Central economic planning is often associated with failed state socialism, and modern capitalism celebrated as its antithesis. This book shows that central planning is not always, or even primarily, a state enterprise, and that the giant industrial corporations that dominated the American economy through the twentieth century were, first and foremost, unprecedented examples of successful, consensual central planning at a very large scale.

Globalization has driven many improvements in technology, communication and transport, but global economic and social challenges remain. Chief among these is the growing income inequality both within and between countries and a persistently high proportion of people living in poverty. While national trade unions have been struggling to influence policy at the national level, especially in the face of the growing influence of multinational enterprises, the international trade union organizations (Global Unions) have become more active. To address these problems, global unions have been attempting to influence the international financial institutions (IFIs), the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) by developing a dialogue between the IFIs and themselves. The international trade union organizations have tried to focus and direct the consciousness of the IFIs towards the ILO core labour standards. Employment Relations and Global Governance focuses on this dialogue, which can be considered as a strategic instrument of transnational trade union policy that helps the Global Unions to exercise influence over the policies of the IFIs, especially those policies which concern workers. This dialogue takes place on three levels including the headquarters, the sector and the country level. The analysis focuses mainly on the headquarters level dialogue which includes exchange and cooperation at the top administrative level between the IFIs and the Global Unions. Employment Relations and Global Governance will be key reading for academics and researchers studying industrial relations, political economy, international organizations, and international comparative employment relations. It will also be of interest to trade unionists and practitioners working for international non-governmental organizations.

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.

The entry of the capital relation into its epoch of structural crisis forms the basis for the development of the author's conception of revolutionary agency. Drawing on the work and achievements of both Marx and Hungarian socialist thinker Istvan Meszaros, May relates the emergence and deepening of the structural crisis to the decline of trade unionism as the traditional and universal form of organization deployed economistically by workers against capital. In the relationship between the "defensively-structured", universal, trade union form and the growing contradictions of the global capitalist system, May seeks to unearth the possibility of a higher form of agency which is more adequately adapted to address the immediate and long-term objectives facing millions of people today worldwide in the age of capital's "destructive self-reproduction". Looking back in order to look forward, he also subjects the form of agency within the Russian Revolution to a critique which relates it directly to the conditions prevailing in Russia at the time. In so doing, he questions its supposed validity as a form of revolutionary agency for the struggle to put an end to the global capitalist system today.

Focusing on the key period between the late 18th century and 1914, this book provides the first comprehensive narrative account of radical and socialist texts and organised movements for reform to land planning and housing policies in Britain. Beginning with the early colonial settlements in the puritan and enlightenment eras, it also covers Benthamite utilitarian planning, Owenite and utopian communitarianism, the Chartists, late Chartists and the First International, Christian socialists and positivists, working class and radical land reform campaigns in the late 19th century, Garden City pioneers and the institutionalisation of the planning profession. The book, in effect, presents a prehistory of land, planning and housing reform in the UK in contrast with most historiography which focuses on the immediate pre-World War I period. Providing an analysis of different intellectual traditions and contrasting middle class-led reform initiatives with those based on working class organisations, the book seeks to relate historical debates to contemporary themes, including utopianism and pragmatism, the role of the state, the balance between local initiatives and centrally driven reforms and the interdependence of land, housing and planning.

Almost 80 years after Leon Trotsky founded the Fourth International, there are now Trotskyist organizations in 57 countries, including most of Western Europe and Latin America. Yet no Trotskyist group has ever led a revolution or built an enduring mass, political party. Contemporary Trotskyism looks in detail at the influence, resilience and weaknesses of the British Trotskyist movement, from the 1970s to the present day. The book argues that to understand and explain the development, resilience and influence of Trotskyist groups, we need to analyse them as bodies that comprise elements of three types of organization: the political party, the sect and the social movement. It is the properties of these three facets of organization and the interplay between them that gives rise to the most characteristic features of the Trotskyist movement: frenetic activity, rampant divisions, inter-organizational hostility, authoritarian and charismatic leadership, high membership turnover and ideological rigidity. Trotskyist groups have been involved in a wide range of important social movements including trade unions, student unions, anti-war, anti-racist and anti-fascist groups. While their energy and activity in civil society have had some success, their influence has never been reflected in votes or seats at elections even after the financial crisis. Drawing on extensive archival research, as well as interviews with many of the leading protagonists and activists within the Trotskyist milieu, this is essential reading for students, activists and researchers with an interest in the far left, social movements and contemporary British political history.

