|
|
Books > Humanities > History > History of specific subjects > Industrial history
In 1909 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, on his way back to South Africa
from London, wrote his now celebrated tract "Hind Swaraj," laying
out his vision for the future of India and famously rejecting the
technological innovations of Western civilization. Despite his
protestations, Western technology endured and helped to make India
one of the leading economies in our globalized world. Few would
question the dominant role that technology plays in modern life,
but to fully understand how India first advanced into technological
modernity, argues David Arnold, we must consider the technology of
the everyday. "Everyday Technology" is a pioneering account of how
small machines and consumer goods that originated in Europe and
North America became objects of everyday use in India in the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than investigate
"big" technologies such as railways and irrigation projects, Arnold
examines the assimilation and appropriation of bicycles, rice
mills, sewing machines, and typewriters in India, and follows their
impact on the ways in which people worked and traveled, the clothes
they wore, and the kind of food they ate. But the effects of these
machines were not limited to the daily rituals of Indian society,
and Arnold demonstrates how such small-scale technologies became
integral to new ways of thinking about class, race, and gender, as
well as about the politics of colonial rule and Indian nationhood.
Arnold's fascinating book offers new perspectives on the
globalization of modern technologies and shows us that to truly
understand what modernity became, we need to look at the everyday
experiences of people in all walks of life, taking stock of how
they repurposed small technologies to reinvent their world and
themselves.
Now widely recognized as a novelist and essayist, working-class
writer Ethel Carnie Holdsworth first published as a poet. The three
books collected here demonstrate her growth in this genre from her
early poems, written when she worked full time in the mill, to her
last book of poetry, Voices of Womanhood, which realizes her mature
insights into the lives of working-class women. Carnie Holdsworth's
poetry provides both a unique perspective on British life in the
early twentieth century and an invaluable testament to the
experiences of her gender and class.
Lockheed has been one of American's largest corporations and most
important defense contractors from World War II to the present day
(since 1995 as part of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company). During
the postwar era, its executives enacted complicated business
responses to black demands for equality. Based on the papers of a
personnel executive, the memoir of an African American employee,
interviews, and company publications, this narrative history offers
a unique inside perspective on the evolution of equal employment
and affirmative action policies at Lockheed Aircraft's massive
Georgia plant from the early 1950s through the early 1980s. Randall
L. Patton provides a rare, perhaps unique, account of African
American struggle and management response, set within the context
of the regional and national struggles for civil rights. The book
describes the complex interplay of black protest, federal policy,
and management action in a crucial space in the national economy
and within the South, contributing to business history, policy
history, labor history, and civil rights history.
For centuries lime was an essential ingredient in many aspects of
life and work - such as farming, building and manufacturing - and
the kilns in which lime was produced were a familiar sight across
the country, not just in areas where limestone naturally occurred.
The importance given to the industry is illustrated by the number
of painters, notably Turner and Girtin, who chose to paint lime
kilns either as the main focus or as an incidental element, and by
the number of literary figures who brought lime burning into their
novels. Lime Kilns: History and Heritage starts by discussing the
uses and importance of lime, and how it has been portrayed
artistically, then describes how lime kilns changed over time, from
simple clamp kilns through small farmers' and estate field kilns to
large commercially operated kilns. It is illustrated with
contemporary and modern photographs, paintings and plans drawing on
examples from across Britain. David Johnson has published and
lectured widely on lime burning and is regarded as an authority on
the subject.
