The rise of China is no doubt one of the most important events in world economic history since the Industrial Revolution. Mainstream economics, especially the institutional theory of economic development based on a dichotomy of extractive vs. inclusive political institutions, is highly inadequate in explaining China's rise. This book argues that only a radical reinterpretation of the history of the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the West (as incorrectly portrayed by the institutional theory) can fully explain China's growth miracle and why the determined rise of China is unstoppable despite its current 'backward' financial system and political institutions. Conversely, China's spectacular and rapid transformation from an impoverished agrarian society to a formidable industrial superpower sheds considerable light on the fundamental shortcomings of the institutional theory and mainstream 'blackboard' economic models, and provides more-accurate reevaluations of historical episodes such as Africa's enduring poverty trap despite radical political and economic reforms, Latin America's lost decades and frequent debt crises, 19th century Europe's great escape from the Malthusian trap, and the Industrial Revolution itself.

This book features oyster beds as a political and environmental battleground. In ""The Oyster Question"", Christine Keiner applies perspectives of environmental, agricultural, political, and social history to examine the decline of Maryland's iconic Chesapeake Bay oyster industry. Oystermen have held on to traditional ways of life and some continue to use preindustrial methods, tonging oysters by hand from small boats. Others use more intensive tools, and thus it is commonly believed that a lack of regulation enabled oystermen to exploit the bay to the point of ruin. But Keiner offers an opposing view in which state officials, scientists, and oystermen created a regulated commons that sustained tidewater communities for decades. Not until the 1980s did a confluence of natural and unnatural disasters weaken the bay's resilience enough to endanger the oyster resource. Keiner examines conflicts that pitted scientists in favor of privatization against watermen who used their power in the statehouse to stave off the forces of rural change. Her study breaks new ground regarding the evolution of environmental politics at the state rather than federal level. ""The Oyster Question"" concludes with the impassioned ongoing debate over introducing nonnative oysters to the Chesapeake Bay and how that proposal might affect the struggling watermen and their identity as the last hunter-gatherers of the industrialized world.

The Industrial Workers of the World is a union unlike any other. Founded in 1905 in Chicago, it rapidly gained members across the world thanks to its revolutionary, internationalist outlook. By using powerful organising methods including direct-action and direct-democracy, it put power in the hands of workers. This philosophy is labeled as 'revolutionary industrial unionism' and the members called, affectionately, 'Wobblies'. This book is the first to look at the history of the IWW from an international perspective. Bringing together a group of leading scholars, it includes lively accounts from a number diverse countries including Australia, Canada, Mexico, South Africa, Sweden and Ireland, which reveal a fascinating story of global anarchism, syndicalism and socialism. Drawing on many important figures of the movements such as Tom Barker, Har Dayal, Joe Hill, James Larkin and William D. "Big Bill" Haywood, and exploring particular industries including shipping, mining, and agriculture, this book describes how the IWW and its ideals travelled around the world.

This book takes a hemispheric approach to contemporary urban intervention, examining urban ecologies, communication technologies, and cultural practices in the twenty-first century. It argues that governmental and social regimes of control and forms of political resistance converge in speculation on disaster and that this convergence has formed a vision of urban environments in the Americas in which forms of play and imaginations of catastrophe intersect in the vertical field. Schifani explores a diverse range of resistant urban interventions, imagining the city as on the verge of or enmeshed in catastrophe. She also presents a model of ecocriticism that addresses aesthetic practices and forms of play in the urban environment. Tracing the historical roots of such tactics as well as mapping their hopes for the future will help the reader to locate the impacts of climate change not only on the physical space of the city, but also on the epistemological and aesthetic strategies that cities can help to engender. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Urban Studies, Media Studies, American Studies, Global Studies, and the broad and interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities.

