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This thesis examines a group of freemen trading in coal at Newcastle upon Tyne in the sixteenth century known as the Hostmen’s Company. The Newcastle hostmen had established an unincorporated guild by 1508 and held the monopoly in the sale of coal from the town’s port during the rapid expansion of the Tyneside coal trade in the half-century from 1550. Their guild was granted legal status by the Crown in 1600. Existing research on the activities of the Newcastle hostmen in the sixteenth century offers important evidence about their monopoly but leaves open questions about the organization and membership of their guild. No comprehensive history of the Tudor hostmen has been attempted before. There has been no detailed assessment of their ascendancy or the trade of their principal members during a period of decisive change in the mining and sale of Tyneside coal and England’s transition to an industrial economy. This thesis uses little-explored town chamberlains’ accounts to investigate the origins, trading networks, family connections, and business activities of the Tudor hostmen for the first time. The accounts show that hosting coal at Newcastle was confined to a small group of citizens drawn mainly from the town’s mercantile and civic elite, and their widows. Some strangers, gentlemen, craftsmen, and yeomen also participated in the hosting trade. After the Dissolution of the Monasteries and the armed rebellions of the English Roman Catholic nobles the principal hostmen used their capital, political power, and religious connections to acquire the bulk of newly available mining land in the vicinity of Newcastle, creating a de facto monopoly in the production as well as the sale of coal. The hostmen shipped Tyneside coal to markets on the English coast, France, the Netherlands, and the Baltic Sea and had gained control over Newcastle’s governance by the mid-sixteenth century. This thesis shows the importance of two urban-industrial coal dynasties founded by the Newcastle corn merchants James Lawson (d. 1544) and Henry Anderson (d. 1559). Members of the Lawson-Anderson oligarchy dominated mining and hosting in Elizabethan Newcastle at a time when there was a more than three-fold increase in the volume of coal leaving the town’s port by the seaborne trade. They mined extensively in the vicinity of Newcastle on the banks of the River Tyne, created the most developed industrialized landscape in Elizabethan England, and built the two biggest integrated coal businesses in the town while continuing to trade as merchants in a wide variety of commodities. This thesis shows that the Lawson-Anderson oligarchy continued to dominate the Tyneside coal trade in the first half of the seventeenth century, though some of their members suffered heavy losses in the Civil War.

In recent decades, many societal changes have unfolded, including population ageing, reconfigurations of household structures, labour market transformation, and a secular deceleration of economic growth. These shifts pose considerable challenges to preexisting welfare states, particularly to the efficacy of countries’ pension systems. This dissertation examines the context and trajectory of pension reforms in Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Its contribution is to ascertain the viability and political feasibility of reforms that enhance the financial sustainability of their pension systems, while maintaining adequate income and coverage levels. The dissertation builds on political economy approaches and on the institutionalist literature, which highlight how the role of interest groups and structure of institutions and political systems shape policy outcomes. The frameworks of blame avoidance and credit-claiming are also considered, to provide a comprehensive analysis of the complex dynamics surrounding pension systems and reform efforts. This dissertation uses a mixed-methods approach – including public opinion surveys of 3,000+ individuals, semi-structured elite interviews, historical document analyses, and specialized fiscal and actuarial projections of selected pension reforms in the three selected countries. It addresses three core research questions: 1) What is the current context for pension reform in Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States given their histories? 2) Is the necessary (for achieving specific minimum levels of sustainability, adequacy, and coverage) pension reform politically feasible? 3) How do the characteristics of each reform affect its political feasibility? Corollary: The modification of which channel (benefits, contributions, retirement age) is perceived as more politically feasible for diverse stakeholders? The methodology chosen provides a timely picture of the context surrounding potential pension reforms in the three case studies. In Mexico, credit-claiming and the interests of private stakeholders explain the success of recent pension reforms, and partisan politics are the key determinants for future fiscal changes. For the United Kingdom, the institutionalist literature helps explain the reasons for the relatively easier reform avenues; the most politically feasible reforms are those in the private sector, while the housing market is of key importance for pensions. In the United States, the institutionalist literature and the framework of blame avoidance also help explain the current legislative gridlock and the reasons why no major reform has been enacted for decades. For Mexico and the United Kingdom there exist politically feasible reforms, notably a modification of the retirement age channel, that can increase the system’s sustainability while maintaining income adequacy and coverage; whereas based on the current context of extreme polarisation and legislative gridlock, there do not seem to exist politically feasible pension reforms that preserve the structure of Social Security in the United States. The dissertation brings the lens of political feasibility to bear on a previously technical literature on the structure of the pension systems in the three countries, and thus on the feasibility of reform to deliver financial sustainability, adequacy of retirement incomes, and adequate coverage of the old age population. It identifies the feasible routes for reform in Mexico and the United Kingdom, but concludes that the political economy context the United States has reached rules out feasible reforms of its current pension structures.

Ammonia has been responsible for feeding population growth in the 20th century through synthetic fertilizer, and is poised to become the preferred energy storage medium for a society powered by renewable electricity in the 21st century. However, conventional brown ammonia production through the Haber-Bosch process is optimized for utilization of centralized and steady energy supply from fossil-fuels. When shifting to distributed and intermittent energy supply through wind and solar energy, a re-optimization is required for a low-capital and flexible green ammonia production processes. This thesis re-designs and Haber-Bosch process by targeting the integration of reaction and separation in a single process vessel at low pressures, thereby achieving the simplification and down-scaling of the high pressure recycle loop of the Haber-Bosch process. Materials are developed for this purpose, the feasibility of integration is demonstrated, and mathematical modeling is utilized for assessing the application of the single-vessel process to a range of renewable energy sources in comparison to competing ammonia production processes. Herein, a catalyst with low-temperature (< 350°C) and high-conversion (i.e. near equilibrium) activity is developed using ruthenium nanoparticles as the active metal supported on ceria and promoted with cesium to mitigate hydrogen and ammonia inhibition, respectively. This catalyst is compared to commercial iron-based catalyst from the perspective of the final application. Concurrently, a high-temperature (> 300°C) manganese chloride absorbent is developed that resists decomposition and is stable when supported on silica. These catalyst and absorbent are integrated in a layered reactor configuration to demonstrate the feasibility of the integrated process by exceeding single-pass reaction equilibrium. Mathematical modelling of ammonia production processes illustrates that at small-scales (< 1 t day-1) the single-vessel process is optimal compared to the Haber-Bosch process due to its modular design. In addition, it can achieve simpler ramping because the Haber-Bosch process is constrained by heat-integration in the recycle loop and the potential for runaway reaction. For final application, the pairing of ammonia production processes with examples of intermittent solar and wind sources demonstrates that the flexibility of the production process is essential when considering non-ideal sources of energy with a long-term (e.g. seasonal) oscillations. Flexible ammonia production also expands the economic usage of ammonia as an energy storage vector from the seasonal to the weekly time-scale, with advantage compared to batteries or hydrogen. The work of this thesis provides a framework for advancing the electrification of the chemical industry given the novel constrains of intermittent and distributed renewable energy. A systems level approach is applied from the ground up, starting from material design and progressing to optimized process design and application.