For more than one hundred years, from the last decade of the thirteenth century to the late fourteenth, Paris was the only western European town north of the Mediterranean basin to produce luxury silk cloth. What was the nature of the Parisian silk industry? How did it get there? And what do the answers to these questions tell us? According to Sharon Farmer, the key to the manufacture of silk lies not just with the availability and importation of raw materials but with the importation of labor as well. Farmer demonstrates the essential role that skilled Mediterranean immigrants played in the formation of Paris's population and in its emergence as a major center of luxury production. She highlights the unique opportunities that silk production offered to women and the rise of women entrepreneurs in Paris to the very pinnacles of their profession. The Silk Industries of Medieval Paris illuminates aspects of intercultural and interreligious interactions that took place in silk workshops and in the homes and businesses of Jewish and Italian pawnbrokers. Drawing on the evidence of tax assessments, aristocratic account books, and guild statutes, Farmer explores the economic and technological contributions that Mediterranean immigrants made to Parisian society, adding new perspectives to our understanding of medieval French history, luxury trade, and gendered work.

The aim of this book is to track the historical origins of China's economic reforms. From the 1920s and 1930s strong ties were built between Chinese textile industrialists and foreign machinery importers in Shanghai and the Yangzi Delta. Despite the fragmentation of China, the contribution of these networks to the modernization of the country was important and longstanding. Facing the challenge of growing in a fragmented country, Chinese textile firms such as Dafeng, Dacheng and Lixin focused on urban markets and also on importing technology for upgrading their production. When the war against Japan blocked trade routes inside China, these networks were concentrated in Shanghai where they envisaged an export-oriented development strategy for China that was based on importing machinery and exporting manufactured products. However, this strategy was only implemented precariously in Shanghai, while the city stood as a neutral space in the first years of the Japanese occupation, but was only consolidated in Hong Kong in the late 1940s, where textile industrialist and most of the foreign importers migrated. These networks were thus reestablished in Hong Kong, where they contributed to the city's industrialization in the Cold War period. Meanwhile, the Chinese industrialists that stayed in Shanghai and the Yangzi Delta had to adapt to the Maoist regime and were progressively incorporated into the state-owned companies or the local government agencies such as the United Front or the Textile bureaus. However, from the early 1970s, the links between Hong Kong and Shanghai were reactivated and these networks played, again, a key role in the modernization of China, especially regarding the imports of technology and exports of manufactured goods. The book ends with the first joint-ventures between Hong Kong businessmen and Chinese local administrations that took place in the beginnings of China's economic reforms in 1979.

This is the definitive story of the men who built the railways the unknown Victorian labourers who blasted, tunnelled, drank and brawled their way across nineteenth-century England.

Preached at and plundered, sworn at and swindled, this anarchic elite endured perils and disasters, and carved out of the English countryside an industrial-age architecture unparalleled in grandeur and audacity since the building of the cathedrals.

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.

The promotion of knowledge was a major preoccupation of the Victorian era and, beginning in 1831 with the establishment of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, a number of national bodies were founded which used annual, week-long meetings held each year in a different town or city as their main tool of knowledge dissemination. Historians have long recognised the power of 'cultural capital' in the competitive climate of the mid-Victorian years, as towns raced to equip themselves with libraries, newspapers, 'Lit. and Phil.' societies and reading rooms, but the staging of the great annual knowledge festivals of the period have not previously been considered in this context. The four national associations studied are the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (NAPSS), the Royal Archaeological Institute (RAI) and the Royal Agricultural Society of England (RASE), who held annual meetings in 62 different provincial towns and cities from 1831 to 1884. In this book it is contended that these meetings were as important as royal visits and major civic ceremonies in providing towns with an opportunity to promote their own status and identity. By deploying a wealth of primary source material, much of which has not been previously utilised by urban historians, this book offers a new and genuinely Britain-wide perspective on a period when comparison and competition with neighbouring places was a constant preoccupation of town leaders.