Race, Labor, and Violence in the Delta examines the history of
labor relations and racial conflict in the Mississippi Valley from
the Civil War into the late twentieth century. This essay
collection grew out of a conference marking the hundredth
anniversary of one of the nation's deadliest labor conflicts-the
1919 Elaine Massacre, during which white mobs ruthlessly
slaughtered over two hundred African Americans across Phillips
County, Arkansas, in response to a meeting of unionized Black
sharecroppers. The essays here demonstrate that the brutality that
unfolded in Phillips County was characteristic of the culture of
race- and labor-based violence that prevailed in the century after
the Civil War. They detail how Delta landowners began seeking cheap
labor as soon as the slave system ended-securing a workforce by
inflicting racial terror, eroding the Reconstruction Amendments in
the courts, and obstructing federal financial-relief efforts. The
result was a system of peonage that continued to exploit Blacks and
poor whites for their labor, sometimes fatally. In response,
laborers devised their own methods for sustaining themselves and
their communities: forming unions, calling strikes, relocating, and
occasionally operating outside the law. By shedding light on the
broader context of the Elaine Massacre, Race, Labor, and Violence
in the Delta reveals that the fight against white supremacy in the
Delta was necessarily a fight for better working conditions, fair
labor practices, and economic justice.
Of the leading print centres in early modern Europe, Wittenberg was
the only one that was not a major centre of trade, politics, or
culture. This monograph examines the rise of the Wittenberg
printing industry and analyses how it overtook the Empire's leading
print centres. It investigates the workshops of the four leading
printers in Wittenberg during Luther's lifetime: Nickel Schirlentz,
Josef Klug, Hans Lufft, and Georg Rhau. Together, these printers
conquered the German print world.
The Filth of Progress explores the untold side of a well-known
American story. For more than a century, accounts of progress in
the West foregrounded the technological feats performed while
canals and railroads were built and lionized the capitalists who
financed the projects. This book salvages stories often omitted
from the triumphant narrative of progress by focusing on the
suffering and survival of the workers who were treated as
outsiders. Ryan Dearinger examines the moving frontiers of canal
and railroad construction workers in the tumultuous years of
American expansion, from the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825
to the joining of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads
in 1869. He tells the story of the immigrants and Americans-the
Irish, Chinese, Mormons, and native-born citizens-whose labor
created the West's infrastructure and turned the nation's dreams of
a continental empire into a reality. Dearinger reveals that canals
and railroads were not static monuments to progress but moving
spaces of conflict and contestation.
The hands of Cornish miners bore scars of one of the most
sophisticated traditions of hard-rock mining in the world.
Toughened "Cousin Jacks" brought generations of toilsome
underground experience to the Americas from one of the oldest
mining regions of the world. Once here, their skill with granite
and ore won their fame as the industrial elite of western mining
camps. Heirs of a perfected system of excavation, a valuable
terminology, and the technical edge of a culture immersed in
sinkings, stopes, and winzes, they were the world's best hard-rock
miners. Pioneers in American mine operation, Cornish miners
utilized tribute pay to raise output and made themselves partners
with a grueling industry. Expertise made them company men,
superintendents, captains, and drillers, with their success
dependent almost entirely on their own initiative, coolness, and
skill. They are part of a culture that has survived because its
very roughness gave a resilience and durability that could be
transplanted and take root in an alien soil. The courage and
determination of these "Cousin Jacks" in their struggle against
overwhelming odds is dramatically illustrated in numerous personal
stories. The Atlantic crossing, and the journey overland to the new
mining districts, were exhausting trials. Although their skill in
working with rock and water was soon recognized, the extremes of
weather and temperature, strange sicknesses, the constant danger of
accidents, and the lawlessness of the camps, all made life hard to
endure. Many did not survive to send home for their families, yet
the majority persevered to spread their legendary mining skills and
to bring social as well as religious stability to mining areas that
extended from Wisconsin to California. In the continent-wide search
for bonanzas, Cornish miners and their families played a vital part
in the opening-up of the American West, and in the shaping of
modern industrial America. The author follows them across the
Atlantic to the lead mines and farms of Wisconsin, along the trails
to Oregon and Death Valley, the Sierras and the Sacramento in
California, then to the copper and iron ranges in the Hiawatha
country of Upper Michigan; from there to the silver and gold
canyons of the Rockies and the notorious Comstock Lode in Nevada,
and finally to the deserts of Utah, Idaho, and Arizona. Originally
published in 1967, this new edition contains an updated
introduction by Dr. Todd. With extensive footnotes and index,
handsomely printed on acid-free paper stock with cloth cover which
is stamped in gold foil on the spine and cover.
