After the Second World War, the drive for the modernisation of Britain's railways ushered in a new breed of locomotive: the Diesel. Diesel-powered trains had been around for some time, but faced with a coal crisis and the Clean Air Act in the 1950s, it was seen as a part of the solution for British Rail. This beautifully illustrated book, written by an expert on rail history, charts the rise and decline of Britain's diesel-powered locomotives. It covers a period of great change and experimentation, where the iconic steam engines that had dominated for a century were replaced by a series of modern diesels including the ill-fated 'Westerns' and the more successful 'Deltics'.

It was not until the eighteenth century that books became widely available throughout the whole of England. Publishing remained largely London-based, but the provincial market grew steadily in importance. In this study, drawing on a wide range of primary sources, John Feather traces the economic, social and cultural forces which made possible this fundamental change, and assesses the impact of the metropolitan printed word on provincial society. He discusses the important issues of copyright and piracy; the various financial arrangements between booksellers and publishers; and above all the elaborate distribution and agency systems that enabled London publishers to retain their effective stranglehold by penetrating the provincial market at every level.

In the early nineteenth century the major English chocolate firms,Fry, Rowntree, and Cadbury,were all Quaker family enterprises that aimed to do well by doing good. The English chocolatiers introduced the world's first chocolate bar and ever fancier chocolate temptations,while also writing ground-breaking papers on poverty, publishing authoritative studies of the Bible, and campaigning against human rights abuses. Chocolate was always a global business, and in the global competitors, especially the Swiss and the Americans Hershey and Mars, the Quaker capitalists met their match. The ensuing chocolate wars would culminate in a multi-billion-dollar showdown pitting Quaker tradition against the cutthroat tactics of a corporate behemoth. Featuring a cast of savvy entrepreneurs, brilliant eccentrics, and resourceful visionaries, Chocolate Wars is a delicious history of the fierce, 150-year business rivalry for one of the world's most coveted markets.

This book examines how it was possible and what it meant for ordinary factory workers to become effective unionists and national political participants by the mid-1930s. We follow Chicago workers as they make choices about whether to attend ethnic benefit society meetings or to go to the movies, whether to shop in local neighborhood stores or patronize the new A & P. Although workers may not have been political in traditional terms during the '20s, as they made daily decisions like these, they declared their loyalty in ways that would ultimately have political significance. As the depression worsened in the 1930s, not only did workers find their pay and working hours cut or eliminated, but the survival strategies they had developed during the 1920s were undermined. Looking elsewhere for help, workers adopted new ideological perspectives and overcame longstanding divisions among themselves to mount new kinds of collective action. Chicago workers' experiences as citizens, ethnics and blacks, wage earners and consumers all converged to make them into New Deal Democrats and CIO unionists. First printed in 1990, Making a New Deal has become an established classic in American History. The second edition includes a new preface by Lizabeth Cohen.

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.

This book examines international trade cooperation in 1815-1914. Basing the theoretical analysis on the domestic political economy of states, Pahre develops theories of international cooperation, the spread of trade cooperation, and the effect of trade regimes. The book examines trade politics in the entire century from 1815 to 1914 around the world, using a database of trade agreements. It will appeal to students of international relations, comparative political economy, economic history, trade law, and international organizations.

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.

This book, first published in 2007, offers a bold new interpretation of American business history during the formative years 1870-1920, which mark the dawn of modern big business. It focuses on four major revolutions that ushered in this new era: those in power, transportation, communication, and organization. Using the metaphor of America as an economic hothouse uniquely suited to rapid economic growth during these years, it analyzes the interplay of key factors such as entrepreneurial talent, technology, land, natural resources, law, mass markets, and the rise of cities. It also delineates the process that laid the foundation for the modern era, in which virtually every human activity became a business, and, in most cases, a big business. The book also profiles numerous major entrepreneurs whose careers and activities illustrate broader trends and themes. It utilizes a wide variety of sources, including novels from the period, to produce a lively narrative.

