In 1973 a group of North Wales building workers were arrested for picketing-related offences during the first and only national building workers strike in Britain the year before. It was a turning point for halting the growth of trade unionism in the building industry, from which it has never recovered. A Very British Conspiracy is the first book to tell the full story of how the state prosecuted these workers and the campaign that was established to overturn this miscarriage of justice. Eileen Turnbull uncovers government and police documents that reveal the careful planning of the prosecution of the 24 men. She forensically reveals how the state used the criminal justice system to secure convictions. It analyses how, in the absence of hard evidence, the Police and prosecution went to extraordinary lengths to criminalise trade unionists. The premature death of the lead picket, Des Warren, was the catalyst for a group of North West trade unionists and several of the pickets to come together in 2006 to organise a campaign to achieve justice. In March 2021, the convictions were finally quashed by the Court of Appeal. The book describes how the pickets and their families felt after forty-eight years being ostracised and considered as criminals in their communities, as well as the response of the Campaign committee members who had brought this historic victory about.

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.

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.

In this landmark study of American labor history, Meredith Tax charts the actions of women in working-class, feminist, and socialist movements between 1880 and 1917 in the USA. Caught between the hostility of male trade unionists, the chauvinism of male socialist organizers, and the assumptions of middle-class feminists, women workers forged their own demands for economic and political justice in the industrializing landscape of North America. In doing so, Tax argues, a unique form of socialist-feminist class consciousness was created, whose remarkable history is chronicled in this work. With a focus on the histories of the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Tax shows how working-class socialist women navigated the terrain between the seemingly oppositional demands for suffrage and labour rights. The Rising of the Women also contains detailed case studies of two germinal moments in American labour history: the uprising of shirtwaist workers in New York City in 1909 - 1910, the real beginning of the International Ladies' Garment Worker Union; and the 1912 IWW strike of immigrant textile workers in Lawrence, Mass., making it an essential text for students of American labor history as well as readers interested in twentieth-century feminism. First published in 1980, the book is reissued by Verso as part of the highly successful Feminist Classics series, where it takes its place alongside texts by Sheila Rowbotham, Kathi Weeks, Stella Dadzie, Lynne Segal and more. The result of years of archival research, Tax blends original source material from the participants of the movements with her own sharp analysis into a rich narrative of women workers' struggle. The Rising of the Women is a classic of feminist labor history whose time has come to find the wide audience it deserves.

Few would dispute that many Western industrial democracies undertook extensive deregulation in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet this narrative, in its most familiar form, depends upon several historiographical assumptions that bely the complexities and pitfalls of studying the recent past. Across thirteen case studies, the contributors to this volume investigate this "deregulatory moment" from a variety of historical perspectives, including transnational, comparative, pan-European, and national approaches. Collectively, they challenge an interpretive framework that treats individual decades in isolation and ignores broader trends that extend to the end of the Second World War.

The contradictions of modernisation run through the whole of modern Chinese history. The abundance of manufactured goods being sold in the west attests to China's industrial revolution, but this capitalist vision of 'utopia' sits uneasily with traditional Chinese values. It is also in conflict with the socialism that has been the bedrock of Chinese society since the foundation of the People's Republic in 1949. Utopia and Modernity in China examines the conflicts inherent in China's attempt to achieve a 'utopia' by advancing production and technology. Through the lenses of literature, arts, law, the press and the environment, the contributors interrogate the contradictions of modernisation in Chinese society and its fundamental challenges. By unpicking both China's vision of utopia and its realities and the increasing tension between traditional Chinese values and those of the west, this book offers a unique insight into the cultural forces that are part of reshaping today's China.