Understanding the history of energy and its evolving place of
energy in society is essential to face the changing future of
energy production. Across North and South America, national and
localized understandings of energy as a common, public, or market
good have influenced the development of energy industries. Energy
in the Americas brings the diverse energy histories of North and
South American nations into dialogue with one another, presenting
an integrated hemispheric framework for understanding the
historical constructions of contemporary debates on the role of
energy in society. Rejecting pat truisms, this collection
historicizes the experiences of producers and policymakers and
assesses the interplay between environmental, technological,
political, and ideological influences within and between countries
and continents. Breaking down assumptions about the evolution of
national energy histories, Energy in the Americas broadens and
opens the conversation. De-emphasizing traditional focus on
national peculiarities, it favours an international, integrated
approach that brings together the work of established and emerging
scholars. This is an essential step in understanding the
circumstances that have created current energy policy and practice,
and the historical narratives that underpin how energy production
is conceptualized and understood.
During the mid-nineteenth century, a quarter of a million
travelers-men, women, and children-followed the "road across the
plains" to gold rush California. This magnificent chronicle-the
second installment of Will Bagley's sweeping Overland West
series-captures the danger, excitement, and heartbreak of America's
first great rush for riches and its enduring consequences. With
narrative scope and detail unmatched by earlier histories, With
Golden Visions Bright Before Them retells this classic American
saga through the voices of the people whose eyewitness testimonies
vividly evoke the most dramatic era of westward migration.
Traditional histories of the overland roads paint the gold rush
migration as a heroic epic of progress that opened new lands and a
continental treasure house for the advancement of civilization.
Yet, according to Bagley, the transformation of the American West
during this period is more complex and contentious than legend
pretends. The gold rush epoch witnessed untold suffering and
sacrifice, and the trails and their trials were enough to make many
people turn back. For America's Native peoples, the effect of the
massive migration was no less than ruinous. The impact that tens of
thousands of intruders had on Native peoples and their homelands is
at the center of this story, not on its margins. Beautifully
written and richly illustrated with photographs and maps, With
Golden Visions Bright Before Them continues the saga that began
with Bagley's highly acclaimed, award-winning So Rugged and
Mountainous: Blazing the Trails to Oregon and California,
1812-1848, hailed by critics as a classic of western history.
'A very readable history of the British way of life viewed through
its homes' Choice Magazine In recent years house histories have
become the new frontier of popular, participatory history. People,
many of whom have already embarked upon that great adventure of
genealogical research, and who have encountered their ancestors in
the archives and uncovered family secrets, are now turning to the
secrets contained within the four walls of their homes and in doing
so finding a direct link to earlier generations. And it is ordinary
homes, not grand public buildings or the mansions of the rich, that
have all the best stories. As with the television series, A House
Through Time offers readers not only the tools to explore the
histories of their own homes, but also a vividly readable history
of the British city, the forces of industry, disease, mass
transportation, crime and class. The rises and falls, the shifts in
the fortunes of neighbourhoods and whole cities are here, tracing
the often surprising journey one single house can take from an
elegant dwelling in a fashionable district to a tenement for
society's rejects. Packed with remarkable human stories, David
Olusoga and Melanie Backe-Hansen give us a phenomenal insight into
living history, a history we can see every day on the streets where
we live. And it reminds us that it is at home that we are truly
ourselves. It is there that the honest face of life can be seen. At
home, behind closed doors and drawn curtains, we live out our inner
lives and family lives.
