This collection brings together primary sources on the British textile industry across the long nineteenth-century, a subject that is both global and multidisciplinary. This set provides an extensive range of resources on the calico printing industry, textile warehousing and shipping, and textile waste and recycling.

Compelling, moving and unexpected portraits of London's poor from a rising star British historian - the Dickensian city brought to real and vivid life. Until now, our view of bustling late Georgian and Victorian London has been filtered through its great chroniclers, who did not themselves come from poverty - Dickens, Mayhew, Gustave Dore. Their visions were dazzling in their way, censorious, often theatrical. Now, for the first time, this innovative social history brilliantly - and radically - shows us the city's most compelling period (1780-1870) at street level. From beggars and thieves to musicians and missionaries, porters and hawkers to sex workers and street criers, Jensen unites a breadth of original research and first-hand accounts and testimonies to tell their stories in their own words. What emerges is a buzzing, cosmopolitan world of the working classes, diverse in gender, ethnicity, origin, ability and occupation - a world that challenges and fascinates us still.

First published in 1853, 12 Years a Slave is the riveting true story of a free black American who was sold into slavery, remaining there for a dozen years until he finally escaped. This powerfully written memoir details the horrors of slave markets, the inhumanity practiced on southern plantations, and the nobility of a man who persevered in some of the worst of conditions, a man who never ceased to hope that he would find freedom and see his beloved family again. This edition has been slightly edited--for spelling and punctuation only--for easier reading by a modern audience. It also includes two helpful appendixes not found in the original book. Now a major motion picture

Paris 1744: a royal official approaches a shopkeeper's wife, proposing that she become an informant to the Crown and report on the conversations of foreign diplomats who take meals at her house. Her reports, housed today in the Bastille archives, are little more than a collection of wartime rumors gathered from clandestine, handwritten newspapers and everyday talk around the city, yet she comes to imagine herself a political agent on behalf of Louis XV. In this book Tabetha Ewing analyses different forms of everyday talk over the course of the War of Austrian Succession to explore how they led to new understandings of political identity. Royal policing and clandestine media shaped what Parisians knew and how they conceptualized events in a period of war. Responding to subversive political verses or to an official declaration hawked on the city streets, they experienced the pleasures and dangers of talking politics and exchanging opinions on matters of state, whether in the cafe or the wigmaker's shop. Tabetha Ewing argues that this ephemeral expression of opinions on war and diplomacy, and its surveillance, transcription, and circulation shaped a distinctly early-modern form of political participation. Whilst the study of sedition has received much scholarly attention, Ewing explores the unexpectedly dynamic effect of loyalty to the French monarchy, spoken in the distinct voices of the common people and urban elites. One such effect was a sense of national identity, arising from the interplay of events, both everyday and extraordinary, and their representation in different media. Rumor, diplomacy and war in Enlightenment Paris rethinks the relationship of the oral and the written, the official and the unofficial, by revealing how gossip, fantasy, and uncertainty are deeply embedded in the emergent modern, public life of French society.

Scholars from France and from countries of the Huguenot Refuge examine the situation of French Protestants before and after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in France and in the countries to which many of them fled during the great exodus which followed the Edict of Fontainebleau. Covering a period from the end of the sixteenth to the beginning of the nineteenth century, the volume examines aspects of life in France, from the debate on church unity to funeral customs, but its primary focus is on departure from France and its consequences -- both before and after the Revocation. It offers insights into individuals and groups, from grandees such as Henri de Ruvigny, depute general and later Earl of Galway, to converted Catholic priests and from businessmen and communities choosing their destination for economic as well as religious reasons, to women and children moving across European frontiers or groups seeking refuge in the islands of the Indian Ocean. The information-gathering activities of the French authorities and the reception of problematic groups such as the Camisard prophets among exile communities are examined, as well as the significant contributions which Huguenots began to make, in a variety of domains, to the countries in which they had settled. The refugees were extremely interested in the history of their diaspora and of the individuals of which it was composed, and this theme too is explored. Finally, the Napoleonic period brought some of the refugees up against France in a more immediate way, raising further questions of identity and aspiration for the Huguenot community in Germany.

