From the late 1940s to the early 1970s, farmers in the Corn Belt transformed their region into a new, industrial powerhouse of large-scale production, mechanization, specialization, and efficiency. Many farm experts and implement manufacturers had urged farmers in this direction for decades, but it was the persistent labor shortage and cost-price squeeze following WWII that prompted farmers to pave the way to industrializing agriculture. Anderson examines the changes in Iowa, a representative state of the Corn Belt, in order to explore why farmers adopted particular technologies and how, over time, they integrated new tools and techniques. In addition to the impressive field machinery, grain storage facilities, and automated feeding systems were the less visible, but no less potent, chemical technologies-antibiotics and growth hormones administered to livestock, as well as insecticide, herbicide, and fertilizer applied to crops. Much of this new technology created unintended consequences: pesticides encouraged the proliferation of resistant strains of plants and insects while also polluting the environment and threatening wildlife, and the use of feed additives triggered concern about the health effects to consumers. In Industrializing the Corn Belt, J. L. Anderson explains that the cost of equipment and chemicals made unprecedented demands on farm capital, and in order to maximize production, farmers planted more acres with fewer but more profitable crops or specialized in raising large herds of a single livestock species. The industrialization of agriculture gave rural Americans a lifestyle resembling that of their urban and suburban counterparts. Yet the rural population continued to dwindle as farms required less human labor, and many small farmers, unable or unwilling to compete, chose to sell out. Based on farm records, cooperative extension reports, USDA publications, oral interviews, trade literature, and agricultural periodicals, Industrializing the Corn Belt offers a fresh look at an important period of revolutionary change in agriculture through the eyes of those who grew the crops, raised the livestock, implemented new technology, and ultimately made the decisions that transformed the nature of the family farm and the Midwestern landscape.

This is the second volume on the history of the Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU), covering the period 1932 to 1945. In 1931, when the economic slump created mass unemployment, the TGWU was a large rambling union. The union lost members, struggled to hold its activists together, and split politically between communists and their allies and the right-wing labour leadership of Bevin. This spilled over to the struggle of the unemployed, the role of the state, and attitudes to the growth of fascism at home and abroad. By the late 1930s, an armament-inspired boom allowed the TGWU to negotiate industry-wide formal agreements in many of its strongholds - docks, passenger and commercial road transport, and general labourers. These deals favoured the weak but held back the strong such as the London bus workers who staged strikes based on rank-and-file organisation. These were matched by local strikes against a range of speed-up initiatives. The TGWU backed rearmament and the war when it came. The leadership put aside its anti-communism for the duration, and communist-inspired shop stewards played major roles in improving war-time productivity. The union grew and large numbers of women joined, forming their own groups and playing an increasing role in union affairs. At the same time the TGWU hesitantly supported liberation in the colonies. As the war came to an end, the union supported the welfare reforms of the Beveridge report and backed the election of a Labour Government.

A whole succession of printing presses, machine tools, motorboats, aircraft, railway engines, trucks and automobiles have been powered by an engine from the factories of D Napier and son. From racing cars to weighing machines for the Bank of England, from world-class Deltic locomotives to the Napier Lion racing aircraft engine, the most powerful of the world's machines have been Napier powered. This volume tells the history of D Napier and Son from the company's beginnings in Lambeth to the works in Acton, NW London. Other works were later located in Luton and Liverpool too. At its peak 20,000 people worked for the Napier company, which now produces from the Napier Turbocharger Works at Lincoln.

In this innovative grassroots to global study, Kathleen Mapes explores how the sugar beet industry transformed the rural Midwest through the introduction of large factories, contract farming, and foreign migrant labor. Sweet Tyranny calls into question the traditional portrait of the rural Midwest as a classless and homogenous place untouched by industrialization and imperialism. Identifying rural areas as centers for modern American industrialism, Mapes contributes to the ongoing expansion of labor history from urban factory workers to rural migrant workers. She engages with a full range of people involved in this industry, including midwestern family farmers, industrialists, eastern European and Mexican immigrants, child laborers, rural reformers, Washington politicos, and colonial interests. Engagingly written, this book demonstrates that capitalism was not solely a force from above but was influenced by the people below who defended their interests in an ever-expanding market of imperialist capitalism. The fact that the United States acquired its own sugar producing empire at the very moment that its domestic sugar beet industry was coming into its own, as well as the fact that the domestic sugar beet industry came to depend on immigrant workers as the basis of its field labor force, magnified the local and global ties as well as the political battles that ensued. As such, the issue of how Americans would satiate their growing demand for sweetness--whether with beet sugar grown at home or with cane sugar raised in colonies abroad--became part of a much larger debate about the path of industrial agriculture, the shape of American imperialism, and the future of immigration.