This concise guide zooms in on the period of American history known as the Industrial Revolution, from its earliest beginnings in the mid-18th century to just after the First World War. This book is a concise reference source on the era in American history known as the Industrial Revolution-a period characterized by urbanization, mass immigration, organization of labor, and an immense gap between wealthy industrialists and the poor. It serves as an ideal resource for students preparing to take the AP U.S. history exam as well as being useful to undergraduates and anyone interested in this important period. Using encyclopedic entries on important events, key people, and trends of the time, the era is examined through the exploration of key themes such as agriculture, business, economy, finance, labor, and politics. Other features of the book include sample documents-based essay questions, rigorous thematic tagging of encyclopedic entries, a detailed chronology, and primary source documents-all of which guide readers through the material and aid in their comprehension of the Industrial Revolution's historical significance. Content covers factories, mass production, the progressive movement, muckrakers, populists, laissez-faire economics, social Darwinism, and robber barons, among other topics. Presents content and themes aligned with course objectives for students preparing for the AP U.S. history exam Includes 15 primary source documents with introductions placing them in their proper historical context Features a sample documents-based essay question similar to those found on the AP U.S. history exam Supplies top tips for answering documents-based essay questions and an appendix of period learning objectives Provides a detailed chronology that links each event to a key theme as well as reference content thematic tagging of entries, documents, and timeline-a unique feature for students

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the newly formed country of Czechoslovakia built an ambitious national rail network out of what remained of the obsolete Habsburg system. While conceived as a means of knitting together a young and ethnically diverse nation-state, these railways were by their very nature a transnational phenomenon, and as such they simultaneously articulated and embodied a distinctive Czechoslovak cosmopolitanism. Drawing on evidence ranging from government documents to newsreels to train timetables, Iron Landscapes gives a nuanced account of how planners and authorities balanced these two imperatives, bringing the cultural history of infrastructure into dialogue with the spatial history of Central Europe.

John Fletcher Hanson was a rare combination of industrialist, journalist, and orator who spent most of his life in Macon, Georgia, rising from the ashes of the Civil War to become the leading voice of the New South. Many have assigned that role to Henry Grady, but while Grady was talking about a New South, Hanson was building one, by creating jobs, promoting Southern industrialization, and advancing educational opportunities. Hanson, commonly referred to as "the Major" throughout his lifetime, founded Bibb Manufacturing and grew it into a textile empire, which stands beside his most enduring legacy, the Georgia Institute of Technology. Later, as president of the Central of Georgia railway and the Ocean Steamship Company, he strengthened the backbone of the state's transportation network. During the 1880s Hanson owned the Macon Telegraph and used it to challenge conventional Southern ideology about economics, race, and the solid Democratic stronghold on the South. While also fighting for a pro-business platform, he became a republican and worked with some of the most influential men of the Gilded Age. Georgia's post-Civil War history cannot be fully understood without examining the life of J. F. Hanson, its most important New South advocate and industrialist. In bringing this remarkable man and his accomplishments to light for the first time, Cracking the Solid South paints an absorbing picture of the economic, political, and social struggles that confronted Georgia after the Civil War and of the many ways one man shaped the course of the state's history.

After the Revolutionary War, despite political independence, the United States still relied on other countries for manufactured goods. Francis Cabot Lowell was one of the principal investors in building the India Wharf and the shops and warehouses close to Boston harbor. His work was instrumental in establishing domestic industry for the United States and brought the Industrial Revolution to the United States. From 1810 to the start of the War of 1812, he traveled through Great Britain, where he saw the tremendous changes caused by the Industrial Revolution, starting with cotton textiles. On his return to the United States he focused on establishing a domestic textile industry to replace imported goods. With his brother-in-law, Patrick Tracy Jackson, he built the Boston Manufacturing Company at Waltham-America's first integrated mill. With his star mechanic, Paul Moody, he developed a power loom and other machines suitable for local conditions. The Life and Times of Francis Cabot Lowell, 1775-1817 tells the story of this amazing man and the great success of the Boston Manufacturing Company, which spurred the American industrial revolution. Francis Cabot Lowell's method-a detailed investment plan, cheap raw materials and power, a motivated labor force, a sound marketing plan, and, above all, modern technology-became the standard for the American factory of the nineteenth century. When Francis Cabot Lowell died, his associates established America's first industrial city, and named it Lowell in his honor.