"Compact and insightful. "--New York Times Book Review "Jack Larkin has retrieved the irretrievable; the intimate facts of everyday life that defined what people were really like."--American Heritage

The development of political economy as a philosophical preoccupation constitutes a defining feature of the Enlightenment, but no consensual agreement on this issue was formed in the period. In this book contributors reassess the conflicting views on money, trade, banking, and the role of the State in the work of leading figures such as Locke, Davenant, Toland, Berkeley and Smith, and Smith's critics in revolutionary France. Key events, from the Recoinage crisis in the 1690s to the South Sea Bubble in the 1720s and the consequences of the French Revolution, sharpened the need for a more dynamic conception of economic forces in the midst of the Financial Revolution. Political economy emerged as a disruptive force, challenging philosophers to debate and define unstable phenomena in a new climate of expanding credit, innovation in money form, political change and international competition. In Money and political economy in the Enlightenment contributors investigate received critical assumptions about what was progressive and what was backward-looking, and reconsider traditional attempts to periodise the Enlightenment. Major questions explored include: the impact of economic and political crises on philosophy; transitions from mercantilist to 'classical' analyses of the market; the challenge of reviving ancient republicanism on the foundations of a modern commercial system, with its inherent social inequalities.

Napoleon arrived on St Helena in October 1815 aboard the British 74-gun warship HMS Northumberland. For the first six weeks he stayed at the Briars, a property in the Upper Jamestown Valley where he enjoyed the hospitality of the Balcombe family. By the end of December, the re-building work on his destined home, Longwood, was completed, and Napoleon accompanied by his entourage moved there, much to Napoleon's annoyance. He found the site bleak, inhospitable, and considered it conducive to rheumatism. The British Government was paranoid about Napoleon being rescued and maintained a large military presence on the island, and numerous warships anchored offshore. This paranoia extended to the new Governor, Sir Hudson Lowe. He ran a typrannical and petty campaign against the residents at Longwood and had violent arguments with Napoleon, who refused to cooperate with him. This book is one of the best accounts of Napoleon's five-and-a-half years' imprisonment, which ended with his death from a stomach ulcer. It details all of the personalities, Napoleon's household, the domestic arrangements, the island residents, the military residents and the long-standing feud between Plantation House and Longwood. It also covers Betsy Balcombe, the Deadwood Races, Napoleon's habits and his garden and much, much more. The book has eighty colour and black & white illustrations.

The familiar story of Irish migration to eighteenth and nineteenth-century London is one of severe poverty, hardship and marginalization. This book explores a very different set of Irish encounters with the metropolis by reconstructing the lives, experiences and activities of middle-class migrants. Detailed case studies of law students, lawyers and merchants show that these more prosperous migrants depended on Irish connections to overcome the ordinary challenges of day-to-day life. In contrast to previous scholarly assumptions that middle-class migrants assimilated completely to English cultural and social norms, this book emphasizes the possibilities rather than the limits of Irishness and argues that Irish identity had a unique, operative value of its own, for which there was no substitute. Guided by recent works that stress the capacity of communities to operate across space rather than being anchored to specific places such as the street, neighbourhood or village, Irish London argues that the middle-class migrant's frame of reference went far beyond the metropolis. The three case studies in this book focus on Irish lives in the city, but also follow migrants further afield-more specifically to Jamaica and India- to explore what middle-class communities were, how they worked and who belonged to them. By doing so, this study seeks to move us towards a better understanding of what it meant to be a middle-class Irish migrant in the global eighteenth century.

Trees and tree products have long been central to human life and culture, taking on intensified significance during the long eighteenth century. As basic raw material they were vital economic resources, objects of international diplomatic and commercial exchange, and key features in local economies. In an age of ongoing deforestation, both individuals and public entities grappled with the complex issues of how and why trees mattered. In this interdisciplinary volume, contributors build on recent research in environmental history, literary and material culture, and postcolonial studies to develop new readings of the ways trees were valued in the eighteenth century. They trace changes in early modern theories of resource management and ecology across European and North American landscapes, and show how different and sometimes contradictory practices were caught up in shifting conceptions of nature, social identity, physical health and moral wellbeing. In its innovative and thought-provoking exploration of man's relationship with trees, Invaluable trees: cultures of nature, 1660 -1830 argues for new ways of understanding the long eighteenth century and its values, and helps re-frame the environmental challenges of our own time.