While the histories of gold, silver, and copper mining and smelting
are well studied, lead has not received much scholarly attention
despite a long history of both Native American and European desire
for the ore. Over time, native peoples made lead ornaments in
molds; French and American settlers used lead to form musket balls;
red lead became an important production element for flint and
crystal production; and white lead was used in making paint until
the mid-twentieth century. Gray Gold aims to broaden understandings
of early colonial and Native American history by turning attention
to the ways that mining-and its scientific, technological,
economic, cultural, and environmental features-shaped intercultural
interactions and developments in the New World. Backed by
remarkable original sources such as firsthand mining accounts,
letters, and surveys, Mark Chambers's study demonstrates how early
mining techniques affected the culture clash between Native
Americans and Europeans all the while tracking the impact increased
mining had on the environment of what would become the states of
Illinois and Missouri. Chambers traces the evolution of lead mining
and smelting technology through pre-contact America, to the
amalgamation of aboriginal processes with French colonial
development, through Spain's short occupation to the Louisiana
Purchase and ultimately the technology transfer from Europe to an
efficient and year-round standard of practice after American
assumption. Additionally, while slavery in early American industry
has been touched on in iron manufacturing and coal mining
scholarship, the lead mining context sheds new light on the history
of that grievous institution. Gray Gold adds significantly to the
understanding of lead mining and the economic and industrial
history of the United States. Chambers makes important
contributions to the fields of United States history, Native
American and frontier history, mining and environmental history,
and the history of science and technology.
International Arms Trade has always been a powerful and
multi-functional constituent of world politics and international
diplomacy. Sending military advisors abroad and promoting arms
sales, each legitimizing and supporting the other, became
indispensable tools of alliance-making starting from the eve of the
First World War until today. To the German Empire, as a relative
latecomer to imperialistic rivalry in the struggle for colonies
around the word in the late 19th century, arms exports performed a
decisive service in stimulating and strengthening the German
military-based expansionist economic foreign policy and provided
effective tools to create new alliances around the globe.
Therefore, from the outset, the German armament firms' marketing
and sales operations to the global arms market but especially to
the Ottoman Empire, under the rule of Sultan Abdulhamid II, were
openly and strongly supported by Kaiser Wilhelm II, Bismarck and
the other decision-makers in German Foreign Policy. Based on
extensive multinational archival research in Germany, Turkey,
Britain and the United States, Arming the Sultan explores the
decisive impact of arms exports on the formation and stimulation of
Germany's expansionist foreign economic policy towards the Ottoman
Empire. Making an important contribution to current scholarship on
the political economy of the international arms trade, Yorulmaz's
innovative book Arming the Sultan reveals that arms exports,
specifically under the shadow of personal diplomacy, proved to be
an indispensable and integral part of Germany's foreign economic
policy during the period leading up to WW1.
Women's emancipation through productive labour was a key tenet of
socialist politics in post-World War II Yugoslavia. Mass
industrialisation under Tito led many young women to join
traditionally 'feminised' sectors, and as a consequence the textile
sector grew rapidly, fast becoming a gendered symbol of
industrialisation, consumption and socialist modernity. By the
1980s Yugoslavia was one of the world's leading producers of
textiles and garments. The break-up of Yugoslavia in 1991, however,
resulted in factory closures, bankruptcy and layoffs, forcing
thousands of garment industry workers into precarious and often
exploitative private-sector jobs. Drawing on more than 60 oral
history interviews with former and current garment workers, as well
as workplace periodicals and contemporary press material collected
across Croatia, Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Slovenia,
Women and Industry in the Balkans charts the rise and fall of the
Yugoslav textile sector, as well as the implications of this
post-socialist transition, for the first time. In the process, the
book explores broader questions about memories of socialism,
lingering feelings of attachment to the socialist welfare system
and the complexity of the post-socialist era. This is important
reading for all scholars working on the history and politics of
Yugoslavia and the Balkans, oral history, memory studies and gender
studies.
In this book, Sean Safford compares the recent history of
Allentown, Pennsylvania, with that of Youngstown, Ohio. Allentown
has seen a noticeable rebound over the course of the past twenty
years. Facing a collapse of its steel-making firms, its economy has
reinvented itself by transforming existing companies, building an
entrepreneurial sector, and attracting inward investment.
