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 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.

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.

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.

Today technology has created a world of dazzling progress, growing disparities of wealth and poverty, and looming threats to the environment. Technology: A World History offers an illuminating backdrop to our present moment--a brilliant history of invention around the globe. Historian Daniel R. Headrick ranges from the Stone Age and the beginnings of agriculture to the Industrial Revolution and the electronic revolution of the recent past. In tracing the growing power of humans over nature through increasingly powerful innovations, he compares the evolution of technology in different parts of the world, providing a much broader account than is found in other histories of technology. We also discover how small changes sometimes have dramatic results--how, for instance, the stirrup revolutionized war and gave the Mongols a deadly advantage over the Chinese. And how the nailed horseshoe was a pivotal breakthrough for western farmers. Enlivened with many illustrations, Technology offers a fascinating look at the spread of inventions around the world, both as boons for humanity and as weapons of destruction.

The 1820s to the 1860s were a foundational period in Australian history, arguably at least as important as Federation. Industrialization was transforming Britain, but the southern colonies were pre-industrial, with economies driven by pastoralism, agriculture, mining, whaling and sealing, commerce, and the construction trades. Convict transportation provided the labour on which the first settlements depended before it was brought to a staggered end, first in New South Wales in 1840 and last in Western Australia in 1868. The numbers of free settlers rose dramatically, surging from the 1820s and again during the 1850s gold rushes. The convict system increasingly included assignment to private masters and mistresses, thus offering settlers the inducement of unpaid labourers as well as the availability of land on a scale that both defied and excited the British imagination. By the 1830s schemes for new kinds of colonies, based on Edward Gibbon Wakefield's systematic colonization, gained attention and support. The pivotal development of the 1840s-1850s, and the political events which form the backbone of this story were the Australian colonies' gradual attainment of representative and then responsible government. Through political struggle and negotiation, in which Australians looked to Canada for their model of political progress, settlers slowly became self-governing. But these political developments were linked to the frontier violence that shaped settlers' lives and became accepted as part of respectable manhood. With narratives of individual lives, Settler Society shows that women's exclusion from political citizenship was vigorously debated, and that settlers were well aware of their place in an empire based on racial hierarchies and threatened by revolts. Angela Woollacott particularly focuses on settlers' dependence in these decades on intertwined categories of unfree labour, including poorly-compensated Aborigines and indentured Indian and Chinese labourers, alongside convicts.

Explore Britain's remaining historic lines with railway expert Julian Holland. The essential guide to exploring Britain's last remaining historic lines, Britain's Heritage Railways is ideal for anyone planning or looking for a nostalgic railway trip. From bestselling railway author Julian Holland. More than 100 locations, the majority steam operated, featured all over Britain. Highly illustrated with maps and old and new photographs. Historic lines include; * Bodmin & Wenford Railway - two rural branch lines with a rich industrial history tucked away in Cornwall * West Somerset Railway - the longest heritage railway in England with views of the Quantock Hills and the sea * Bluebell Railway - a Victorian steam railway deep in rural Mid Sussex * North Norfolk Railway - a delightful journey through heathland with views of the sea * Dean Forest Railway - with a rich industrial history this heritage railway takes passengers into the ancient Forest of Dean * Ffestiniog Railway - a steam operated Victorian narrow gauge slate railway clinging to steep hillsides * Wensleydale Railway - a long heritage railway in the unspoilt Yorkshire Dales * Speyside Railway - a Highland line with views of the Cairngorm Mountains

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 is the first full-length history of the Scottish cotton industry, from its beginnings in the late eighteenth century to its premature decline in the years leading up to the First World War. The book examines the industry chronologically and through themes such as precursors, technology, capital and employers, markets, labour and work, placed within their broader economic and scoial contexts. Its account of the cotton industry is set within important historiographical debates such as proto-industrialisation, the speed of industrial change, the diffusion of technology, the labour process, paternalism, workplace control, entrepreneurship and theories of industrial decline. Cotton was Scotland's premier industry during the Industrial Revolution and this book will be wlecomed by specialists, students and interested readers alike. -- .