This collection pieces together a wealth of material in order to get inside the experience of scientific practice in the long nineteenth century. It aims to reach, or perhaps to facilitate, an understanding of the ways in which the value of scientific knowledge was produced, lived and challenged. The new turn to the history of experience suggests a logic to the compilation of material that is completely original: the sources are not selected according to the historical success of an idea or experiment, but for the ways in which scientific endeavour loaded knowledge claims with political or moral value, coupled with attendant practical justifications. Thus, 'bad ideas' sit alongside 'good'; now discountenanced practices take their place among the revered. In sum, they reveal an experimental culture that was not merely orientated toward cold knowledge or intellectual output, but defined by shifting sets of affective practices and procedures and the making of expertise out of the lived experience of doing science.

"What Bodanis does brilliantly is to give us a feel for Einstein as a person. I don't think I've ever read a book that does this as well . . . Whenever there's a chance for storytelling, Bodanis triumphs." --Popular Science "Fascinating." --Forbes Widely considered the greatest genius of all time, Albert Einstein revolutionized our understanding of the cosmos with his general theory of relativity and helped lead us into the atomic age. Yet in the final decades of his life, he was ignored by most working scientists, and his ideas were opposed by even his closest friends. How did this happen? Best-selling biographer David Bodanis traces the arc of Einstein's life--from the skeptical, erratic student to the world's most brilliant physicist to the fallen-from-grace celebrity. An intimate biography in which "theories of the universe morph into theories of life" (Times, London), Einstein's Greatest Mistake reveals what we owe Einstein today--and how much more he might have achieved if not for his all-too-human flaws.

This book is a study of political exile and transnational activism in the late-Victorian period. It explores the history of about 500 French-speaking anarchists who lived in exile in London between 1880 and 1914, with a close focus on the 1890s, when their presence peaked. These individuals sought to escape intense repression in France, at a time when anarchist-inspired terrorism swept over the Western world. Until the 1905 Aliens Act, Britain was the exception in maintaining a liberal approach to the containment of anarchism and terrorism; it was therefore the choice destination of international exiled anarchists, just as it had been for previous generations of revolutionary exiles throughout the nineteenth century. These French groups in London played a strategic role in the reinvention of anarchism at a time of crisis, but also triggered intense moral panic in France, Britain and beyond. This study retraces the lives of these largely unknown individuals - how they struggled to get by in the great late-Victorian metropolis, their social and political interactions among themselves, with other exiled groups and their host society. The myths surrounding their rumoured terrorist activities are examined, as well as the constant overt and covert surveillance which French and British intelligence services kept over them. The debates surrounding the controversial asylum granted to international anarchists, and especially the French, are presented, showing their role in the redefinition of British liberalism. The political legacy of these 'London years' is also analysed, since exile contributed to the formation of small but efficient transnational networks, which were pivotal to the development and international dissemination of syndicalism and, less successfully, to anti-war propaganda in the run up to 1914.