Almost 80 years after Leon Trotsky founded the Fourth International, there are now Trotskyist organizations in 57 countries, including most of Western Europe and Latin America. Yet no Trotskyist group has ever led a revolution or built an enduring mass, political party. Contemporary Trotskyism looks in detail at the influence, resilience and weaknesses of the British Trotskyist movement, from the 1970s to the present day. The book argues that to understand and explain the development, resilience and influence of Trotskyist groups, we need to analyse them as bodies that comprise elements of three types of organization: the political party, the sect and the social movement. It is the properties of these three facets of organization and the interplay between them that gives rise to the most characteristic features of the Trotskyist movement: frenetic activity, rampant divisions, inter-organizational hostility, authoritarian and charismatic leadership, high membership turnover and ideological rigidity. Trotskyist groups have been involved in a wide range of important social movements including trade unions, student unions, anti-war, anti-racist and anti-fascist groups. While their energy and activity in civil society have had some success, their influence has never been reflected in votes or seats at elections even after the financial crisis. Drawing on extensive archival research, as well as interviews with many of the leading protagonists and activists within the Trotskyist milieu, this is essential reading for students, activists and researchers with an interest in the far left, social movements and contemporary British political history.

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.

Paul Revere's ride to warn the colonial militia of the British march on Lexington and Concord is a legendary contribution to the American Revolution. "Midnight Ride, Industrial Dawn" reveals another side of this American hero's life, that of a transformational entrepreneur instrumental in the industrial revolution.

Robert Martello combines a biographical examination of Revere with a probing study of the new nation's business and technological climate. A silversmith prior to the Revolution and heralded for his patriotism during the war, Revere aspired to higher social status within the fledgling United States. To that end, he shifted away from artisan silversmithing toward larger, more involved manufacturing ventures such as ironworking, bronze casting, and copper sheet rolling. Drawing extensively on the Revere Family Papers, Martello explores Revere's vibrant career successes and failures, social networks, business practices, and the groundbreaking metallurgical technologies he developed and employed. Revere's commercial ventures epitomized what Martello terms "proto-industrialization," a transitional state between craft work and mass manufacture that characterizes the broader, fast-changing landscape of the American economy. Martello uses Revere as a lens to view the social, economic, and technological milieu of early America while demonstrating Revere's pivotal role in both the American Revolution and the rise of industrial America.

Original and well told, this account argues that the greatest patriotic contribution of America's Midnight Rider was his work in helping the nation develop from a craft to an industrial economy.

James Watt (1736-1819) was a pivotal figure of the Industrial Revolution. His career as a scientific instrument maker, inventor and engineer was developed in Scotland, his land of birth. His subsequent national and international significance as a scientist, technologist and businessman was formed in the Birmingham area. There, his partnership with Matthew Boulton and the intellectual and personal support of other members of the Lunar Society network, such as Erasmus Darwin, James Keir, William Small and Josiah Wedgwood, enabled him to translate his improvements in steam technology into efficient machines. His pumping and rotative steam engines represent a summit of technological achievement in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. This is the traditional picture of James Watt. After his death, his surviving son, James Watt junior projected his father's image through commissioning sculptures, medals, paintings and biographies which celebrated his reputation as a 'great man' of the Industrial Revolution. In popular historical understanding Watt has also become a hero of modernity, but the context in which he operated and the roles of others in shaping his ideas have been downplayed. This book explores new aspects of his work and evaluates him in his locational, family, social and intellectual contexts.

