Textile workers were the only major segment of the British population to accept the BCGA's claims about the value of empire-grown cotton for Britain. Their support for imperial development was, however, limited and pragmatic. The BCGA's struggle to raise money for empire cotton shows the importance of grounding the rhetoric of empire in empirical findings: in the face of the Lancashire lobby's vocal campaign for empire cotton, Britons in general were reluctant to pay for it themselves.

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Articles
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 54 , Issue 4 , October 2015 , pp. 869 - 897
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Copyright © The North American Conference on British Studies 2015 

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References

1 King's Speech to the House of Lords, 2 February 1904, Parliamentary Debates, Lords, 4th ser., vol. 129 (1904), col. 4.

2 Several dissertations have been written on the BCGA and related groups. See John Hose, “Britain and the Development of West African Cotton, 1845–1960” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1970); Brian Vincent, “Cotton Growing in Southern Nigeria: Missionary, Mercantile, Imperial and Colonial Government Involvement versus African Realities c. 1845 to 1939” (PhD diss., Simon Fraser University, 1977); William A. Wardle, “A History of the British Cotton Growing Association, 1902–39, with Special Reference to Its Operations in Northern Nigeria” (PhD diss., University of Birmingham, 1980).

3 The literature on “cotton colonialism” is too voluminous to list in its entirety here. For an overview, see Allen Isaacman and Richard Roberts, eds., Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History in Sub-Saharan Africa (Portsmouth, 1995); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2014), 340–78. On the phrase “cotton imperialism,” see Johnson, Marion, “Cotton Imperialism in West Africa,” African Affairs 73, no. 291 (April 1974): 178–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Egboh, Edmund O., “The Adventures of the British Cotton Growers' [sic] Association in Southern Nigeria, 1902–1913,” Quarterly Review of Historical Studies 16, no. 1 (1978): 71–93Google Scholar.

4 Nonnenmacher, Tomas and Onyeiwu, Steve, “Illusion of a Cotton Paradise: Explaining the Failure of the British Cotton Growing Association in Colonial Nigeria,” Journal of European Economic History 34, no. 1 (Spring 2005): 121–48Google Scholar, at 125; Onyeiwu, Steve, “Deceived by African Cotton: The British Cotton Growing Association and the Demise of the Lancashire Textile Industry,” African Economic History 28 (2000): 89–121, at 90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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6 See especially Johnson, “Cotton Imperialism in West Africa”; Stephen Constantine, The Making of British Colonial Development Policy: 1914–1940 (London, 1984); Jan S. Hogendorn, “The Cotton Campaign in Northern Nigeria, 1902–1914: An Early Example of a Public/Private Planning Failure in Agriculture,” in Isaacman and Roberts, eds., Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History, 50–70; Nonnenmacher and Onyeiwu, “Illusion of a Cotton Paradise”; Onyeiwu, “Deceived by African Cotton.”

7 Lance E. Davis and Robert A. Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire: The Political Economy of British Imperialism, 1860–1912 (Cambridge, 1986), 309.

8 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688–2000, 2nd ed. (London, 2001), 400.

9 Allen Isaacman, Cotton Is the Mother of Poverty: Peasants, Work, and Rural Struggle in Colonial Mozambique, 1938–1961 (Portsmouth, 1996), 4.

10 M. Anne Pitcher, Politics in the Portuguese Empire: The State, Industry, and Cotton, 1926–1974 (Oxford, 1993), 3.

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13 Quoted in Ronald Hyam, Understanding the British Empire (Cambridge, 2010), 323.

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15 John K. Walton, A Social History of Lancashire, 1558–1939 (Manchester, 1986), 207; Douglas A. Farnie, “Cotton, 1870–1914,” in The Cambridge History of Western Textiles, ed. D. T. Jenkins (Cambridge, 2003), 721–60.

16 BCGA Minutes, 18 February 1902, BCGA 1/1/1, Records of the British Cotton Growing Association, University of Birmingham Special Collections (henceforth UBSC).

17 BCGA Minutes, 9 April 1902, BCGA 1/1/1.

18 Wardle, “History,” chap. 1, 3; Jonathan E. Robins, “The Cotton Crisis: Empire and Globalization in the Atlantic World” (PhD diss., University of Rochester, 2010), 85–89.

