The Industrial Revolution had a profound and lasting effect on socioeconomic and cultural conditions in Britain.

The Birth of Industrial Britain examines the impact of early industrialisation on British society in the century before 1850, coinciding with Britain's transition from a late pre-industrial economy to one based on industrialisation and urbanisation.This fully revised and updated second edition provides a comprehensive range of pedagogical material to support the text, including a Glossary of terms, people and parliamentary acts, new primary source documents and a brand new Chronology and 'Who's Who' section. "The Birth of Industrial Britain "provides an essential up-to-date synthesis of the impact of the Industrial Revolution on British society for students at all levels.

Bengal's traditional industries, once celebrated worldwide, largely decayed under the backwash effects of the British Industrial Revolution in the first half of the nineteenth century. Although colonial ambivalence is often cited as an explanation, this study also shows that a series of new industries emerged during this period. The book reappraises the thesis of India's deindustrialisation and discusses the development status of the traditional industries in the early nineteenth century, examines their technology, employment opportunities and marketing and, finally, analyses the underlying reasons for their decay. It offers a study of how traditional industries evolved into modern enterprises in a British colony, and contributes to the broader discussion on the global history of industrialisation. This book will be of interest to scholars of Indian economic history as well as those who seek to understand the widespread effects of industrialisation, especially in a colonial context.

This collection examines cloth as a material and consumer object from early periods to the twenty-first century, across multiple oceanic sites-from Zanzibar, Muscat and Kampala to Ajanta, Srivijaya and Osaka. It moves beyond usual focuses on a single fibre (such as cotton) or place (such as India) to provide a fresh, expansive perspective of the ocean as an "interaction-based arena," with an internal dynamism and historical coherence forged by material exchange and human relationships. Contributors map shifting social, cultural and commercial circuits to chart the many histories of cloth across the region. They also trace these histories up to the present with discussions of contemporary trade in Dubai, Zanzibar, and Eritrea. Richly illustrated, this collection brings together new and diverse strands in the long story of textiles in the Indian Ocean, past and present.

This volume, first published in 1990, commemorates one of the most notable economic historians of his age. Professor W.H. Chaloner taught in the History Department of the University of Manchester from 1945 to 1981. He preferred the article to the book as the most appropriate vehicle of publishing the results of his research. From 1938 to 1983 he wrote over 120 articles and prefaces, most of which appeared in historical journals and in the transactions of learned societies. These essays collected here cover a long period of time, from the Industrial Revolution to problems of the inter-war years in the twentieth century. They deal with a very wide range of topics, for Professor Chaloner was an authority on business, urban, transport, social and agricultural history.

Ebenezer Howard, an Englishman, and Jane Jacobs, a naturalized Canadian, personify the twentieth century's opposing outlooks on cities. Howard envisaged small towns, newly built from scratch and comprised of single-family homes with small gardens, while Jacobs embraced existing inner-city neighbourhoods that emphasized the verve of the living street. Both figures have had their share of supporters as well as detractors: Howard's conceptualization received criticism for its uniformity and alienation from the city core, while Jacobs's urban vision came to be recognized as the result of invasive gentrification. Presenting Howard and Jacobs within a psychocultural context, The Urban Archetypes of Jane Jacobs and Ebenezer Howard addresses our urban crisis in its recognition that "city form is a gendered, allegorical medium expressing femininity and masculinity within two founding features of the built environment: void and volume." These founding contrasts represent both tension as well as the opportunity for fusion between pairs of urban polarities: human scale against superscale, gait against speed, and spontaneity against surveillance. In their respective attitudes, Howard and Jacobs have come to embrace the two ancient archetypes of the Garden and the Citadel, leaving it to future generations to blend their two contrarian stances.

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.