A DAILY TELEGRAPH BOOK OF THE YEAR 2022 'A spirited attempt at uncovering the mystery of how Birmingham has managed for so long to stand at the centre of Britain's history without anyone noticing ... This absorbing book shows us how we did it' Observer 'Vinen has written a history of Birmingham, but it is also a theory of Birmingham. And also, perhaps, a theory of England. I buy it' Daily Telegraph For over a century, Birmingham has been the second largest town in England, and central to modern history. In his richly enjoyable new book Richard Vinen captures the drama of a small village that grew to become the quintessential city of the twentieth century: a place of mass production, full employment and prosperity that began in the 1930s, but which came to a cataclysmic halt in the 1980s. For most of that time, Birmingham has also been a magnet for migration, drawing in people from Wales, Ireland, India, Pakistan and the Caribbean. Indeed, much of British history - the passage of the first reform bill, the rise and fall of the Chamberlain dynasty, racial tension - can be explained, in large measure, with reference to Birmingham. Vinen roots his sweeping story in the experience of individuals. This is a book about figures everyone has heard of, from J. R. R. Tolkien to Duran Duran. It is also about those that everyone ought to have heard of - such as Dick Etheridge, the all-powerful Communist convenor at the Longbridge factory, or Stan Crooke, one of the remarkable West Indians interviewed for the 1960s documentary The Colony. It captures the ways in which hundreds of thousands of people - from the Welsh miners who poured into the car factories in the 1930s to the young women who danced to reggae in the basement of Rebecca's nightclub in the 1980s - were caught up in the convulsions of social change. Birmingham is not a pretty place, and its history does not always make for comfortable reading. But modern Britain does not make sense without it. 'There is unlikely to be a fuller or more informative history of Birmingham than Vinen's' Jonathan Coe, Financial Times

Anthony Burton has travelled from the Highlands of Scotland, to the south west of England in pursuit of his passion for the steam engine in all its different forms. He has travelled on narrow gauge railways in Wales and enjoyed the splendour of main line journeys behind some of the grandest locomotives ever built. He has shovelled coal into the boiler of an old Clyde Puffer, while steaming down Scotland's west coast, and luxuriated in the elegance of a Windermere steam launch. He has marvelled at the magnificence of the great Victorian pumping engines and their elaborately decorated engine houses - and spends time every year helping to oil and polish an old mill engine to get it ready to receive visitors. He has revelled in the fun of the steam fair and shared a ride in a replica of Richard Trevithick's extraordinary steam carriage with a direct descendant of the great engineer. All these experiences and more are brought together in this lively narrative, in which the author shares his own sense of excitement and places each visit within its historical context.Above all, this book is a tribute to all those anonymous volunteers whose hard work and dedication have kept this great tradition alive.

Streetscapes are part of the taken-for-granted spaces of everyday urban life, yet they are also contested arenas in which struggles over identity, memory, and place shape the social production of urban space. This book examines the role that street naming has played in the political life of urban streetscapes in both historical and contemporary cities. The renaming of streets and remaking of urban commemorative landscapes have long been key strategies that different political regimes have employed to legitimize spatial assertions of sovereign authority, ideological hegemony, and symbolic power. Over the past few decades, a rich body of critical scholarship has explored the politics of urban toponymy, and the present collection brings together the works of geographers, anthropologists, historians, linguists, planners, and political scientists to examine the power of street naming as an urban place-making practice. Covering a wide range of case studies from cities in Europe, North America, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Asia, the contributions to this volume illustrate how the naming of streets has been instrumental to the reshaping of urban spatial imaginaries and the cultural politics of place.

Cities are built over the remnants of their past buried beneath their present. We build on what has been built before, whether over foundations formalising previous permanency or over the temporal occupations of ground. But what happens when you shift a city - when you dislodge its occupation of ground towards a new ground, bury it and forget it? Focusing on Berlin's destruction during World War II and its reconstruction after the end of the war, this book offers a rethinking of how the practices of destruction and burial combine to reform the city through geography and how burying a city is intricately tied to forgetting destruction, ruination and trauma. Created from 25 million cubic meters of rubble produced during World War II, Teufelsberg (Devil's Mountain) is the exemplar of the destroyed city. Its critical journey is chronicled in combination with Berlin's seven other rubble hills, and their connections to constructing forgetting through burial. Furthermore, the book investigates Berlin's sublime relation to Albert Speer's urban vision to rival the ancient cities of Rome and Athens through their now shared geographies of seven hills. Finally, there is a central focus on the role of the citizens who cleared Berlin's streets of rubble, and the subsequent human relationships between people and ruins. This book is valuable reading for those interested in Architectural Theory, Urban Geography, Modern History and Urban Design.