Relations between Jews and their neighbours in eastern Europe have long been perceived, both in the popular mind and in conventional scholarship, as being in a permanent state of conflict. This volume counters that image by exploring long-neglected aspects of inter-group interaction and exchange. In so doing it broadens our understanding of Jewish history and culture, as well as that of eastern Europe. Whereas traditional historiography concentrates on the differences between Jews and non-Jews, the essays here focus on commonalities: the social, political, and economic worlds that members of different groups often shared. Shifting the emphasis in this way allows quite a different picture to emerge. Jews may have been subject to the whims of ruling powers and influenced by broader cultural and political developments, but at the same time they exerted a discernible influence on them - the social, cultural, and political spheres were ones that they not only shared, but that they also helped to create. This model of reciprocal influence and exchange has much to offer to the study of inter-group relations in eastern Europe and beyond. Designed to move the study of east European Jewry beyond the intellectual and academic discourse of difference that has long troubled scholars, this volume contributes to our perception of how members of different groups operate and interact on a multitude of different levels. The various contributions represent a wide cross-section of opinions and approaches - historical, literary, and cultural. Taken together they move our understanding of east European Jewry from the realm of the mythical to a more rational mode. In addition to essays considering interactions between Jews and Poles, other contributions examine relations between Jews and other ethnic groups (Lithuanians, Russians), discuss negotiations with various governments (Habsburg, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, and Soviet), analyse exchanges between Jews and different cultural realms (German, Polish, and Russian), and explore how the politics of memory affects contemporary interpretations of these and related phenomena. CONTRIBUTORS Karen Auerbach, Israel Bartal, Ela Bauer, Jan Blonski, Marek Edelman, Michael Fleming, Dorota Glowacka, Regina Grol, Francois Guesnet, Brian Horowitz, Agnieszka Jagodinska, Jeff Kopstein, Sergei Kravtsov, Rachel Manekin, Czeslaw Milosz, Karin Neuberger, Przemyslaw Rozanski, Kai Struve, Joanna Tokarska-Bakir, Jerzy Turowicz, Scott Ury, Kalman Weiser, Jason Wittenberg, Marcin Wodzinski, Piotr Wrobel

First published in 1956, The Post-War Condition of Britain measures the extent of changes in Britain since the thirties. It contains more than two hundred tables on such matters as the national income, employment, production and productivity, investment and consumption; health, education, housing, and the insurance, assistance and similar services; on Trade Unions and industrial relations; class structure, political attitudes and party organizations; and the problems of local government and town and country planning. It is simply written, demanding from the reader the minimum of technical knowledge of economics or other specialized studies, and it should serve as an invaluable reference book for all who need exact information.

Before he had even conceived of the Decline and fall of the Roman Empire there was another Edward Gibbon, a young expatriate living in Switzerland and writing in French. In the Essai, a work of remarkable erudition and energy completed by the age of twenty-one, Gibbon reflects on the present state of knowledge in post-Renaissance Europe - what he calls litterature. The first publication of the Essai since 1761, this critical edition sets Gibbon's work in its intellectual context. A detailed introduction examines the biographical, cultural and historical background to this text: the young writer's perception of European intellectual life as he observed it from Lausanne, his relation to the Encyclopedie and the French academies, the fate of erudition, and the modern organization of learning in books. An extensive commentary completes this edition, providing invaluable annotation of each chapter, including the important but little-known sections on religion that were replaced by Gibbon in the final text. As current debates revisit the meaning of Enlightenment, readers will find in this edition of Gibbon's Essai a new approach to the intellectual networks and tensions that lie at its heart.

This compendium of primary sources examines British architectural history from the accession of King George III in 1760 to the outbreak if the First World War in 1914. The collection of two volumes contains a mixture of architectural treatises, biographical material on architects, works on different types of building, and contemporary descriptions of individual buildings. This title will be of great interest to students of Art History and Architecture.

Many of us assume Western Civilization derives from a cultural inheritance that stretches back to classical antiquity, a golden thread that binds us from Plato to NATO. But what if all this is wrong? What if the Western world does not have its ultimate origins in a single cultural bloodline but rather a messy bramble of ancestors and influences? What if The West is just an idea that has been invented, co-opted, and mythologised to serve different purposes through history? As battles over privilege, identity and prejudice rock the cultural wars, it's never been more important to understand how the concept of The West came to be. This book tells a bold, empowering new story of how the idea of the West was created, how it has been used to justify imperialism and racism, and also why it's still a powerful ideological tool to understand our world. Told through the lives of fourteen fascinating historical figures -- from a powerful Roman matriarch to an Islamic scholar, from a crusading Greek soldier to a founding father of the United States, from a slave girl in the new Americas to a British prime minister -- it casts a new light on how the West was invented, embraced, rejected and re-imagined to shape our world today.