Newspapers do more than provide information. They enter into the process of forming communities, from voluntary associations to cities to nation-states.

Widely acknowledged as one of our most insightful commentators on the history of American journalism, David Paul Nord offers a lively and wide-ranging discussion of journalism as a vital component of community. In settings ranging from the religion-infused towns of colonial America to the rapidly expanding urban metropolises of the late nineteenth century, Nord explores the cultural work of the press.

Nord perceives the daily press as an arena in which a broad cross-section of the populace -- ethnically diverse, geographically diffuse, and economically stratified -- could participate in a common culture. During times of crisis, such as the yellow fever epidemic that gripped Philadelphia in 1793, newspapers sustained the bonds of community life. Amassing concrete historical evidence, Nord also examines how ordinary readers make sense of what they read and how they use journalism to form community attachments and engage in civic life.

Illuminating how newspapers have intersected with religion, politics, reform, and urban life over nearly three centuries, Communities of Journalism is a deeply satisfying contribution to the cultural history of American journalism and to the history of reading.

Originally published in 1969. In describing the emergence of oligopoly, Professor Eichner has written a history of the American sugar refining industry, one based in part on records of the United States Department of Justice. Sugar refining was one of the first major industries to be consolidated, and its expertise was in many ways typical of the development of other industries. Eichner's focus is on the changing pattern of industrial organization. This study is based on a unique four-stage model of the process by which the industrial structure of the American economy has evolved. The first part of the book traces the early history of the sugar refining industry and argues that the classical model of a competitive industry is inherently unstable once large fixed investments are required. The more closely sugar refining approximated this model, the more unstable the model became in practice. This instability led, in 1887, to the formation of the sugar trust. The author contends that the trust was formed not to exploit economies of scale but with the intent of achieving control over prices. In the second part of the book, Eichner describes the political and legal reaction that transformed monopoly into oligopoly. This sequence of events is best understood in terms of a learning curve in which the response of businessmen over time was related to the changing institutional environment in which they were forced to operate.

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.

Richard Mendelson brings together his expertise as both a Napa Valley lawyer and a winemaker into this accessible overview of American wine law from colonial times to the present. It is a story of fits and starts that provides a fascinating chronicle of the history of wine in the United States told through the lens of the law. From the country's early support for wine as a beverage to the moral and religious fervor that resulted in Prohibition and to the governmental controls that followed Repeal, Mendelson takes us to the present day - and to the emergence of an authentic and significant wine culture. He explains how current laws shape the wine industry in such areas as pricing and taxation, licensing, appellations, health claims and warnings, labeling, and domestic and international commerce. As he explores these and other legal and policy issues, Mendelson lucidly highlights the concerns that have made wine alternatively the demon or the darling of American society - and at the same time illuminates the ways in which lives and livelihoods are affected by the rise and fall of social movements.

The Press and the People is the first full-length study of cheap print in early modern Scotland. It traces the production and distribution of ephemeral publications from the nation's first presses in the early sixteenth century through to the age of Burns in the late eighteenth. It explores the development of the Scottish book trade in general and the production of slight and popular texts in particular. Focusing on the means by which these works reached a wide audience, it illuminates the nature of their circulation in both urban and rural contexts. Specific chapters examine single-sheet imprints such as ballads and gallows speeches, newssheets and advertisements, as well as the little pamphlets that contained almanacs and devotional works, stories and songs. The book demonstrates just how much more of this literature was once printed than now survives and argues that Scotland had a much larger market for such material than has been appreciated. By illustrating the ways in which Scottish printers combined well-known titles from England with a distinctive repertoire of their own, The Press and the People transforms our understanding of popular literature in early modern Scotland and its contribution to British culture more widely.