Market Ethics and Practices, c. 1300-1850 analyses the nature, development, and operation of market ethics in the context of social practices, ranging from rituals of exchange and unofficial expectations to law, institutions, and formal regulations from the late medieval through to the modern era. Divided into two parts, the first explores the principles and regulations of market ethics, such as the relations between professed norms and economic behaviour across a range of geographies and chronologies. The chapters consider key subjects such as medieval attitudes towards merchant activities across Europe, North Africa, and Asia; market regulations and the notion of the "common good"; Adam Smith's conception of moral capitalism; and the combining of religious and capitalist ethics in Nat Turner's "Confession." The second part provides microstudies that offer insights into topics such as household and market relations in colonial New England; the harsher side of the consumer economy experienced by a family of parasol sellers from Lyon; informal Jewish networks in the early modern Caribbean and slave trade; merchant networks and commercial litigation in eighteenth-century France; and early encounters and the informal norms of fur trading between Europeans and Native Americans. This book provides an understanding of the key pre-modern economic historiography, whilst pointing students towards new debates and the historical significance for our collective economic future. It is ideal for students and postgraduates of late medieval and early modern economic history.

The image of western ranchers making a stand for their "rights"-against developers, the government, "illegal" immigrants-may be commonplace today, but the political power of the cowboy was a long time in the making. In a book steeped in the culture, traditions, and history of western range ranching, Michelle K. Berry takes readers into the Cold War world of cattle ranchers in the American West to show how that power, with its implications for the lands and resources of the mountain states, was built, shaped, and shored up between 1945 and 1965. After long days working the ranch, battling human and nonhuman threats, and wrestling with nature, ranchers got down to business of another sort, which Berry calls "cow talk." Discussing the best new machinery; sharing stories of drought, blizzards, and bugs; talking money and management and strategy: these ranchers were building a community specific to their time, place, and work and creating a language that embodied their culture. Cow Talk explores how this language and its iconography evolved and how it came to provide both a context and a vehicle for political power. Using ranchers' personal papers, publications, and cattle growers association records, the book provides an inside view of how range cattle ranchers in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana created a culture and a shared identity that would frame and inform their relationship with their environment and with society at large in an increasingly challenging, modernizing world. A multifaceted analysis of postwar ranch life, labor, and culture, this innovative work offers unprecedented insight into the cohesive political and cultural power of western ranchers in our day.

Originally published in 1991 this book brings together 9 essays which address a number of central issues relating to the nature of German industrialisation, including the role of foreign competition in fostering technological change, the importance of market integration for economic development and the response of German banks to industrialisation. The book also provides an important corrective to the traditional interpretation of German industrialisation and reassesses the economic impact of the customs union (Zollverein). The reappraisal of some dominant themes in German economic and business history is distinctive in its explicit use of economic theory in historical analysis of long-term growth processes. It also emphasises the importance of sectoral analysis and illustrates the usefulness of a differential regional approach for understanding the process of German industrialisation.

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

Building for Oil is a historical account of the development of the oil town of Daqing in northeastern China during the formative years of the People's Republic, describing Daqing's rise and fall as a national model city. Daqing oil field was the most profitable state-owned enterprise and the single largest source of state revenue for almost three decades, from the 1950s through the early 1980s. The book traces the roots and maturation of the Chinese socialist state and its early industrialization and modernization policies during a time of unprecedented economic growth. The metamorphosis of Daqing's physical landscape in many ways exemplified the major challenges and changes taking place in Chinese state and society. Through detailed, often personal descriptions of the process of planning and building Daqing, the book illuminates the politics between party leaders and elite ministerial cadres and examines the diverse interests, conflicts, tensions, functions, and dysfunctions of state institutions and individuals. Building for Oil records the rise of the "Petroleum Group" in the central government while simultaneously revealing the everyday stories and struggles of the working men and women who inhabited China's industrializing landscape-their beliefs, frustrations, and pursuit of a decent life.

Although the last two generations have seen an enormous amount of attention paid to advances in electronics, the fact remains that high-income, high-energy societies could thrive without microchips, etc., but, by contrast, could not exist without steel. Because of the importance of this material to comtemporary civilization, a comprehensive resource is needed for metallurgists, non-metallurgists, and anyone with a background in environmental studies, industry, manufacturing, and history, seeking a broader understanding of the history of iron and steel and its current and future impact on society. Given its coverage of the history of iron and steel from its genesis to slow pre-industrial progress, revolutionary advances during the 19th century, magnification of 19th century advances during the past five generations, patterns of modern steel production, the ubiquitous uses of the material, potential substitutions, advances in relative dematerialization, and appraisal of steel's possible futures, Still the Iron Age: Iron and Steel in the Modern World by world-renowned author Vaclav Smil meets that need.