The perfect gift for every railway enthusiast. The history of Britain's railways is a long and fascinating one, filled with stories of grand endeavours, noted figures and record-breaking feats. Julian Holland brings together a unique miscellany of intriguing tales and engaging trivia - the perfect collection for every railway enthusiast. Stories range from Bulleid's 'Chinese Laundries', trainspotting trips in Wales and Scotland and Liverpool's 'Dockers' Umbrella' to railway artists and clergy, a railway-owned airline and railways that were never built. Find out about * The Royal Scot's 11,000-mile journey in the USA and Canada * A narrow gauge island railway in the middle of the Bristol Channel * How the London & South Western Railway saved the British Empire * Mallard's unbeaten world speed record of 1938 * How to fly by Great Western Railway from Cardiff to Plymouth * The 75-mile network of narrow gauge railways on the Isle of Skye * How another 4,500 miles of railway escaped closure by Dr Beeching All Aboard is a delightful miscellany for every railway enthusiast, filled with fascinating and obscure stories, facts and figures.

Unassuming but formidable, American maritime insurers used their position at the pinnacle of global trade to shape the new nation. The international information they gathered and the capital they generated enabled them to play central roles in state building and economic development. During the Revolution, they helped the U.S. negotiate foreign loans, sell state debts, and establish a single national bank. Afterward, they increased their influence by lending money to the federal government and to its citizens. Even as federal and state governments began to encroach on their domain, maritime insurers adapted, preserving their autonomy and authority through extensive involvement in the formation of commercial law. Leveraging their claims to unmatched expertise, they operated free from government interference while simultaneously embedding themselves into the nation's institutional fabric. By the early nineteenth century, insurers were no longer just risk assessors. They were nation builders and market makers. Deeply and imaginatively researched, Underwriters of the United States uses marine insurers to reveal a startlingly original story of risk, money, and power in the founding era.

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.

The more we know about the catastrophic implications of climate change, the more fossil fuels we burn. How did we end up in this mess? In this masterful new history, Andreas Malm claims it all began in Britain with the rise of steam power. But why did manufacturers turn from traditional sources of power, notably water mills, to an engine fired by coal? Contrary to established views, steam offered neither cheaper nor more abundant energy-but rather superior control of subordinate labour. Animated by fossil fuels, capital could concentrate production at the most profitable sites and during the most convenient hours, as it continues to do today. Sweeping from nineteenth-century Manchester to the emissions explosion in China, from the original triumph of coal to the stalled shift to renewables, this study hones in on the burning heart of capital and demonstrates, in unprecedented depth, that turning down the heat will mean a radical overthrow of the current economic order.

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.

Winner of the 2013 New York Book Show Award in Scholarly/Professional Book Design From Ernest and Julio Gallo to Francis Ford Coppola, Italians have shaped the history of California wine. More than any other group, Italian immigrants and their families have made California viticulture one of America's most distinctive and vibrant achievements, from boutique vineyards in the Sonoma hills to the massive industrial wineries of the Central Valley. But how did a small group of nineteenth-century immigrants plant the roots that flourished into a world-class industry? Was there something particularly "Italian" in their success? In this fresh, fascinating account of the ethnic origins of California wine, Simone Cinotto rewrites a century-old triumphalist story. He demonstrates that these Italian visionaries were not skilled winemakers transplanting an immemorial agricultural tradition, even if California did resemble the rolling Italian countryside of their native Piedmont. Instead, Cinotto argues that it was the wine-makers' access to "social capital," or the ethnic and familial ties that bound them to their rich wine-growing heritage, and not financial leverage or direct enological experience, that enabled them to develop such a successful and influential wine business. Focusing on some of the most important names in wine history-particularly Pietro Carlo Rossi, Secondo Guasti, and the Gallos-he chronicles a story driven by ambition and creativity but realized in a complicated tangle of immigrant entrepreneurship, class struggle, racial inequality, and a new world of consumer culture. Skillfully blending regional, social, and immigration history, Soft Soil, Black Grapes takes us on an original journey into the cultural construction of ethnic economies and markets, the social dynamics of American race, and the fully transnational history of American wine.