This volume, first published in 1971, brings together eleven essays and articles on the history of the industrial revolution. Method is the central consideration, and the author discusses ways in which historians have analysed the industrial revolution, demonstrates inconsistency and bias in their interpretations, and suggests an appropriate framework of economic theory for future studies. This title will be of interest to students of history and economics.

This book provides a much-needed review of Asia's economic growth and its challenges in the context of post-war industrialization. In the early 1990s, the World Bank (1993) recognized eight high-performing Asian economies (HPAEs) (Japan, the Asian tigers, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand) and named them the 'Asian economic miracle'. In the recent past, the term 'emerging economies' has been widely used to refer to the high-growth economies, and includes China, India, Mongolia and Vietnam. In this rush towards high growth, the adverse effects of industrialization are widespread, but were unnoticed. The major challenge is to bring together a comprehensive picture of Asia's growth, taking into account the adverse consequences. Finally, this book examines two challenges for the future of Asia's development: the global financial crisis and urban poverty and inequality.

The Great Depression of the 1930s nearly brought the agricultural community to a standstill. As markets went into an economic freefall, farmers who had suffered through a post–World War I economic depression in the 1920s would now struggle to produce crops, livestock, and other commodities that could return more than the cost to produce them. In Indiana, the county agents of the Purdue University Cooperative Extension Service saw this desperation firsthand. As they looked into the worried faces of the people they were asked to assist, the trust they had worked to build in their communities during the previous two decades would be put to the test. Throughout the painful years of the Great Depression, the county agents would stand side by side with Hoosier farmers, relying on science-based advice and proven strategies to help them produce more bushels per acre, more pigs per litter, more gallons of milk per cow, and more eggs per chicken. Then, as the decade drew to a close, the start of World War II in Europe soon placed farmers on the frontlines at home, producing the agricultural commodities needed in the United States and in war-torn locations abroad. The federal government quickly called on county agents to push farmers to meet historic production quotas—not an easy task with farm machinery, tires, and fuel rationed, and a severe labor shortage resulting from farm workers being drafted for military service or opting for higher-paying jobs in factories. Using the observations and reports of county agents, Planting the Seeds of Hope offers a behind-the-scenes look at what it was like to live through these historic events in rural Indiana. The agents' own words and numerous accompanying photographs provide a one-of-a-kind perspective that brings their stories and those of the agricultural community they served to life at a pivotal time in American 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.

Originally published in 1978, The Making of Urban Scotland traces the evolution of towns from their prehistoric origins to the present day. Most of the material is based on research in Scotland's archives, housed in the Scottish Record Office. Special emphasis is placed on the causes of economic change and its repercussions upon Scottish town life. The urban stresses of the nineteenth century are analysed in detail, as well as the subsequent emergence of Scotland as Western Europe's pre-eminent council house society. The unique character of Scotland's housing occupies two chapters and for the first time the whole panoply of the statuary origins of the council house landscape is exposed.

The field of urban environmental history is a relatively new one, yet it is rapidly moving to the forefront of scholarly research and is the focus of much interdisciplinary work. Given the environmental problems facing the modern world it is perhaps unsurprising that historians, geographers, political, natural and social scientists should increasingly look at the environmental problems faced by previous generations, and how they were regarded and responded to. This volume reflects this growing concern, and reflects many of the key concerns and issues that are essential to our understanding of the problems faced by cities in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Addressing a variety of environmental issues, such as clean water supply, the provision/retention of green space, and noise pollution, that faced European and North American cities the essays in this volume highlight the common responses as well as the differences that characterised the reactions to these trans-national concerns.

A CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE The disappearance of China's naturally occurring forests is one of the most significant environmental shifts in the country's history, one often blamed on imperial demand for lumber. China's early modern forest history is typically viewed as a centuries-long process of environmental decline, culminating in a nineteenth-century social and ecological crisis. Pushing back against this narrative of deforestation, Ian Miller charts the rise of timber plantations between about 1000 and 1700, when natural forests were replaced with anthropogenic ones. Miller demonstrates that this form of forest management generally rested on private ownership under relatively distant state oversight and taxation. He further draws on in-depth case studies of shipbuilding and imperial logging to argue that this novel landscape was not created through simple extractive pressures, but by attempts to incorporate institutional and ecological complexity into a unified imperial state. Miller uses the emergence of anthropogenic forests in south China to rethink both temporal and spatial frameworks for Chinese history and the nature of Chinese empire. Because dominant European forestry models do not neatly overlap with the non-Western world, China's history is often left out of global conversations about them; Miller's work rectifies this omission and suggests that in some ways, China's forest system may have worked better than the more familiar European institutions. The open access publication of this book was made possible by a grant from the James P. Geiss and Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation.