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21 For India, see Peter Harnetty, Imperialism and Free Trade: Lancashire and India in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Vancouver, 1972); for Africa, see Ratcliffe, B. M., “Cotton Imperialism: Manchester Merchants and Cotton Cultivation in West Africa in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” Historical Papers 16, no. 1 (1981): 101–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hose, “Britain and the Development of West African Cotton, 1845–1960”; Vincent, “Cotton Growing in Southern Nigeria.”

22 BCGA chairman J. Arthur Hutton clearly read CSA documents, as he left extensive notes on two pamphlets in the BCGA papers. BCGA 2/2/7.

23 Cotton Supply Association, Cotton Culture in New or Partially Developed Sources of Supply (Manchester, 1862), in BCGA 2/2/7.

24 See for example Textile World Record 39, no. 6 (September 1910), 656Google Scholar. In the original formulation, related by John Bright, a worker interjected “O Lord! But not Surat” after a public prayer for more cotton. Speech of Mr. Bright, M.P., in the Town Hall, Birmingham, December 18, 1862 (Birmingham, 1862), 5.

25 “West African Correspondence no. 4,” 1906, Africa Confidential Print no. 835, The National Archives (henceforth TNA), CO 879/92/835.

26 Nworah, K. D., “The West African Operations of the British Cotton Growing Association, 1904–1914,” African Historical Studies 4, no. 2 (1971): 315–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Oldham spinner J. Newton was the first chairman, but he gradually ceded power to vice-chairman Hutton over the course of 1903. By 1904 Hutton was firmly in charge.

27 For Jones's business history, see Peter N. Davies, The Trade Makers: Elder Dempster in West Africa, 1852–1972 (London, 1973); idem, Sir Alfred Jones: Shipping Entrepreneur Par Excellence (London, 1978); Barbara G. Jaquay, “The Caribbean Cotton Production: An Historical Geography of the Region's Mystery Crop” (PhD diss., Texas A&M University, 1997).

28 Miscellaneous correspondence 1902–1905, BCGA 6/3.

29 BCGA annual reports, 1902–1905, BCGA 2/1.

30 Bruce Baker and Barbara Hahn, The Cotton Kings: Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans (New York, 2015).

31 This figure assumes British takings of three million bales of American cotton, an average amount for the period 1890–1900.

32 See Robins, “Cotton Crisis,” chap. 3.

33 BCGA Annual report for 1903, BCGA 2/1.

34 J. Arthur Hutton, The Cotton Crisis. Paper Read Before the Economic Section of the British Association, Cambridge, August 22, 1904 (Manchester, 1904), 14.

35 Pamphlets, posters, and descriptions of ephemera are scattered across the BCGA papers; see especially Hutton daybook 2, 4 May 1905, BCGA 7/2/2; Manchester subcommittee minutes, 11 and 25 October 1905, BCGA 1/4/2, and BCGA 10/4/1. Some materials were saved in the papers of the Amalgamated Association of Operative Cotton Spinners and Twiners (ACS), John Rylands University Library, University of Manchester (henceforth JRUL).

36 Hutton, The Cotton Crisis, 9–10.

37 Fund-raising letter, 4 April 1905, BCGA 10/4/1.

38 “The World's Cotton Supply,” Journal of the Society of Arts 53, no. 2714 (November 1904): 31–33, at 32Google Scholar.

39 Constantine, The Making of British Colonial Development Policy, 9; Michael Havinden and David Meredith, Colonialism and Development: Britain and Its Tropical Colonies, 1850–1960 (London, 1993), 70–90; for biographies of Chamberlain, see Peter Marsh, Joseph Chamberlain: Entrepreneur in Politics (New Haven, 1994); Travis L. Crosby, Joseph Chamberlain: A Most Radical Imperialist (London, 2011).

40 BCGA leaflet, February 1903, BCGA 10/4/1.

41 Shelford, Frederic, “Ten Years’ Progress in West Africa,” Journal of the Royal African Society 6, no. 24 (July 1907): 341–49, at 347Google Scholar.

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43 George Douglas Hazzledine, The White Man in Nigeria (London, 1904), 190.

44 Ibid., 4. For more moderate examples of pro–BCGA rhetoric by a colonial official, see Charles W. J. Orr, The Making of Northern Nigeria (London, 1911), 209–18.