A World History of Rubber helps readers understand and gain new insights into the social and cultural contexts of global production and consumption, from the nineteenth century to today, through the fascinating story of one commodity. * Divides the coverage into themes of race, migration, and labor; gender on plantations and in factories; demand and everyday consumption; World Wars and nationalism; and resistance and independence * Highlights the interrelatedness of our world long before the age of globalization and the global social inequalities that persist today * Discusses key concepts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including imperialism, industrialization, racism, and inequality, through the lens of rubber * Provides an engaging and accessible narrative for all levels that is filled with archival research, illustrations, and maps

Jet, a hard, black, shiny gem closely related to coal, has been fashioned into jewelry and trinkets for generations. During the Victorian period, when the ritual surrounding death and the long mourning of Queen Victoria made black fashionable, jet became hugely popular. Although jet is found elsewhere in the world, it is the jet from Whitby that excites collectors to such an extent that even jet jewelry manufactured elsewhere is often called Whitby Jet. This book traces the history of jet and the Whitby jet industry, examining different types and styles of jet jewelry, and pictures the work of some of the best-known Whitby craftsmen.

This book presents a new view on the relation between labour and community through a focus on craft guilds. In the Southern Netherlands, occupational guilds were both powerful and governed by manufacturing masters, enabling the latter to imprint their mark upon urban society in an economic, socio-cultural and political way. While the urban community was deeply indebted to a corporative spirit and guild ethic originating in medieval Germanic and Christian traditions, guild-based artisans succeeded in being accepted as genuine political (and, hence, rational) actors - their political identity and agency being based upon their skills and trustworthiness. In the long run, this corporative spirit and power inexorably waned. Yet this book shows that an adequate understanding of the development of European modernity - i.e., proletarianisation and the emergence of a modern economy and modern economic and political thinking - requires taking seriously the ruins upon which it is build. These histories can actually be recounted as purifications of sorts, in which the economic was separated from the political, the individual from the social, and the transcendent from the material. While the religiously inspired corporative nature of the urban body politic waned, the urban artisans lost their credibility as political (and rational) actors.

This book examines the creative exchanges between architects, artists and intellectuals, from the Early Renaissance to the beginning of the Enlightenment, in the forging of relationships between architecture and emerging concepts of language in early modern Italy. The study extends across the spectrum of linguistic disputes during this time - among members of the clergy, humanists, philosophers and polymaths - on issues of grammar, rhetoric, philology, etymology and epigraphy, and how these disputes paralleled and informed important developments in architectural thinking and practice. Drawing upon a wealth of primary source material, such as humanist tracts, philosophical works, architectural/antiquarian treatises, epigraphic/philological studies, religious sermons and grammaticae, the book traces key periods when the emerging field of linguistics in early modern Italy impacted on the theory, design and symbolism of buildings.

Telegraphy in the nineteenth century approximated the internet in our own day. Historian and electrical engineer David Hochfelder offers readers a comprehensive history of this groundbreaking technology, which employs breaks in an electrical current to send code along miles of wire. "The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920," examines the correlation between technological innovation and social change and shows how this transformative relationship helps us to understand and perhaps define modernity.

The telegraph revolutionized the spread of information--speeding personal messages, news of public events, and details of stock fluctuations. During the Civil War, telegraphed intelligence and high-level directives gave the Union war effort a critical advantage. Afterward, the telegraph helped build and break fortunes and, along with the railroad, altered the way Americans thought about time and space. Hochfelder thus supplies us with an introduction to the early stirrings of the information age.

This book examines the decline of the cotton textiles industry, which defined Britain as an industrial nation, from its peak in the late nineteenth century to the state of the industry at the end of the twentieth century. Focusing on the owners and managers of cotton businesses, the authors examine how they mobilised financial resources; their attitudes to industry structure and technology; and their responses to the challenges posed by global markets. The origins of the problems which forced the industry into decline are not found in any apparent loss of competitiveness during the long nineteenth century but rather in the disastrous reflotation after the First World War. As a consequence of these speculations, rationalisation and restructuring became more difficult at the time when they were most needed, and government intervention led to a series of partial solutions to what became a process of protracted decline. In the post-1945 period, the authors show how government policy encouraged capital withdrawal rather than encouraging the investment needed for restructuring. The examples of corporate success since the Second World War - such as David Alliance and his Viyella Group - exploited government policy, access to capital markets, and closer relationships with retailers, but were ultimately unable to respond effectively to international competition and the challenges of globalisation. A new introduction and epilogue provide an updated framework for the chapters in this book, which were originally published in Business History and Accounting, Business and Financial History