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.

This volume is based on possibly the biggest single Europe-wide project in urban history. In 1955 the International Commission for the History of Towns established the European historic towns atlas project in accordance with a common scheme in order to encourage comparative urban studies. Although advances in urban archaeology since the 1960s have highlighted the problematic relationship between the oldest extant town plan and the actual origins of a town, the large-scale cadastral maps as they have been made available by the European historic towns atlas project are still necessary if we want to understand the evolution of the physical form of our towns. By 2014 the project consisted of over 500 individual publications from over 18 different countries across Europe. Each atlas comprises at least a core-map at the scale of 1:2500, analytical maps and an explanatory text. The time has come to use this enormous database that has been compiled over the last 40 years. This volume, itself based on a conference related to this topic that was held in the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin in 2006, takes up this challenge. The focus of the volume is on the question of how seigneurial power influenced the creation of towns in medieval Europe and of how this process in turn influenced urban form. Part I of the volume addresses two major issues: the history of the use of town plans in urban research and the methodological challenges of comparative urban history. Parts II and III constitute the core of the book focusing on the dynamic relationship between lordship and town planning in the core area of medieval Europe and on the periphery. In Part IV the symbolic meaning of town plans for medieval people is discussed. Part V consists of critical contributions by an archaeologist, an art historian and an historical geographer. By presenting case studies by leading researchers from different European countries, this volume combines findings that were hitherto not available in English. A comparison of the English and German bibliographies, attached to this volume, reveals some interesting insights as to how the focus of research shifted over time. The book also shows how work on urban topography integrates the approaches of the historian, archaeologist and historical geographer. The narrative of medieval urbanization becomes enriched and the volume is a genuine contribution to European studies.

The Muspratt family form a fascinating dynasty in the history of British commerce and manufacturing. Associated principally with the development of the chemical industry in Liverpool - James Muspratt (1793-1884) was the first person to make alkali on a large scale using the Leblanc Process - the three generations of the family also contributed to wider Victorian and Edwardian culture through their interests in politics, education (founding the Liverpool College of Chemistry in 1848), art, literature and theatre. This is the first study to present the history of the Muspratts as a family group and to consider the entrepreneurial spirit they brought to chemical manufacture in Britain and to their many other ventures.

Jan Breman takes dispossession as his central theme in this ambitious analysis of labour bondage in India's changing political economy from 1962 to 2017. When, in a remote past, tribal and low-caste communities were attached to landowning households, their lack of freedom was framed as subsistence-oriented dependency. Breman argues that with colonial rule came the intrusion of capitalism into India's agrarian economy, leading to a decline in the idea of patronage in the relationship between bonded labour and landowner. Instead, servitude was reshaped as indebtedness. As labour became transformed into a commodity, peasant workers were increasingly pushed out of agriculture and the village but remained adrift in the wider economy. This footloose workforce is subjected to exploitation when their labour power is required and is left in a state of exclusion when it is surplus to demand. The outcome is progressive inequality that is thoroughly capitalist in nature.

Imperial Russia, is was said, had two capital cities because it had two identities: St. Petersburg was Russia's "window to Europe," whereas Moscow preserved the nation's proud historical traditions. Enlightened Metropolis challenges this myth by exploring how the tsarist regime actually tried to turn Moscow into a bridgehead of Europe in the heartland of Russia. Moscow in the eighteenth century was widely scorned as backward and "Asiatic." The tsars thought it a benighted place that endangered their state's internal security and their effort to make Russia European. Beginning with Catherine the Great, they sought to construct a new Moscow, with European buildings and institutions, a Westernized "middle estate", and a new cultural image as an enlightened metropolis. Drawing on the methodologies of urban, social, institutional, cultural, and intellectual history, Enlightened Metropolis asks: How was the urban environment - buildings, institutions, streets, smells - transformed in the nine decades from Catherine's accession to the death of Nicholas I? How were the lives of the inhabitants changed? Did a "middle estate" come into being? How similar was Moscow's modernization to that of Western cities, and how was it affected by the disastrous occupation by Napoleon? Lastly, how were Moscow and its people imagined by writers, artists, and social commentators in Russia and the West from the Enlightenment to the mid-nineteenth century?