A clear and accessibly written guide to the medieval cloth-making trade in England. Cloth-making became England's leading industry in the late Middle Ages; clothiers co-ordinated its different stages, in some cases carrying out the processes themselves, and found markets for their finished cloth, selling to merchants, drapers and other traders. While many clothiers were of only modest status or "jacks of all trades", a handful of individuals amassed huge fortunes through the trade, becoming the multi-millionaires of their day. This book offers the first recent survey of this hugely important and significant trade and its practitioners, examining the whole range of clothiers across different areas of England, and exploring their impact within the industry andin their wider communities. Alongside the mechanics of the trade, it considers clothiers as entrepreneurs and early capitalists, employing workers and even establishing early factories; it also looks at their family backgrounds and their roles as patrons of church rebuilding and charitable activities. It is completed with extracts from clothiers' wills and a gazetteer of places to visit, making the book invaluable to academics, students, and local historians alike. JOHN S. LEE is a Research Associate at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York.

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.

In the middle of the nineteenth century, middle-class Americans embraced a new culture of domestic consumption, one that centered on chairs and clocks as well as family portraits and books. How did that new world of goods, represented by Victorian parlors filled with overstuffed furniture and daguerreotype portraits, come into being? "A New Nation of Goods" highlights the significant role of provincial artisans in four crafts in the northeastern United States--chairmaking, clockmaking, portrait painting, and book publishing--to explain the shift from preindustrial society to an entirely new configuration of work, commodities, and culture. As a whole, the book proposes an innovative analysis of early nineteenth-century industrialization and the development of a middle-class consumer culture. It relies on many of the objects beloved by decorative arts scholars and collectors to evoke the vitality of village craft production and culture in the decades after the War of Independence."A New Nation of Goods" grounds its broad narrative of cultural change in case studies of artisans, consumers, and specific artifacts. Each chapter opens with an "object lesson" and weaves an object-based analysis together with the richness of individual lives. The path that such craftspeople and consumers took was not inevitable; on the contrary, as historian David Jaffee vividly demonstrates, it was strewn with alternative outcomes, such as decentralized production with specialized makers. The richly illustrated book offers a collective biography of the post-Revolutionary generation, gathering together the case studies of producers and consumers who embraced these changes, those who opposed them, or, most significantly, those who fashioned the myriad small changes that coalesced into a new Victorian cultural order that none of them had envisioned or entirely appreciated.

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.

Beginning with one of the crucial technological breakthroughs of Western history - the development of moveable type by Johann Gutenberg - The History of the Book in the West 1455-1700 covers the period that saw the growth and consolidation of the printed book as a significant feature of Western European culture and society. The volume collects together seventeen key articles, written by leading scholars during the past five decades, that together survey a wide range of topics, such as typography, economics, regulation, bookselling, and reading practices. Books, whether printed or in manuscript, played a major role in the religious, political, and intellectual upheavals of the period, and understanding how books were made, distributed, and encountered provides valuable new insights into the history of Western Europe in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries.

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.

Isobel Armstrong's startlingly original and beautifully illustrated book tells the stories that spring from the mass-production of glass in nineteenth-century England. Moving across technology, industry, local history, architecture, literature, print culture, the visual arts, optics, and philosophy, it will transform our understanding of the Victorian period.
The mass production of glass in the nineteenth century transformed an ancient material into a modern one, at the same time transforming the environment and the nineteenth-century imagination. It created a new glass culture hitherto inconceivable. Glass culture constituted Victorian modernity. It was made from infinite variations of the prefabricated glass panel, and the lens. The mirror and the window became its formative elements, both the texts and constituents of glass culture. The glassworlds of the century are heterogeneous. They manifest themselves in the technologies of the factory furnace, in the myths of Cinderella and her glass slipper circulated in print media, in the ideologies of the conservatory as building type, in the fantasia of the shopfront, in the production of chandeliers, in the Crystal Palace, and the lens-made images of the magic lantern and microscope. But they were nevertheless governed by two inescapable conditions.
First, to look through glass was to look through the residues of the breath of an unknown artisan, because glass was mass produced by incorporating glassblowing into the division of labour. Second, literally a new medium, glass brought the ambiguity of transparency and the problems of mediation into the everyday. It intervened between seer and seen, incorporating a modernphilosophical problem into bodily experience. Thus for poets and novelists glass took on material and ontological, political, and aesthetic meanings.
Reading glass forwards into Bauhaus modernism, Walter Benjamin overlooked an early phase of glass culture where the languages of glass are different. The book charts this phase in three parts. Factory archives, trade union records, and periodicals document the individual manufacturers and artisans who founded glass culture, the industrial tourists who described it, and the systematic politics of window-breaking. Part Two, culminating in glass under glass at the Crystal Palace, reads the glassing of the environment, including the mirror, the window, and controversy round the conservatory, and their inscription in poems and novels. Part Three explores the lens, from optical toys to 'philosophical' instruments as the telescope and microscope were known.
A meditation on its history and phenomenology, Victorian Glassworlds is a poetics of glass for nineteenth-century modernity.