This four-volume collection explores the idea that, for Victorians and Edwardians, the meanings attached to work and the meanings attached to being without work were always dependent upon each other, knotted together by the imperative for a man to desire employment and be willing to work. Mechanization and the decline of old trades, the creation of single-industry cities and towns, the migration of agricultural labourers from the countryside to these cities and to London, the intensification of the sweated industries, and the displacement of the labour of adult men by the labour of women and adolescent boys all contributed to urgent conversations about the relationships between work and unemployment and are examined through primary sources. Accompanied by extensive editorial commentary, this collection will be of great interest to students of British History.

In this dazzling work of history, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author follows Benjamin Franklin to France for the crowning achievement of his career
In December of 1776 a small boat delivered an old man to France." So begins an enthralling narrative account of how Benjamin Franklin-seventy years old, without any diplomatic training, and possessed of the most rudimentary French-convinced France, an absolute monarchy, to underwrite America's experiment in democracy.
When Franklin stepped onto French soil, he well understood he was embarking on the greatest gamble of his career. By virtue of fame, charisma, and ingenuity, Franklin outmaneuvered British spies, French informers, and hostile colleagues; engineered the Franco-American alliance of l778; and helped to negotiate the peace of l783. The eight-year French mission stands not only as Franklin's most vital service to his country but as the most revealing of the man.
In "A Great Improvisation," Stacy Schiff draws from new and little-known sources to illuminate the least-explored part of Franklin's life. Here is an unfamiliar, unforgettable chapter of the Revolution, a rousing tale of American infighting, and the treacherous backroom dealings at Versailles that would propel George Washington from near decimation at Valley Forge to victory at Yorktown. From these pages emerge a particularly human and yet fiercely determined Founding Father, as well as a profound sense of how fragile, improvisational, and international was our country's bid for independence.

Voltaire's turbulent relationship with the courts of law of ancien regime France reveals much about his social and political thought, but its representation in many studies of the philosophe is often simplistic and distorted. In the first in-depth study of Voltaire and the parlements James Hanrahan looks afresh at this relationship to offer a new and challenging analysis of Voltaire's political thought and activity. Through examination of Voltaire's evolving representation of the parlements in his writings from La Henriade to the Histoire du parlement, Hanrahan calls into question the dominant historiography of extremes that pits Voltaire 'defender of the oppressed' against 'self-interested' magistrates. He presents a much more nuanced view of the relationship, from which the philosophe emerges as a highly pragmatic figure whose political philosophy was inseparable from his business or humanitarian interests. In Voltaire and the 'parlements' of France Hanrahan opens up analysis of Voltaire's politics, and provides a new context for future study of the writer as both historiographer and campaigner for justice.

Sir John Duckworth commanded ships and squadrons and fleets throughout the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. He was an assiduous correspondent, writing to Admirals St Vincent, Nelson, Collingwood, and numerous other naval officers. He kept every piece of paper he wrote on or received. He was in the first expedition to the West Indies when he went on a mission to the United States to suppress a French privateer. He commanded a ship in First of June fight in 1794, and was peripherally involved in the great naval mutinies of 1797. He was picked out by Lord St Vincent to command the recovery of Minorca in 1798. He returned to the West Indies in 1799 where he was commander-in-chief in the Leeward Islands, and then at Jamaica. There he was much involved in the Revolutionary war in Haiti, eventually receiving several thousands of French refugees and sending them on to France. A spell with the Channel fleet was succeeded by time at the blockade of Gibraltar. Against orders, he chased a French squadron across the Atlantic and destroyed it (Battle of San Domingo 1796). One of his more curious adventures was a diplomatic mission to the Constantinople to browbeat the Ottoman Sultan into making peace with Russia in 1807. He failed, of course, and was criticised for not bombarding the city. He served out his time afloat with the Channel fleet, displaying his usual humanity. A three-year appointment as governor of Newfoundland completed his career.