Part biography and part corporate history, ""In the Shadow of Detroit"" investigates the life and career of Gordon M. McGregor, who founded and led Ford of Canada during the first two decades of the twentieth century. With no automotive background, minimal technical expertise, and only a few years of experience in business, McGregor came to Ford in 1904 from a failing wagon-building firm. David Roberts draws from diverse public and private historical sources to chronicle McGregor's swift ascension to corporate leader, including how McGregor attached himself to Henry Ford's meteoric rise, achieved remarkable success, and became for a time Windsor's preeminent industrialist and civic leader. Roberts intertwines McGregor's corporate, civic, and personal lives to trace his pioneering role in the automobile industry. Some themes from McGregor's career that are considered here include company growth, the technical and cultural concept of the automobile, the impact of automotive transportation, technological reliance on Detroit, parent-branch relations, the effects of border proximity, industrial and political lobbying, labor relations, secondary manufacturing, public involvement, and the Great War. In addition, Roberts probes McGregor's often-subservient relationship with the enigmatic Henry Ford and examines how McGregor drew praise and political ire in calling for regional governance in the ""Border Cities"" opposite Detroit. In the years before his premature death, McGregor and his company dominated and defined the growing automotive industry in Windsor-Detroit, and their story deserves to be more widely known. Both elegantly written and exhaustively researched, ""In the Shadow of Detroit"" will be enjoyable and informative reading for local historians and anyone interested in the automobile industry.

This set of 23 volumes, originally published between 1934 and 1994 shed much light on the history of industrial relations and working-class organisation in the UK. They analyse trade union structure, organization and government and look at the pattern of union activity in the workplace. Containing fascinating insider accounts of developments in British industrial relations they analyse the impact of the changing economic and political climate on trade unions in Europe and use a series of comparative case studies to examine change in the government, growth, mergers, character and bargaining structures of British unions. They provide an introduction to the characteristics and styles of trade unionism in Europe and offer a comprehensive guide to the complex structure and administration of British Trade Unions as well as analysing the relationship between political parties and trade unions in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria.

Perhaps no other industrial technology changed the course of Mexican history in the United States--and Mexico--than did the coming of the railroads. Tens of thousands of Mexicans worked for the railroads in the United States, especially in the Southwest and Midwest. Construction crews soon became railroad workers proper, along with maintenance crews later. Extensive Mexican American settlements appeared throughout the lower and upper Midwest as the result of the railroad. The substantial Mexican American populations in these regions today are largely attributable to 19th- and 20th-century railroad work. Only agricultural work surpassed railroad work in terms of employment of Mexicans.

The full history of Mexican American railroad labor and settlement in the United States had not been told, however, until Jeffrey Marcos Garcilazo's groundbreaking research in "Traqueros." Garcilazo mined numerous archives and other sources to provide the first and only comprehensive history of Mexican railroad workers across the United States, with particular attention to the Midwest. He first explores the origins and process of Mexican labor recruitment and immigration and then describes the areas of work performed. He reconstructs the workers' daily lives and explores not only what the workers did on the job but also what they did at home and how they accommodated and/or resisted Americanization. Boxcar communities, strike organizations, and "traquero culture" finally receive historical acknowledgment. Integral to his study is the importance of family settlement in shaping working class communities and consciousness throughout the Midwest.