45 E. D. Morel, Affairs of West Africa (London, 1902), 188–200; idem, Nigeria, Its Peoples and Its Problems, 2nd ed. (London, 1912), 222–49.

46 Kevin Grant, A Civilised Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926 (New York, 2005), chap. 3 and 4.

47 E. D. Morel, The Black Man's Burden (Manchester, 1920), 163–96.

48 Lagos Weekly Record, 16 June 1905.

49 West African Mail, 10 August 1906.

50 BCGA annual reports for 1902 and 1910, BCGA 2/1.

51 Eight of those sixteen subscribed in guineas, and ten marked their contributions as donations.

52 BCGA annual reports, 1904–1907, BCGA 2/1.

53 John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester, 1984), 97; MacKenzie emphasizes that the Imperial Institute “largely abandoned its efforts to teach a ‘voluntary’ audience and concentrated instead on schoolchildren,” who could be dragooned into attending exhibitions (122). See also Andrew S. Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back?: The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow, 2005), 84–88.

54 Imperial Institute and the BCGA, Handbook of an Exhibition Illustrating British Cotton Cultivation & the Commercial Uses of Cotton (London, 1905).

55 Times, 2 June 1905.

56 Oldham Chamber of Commerce minutes, 19 March 1906, D-ABJ 1/3, Oldham Local Studies and Archives (henceforth OLSA).

57 Cotton Exhibition pamphlet, BCGA 10/3/1.

58 BCGA Organisation committee minutes, 23 June 1905, BCGA 1/4/3.

59 Manchester subcommittee minutes, 23 August 1904, BCGA 1/4/2; see also Oldham MCSA minutes, 28 July 1905, Oldham and Rochdale Textile Employers’ Association, D-AAN 1/1/5/9, OLSA.

60 Walton, Social History of Lancashire, chap. 9–12.

61 Steven King, Women, Welfare and Local Politics 1880–1920: “We Might Be Trusted” (Eastbourne, 2010), 64–65.

62 Charles W. Macara, Recollections (London, 1921), 195; see also Andrew S. Thompson, “Publicity, Philanthropy and Commemoration: British Society and the War,” in The Impact of the South African War, ed. Andrew S. Thompson and David Omissi (Basingstoke, 2002), 99–123.

63 Johnston Birchall, Co-Op: The People's Business (Manchester, 1994).

64 Douglas A. Farnie, The Manchester Ship Canal and the Rise of the Port of Manchester, 1894–1975 (Manchester, 1980).

65 William Haslam Mills, Sir Charles W. Macara, Bart.; A Study of Modern Lancashire (Manchester, 1917), 130.

66 Alan Fowler, Lancashire Cotton Operatives and Work, 1900–1950: A Social History of Lancashire Cotton Operatives in the Twentieth Century (Burlington, 2003).

67 Arthur McIvor, Organised Capital: Employers' Associations and Industrial Relations in Northern England, 1880–1939 (Cambridge, 1996).

68 BCGA Organisation committee, 13 December 1904, 16 February 1905, BCGA 1/4/3.

69 FMCSA report, June 1905, Federation of Master Cotton Spinners' Associations papers, FET 4/1/1, Bolton Archives (henceforth BA).

70 Oldham MCSA General Committee Minutes, 19 February 1904, D-AAN 1/1/5/9, OLSA.

71 Bolton MCSA Minutes, 29 October 1902, FET 1/1/4, BA.

72 Bolton MCSA to members, 2 May 1905, enclosed in BCGA 7/2/2.

73 Darwen letter book, 28 January 1907, FET 3/4/1; 6 September 1911, FET 3/4/2, BA.

74 Oldham MCSA General Committee minutes, 28 July 1905, D-AAN 1/1/5/9, Smallbrook Mill directors to Oldham MCSA, 26 October 1905, OLD 2/5/1, JRUL; Manchester subcommittee minutes, 27 July 1906, BCGA 1/4/2.

75 John Dunkerley & Sons to Oldham MCSA, 8 November 1905, OLD 2/5/1, JRUL. For a contemporary account of the “mill building mania,” see Benjamin Bowker, Lancashire under the Hammer (London, 1928).