To most people, technology has been reduced to computers, consumer goods, and military weapons; we speak of "technological progress" in terms of RAM and CD-ROMs and the flatness of our television screens. In "Human-Built World," thankfully, Thomas Hughes restores to technology the conceptual richness and depth it deserves by chronicling the ideas about technology expressed by influential Western thinkers who not only understood its multifaceted character but who also explored its creative potential.
Hughes draws on an enormous range of literature, art, and architecture to explore what technology has brought to society and culture, and to explain how we might begin to develop an "ecotechnology" that works with, not against, ecological systems. From the "Creator" model of development of the sixteenth century to the "big science" of the 1940s and 1950s to the architecture of Frank Gehry, Hughes nimbly charts the myriad ways that technology has been woven into the social and cultural fabric of different eras and the promises and problems it has offered. Thomas Jefferson, for instance, optimistically hoped that technology could be combined with nature to create an Edenic environment; Lewis Mumford, two centuries later, warned of the increasing mechanization of American life.
Such divergent views, Hughes shows, have existed side by side, demonstrating the fundamental idea that "in its variety, technology is full of contradictions, laden with human folly, saved by occasional benign deeds, and rich with unintended consequences." In "Human-Built World," he offers the highly engaging history of these contradictions, follies, and consequences, a history that resurrects technology, rightfully, as more than gadgetry; it is in fact no less than an embodiment of human values.

Everyday Technology is a pioneering account of how small machines and consumer goods that originated in Europe and North America became objects of everyday use in India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Rather than investigate "big" technologies such as railways and irrigation projects, Arnold examines the assimilation and appropriation of bicycles, rice mills, sewing machines, and typewriters in India, and follows their impact on the ways in which people worked and travelled, the clothes they wore, and the kind of food they ate. But the effects of these machines were not limited to the daily rituals of Indian society, and Arnold demonstrates how such small-scale technologies became integral to new ways of thinking about class, race, and gender, as well as about the politics of colonial rule and Indian nationhood.

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 The Industrial Turn in World History, Peter N. Stearns presents a concise yet far reaching overview of the worldwide shift from agricultural societies to industrial societies over the past two centuries. Putting the implications for individuals and societies in global context while simultaneously considering the limits of generalization across cultures, Stearns's text explores the nature of industrialization across national and regional lines. Rather than portraying the Industrial Revolution as primarily a Western, early 19th-century development, this new narrative argues that the move to industrial societies is an ongoing and truly global shift. Taking a largely social and cultural approach, Stearns engages with the leading-edge approach of looking at emotion historically-allowing readers to ask questions about the impact of industrial society on emotional experience and happiness levels. This innovating framing allows for use in a variety of courses, including world history, economic history, and more general courses on the Industrial Revolution.

This volume explores the relationship between cities and railways over three centuries. Despite their nearly 200-year existence, The City and the Railway in the World shows that urban railways are still politically and historically important to the modern world. Since its inception, cities have played a significant role in the railway system; cities were among the main reasons for building such efficient but lavish and costly modes of transport for persons, goods, and information. They also influenced the technological appearance of railways as these have had to meet particular demands for transport in urban areas. In 25 essays, this volume demonstrates that the relationship between the city and the railway is one of the most publicly debated themes in the context of daily lives in growing urban settings, as well as in the second urbanisation of the global South with migration from rural to urban landscapes. The volume's broad geographical range includes discussions of railway networks, railway stations, and urban rails in countries such as India, Japan, England, Belgium, Romania, Nigeria, the USA, and Mexico. The City and the Railway in the World will be a useful tool for scholars interested in the history of transport, travel, and urban change.