In the late nineteenth century, Mexican citizens quickly adopted new technologies imported from abroad to sew cloth, manufacture glass bottles, refine minerals, and provide many goods and services. Rapid technological change supported economic growth and also brought cultural change and social dislocation. Drawing on three detailed case studies the sewing machine, a glass bottle blowing factory, and the cyanide process for gold and silver refining, Edward Beatty explores a central paradox of economic growth in nineteenth-century Mexico. While Mexicans made significant efforts to integrate new machines and products, difficulties in assimilating the skills required to use emerging technologies resulted in a persistent dependence on international expertise.

At the start of the Ford Motor Company in 1903, the Dodge Brothers supplied nearly every car part needed by the up-and-coming auto giant. After fifteen years of operating a successful automotive supplier company, much to Ford's advantage, John and Horace Dodge again changed the face of the automotive market in 1914 by introducing their own car. The Dodge Brothers automobile carried on their names even after their untimely deaths in 1920, with the company then remaining in the hands of their widows until its sale in 1925 to New York bankers and subsequent purchase in 1928 by Walter Chrysler. The Dodge nameplate has endured, but despite their achievements and their critical role in the early success of Henry Ford, John and Horace Dodge are usually overlooked in histories of the early automotive industry. Charles K. Hyde's book The Dodge Brothers: The Men, the Motor Cars, and the Legacy is the first scholarly study of the Dodge brothers and their company, chronicling their lives - from their childhood in Niles, Michigan, to their long years of learning the machinist's trade in Battle Creek, Port Huron, Detroit, and Windsor, Ontario - and examining their influence on automotive manufacturing and marketing trends in the early part of the twentieth century. Hyde details the brothers' civic contributions to Detroit, their hiring of minorities and women, and their often anonymous charitable contributions to local organizations. Hyde puts the Dodge brothers' lives and accomplishments in perspective by indicating their long-term influence, which has continued long after their deaths. The most complete and accurate resource on John and Horace Dodge available, The Dodge Brothers uses sources that have never before been examined. Its scholarly approach and personal tone make this book appealing for automotive historians as well as car enthusiasts and those interested in Detroit's early development.

The Kahans from Baku is the saga of a Russian Jewish family. Their story provides an insight into the history of Jews in the Imperial Russian economy, especially in the oil industry. The entrepreneur and family patriarch, Chaim Kahan, was a pious and enlightened man and a Zionist. His children followed in his footsteps in business as well as in politics, philanthropy, and love of books. The book takes us through their forced migration in times of war, revolution, and the twentieth century's totalitarian regimes, telling the story of fortune and misfortune of one cohesive family over four generations through Russia, Germany, Denmark, and France, and finally on to Palestine and the United States of America.

A facsimile edition of Bradshaw's wonderfully illustrated guide to Victorian London, dating from 1862. Bradshaw's guide to London was published in a single volume as a handbook for visitors to the capital. It includes beautiful engravings of London attractions, a historical overview of the city, advice for tourists and a series of 'walking tours' radiating outwards from the centre of London, covering the North, East, South and West, The City of London and a tour of the Thames (from Greenwich to Windsor). All major attractions and districts are covered in detailed pages full of picturesque description. This beautiful reformatted edition preserves the historical value of this meticulously detailed and comprehensive book, which will appeal to Bradshaw's enthusiasts, local historians, aficionados of Victoriana, tourists and Londoners alike - there really is something for everyone. It will enchant anyone with an interest in the capital and its rich 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.

In this magisterial study, Michael Smith explains how France left behind small-scale merchant capitalism for the large corporate enterprises that would eventually dominate its domestic economy and project French influence throughout the world.

Arguing against the long-standing view that French economic and business development was crippled by missed opportunities and entrepreneurial failures, Smith presents a story of considerable achievement. French companies made major contributions to the Second Industrial Revolution of 1880-1930, especially in ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy, electrochemicals, industrial gases, and motor vehicles. Rejecting the notion that France took a separate route to economic modernity, Smith argues that it tracked other industrial nations along a path dominated by large-scale production and corporate enterprise. Technological and organizational capabilities acquired by French companies prior to 1930 played a key role in the country's rapid economic recovery after World War II and its broader economic success in the second half of the twentieth century. Smith also addresses the distinctive characteristics of French economic and business development, including the pivotal role of the French state, the pervasive influence of French financiers, and the significance of labor conflict.

This superb account is an invaluable contribution to business history and the history of modern France.