The fascinating, often surprising story of how a simple black rock altered the course of history, perfect for fans of Mark Kurlansky's Salt and Jeremy Paxman's Black Gold. 'A passionate plea for a more considered way of treating the earth, its resources and its inhabitants' DAILY TELEGRAPH ____________________________________________________________ Coal has transformed societies, fueled economies, and expanded frontiers. It made China a twelfth-century superpower, inspired the writing of the Communist Manifesto, and helped the northern states win the American Civil War. Yet the mundane mineral that built our global economy has also caused death, disease, and environmental destruction. In this remarkable book, Barbara Freese takes us on a rich historical journey that begins three hundred million years ago and spans the globe. From the 'Great Stinking Fogs' of London to the rat-infested coal mines of Pennsylvania, from the impoverished slums of Manchester to the toxic city streets of Beijing, Coal is a captivating narrative about the simple black rock that helped build our modern world, but now endangers our future. ____________________________________________________________ 'Elegant and engaging . . . No subject is more important for understanding the recent past, and preparing for the future.' SUNDAY TIMES 'The incredible story of Britain's black goal.' DAILY MAIL 'Eloquent . . . unsparing . . . The relation between carbon and climate change has seldom been so clearly and readably explained.' SCOTSMAN 'As much about the growing scientific evidence of the damage coal causes to the environment as it is about the social history of the Industrial Revolution.' FINANCIAL TIMES 'Freese wants readers to be clear about just how vital coal has been to our era of human development because she hopes to persuade us that it's time to enter a new one.' NEW YORK TIMES 'An absorbing book that never loses its grip.' NEW SCIENTIST 'Fascinating . . . It lingers hauntingly in the mind.' NEW STATESMAN 'As this human history of coal makes clear, there are no easy answers. . . A welcome contribution to the search for a sustainable energy economy.' NATURAL HISTORY

In Newspaper City, Phillip Gordon Mackintosh scrutinizes the reluctance of early Torontonians to pave their streets. He demonstrates how Toronto's two liberal newspapers, the Toronto Globe and Toronto Daily Star, nevertheless campaigned for surface infrastructure as the leading expression of modern urbanity, despite the broad resistance of property owners to pay for infrastructure improvements under local improvements by-laws. To boost paving, newspapers used their broadsheets to fashion two imagined cities for their readers: one overrun with animals, dirt, and marginal people, the other civilized, modern, and crowned with clean streets. However, the employment of capitalism to generate traditional public goods, such as concrete sidewalks, asphalt roads, regulated pedestrianism, and efficient automobilism, is complicated. Thus, the liberal newspapers' promotion of a city of orderly infrastructure and contented people in actual Toronto proved strikingly illiberal. Consequently, Mackintosh's study reveals the contradictory nature of newspapers and the historiographical complexities of newspaper research.

The Ottoman Empire went through rapid economic and social development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as it approached its end. Profound changes took place in its European territories, particularly and prominently in Macedonia. In the decades before the First World War, industrial capitalism began to emerge in Ottoman Macedonia and its impact was felt across society. The port city of Salonica was at the epicentre of this transformation, led by its Jewish community. But the most remarkable site of development was found deep in provincial Macedonia, where industrial capitalism sprang from domestic sources in spite of unfavourable conditions. Ottoman Greek traders and industrialists from the region of Mount Vermion helped shape the economic trajectory of 'Turkey in Europe', and competed successfully against Jewish capitalists from Salonica. The story of Ottoman Macedonian capitalism was nearly forgotten in the century that followed the demise of the Empire. This book pieces it together by unearthing Ottoman archival materials combined with Greek sources and field research. It offers a fresh perspective on late Ottoman economic history and will be an invaluable resource for scholars of Ottoman, Greek and Turkish history. Published in Association with the British Institute at Ankara

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Ever since the Industrial Revolution of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, industrialization has been the key to modern economic growth. The fact that modern industry originated in Britain, and spread initially to north-western Europe and North America, implied a dramatic divergence in living standards between the industrial North (or 'West') and a non-industrial, or even de-industrializing, South (or 'Rest'). This nineteenth-century divergence, which had profound economic, military, and geopolitical implications, has been studied in great detail by many economists and historians. Today, this divergence between the 'West' and the 'Rest' is visibly unravelling, as economies in Asia, Latin America and even sub-Saharan Africa converge on the rich economies of Europe and North America. This phenomenon, which is set to define the twenty-first century, both economically and politically, has also been the subject of a considerable amount of research. Less appreciated, however, are the deep historical roots of this convergence process, and in particular of the spread of modern industry to the global periphery. This volume fills this gap by providing a systematic, comparative, historical account of the spread of modern manufacturing beyond its traditional heartland, to Southern and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America, or what we call the poor periphery. It identifies the timing of this convergence, finding that this was fastest in the interwar and post-World War II years, not the more recent 'miracle growth' years. It also identifies which driving forces were common to all periphery countries, and which were not.