Animal Cities builds upon a recent surge of interest about animals in the urban context. Considering animals in urban settings is now a firmly established area of study and this book presents a number of valuable case studies that illustrate some of the perspectives that may be adopted. Having an 'urban history' flavour, the book follows a fourfold agenda. First, the opening chapters look at working and productive animals that lived and died in nineteenth-century cities such as London, Edinburgh and Paris. The argument here is that their presence yields insights into evolving understandings of the category 'urban' and what made a good city. Second, there is a consideration of nineteenth-century animal spectacles, which influenced contemporary interpretations of the urban experience. Third, the theme of contested animal spaces in the city is explored further with regard to backyard chickens in suburban Australia. Finally, there is discussion of the problem of the public companion animal and its role in changing attitudes to public space, illustrated with a chapter on dog-walking in Victorian and Edwardian London. Animal Cities makes a significant contribution to animal studies and is of interest to historical geographers, urban, cultural, social and economic historians and historians of policy and planning.

The extraordinary, unknown story of two giants of American history-Henry Ford and Thomas Edison-and their attempt to create an electric-powered city of tomorrow on the Tennessee River During the roaring twenties, two of the most revered and influential men in American business proposed to transform one of the country's poorest regions into a dream technological metropolis, a shining paradise of small farms, giant factories, and sparkling laboratories. Henry Ford and Thomas Edison's "Detroit of the South" would be ten times the size of Manhattan, powered by renewable energy, and free of air pollution. And it would reshape American society, introducing mass commuting by car, use a new kind of currency called "energy dollars," and have the added benefit (from Ford and Edison's view) of crippling the growth of socialism.The whole audacious scheme almost came off, with Southerners rallying to support what became known as the Ford Plan. But while some saw it as a way to conjure the future and reinvent the South, others saw it as one of the biggest land swindles of all time. They were all true.Electric City is a rich chronicle of the time and the social backdrop, and offers a fresh look at the lives of the two men who almost saw the project to fruition, the forces that came to oppose them, and what rose in its stead: a new kind of public corporation called the Tennessee Valley Authority, one of the greatest achievements of the New Deal. This is a history for a wide audience, including readers interested in American history, technology, politics, and the future.

Between 1889 and 1919, Weetman Pearson became one of the world's most important engineering contractors, a pioneer in the international oil industry, and one of Britain's wealthiest men. At the center of his global business empire were his interests in Mexico.
While Pearson's extraordinary success in Mexico took place within the context of unprecedented levels of British trade with and investment in Latin America, Garner argues that Pearson should be understood less as an agent of British imperialism than as an agent of Porfirian state building and modernization. Pearson was able to secure contracts for some of nineteenth-century Mexico's most important public works projects in large part because of his reliability, his empathy with the developmentalist project of Mexican President Porfirio Diaz, and his assiduous cultivation of a clientelist network within the Mexican political elite. His success thus provides an opportunity to reappraise the role played by overseas interests in the national development of Mexico.

The Useful Knowledge of William Hutton shows the rapid rise of a self-taught workman and the growing prominence of the city of Birmingham during the two major events of the eighteenth-century - the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment. Hutton achieved wealth, land, status, and literary fame, but later became a victim of violent riots. The book boldly claims that an understanding of the Industrial Revolution requires engagement with the figure of the 'rough diamond', a person of worth and character, but lacking in manners, education, and refinement. A cast of unpolished entrepreneurs is brought to life as they drive economic and social change, and improve their towns and themselves. The book also contends that the rise of Birmingham cannot be understood without accepting that its vibrant cultural life was a crucial factor that spurred economic growth. Readers are plunged into a hidden provincial world marked by literacy, bookshops, printing, authorship, and the spread of useful knowledge. We see that ordinary people read history and wrote poetry, whilst they grappled with the effects of industrial change. Newly discovered memoirs reveal social conflict and relationships in rare detail. They also address the problems of social mobility, income inequality, and breath-taking technological change that continue to perplex us today.