This monograph provides the first comprehensive analysis of industrial development in Ireland and its impact on Irish society between 1801-1922. Studies of Irish industrial history to date have been regionally focused or industry specific.

The book addresses this problem by bringing together the economic and social dimensions of Irish industrial history during the Union between Ireland and Great Britain. In this period, British economic and political influences on Ireland were all pervasive, particularly in the industrial sphere as a consequence of the British industrial revolution.

By making the Irish industrial story more relevant to a wider national and international audience and by adopting a more multi-disciplinary approach which challenges many of the received wisdoms derived from narrow regional or single industry studies - this book will be of interest to economic historians across the globe as well as all those interested in Irish history more generally.

An ambitious and shocking expose of America's hidden empire in Liberia, run by the storied Firestone corporation, and its long shadow In the early 1920s, Americans owned 80 percent of the world's automobiles and consumed 75 percent of the world's rubber. But only one percent of the world's rubber grew under the U.S. flag, creating a bottleneck that hampered the nation's explosive economic expansion. To solve its conundrum, the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company turned to a tiny West African nation, Liberia, founded in 1847 as a free Black republic. Empire of Rubber tells a sweeping story of capitalism, racial exploitation, and environmental devastation, as Firestone transformed Liberia into America's rubber empire. Historian and filmmaker Gregg Mitman scoured remote archives to unearth a history of promises unfulfilled for the vast numbers of Liberians who toiled on rubber plantations built on taken land. Mitman reveals a history of racial segregation and medical experimentation that reflected Jim Crow America-on African soil. As Firestone reaped fortunes, wealth and power concentrated in the hands of a few elites, fostering widespread inequalities that fed unrest, rebellions and, eventually, civil war. A riveting narrative of ecology and disease, of commerce and science, and of racial politics and political maneuvering, Empire of Rubber uncovers the hidden story of a corporate empire whose tentacles reach into the present.

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.

It is a cliche that tsarist Russia had two rival capitals: St. Petersburg, Russia's "window to Europe"; and Moscow, city of palaces and onion domes, the tradition-bound metropolis of the Orthodox heartland. Enlightened Metropolis challenges this cultural myth by examining the tsarist regime's efforts to turn Moscow into a European city. In the eighteenth century, Europeans and even some Russians scorned Moscow as part of Asia, and the tsars themselves thought it a benighted place that endangered both their political security and their effort to Westernize their country and gain respect for Russia abroad. Beginning with Catherine the Great, they sought to remake Moscow on the model of St. Petersburg by reconstructing its buildings and institutions, fostering a Westernized "middle estate" and constructing a new image of Moscow as an enlightened metropolis. Drawing on the methodologies of urban, social, institutional, cultural, and intellectual history, Enlightened Metropolis asks: How was the city's urban environment - buildings, institutions, streets, smells - transformed in the nine decades from Catherine's accession to the death of Nicholas I? How did these changes affect the everyday lives of the inhabitants, and did a "middle estate" in fact come into being? Did Moscow's urban modernization resemble that of Western cities, and how was it affected by the disastrous occupation by Napoleon in 1812? Lastly, how was Moscow's modernization interpreted by writers, artists, and social commentators in Russia and the West from the Enlightenment to the mid-nineteenth century?