Based on innovative and unique primary sources (e.g. notarial deeds) Cotton Enterprises: Networks and Strategies looks to tell the story of the Lombardy cotton industry in the early 19th century, particularly the stories of entrepreneurs such as Francesco Turati who were able to 'corner' this otherwise atomistic industry. The book looks at both the financial and strategic elements of the businesses, as well as looking at enabling technology and even the emergence of factory organization in Italy and takes a business history analysis of pre-industrial business enterprises in a developing economy by taking into account all the crucial functions of enterprise. Cotton Enterprises: Networks and Strategies makes important contributions to the study and research of the financing of early cotton mills, technology transfer in these entrepreneurial ventures, the organization of production, including a detailed discussion of the available technology, networks and relationships within the district. By highlighting the shift from putting-out to factory system, the crucial change of actors (both entrepreneurs and workers) and the birth of a local industrial district, exerting a long-lasting influence on the history of the area the book outlines the building of entrepreneurial networks and social hierarchies in (at the time) a new urban context. Aimed at scholars, researchers and students in the fields of management history, development entrepreneurship and regional economics, Cotton Enterprises: Networks and Strategies answers previously non-addressable questions via innovative research methods and, as such, will be a key work in the field for years to come.

This book deals with two key aspects of the history of steam engines, a cornerstone of the Industrial Revolution, specifically the road that led to its discovery and the process of diffusion of the early steam engines. The first part of the volume outlines the technological and scientific developments which took place between the 16th and 18th centuries, proving critical for the invention of this strategic technology. The most important question addressed is why did England come up with this innovation first as opposed to other countries (e.g., France, Italy), which were more advanced in terms of knowledge pertinent to it. The second part of the volume traces the process of diffusion of the early steam engines, the Newcomen model, through to 1773, the year prior to the first commercial application of the second generation of steam engines (the Watt model). The process of diffusion is quantified on the basis of a novel method before proceeding with a discussion of the main determinants of this process. Kitsikopoulos pulls together a large amount of relevant evidence found in primary sources and more technically oriented literature which is often ignored by economic historians. This book will be of interest to economic historians and historians of technology.

The International Workingmen's Association was the prototype of all organizations of the Labor movement and the 150th anniversary of its birth (1864-2014) offers an important opportunity to rediscover its history and learn from its legacy. The International helped workers to grasp that the emancipation of labour could not be won in a single country but was a global objective. It also spread an awareness in their ranks that they had to achieve the goal themselves, through their own capacity for organization, rather than by delegating it to some other force; and that it was essential to overcome the capitalist system itself, since improvements within it, though necessary to pursue, would not eliminate exploitation and social injustice. This book reconsider the main issues broached or advanced by the International - such as labor rights, critiques of capitalism and the search for international solidarity - in light of present-day concerns. With the recent crisis of capitalism, that has sharpened more than before the division between capital and labor, the political legacy of the organization founded in London in 1864 has regained profound relevance, and its lessons are today more timely than ever. This book was published as a special issue of Socialism and Democracy.

In the years Bbetween the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and the beginning of the war mobilization boom in 1930, collieries in Europe and America embraced new technologies and had long since been excluded women from working underground. In Japan, however, mining women witnessed no significant changes in working practices over this period. The availability of the cheap and abundant labor of these women allowed the captains of the coal industry in Japan to avoid expensive investments in new machinery and sophisticated mining methods;, instead, they continued to intensely exploit workers and markets intensively, making substantial profits without the burdens of extensive mechanization. This unique book explores the lives of the thousands of women who labored underground in Japan's coal mines in the years 1868 to 1930. It examines their working lives, their family lives, their aspirations, achievements and disappointments. Drawing heavily on interview material with the miners themselves, W. Donald Burton combines translations of their stories with features of Japanese society at the time and coal mining technology. In doing so, he presents a complex account of the women's lives, as well as providing a keen insight intoon gender relations and the industrial and labor history of Japan. Coal Mining Women in Japan will be welcomed by students and scholars of Japanese history, gender studies and industrial history.