In popular retellings of American history, capitalism generally doesn't feature much as part of the founding or development of the nation. Instead, it is alluded to in figurative terms as opportunity, entrepreneurial vigor, material abundance, and the seven-league boots of manifest destiny. ?In this collection of essays, Steve Fraser, the preeminent historian of American capitalism, sets the record straight, rewriting the arc of the American saga with class conflict center stage and mounting a serious challenge to the consoling fantasy of American exceptionalism. From the colonial era to Trump, Fraser recovers the repressed history of debtors' prisons and disaster capitalism, of confidence men and the reserve armies of the unemployed. In language that is dynamic and compelling, he demonstrates that class is a fundamental feature of American political life and provides essential intellectual tools for a shrew reading of American history.

American Business Abroad: Ford on Six Continents documents the first sixty years of Ford Motor Company's international expansion. Ford Motor Company introduced Americans to the first affordable car. Based on Ford's extraordinary company archives, this book traces the company's rise as a multinational enterprise. Following the export of the sixth car produced by the company, Ford opened its first plant abroad in its second year of business and quickly expanded around the world, building a business that by the mid 1920s spanned six continents. It faced wars, nationalism, numerous government restrictions and all the perils of operating across borders. First published in 1964, this book has lasting value in reminding readers of the long and uneven path of globalization. This new edition includes a new introduction by the author examining the impact and legacy of the study. It remains a major contribution to global economic history. In addition, Ford's history offers useful lessons today for both participants in the global economy and students of international business.

Originally published in 1986, this is a business history of the first twenty-five years of nationalised railways in Britain. Commissioned by the British Railways Board and based on the Board's extensive archives, it fully analyses the dynamics of nationalised industry management and the complexities of the vital relationship with government. After exploring the origins of nationalisation, the book deals with the organisation, financial performance, investment and commercial policies of the British Transport Commission (1948 2), Railway Executive (1948 53) and British Railways Board (1963 73). Calculations of profit and loss, investment, and productivity are provided on a consistent basis for 1948 73. This business history thus represents a major contribution not only to the debate about the role of the railways in a modern economy but also to that concerning the nationalised industries, which have proved to be one of the most enduring problems of the British economy since the war.

In the days of the British Raj Calcutta was a great port city. Thousands of men, women, and children worked there, loading and unloading valuable cargoes that sustained the regional economy, and contributed significantly to world trade. In the second half of the nineteenth century, in response to a shift from sailing ships to steamers, port authorities in Calcutta began work on a massive modernization project. This book is the first study of port labor in colonial Calcutta and British India. Drawing on primary source material, including government documents and newspaper records, the author demonstrates how the modernization process worsened class conflict and highlights the important part played by labor in the shaping of the port's modernization. Class Conflict and Modernization in India places this history in a comparative context, highlighting the interconnected nature of port and port labor histories. It examines how the port's modernization affected the port workforce and the port's managers, as well as the impact on class formation that emerged as labourers resisted through acts of everyday resistance and organized strikes. A detailed study of state power, technological change, and class conflict, this book will be of interest to academics of modern Indian history, labour history and the history of science and technology.

A History of Siena provides a concise and up-to-date biography of the city, from its ancient and medieval development up to the present day, and makes Siena's history, culture, and traditions accessible to anyone studying or visiting the city. Well informed by archival research and recent scholarship on medieval Siena and the Italian city-states, this book places Siena's development in its larger context, both temporally and geographically. In the process, this book offers new interpretations of Siena's artistic, political, and economic development, highlighting in particular the role of pilgrimage, banking, and class conflict. The second half of the book provides an important analysis of the historical development of Siena's nobility, its unique system of neighborhood associations (contrade) and the race of the Palio, as well as an overview of the rise and fall of Siena's troubled bank, the Monte dei Paschi. This book is accessible to undergraduates and tourists, while also offering plenty of new insights for graduate students and scholars of all periods of Sienese history.