Impoverished, indebted, and underdeveloped at the close of World War II, Romania underwent dramatic changes as part of its transition to a centrally planned economy. As with the Soviet experience, it pursued a policy of "primitive socialist accumulation" whereby the state appropriated agricultural surplus and restricted workers' consumption in support of industrial growth. Focusing on the daily operations of planning in the ethnically mixed city of Cluj from 1945 to 1955, this book argues that socialist accumulation was deeply contradictory: it not only inherited some of the classical tensions of capital accumulation, but also generated its own, which derived from the multivocal nature of the state socialist worker as a creator of value, as living labour, and as a subject of emancipatory politics.

A pioneering work in oral history, this book tells the story of the rise and fall of the industrial revolution and the apogee and crisis of the labor movement through an oral history of Terni, a steel town in Central Italy and the seat of the first large industrial enterprise in Italy. This story is told through a combination of stories, songs, myths and memories from over 200 voices of five generations, woven with a wealth of archival material.

Britain's supremacy in the nineteenth century depended in large part on its vast deposits of coal. This coal not only powered steam engines in factories, ships, and railway locomotives but also warmed homes and cooked food. As coal consumption skyrocketed, the air in Britain's cities and towns became filled with ever-greater and denser clouds of smoke. In this far-reaching study, Peter Thorsheim explains that, for much of the nineteenth century, few people in Britain even considered coal smoke to be pollution. To them, pollution meant miasma: invisible gases generated by decomposing plant and animal matter. Far from viewing coal smoke as pollution, most people considered smoke to be a valuable disinfectant, for its carbon and sulfur were thought capable of rendering miasma harmless. Inventing Pollution examines the radically new understanding of pollution that emerged in the late nineteenth century, one that centered not on organic decay but on coal combustion. This change, as Peter Thorsheim argues, gave birth to the smoke-abatement movement and to new ways of thinking about the relationships among humanity, technology, and the environment.

Since the Middle Ages Europe has been one of the most urbanized continents on the planet and Europe's cities have firmly stamped their imprint on the continent's economic, social, political, and cultural life.
This study of European cities and towns from the fall of the Roman Empire to the present day looks both at regional trends from across Europe and also at the widely differing fortunes of individual communities on the roller coaster of European urbanization. Taking a wide-angled view of the continent that embraces northern and eastern Europe as well as the city systems of the Mediterranean and western Europe, it addresses important debates ranging from the nature of urban survival in the post-Roman era to the position of the European city in a globalizing world.
The book is divided into three parts, dealing with the middle ages, the early modern period, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - with each part containing chapters on urban trends, the urban economy, social developments, cultural life and landscape, and governance. Throughout, the book addresses key questions such as the role of migration, including that of women and ethnic minorities; the functioning of competition and emulation between cities, as well as issues of inter-urban cooperation; the different ways civic leaders have sought to promote urban identity and visibility; the significance of urban autonomy in enabling cities to protect their interests against the state; and not least why European cities and towns over the period have been such pressure cookers for new ideas and creativity, whether economic, political, or cultural.

This collective book is a multidisciplinary approach on a key-topic for our common future: overfishing. The focus is addressed to the "Atlantic World", considering the main oceanic geography in which this problem born in the early 20th century. The volume offers a wide range of contributions from experts on the topic covering the most relevant areas of the Atlantic and explaining important case studies on overfishing recent history. Written in a historical perspective, the book looks for institutional regulatory solutions based on multilateral solutions and scientific advising. Founders thought on the topic and the understanding's evolution of the overfishing problem are mainly considered. This book is an accessible synthesis on overfishing history especially recommended for social scientists, historians, biologists, decision-makers and committed citizens.

This monograph aims to analyze the economic and business history of colonial India from a corporate perspective by clarifying the historical role of institutional developments based on archival evidence of a representative enterprise. The perspective is distinctively unique in that it highlights the salience of corporate-level institutional responses to explain the causes of colonial India's industrial growth, in addition to two renowned perspectives focusing on government economic policy or factor endowment. One of the driving forces of India's high growth rate since the 1980s is the expansion of modern business corporations whose origins date back to the colonial era in the mid-nineteenth century. This monograph explores the historical foundation of the growth of such corporations in colonial India, guided by a substantial collection of documents of Tata Iron and Steel Company, whose rich records have not received the due attention they have long deserved. As clarified by numerous economic and business historians of leading industrialized countries since the works of Douglass North and Alfred Chandler, this study as well proposes that the development of modern business corporations in colonial India was broadly supported by the reciprocal evolution of economic institutions and corporate organizations. Adding a new perspective to the business and economic history of colonial India, the analysis also provides an important case study of the development of corporate business in the non-Western world to the study of global business history.