How did Bright Flue-Cured Tobacco come to dominate the industry? In her sweeping history of the American tobacco industry, Barbara Hahn traces the emergence of the tobacco plant's many varietal types, arguing that they are products not of nature but of economic relations and continued and intense market regulation. Hahn focuses her study on the most popular of these varieties, Bright Flue-Cured Tobacco. First grown in the inland Piedmont along the Virginia-North Carolina border, Bright Tobacco now grows all over the world, primarily because of its unique-and easily replicated-cultivation and curing methods. Hahn traces the evolution of technologies in a variety of regulatory and cultural environments to reconstruct how Bright Tobacco became, and remains to this day, a leading commodity in the global tobacco industry. This study asks not what effect tobacco had on the world market, but how that market shaped tobacco into types that served specific purposes and became distinguishable from one another more by technologies of production than genetics. In so doing, it explores the intersection of crossbreeding, tobacco-raising technology, changing popular demand, attempts at regulation, and sheer marketing ingenuity during the heyday of the American tobacco industry. Combining economic theory with the history of technology, Making Tobacco Bright revises several narratives in American history, from colonial staple-crop agriculture to the origins of the tobacco industry to the rise of identity politics in the twentieth century.

Since the end of the eighteenth century, the insurance industry has cast a safety net around the world, first in the British Isles and then further afield, irrespective of cultural, political and ideological divides. Unlike previous publications on insurance history, which tend to discuss the development of national markets or individual companies, this book focuses on the creation of networks across borders from the end of the eighteenth century to the present day.
Distinguished international economic historians draw upon examples from twenty countries across the continents to demonstrate how what was called the 'British system' of risk management spread out in waves, and describes the forces that made this possible--first among them migration from Europe and international trade. The book explores the economic, political, religious, and cultural obstacles that blocked the path of this European invention--not only religious law and traditional practices, but above all protectionism, inflation, and political ideologies. It examines the process of transformation through which modern insurance supplanted traditional forms of protection against perils and risks and was able to keep on offering new ways of dealing with the risks of modern life. As well as discussing primary insurance, it also considers the role played by reinsurance, without which the losses arising out of today's natural and man-made disasters would be immeasurably greater. Finally, taking modern-day disaster scenarios as examples, the book shows just what the limits of insurability are and what risks worldwide networks entail.

An exploration of the social and environmental consequences of oil extraction in the tropical rainforest. Using northern Veracruz as a case study, the author argues that oil production generated major historical and environmental transformations in land tenure systems and uses, and social organisation. Such changes, furthermore, entailed effects, including the marginalisation of indigenes, environmental destruction, and tense labour relations. In the context of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), however, the results of oil development did not go unchallenged. Mexican oil workers responded to their experience by forging a politicised culture and a radical left militancy that turned 'oil country' into one of the most significant sites of class conflict in revolutionary Mexico. Ultimately, the book argues, Mexican oil workers deserve their share of credit for the 1938 decree nationalising the foreign oil industry - heretofore reserved for President Lazaro Cardenas - and thus changing the course of Mexican history.

Puerto Rico, Hawai'i, and California share the experiences of conquest and annexation to the United States in the nineteenth century and mass organizational struggles by rural workers in the twentieth. Organized Agriculture and the Labor Movement before the UFW offers a comparative examination of those struggles, which were the era's longest and most protracted campaigns by agricultural workers, supported by organized labour, to establish a collective presence and realize the fruits of democracy. Dionicio Nodin Valdes examines critical links between the earlier conquests and the later organizing campaigns while he corrects a number of popular misconceptions about agriculture, farm-workers, and organized labour. He shows that agricultural workers have engaged in continuous efforts to gain a place in the institutional life of the nation, that unions succeeded before the United Farm Workers and Cesar Chavez, and that the labour movement played a major role in those efforts. He also offers a window into understanding crucial limitations of institutional democracy in the United States, and demonstrates that the widespread lack of participation in the nation's institutions by agricultural workers has not been due to a lack of volition, but rather to employers' continuous efforts to prevent worker empowerment. Organized Agriculture and the Labor Movement before the UFW demonstrates how employers benefitted not only from power and wealth, but also from imperialism in both its domestic and international manifestations. It also demonstrates how workers at times successfully overcame growers' advantages, although they were ultimately unable to sustain movements and gain a permanent institutional presence in Puerto Rico and California.