Youngstown was similar to Allentown in its industrial history, the
composition of its labor force, and other important variables, and
yet instead of adapting in the face of acute economic crisis, it
fell into a mean race to the bottom.
Challenging various theoretical perspectives on regional
socioeconomic change, "Why the Garden Club Couldn't Save
Youngstown" argues that the structure of social networks among the
cities' economic, political, and civic leaders account for the
divergent trajectories of post-industrial regions. It offers a
probing historical explanation for the decline, fall, and unlikely
rejuvenation of the Rust Belt. Emphasizing the power of social
networks to shape action, determine access to and control over
information and resources, define the contexts in which problems
are viewed, and enable collective action in the face of externally
generated crises, this book points toward present-day policy
prescriptions for the ongoing plight of mature industrial regions
in the U.S. and abroad.
The most significant debate in global economic history over the
past twenty years has dealt with the Great Divergence, the economic
gap between different parts of the world. Thus far, this debate has
focused on China, India and north-western Europe, particularly
Great Britain. This book shifts the focus to ask how Japan became
the only non-western county that managed, at least partially, to
modernize its economy and start to industrialize in the 19th
century. Using a range of empirical data, Peer Vries analyses the
role of the state in Japan's economic growth from the Meiji
Restoration to World War II, and asks whether Japan's economic
success can be attributed to the rise of state power. Asserting
that the state's involvement was fundamental in Japan's economic
'catching up', he demonstrates how this was built on legacies from
the previous Tokugawa period. In this book, Vries deepens our
understanding of the Great Divergence in global history by
re-examining how Japan developed and modernized against the odds.
It is 1615. Shakespeare is still alive and the country is at peace.
James 1 of England (James VI of Scotland) has been on the throne
since the childless Elisabeth I died in 1603. He claimed the throne
by virtue of the fact that he was direct in line of descent from
Henry VII, his great-grandfather. The English Navy, which had been
founded as a standing force by Henry VIII and had defended the
country from several Spanish Armadas during the Elisabethan era,
had been neglected. It needed rebuilding and this meant new ships
and plenty of stout English (and Welsh) oak. Luckily for James, one
of his closest advisors was an admiral, Sir Robert Mansell, who
having given up his naval career and become an industrialist and
entrepreneur (as well as a Member of Parliament), saw an
opportunity to secure his new-found business of coal mining and
glass-making. Mansell applied to the King to grant him a patent
forbidding the use of timber for smelting (mainly iron and glass)
and on 23 May 1615 the papers were signed. Thus, with the stroke of
his quill, the king started the industrial revolution that turned
the British Isles from an agrarian economy, based upon wool, water
power and wind power, to one where coal and steam brought about
unimaginable developments in trade and industry. It was following
the signing of the 1615 patent that glassmaking in Britain went
from a peripatetic, nomadic business which chased the fuel from
clearing to clearing in the dwindling forests, to one where the
fuel travelled to the kilns. By virtue of the fact that kilns
didn't have to move as the wood ran out, they could be bigger and
better, brick-built with chimneys and flues, which made the glass
stronger and more durable. It was into this exciting, changing
world of glassmaking that Sir Kenelm Digby developed his strong
verre Anglais bottles which enabled the production of (lightly)
sparkling bottle-fermented ciders and wines. The Knight who
invented Champagne is the story of King James I, Admiral Sir Robert
Mansell and Sir Kenelm Digby and the part they played between 1615
and 1630 in revolutionising the production of glass. The changes
they helped bring about led to the development and production of
stronger glass that could be used for making bottles that would
withstand the pressure caused by a secondary-fermentation in the
bottle. By 1662 we know that it was common practice by cidermakers,
vintners and coopers to add raisins and sugar to wine and cider at
bottling to start a secondary fermentation in the bottle. All of
this happened several years before Dom Perignon, often credited
with 'inventing Champagne', took up his position as cellarer at the
Abbaye Saint-Pierre d'Hautvillers.
|
You may like...
Chasing Vines
Beth Moore
Paperback
R299
R275
Discovery Miles 2 750
|