This book, first published in 2007, offers a bold new interpretation of American business history during the formative years 1870-1920, which mark the dawn of modern big business. It focuses on four major revolutions that ushered in this new era: those in power, transportation, communication, and organization. Using the metaphor of America as an economic hothouse uniquely suited to rapid economic growth during these years, it analyzes the interplay of key factors such as entrepreneurial talent, technology, land, natural resources, law, mass markets, and the rise of cities. It also delineates the process that laid the foundation for the modern era, in which virtually every human activity became a business, and, in most cases, a big business. The book also profiles numerous major entrepreneurs whose careers and activities illustrate broader trends and themes. It utilizes a wide variety of sources, including novels from the period, to produce a lively narrative.

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.

The majority of workers in South Asia are employed in industries that rely on manual labour and craft skills. Some of these industries have existed for centuries and survived great changes in consumption and technology over the last 150 years. In earlier studies, historians of the region focused on mechanized rather than craft industries, arguing that traditional manufacturing was destroyed or devitalized during the colonial period, and that 'modern' industry is substantially different. Exploring material from research into five traditional industries, Tirthankar Roy's book contests these notions, demonstrating that while traditional industry did evolve during the Industrial Revolution, these transformations had a positive rather than destructive effect on manufacturing generally. In fact, the book suggests, the major industries in post-independence India were shaped by such transformations. Tirthankar Roy's book offers penetrating insights into India's economic and social history.

Gerald Feldman's history of the internationally prominent insurance corporation Allianz AG in the Nazi era is based largely on new or previously unavailable archival sources, making this a more accurate account of Allianz and the men who directed its business than was ever before possible. Feldman takes the reader through varied cases of collaboration and conflict with the Nazi regime with fairness and a commitment to informed analysis, touching on issues of damages in the Pogrom of 1938, insuring facilities used in forced labor camps, and the problems of denazification and restitution. The broader issues examined in this study--when cooperation with Nazi policies was compulsory and when it was complicit, the way in which profit, ideology, and opportunism played a role in corporate decision making, and the question of how Jewish insurance assets were expropriated--are particularly relevant today given the ongoing international debate about restitution for Holocaust survivors. This book joins a growing body of scholarship based on open access to the records of German corporations in the Nazi era. Gerald D. Feldman is Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley. His book, The Great Disorder (Oxford, 1993) received the DAAD Book Prize of the German Historical Association and the Book Prize for Central European History from the American Historical Association. He was an invited expert at the London Gold Conference in December 1997 and at the U.S. Conference on Holocaust Assets in Washington, D.C. in December 1998 and served as an advisor to the Presidential Commision on Holocaust Assets in the United States.

Machine tools are vital to our industrial, metal-using society. This book is the first history of the British machine-tool industry during an important period of its development, a time when it played a crucial part in the transformation of the British economy. The author discusses the structure of the industry, its performance in international trade, and, through an analysis of the voluminous records of one firm, its efficiency and productivity. This discussion is placed within the wider context of current controversies about the behaviour of the British economy during the 'Great Depression' of the later nineteenth century, and its conclusions do not support pessimistic views of the performance of British industry. The book is also intended as a contribution to the explanation of the process of technological change, a problem of increasing interest to economists and economic historians.

This book investigates the causes, course and consequences of the shift in West German chemical technology from a coal to a petroleum basis between 1945 and 1961. It examines the historical underpinnings of the technological culture of the German chemical industry; changing political and economic constraints on technological decision-making in the post-war period; and the actual decision-making process within five individual firms. By addressing a wide variety of broader issues - including the origins and impact of the division of Germany; the effects of the Wirtschaftswunder, or economic miracle; European integration; and the changing role of the West German Federal Republic in the international political order - this book explains how West German industry regained and then retained a competitive position in world markets.

State Corporatism and Proto-Industry focuses on an industrial countryside in south-west Germany, where a dense worsted industry dominated the rural economy from 1580 to 1800. This is an example of 'proto-industry', the dense, export-oriented rural manufacturing which arose throughout Europe before factory industrialization. But although the Wurttemberg worsted industry possessed all the features of a classic proto-industry, closer scrutiny throws doubt on basic assumptions about European proto-industrialization. In this book, Sheilagh Ogilvie shows that proto-industries did not break down traditional society. Instead, corporate institutions such as guilds, merchant companies, village communities and manorial systems retained enormous power. This was a result of 'state corporatism': the expanding early modern state granted privileges to favoured groups in return for fiscal and regulatory co-operation. As Ogilvie shows, these corporate privileges profoundly constrained both individual decisions and economic development.