76 Bolton Employers' minutes, 18 October 1905, FET 1/1/4; see also 11 March 1910, FET 1/1/15, BA.

77 Letter in BCGA-FMCSA correspondence, 4 March 1910, OLD 2/5/2; FMCSA minutes, 7 February 1910, OLD 2/5/3/1, JRUL.

78 BCGA India Committee minutes, especially 1910–11, BCGA 1/4/1 and BCGA Punjab correspondence, BCGA 6.2. There has been little research on BCGA-Punjab; see Imran Ali, The Punjab Under Imperialism 1885–1947 (Princeton, 1988), 206–35.

79 Poster, September 1905, BCGA 10/4/1.

80 The Manchester Central Library holds a BCGA shareholder register for 1904–29, but the book is missing many individuals and firms whose subscriptions appear elsewhere.

81 “List of firms who have not done as they ought,” n.d. but ca. 1913, BCGA correspondence, Oldham MCSA papers, OLD 2/5/3/2, JRUL.

82 This phrase comes from Douglas Farnie's description of similar attitudes shown during the 1862–65 “cotton famine.” Farnie, “The Cotton Famine in Great Britain,” 157.

83 Bowker, Lancashire under the Hammer, 19–20; 23.

84 Cotton Factory Times, 13 June 1902.

85 BCGA minutes, 20 June 1902, BCGA 1/1/1.

86 Annual Report, 1904, 56–66, BCGA 2/2/1.

87 Cotton Factory Times, 19 August 1904; Organisation Subcommittee Minutes, 24 February 1905; BCGA 1/4/3.

88 “Statement of Capital subscribed to by the different Organisations,” enclosed in Oldfield to Marsland, 4 July 1913, ACS 6/6/1, JRUL.

89 £45,500 is the absolute minimum number of shares bought by workers, trade unions, and associated organizations through collective purchases. Individual workers and community groups likely bought more.

90 Address by J. Arthur Hutton, 2nd International Congress of Delegated Representatives of Master Cotton Spinners’ and Manufacturers’ Association (Liverpool, 1905), 100.

91 Miscellaneous minutes, 18 February 1910, BCGA 1/4/6.

92 A skilled operative in a spinning mill might earn sixty shillings for fifty-five or fifty-eight hours of work per week, with wages supplemented by his wife and children. See Joseph L. White, The Limits of Trade Union Militancy: The Lancashire Textile Workers, 1910–1914 (Westport, 1978), 20. A weeks' expenses in a Lancashire town were about fifty shillings for a family of four (this figure is for Burnley; see Zach McGhee, “The Englishman's Bigger Dollar,” World's Work, July 1910, 13, 157.)

93 Cotton Factory Times, 18 February 1910.

94 Bolton & District Operative Cotton Spinners Provincial Association, 24th Annual Report, 1903, 5, FT21/7, BA.

95 Cotton Factory Times, 15 April 1910.

96 See Bolton & District Cardroom Quarterly Report, September 1905, 5, G12/36, Greater Manchester County Records Office.

97 The 1916 dividend was 2.5 percent. Executive minutes, 28 July 1916, BCGA 1/3/2. For union shares, see BCGA share certificates, ACS 3/3/19, JRUL.

98 Report by Henry McNiel, 31 October 1906, Manchester Subcommittee minutes, BCGA 1/4/2.

99 Manchester Subcommittee Minutes, 27 September 1905, BCGA 1/4/2.

100 Cotton Factory Times, 3 July 1903 and 9 February 1906.

101 Oldham Cardroom Minutes, 2 May 1906 and 23 May 1906, D-TU 2/1/20, OLSA.

102 Bolton Operative Spinners, 26th Annual Report, 1905, 7, FT 21/7, BA.

103 Operative Cotton Spinners annual report, 1905, in BCGA 2/2/5.

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105 William Lazonick, Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor (Cambridge, MA, 1990).

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107 International Federation of Master Cotton Spinners' and Manufacturers Associations, Report of the Eighth International Congress (Manchester, 1911), 100; Sunseri, “The Baumwollfrage,” 45.

108 Minutes of a 10 July 1914 meeting, enclosed in BCGA to Marsland, 11 July 1914, and 18 August 1914, ACS 6/6/1, JRUL.

109 Davis and Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire, 314.

110 Lancashire gentry were targeted in a 1906 “County Movement” that brought in a few major subscribers. Manchester Subcommittee minutes, 28 February 1906, BCGA 1/4/2.