In many ways this book tells a familiar story in British industry: of innovation and enterprise in the early decades ...of worldwide dominance at a time when Britain was the workshop of the world ...of wars and economic downturns ...of foreign competition ...and of relative and absolute decline on the path of de-industrialisation in the latter part of the twentieth century. For most of this period the farm machine industry grew and matured. It is an inspiring story of technological achievement and of industrial success, as farmers and engineers brought iron and steel to fields which had previously been the domain of locally made timber implements and power provided by horses.Agricultural technology moved on, inexorably, from broad-cast seed and the sound of the threshing flail, via the portable steam engine and the threshing machine, right through to the modern world of giant tractors - each with the power of 200 horses - combine harvesters and impressively efficient farming methods.This book traces the broad sweep of the whole industry over 200 years, looking at many individual companies and products to explain how and why the farm machinery industry developed in the way it did. Important individual machines are described and illustrated in detail. The British farm machine industry is unlikely ever again to be large by world standards, nor to dominate the world stage as once it did. Yet the author traces a rich vein of innovation, enterprise and technological inspiration, often taking place within the large number of relatively small-scale, craft-based workshops which were so prevalent in the early decades. Rather than mere manufacturing, therefore, perhaps it is this tradition of technical innovation and invention which marked out the British farm machinery industry for historical greatness, and perhaps it is this tradition which will continue to mark it out in the future.

Cycling advocates envisage a future in which bikes are a widespread daily form of transportation. While many global cities are seeing the number of bike commuters increase, this future is still far away; at times, urban cycling seems to be fighting for its very survival. Will we ever witness a true "bike boom" in cities? What can we learn from past successes and failures to make cycling safer, easier, and more accessible? Use of bicycles in Britain and America fell off a cliff in the 1950s and 1960s thanks to the rapid rise in car ownership. Urban planners and politicians predicted that cycling would wither to nothing, and they did their level best to bring about this extinction by catering to only motorists. But in the 1970s, something strange happened, cycling bounced back, first in America and then in Britain. In Bike Boom, journalist Carlton Reid uses history to shine a spotlight on the present and demonstrates how cycling has the potential to grow even further, if the right measures are put in place by the politicians and planners of today and tomorrow.He explores the benefits and challenges of cycling, the roles of infrastructure and advocacy, and what we can learn from cities that have successfully supported and encouraged bike booms, including London; Davis, California; Montreal; Stevenage; Amsterdam; New York; and Copenhagen. Given that today's global cycling "boom" has its roots in the early 1970s, Reid draws lessons from that period. At that time, the Dutch were investing in bike infrastructure and advocacy, the US and the UK had the choice to follow the Dutch example, but didn't. Reid sets out to discover what we can learn from the history of bike "booms" in this entertaining and thought-provoking book.

Colonialization has never failed to provoke discussion and debate over its territorial, economic and political projects, and their ongoing consequences. This work argues that the state-based activity of planning was integral to these projects in conceptualizing, shaping and managing place in settler societies. Planning was used to appropriate and then produce territory for management by the state and in doing so, became central to the colonial invasion of settler states. Moreover, the book demonstrates how the colonial roots of planning endure in complex (post)colonial societies and how such roots, manifest in everyday planning practice, continue to shape land use contests between indigenous people and planning systems in contemporary (post)colonial states.

In 1890, Argentina was a wealthy nation on the brink of industrialization. "Industrial Development in a Frontier Economy" examines Argentina's failure over the next forty years to develop an efficient manufacturing sector, even as countries in similar circumstances--Meiji Japan, Brazil, and Mexico--successfully modernized their economies. Yovanna Pineda conducts a pioneering microanalysis of 59 domestic corporations, spanning ten manufacturing sectors, to show that Argentina's macroeconomic conditions led domestic manufacturers to concentrate on survival at the expense of innovation and growth. Her analysis reveals that the resulting risk-averse, monopolistic business practices, more than any collective action or governmental policy, forestalled the country's industrialization.

Intelligent and Honest Radicals explores the Chicago labor movement's relationship to Illinois legal and political system especially as seen through the eyes of the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL). Newton-Matza focuses on the significant era between the great strike in 1919 and Franklin D. Roosevelt's inauguration and the beginning of the New Deal in 1933. He brings to light a number of victories and achievements for the labor movement in this period that are often overlooked. Newton-Matza shows the Chicago labor movement as a progressive agency intent on changing the workers' world through words and peaceful actions, drawing upon their personal experiences and ideology.