This book explores the long-term forces shaping business attitudes in the British and American cotton industries from the eighteenth to the twentieth century. Mary Rose traces social, political and developmental differences from the early stages of industrialization. She demonstrates how firms become embedded in networks, and evolve according to business values and strategies. The book examines local and regional networks, the changing competitive environment, community characteristics and national differences. Rose's findings challenge traditional views with new evidence that the character and achievements of each industry uniquely reflect local circumstances and historical experience. This is a critical synthesis of the multidisciplinary literature on the cotton textile industries of two major industrial nations and a study of the changing forces influencing decision making. An important contribution to comparative business history, this book will be of interest to graduates and scholars in all areas of business and economic history.

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.

Scottish Arctic Whaling brings to light a previously little-known but important Scottish industry. The author's extensive use of original sources such as log-books and diaries shows that hundreds of whaling vessels, sailing variously from sixteen east-coast Scottish ports, harvested more than 20,000 bowhead whales at East Greenland, Davis Strait and Baffin Bay during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And they did so under almost unimaginably demanding and hazardous conditions. More than 110 ships were lost, while others were often detained within the pack-ice, causing the whale men to suffer starvation, disease, scurvy, frostbite and death. In 1836 alone, more than 100 whalers on the Advice and Thomas, Dundee, and Dee of Aberdeen perished when they became entrapped at Davis Strait. Nevertheless, by the second half of the nineteenth century, through hard work, skill and perseverance, Scotland had a virtual monopoly on Arctic oil and bone, until seriously depleted stocks and the outbreak of the First World War brought the industry to a close.

In its broadest sense, this book is concerned with the attempt by workers in Britain during the period 1760-1871 to engage in collective action in circumstances of conflict with their employers during a time when the nation and many of its traditional economic structures and customary modes of working were undergoing rapid and unsettling change. More specifically, the book principally focuses on the attempt by those workers favouring a collective approach to struggle to overcome what they felt to be one of the main obstacles to collective action, the uncooperative worker. At times during these decades, the sanctions directed by collectively inclined workmen at those workers deemed to have engaged in acts contrary to the interests of the trade and customary codes of behaviour in the context of strikes and other instances of friction in the workplace were severe and uncompromising. Stern and unforgiving, too, was the struggle between the collectively inclined worker and the uncooperative worker in a more general sense, a contest that occasionally took a violent and bloody form. In exploring the fractious and hostile relationship between these two conflicting parties, this book draws on concepts and insights from a range of scholarly disciplines in an effort to shift the perception and study of this relationship beyond many of the conventional paradigms and explanatory frameworks associated with mainstream trade union studies.

From Britain's most popular railway historian, a concise, authoritative and fast-paced telling of how the railways changed the world. The arrival of the railways in the first half of the nineteenth century and their subsequent spread across every one of the world's continents acted as a spur for economic growth and social change on an extraordinary scale. The 'iron road' stimulated innovation in engineering and architecture, enabled people and goods to move around the world more quickly than ever before, and played a critical role in warfare as well as in the social and economic spheres. Christian Wolmar describes the emergence of modern railways in both Britain and the USA in the 1830s, and elsewhere in the following decade. He charts the surge in railway investment plans in Britain in the early 1840s and the ensuing 'railway mania' (which created the backbone of today's railway network), and the unstoppable spread of the railways across Europe, America and Asia. Above all, he assesses the global impact of a technology that, arguably, had the most transformative impact on human society of any before the coming of the Internet, and which, as it approaches two centuries of existence, continues to play a key role in human society in the twenty-first century. 'A lucid and engaging account of the far-reaching effects that trains have had upon society' The Railway & Canal Historical Society