A startling and eye-opening look into America's First Family, Never Caught is the powerful story about a daring woman of "extraordinary grit" (The Philadelphia Inquirer). When George Washington was elected president, he reluctantly left behind his beloved Mount Vernon to serve in Philadelphia, the temporary seat of the nation's capital. In setting up his household he brought along nine slaves, including Ona Judge. As the President grew accustomed to Northern ways, there was one change he couldn't abide: Pennsylvania law required enslaved people be set free after six months of residency in the state. Rather than comply, Washington decided to circumvent the law. Every six months he sent the slaves back down south just as the clock was about to expire. Though Ona Judge lived a life of relative comfort, she was denied freedom. So, when the opportunity presented itself one clear and pleasant spring day in Philadelphia, Judge left everything she knew to escape to New England. Yet freedom would not come without its costs. At just twenty-two-years-old, Ona became the subject of an intense manhunt led by George Washington, who used his political and personal contacts to recapture his property. "A crisp and compulsively readable feat of research and storytelling" (USA TODAY), historian and National Book Award finalist Erica Armstrong Dunbar weaves a powerful tale and offers fascinating new scholarship on how one young woman risked everything to gain freedom from the famous founding father and most powerful man in the United States at the time.

Jean-Louis Wagniere servit Voltaire en qualite de secretaire de 1755 a 1778 avant de defendre sa memoire jusqu'a sa mort. Ses lettres assurent une importante mediation dans notre connaissance de la vie et de l'oeuvre du grand philosophe. Dans cette etude Christophe Paillard rassemble d'importants documents inedits qui apportent des eclaircissements sur les oeuvres de Voltaire et ses strategies epistolaires, ses rapports avec les editeurs, l'installation de sa bibliotheque a Petersbourg et l'histoire de l'edition de Kehl. Or, C. Paillard montre aussi que le temoignage de Wagniere doit etre interprete avec plus de precaution que la critique n'a eu tendance a le faire auparavant. Il fait voir que l'attribution de certaines oeuvres ou les remarques sur l'edition de Kehl doivent etre replacees dans le contexte d'une mise en scene; on decouvre a quel point le 'petit scribe' a assimile et mis en oeuvre les strategies litteraires de son maitre. Dans Jean-Louis Wagniere, secretaire de Voltaire: lettres et documents Christophe Paillard renouvelle l'etude de l'epistolaire et des methodes d'ecriture de Voltaire. Il procure aux specialistes de Voltaire une mine de documents inedits, et, de plus, il nous offre un moyen de les lire.

The "superb" (The Guardian) biography of an American who stood against all the forces of Gilded Age America to fight for civil rights and economic freedom: Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan. They say that history is written by the victors. But not in the case of the most famous dissenter on the Supreme Court. Almost a century after his death, John Marshall Harlan's words helped end segregation and gave us our civil rights and our modern economic freedom. But his legacy would not have been possible without the courage of Robert Harlan, a slave who John's father raised like a son in the same household. After the Civil War, Robert emerges as a political leader. With Black people holding power in the Republican Party, it is Robert who helps John land his appointment to the Supreme Court. At first, John is awed by his fellow justices, but the country is changing. Northern whites are prepared to take away black rights to appease the South. Giant trusts are monopolizing entire industries. Against this onslaught, the Supreme Court seemed all too willing to strip away civil rights and invalidate labor protections. So as case after case comes before the court, challenging his core values, John makes a fateful decision: He breaks with his colleagues in fundamental ways, becoming the nation's prime defender of the rights of Black people, immigrant laborers, and people in distant lands occupied by the US. Harlan's dissents, particularly in Plessy v. Ferguson, were widely read and a source of hope for decades. Thurgood Marshall called Harlan's Plessy dissent his "Bible"--and his legal roadmap to overturning segregation. In the end, Harlan's words built the foundations for the legal revolutions of the New Deal and Civil Rights eras. Spanning from the Civil War to the Civil Rights movement and beyond, The Great Dissenter is a "magnificent" (Douglas Brinkley) and "thoroughly researched" (The New York Times) rendering of the American legal system's most significant failures and most inspiring successes.