111 Davis and Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire, 313.

112 Harold Hamel Smith and F. A. G Pape, Coco-Nuts: The Consols of the East (London, 1912); see also Harry Clyde Billows and Harold Beckwith, Palm Oil and Kernels: “The Consols of the West Coast.” An Exposition of the Palm Oil Industry, &c. (Liverpool, 1913).

113 D. K. Fieldhouse, Unilever Overseas: The Anatomy of a Multinational, 1895–1965 (Stanford, 1978), 499.

114 Davis and Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire, 302; Crosby, Joseph Chamberlain, 93–94; see also Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back?, 162–63.

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117 Rhodesia Cotton Syndicate Ltd. file, TNA, BT 31/10535/79583.

118 See for instance Nyasa Cotton Estates Ltd. and East African (Jubaland) Cotton Growers' Association, TNA, BT 31/13515/114072, BT 31/13751/118615.

119 For an account of SPS financing, see Simon Mollan, “‘Productive for the State and to Commerce’—Financing Business in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan: The Case of the Sudan Plantations Syndicate, 1904–1913” (paper presented at the Economic History Society Annual Conference, University of Durham, April 2003). For connections between the SPS and the BCGA, see Robins, “Cotton Crisis,” 234–48; Victoria Bernal, “Cotton and Colonial Order in Sudan: A Social History with Emphasis on the Gezira Scheme,” in Isaacman and Roberts, eds., Cotton, Colonialism, and Social History, 96–118.

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123 Howard Reed, “Cotton Growing within the British Empire,” pamphlet reprinted from Cooperative Wholesale Society Annual, 1911, in BCGA 2/2/11.

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125 Ronald Hyam, Elgin and Churchill at the Colonial Office 1905–1908: The Watershed of the Empire-Commonwealth (London, 1968); Clarke, P. F., “The End of Laissez Faire and the Politics of Cotton,” Historical Journal 15, no 3 (September 1972): 493–512, at 494–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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128 House of Commons debate, 22 August 1907, as reported in BCGA annual report, 1907, BCGA 2/2/7.

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130 Times, 6 December 1909.

131 P. F. Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge, 1971), 96.

132 The Annual Register: A Review of Public Events at Home and Abroad for the Year 1908 (London, 1909), 83.

133 Hutton refused his salary in 1917 in protest at a continuing lack of cooperation among Lancashire spinners before finally resigning in January 1918. Executive Council minutes, 1917–1918, BCGA 1/3/2.

134 BCGA minutes, 7 November 1916, BCGA 1/2/2.

135 Wardle, “History,” 182–212.

136 Ibid., 107.

137 W. H. Himbury, The Exploration and Development of New Cotton Fields within the British Empire (Manchester, 1921).

138 There is no history yet of the ECGC. For early BCGA-ECGC relations, see BCGA executive minutes for 1917–1919, BCGA 1/3/2, and ECGC reports in BCGA 2/6. See also Wardle, “History,” 158–212.

139 White, The Limits of Trade Union Militancy, 148–49.

140 Cotton Factory Times, 10 July 1903.

141 Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back?, 3–4; Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Chicago, 2002), 12; Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford, 2004), 224; idem, “Further Thoughts on Imperial Absent-Mindedness,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 36, no. 1 (March 2008): 101–17CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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143 See contributions to the Commodities of Empire working paper series (http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/ferguson-centre/commodities-of-empire/working-papers/).

144 Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back?; Gilles de Gantès, “Migration to Indochina: Proof of the Popularity of Colonial Empire?,” in Promoting the Colonial Idea: Propaganda and Visions of Empire in France, ed. Tony Chafer and Amanda Sackur (Basingstoke, 2002), 15–28; Isabelle Merle, “Drawing Settlers to New Caledonia: French Colonial Propaganda in the Late Nineteenth Century,” in Promoting the Colonial Idea, 40–52.

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146 See D. C. M. Platt, Finance, Trade and Politics in British Foreign Policy, 1815–1914 (Oxford, 1968); Michael Edelstein, Overseas Investment in the Age of High Imperialism: The United Kingdom, 1850–1914 (New York, 1982); Davis and Huttenback, Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire; Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism.

147 Hopkins, A. G., “Big Business in African Studies,” Journal of African History 28, no. 1 (1987): 119–40, at 130CrossRefGoogle Scholar.