In early twentieth-century China, Chen Diexian (1879-1940) was a maverick entrepreneur-at once a prolific man of letters and captain of industry, a magazine editor and cosmetics magnate. He tinkered with chemistry in his private studio, used local cuttlefish to source magnesium carbonate, and published manufacturing tips in how-to columns. In a rapidly changing society, Chen copied foreign technologies and translated manufacturing processes from abroad to produce adaptations of global commodities that bested foreign brands. Engaging in the worlds of journalism, industry, and commerce, he drew on literati practices associated with late-imperial elites but deployed them in novel ways within a culture of educated tinkering that generated industrial innovation. Through the lens of Chen's career, Eugenia Lean explores how unlikely individuals devised unconventional, homegrown approaches to industry and science in early twentieth-century China. She contends that Chen's activities exemplify "vernacular industrialism," the pursuit of industry and science outside of conventional venues, often involving ad hoc forms of knowledge and material work. Lean shows how vernacular industrialists accessed worldwide circuits of law and science and experimented with local and global processes of manufacturing to navigate, innovate, and compete in global capitalism. In doing so, they presaged the approach that has helped fuel China's economic ascent in the twenty-first century. Rather than conventional narratives that depict China as belatedly borrowing from Western technology, Vernacular Industrialism in China offers a new understanding of industrialization, going beyond material factors to show the central role of culture and knowledge production in technological and industrial change.

In the early 20th century, immigration, labor unrest, social reforms and government regulations threatened the power of the country's largest employers. The Amoskeag Manufacturing Company of Manchester, New Hampshire, remained successful by controlling its workforce, the local media, and local and state government. When a 1912 strike in nearby Lawrence, Massachusetts, threatened to bring the Industrial Workers of the World union to Manchester, the company sought to reassert its influence. Amoskeag worked to promote company pride and to Americanize its many foreign-born workers through benevolence programs, including a baseball club. Textile Field, the most advanced stadium in New England outside of Boston when it was built in 1913, was the centerpiece of this effort. Results were mixed-the company found itself at odds with social movements and new media outlets, and Textile Field became a magnet for conflict with all of professional baseball.

In this holistic approach to the study of textiles and their makers, Colleen Kriger charts the role cotton has played in commercial, community, and labor settings in West Africa. By paying close attention to the details of how people made, exchanged, and wore cotton cloth from before industrialization in Europe to the twentieth century, she is able to demonstrate some of the cultural effects of Africa's long involvement in trading contacts with Muslim societies and with Europe. Cloth in West African History thus offers a fresh perspective on the history of the region and on the local, regional, and global processes that shaped it. A variety of readers will find its account and insights into the African past and culture valuable, and will appreciate the connections made between the local concerns of small-scale weavers in African villages, the emergence of an indigenous textile industry, and its integration into international networks.

The history of an entrepreneurial family whose work influenced followers of the Arts and Crafts Movement, Gothic Revivalism, Art Needlework and Aestheticism LONGLISTED for the Arnold Bennett Society Book Prize 2020 This book is a richly illustrated history of the Wardle family of Leek, Staffordshire, which rose to prominence in fine textile production in the second half ofthe nineteenth century. At its core is an object-centred exploration revealing how an entrepreneurial family responded to complex international factors. Beautiful dyed, printed and embroidered textiles were created in Leek using traditional craft skills. Followers of the Arts and Crafts Movement and Gothic Revivalism, as well as Art Needlework and Aestheticism, benefited from the family enterprises that flourished despite rapid industrialisation. The Wardle family's rich legacy is played out against the backdrop of the Anglo-Indian silk trade. Thomas Wardle travelled in India and integrated Indian designs into British silk production. His work attracted William Morris, Walter Crane and A. L. Liberty, among others, and their designs, printed by Wardle, were internationally applauded. Elizabeth Wardle, embroiderer, worked with many major architects such as R. N. Shaw, G. G. Scott Jnr and J. D. Sedding.Lavishly illustrated, this book will be of interest to those interested in textile and fashion history and the history of the Arts and Crafts movement, as well as the relationship between the British Empire and the Indian subcontinent. BRENDA M. KING is a textile historian and holds the Chair of the Textile Society. She is also a freelance lecturer in the History of Design and Museum and Heritage Studies and the author of Silk and Empire (2005 and 2009) and Dye, Print, Stitch: Textiles by Thomas and Elizabeth Wardle (2009).