From muddy creek to naval-industrial powerhouse; from constructing wooden walls to building Dreadnoughts; from maintaining King John's galleys to servicing the enormous new Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers: this is the story of Portsmouth Dockyard. Respected maritime historian Paul Brown's unique 800-year history of what was once the largest industrial organisation in the world is a combination of extensive original research and stunning images. The most comprehensive history of the dockyard to date, it is sure to become the definitive work on this important heritage site and modern naval base.

This volume of original essays considers how the International Labour Organization has helped generate a set of ideas and practices, past and present, transnational and within a single nation, aimed at advancing social and economic reform in the Pacific Rim.

This book probes the materiality of Improvement in early 19th century rural Massachusetts. Improvement was a metaphor for human intervention in the dramatic changes taking place to the English speaking world in the 18th and 19th centuries as part of a transition to industrial capitalism. The meaning of Improvement vacillated between ideas of economic profit and human betterment, but in practice, Improvement relied on a broad assemblage of material things and spaces for coherence and enaction. Utilizing archaeological data from the home of a wealthy farmer in rural Western Massachusetts, as well as an analysis of early Republican agricultural publications, this book shows how Improvement's twin meanings of profit and betterment unfolded unevenly across early 19th century New England. The Improvement movement in Massachusetts emerged at a time of great social instability, and served to ameliorate growing tensions between urban and rural socioeconomic life through a rationalization of space. Alongside this rationalization, Improvement also served to reshape rural landscapes in keeping with the social and economic processes of a modernizing global capitalism. But the contradictions inherent in such processes spurred and buttressed wealth inequality, ecological distress, and social dislocation.

A Comparative History of Commerce and Industry, Volume II offers a subjective review of how the cultural, social and economic institutions of commerce and industry evolved in industrialized nations to produce the institution we now know as business enterprise.

Marx's Rebellion Against Lenin, by negating the Leninist-Stalinist theory of dialectical materialism and tracing Marx's political philosophy to the Classical Humanism of Aristotle, overthrows the stultifying entrapment of Stalinist Bolshevism and contributes to the revitalization of Marx's method.

In 1977, the iconic Swindon Works was building locomotives. By 1986, it was shut down. In The End of the Line, Ron Bateman recounts the fight to save Swindon Works, its 3,500 jobs and the livelihood of the entire community it represented. Initially joining through the Works Training School in 1977, Ron witnessed this tragic struggle and the crushing blow dealt to the industry that had defined Swindon for generations. Combining personal recollections with information and interviews from many other insiders and railmen, this book provides the only comprehensive chronicle on the final decade of 147 years of railway engineering and a fateful milestone in the history of Swindon.

Home Fires tells the fascinating story of how changes in home heating over the nineteenth century spurred the growth of networks that helped remake American society. Sean Patrick Adams reconstructs the ways in which the "industrial hearth" appeared in American cities, the methods that entrepreneurs in home heating markets used to convince consumers that their product designs and fuel choices were superior, and how elite, middle-class, and poor Americans responded to these overtures. Adams depicts the problem of dwindling supplies of firewood and the search for alternatives; the hazards of cutting, digging, and drilling in the name of home heating; the trouble and expense of moving materials from place to place; the rise of steam power; the growth of an industrial economy; and questions of economic efficiency, at both the individual household and the regional level. Home Fires makes it clear that debates over energy sources, energy policy, and company profit margins have been around a long time. The challenge of staying warm in the industrializing North becomes a window into the complex world of energy transitions, economic change, and emerging consumerism. Readers will understand the struggles of urban families as they sought to adapt to the ever-changing nineteenth-century industrial landscape. This perspective allows a unique view of the development of an industrial society not just from the ground up but from the hearth up.