This book explores the relationship between cities and their commercial airports. These vital transportation facilities are locally owned and managed and civic leaders and boosters have made them central to often expansive economic development dreams, including the construction of architecturally significant buildings. However, other metropolitan residents have paid a high price for the expansion of air transportation, as battles over jet aircraft noise resulted not only in quieter jet engine technologies, but profound changes in the metropolitan landscape with the clearance of both urban and suburban neighborhoods. And in the wake of 9/11, the US commercial airport has emerged as the place where Americans most fully experience the security regime introduced after those terrorist attacks.

During the middle decades of the twentieth century, the production of America's consumer culture was centralized in midtown Manhattan to an extent unparalleled in the history of the modern United States. Within a few square miles of skyscrapers were the headquarters of networks like NBC and CBS, the editorial offices of book publishers and mass circulation magazines such as Time and Life, numerous influential newspapers, and major advertising agencies on Madison Avenue. Every day tens of thousands of writers, editors, artists, performers, technicians, secretaries, and other white-collar workers made advertisements, produced media content, and enhanced the appearance of goods in order to boost sales. While this center of creativity has often been portrayed as a smoothly running machine, within these offices many white-collar workers challenged the managers and executives who directed their labors. In this definitive history, The Making of the American Creative Class examines these workers and their industries throughout the twentieth century. As manufacturers and retailers competed to attract consumers' attention, their advertising expenditures financed the growth of enterprises engaged in the production of culture, which in turn provided employment for an increasing number of clerical, technical, professional, and creative workers. The book explores employees' efforts to improve their working conditions by forming unions, experimenting with alternative media and cultural endeavors supported by public, labor, or cooperative patronage, and expanding their opportunities for creative autonomy. As blacklisting and attacks on militant unions left them destroyed or weakened, workers in advertising, design, publishing, and broadcasting in the late twentieth century were constrained in their ability to respond to economic dislocations and to combat discrimination in the culture industries. At once a portrait of a city and the national culture of consumer capitalism it has produced, The Making of the American Creative Class is an innovative narrative of modern American history that addresses issues of earnings and status still experienced by today's culture workers.

Enclosing Water is an environmental history of the Industrial Revolution, as inscribed on the Liri valley in Italy's Central Apennines. Amid forces of revolution and empire, and Enlightenment discourses of 'improvement' and political economy, the Liri's natural wealth - water-power - generated sweeping changes in its landscape and working and living environments. This book tells the story of how defining water as property - both materially and discursively - led to the emergence of an industrial riverscape, and of a concomitant new ecological consciousness; to heightened environmental risks and awareness of those risks. A dramatic century in the Liri's socio-environmental history, with its cast of new industrial bourgeoisie, engineers and civil servants, illuminates how material developments and ideological currents completely reshaped the relationship between society and nature at the periphery of 19th century Europe. By integrating Political Economy into the narrative of European environmental history, this pioneering book offers a critical new view of discourses of water disorder and environmental politics in the Mediterranean region.

This account of the extraordinary growth of the Greek ship-operating industry following the Second World War is a major breakthrough. The body of data presented and analysed makes it possible to form an informed historical view of Greek pre-eminence in sea transport.

Taking a comparative and transnational perspective in its exploration of East and Western Europe, this volume analyses the history of post-war industrial policy after the Second World War. It investigates differences and similarities, looks at transfers across national borders and locates industrial policy in the context of the Cold War.