On Memorial Day 1937, thousands of steelworkers, middle-class supporters, and working-class activists gathered at Sam's Place on the Southeast Side of Chicago to protest Republic Steel's virulent opposition to union recognition and collective bargaining. By the end of the day, ten marchers had been mortally wounded and more than one hundred badly injured, victims of a terrifying police riot. Sam's Place, the headquarters for the steelworkers, was transformed into a bloody and frantic triage unit for treating heads split open by police batons, flesh torn by bullets, and limbs mangled badly enough to require amputation.

While no one doubts the importance of the Memorial Day Massacre, Michael Dennis identifies it as a focal point in the larger effort to revitalize American equality during the New Deal. In "Blood on Steel," Dennis shows how the incident--captured on film by Paramount newsreels--validated the claims of labor activists and catalyzed public opinion in their favor.

In the aftermath of the massacre, Senate hearings laid bare patterns of anti-union aggression among management, ranging from blacklists to harassment and vigilante violence. Companies were determined to subvert the right to form a union, which Congress had finally recognized in 1935. Only in the following year would Congress pass the Fair Labor Standards Act, which established a minimum wage and a maximum work week, outlawed child labor, and regulated hazardous work. Like the Wagner Act that protected collective bargaining, this law aimed to protect workers who had suffered the worst of what the Great Depression had inflicted.

Dennis's wide-angle perspective reveals the Memorial Day Massacre as not simply another bloody incident in the long story of labor-management tension in American history but as an illustration of the broad-based movement for social democracy which developed in the New Deal era.

With England's Great Transformation, Marc W. Steinberg throws a wrench into our understanding of the English Industrial Revolution, largely revising the thesis at heart of Karl Polanyi's landmark The Great Transformation. The conventional wisdom has been that in the nineteenth century, England quickly moved toward a modern labor market where workers were free to shift from employer to employer in response to market signals. Expanding on recent historical research, Steinberg finds to the contrary that labor contracts, centered on insidious master-servant laws, allowed employers and legal institutions to work in tandem to keep employees in line. Building his argument on three case studies--the Hanley pottery industry, Hull fisheries, and Redditch needlemakers--Steinberg employs both local and national analyses to emphasize the ways in which these master-servant laws allowed employers to use the criminal prosecutions of workers to maintain control of their labor force. Steinberg provides a fresh perspective on the dynamics of labor control and class power, integrating the complex pathways of Marxism, historical institutionalism, and feminism, and giving readers a subtle yet revelatory new understanding of workplace control and power during England's Industrial Revolution.

The oil industry in the United States has been the subject of innumerable histories. But books on the development of the natural gas industry and the electricity industry in the U.S. are scarce. "Edison to Enron" is a readable flowing history of two of America's largest and most colorful industries.

It begins with the story of Samuel Insull, a poor boy from England, who started his career as Thomas Edison's right-hand man, then went on his own and became one of America's top industrialists. But when Insull's General Electric's energy empire collapsed during the Great Depression, the hitherto Great Man was denounced and prosecuted and died a pauper. Against that backdrop, the book introduces Ken Lay, a poor boy from Missouri who began his career as an aide to the head of Humble oil, now part of Exxon Mobil. Lay went on to become a Washington bureaucrat and energy regulator and then became the "wunderkind" of the natural gas industry in the 1980s with Enron.

To connect the lives of these two energy giants, "Edison to Enron" takes the reader through the flamboyant history of the American energy industry, from Texas wildcatters to the great pipeline builders to the Washington wheeler-dealers.

From the Reviews...

"This scholarly work fills in much missing history about two of America's most important industries, electricity and natural gas."
--Joseph A. Pratt, NEH-Cullen Professor of History and Business, University of Houston

..". a remarkable book on the political inner workings of the U.S. energy industry."
--Robert Peltier, PE, Editor-in-Chief, "POWER Magazine"

"This is a powerful story, brilliantly told."
--Forrest McDonald, Historian

Founded in 1957, the Southern California suburb prophetically named City of Industry today represents, in the words of Victor Valle, ""The gritty crossroads of the global trade revolution that is transforming Southern California factories into warehouses, and adjacent working class communities into economic and environmental sacrifice zones choking on cheap goods and carcinogenic diesel exhaust."""City of Industry" is a stunning expose on the construction of corporate capitalist spaces.

Valle investigated an untapped archive of Industry's built landscape, media coverage, and public records, including sealed FBI reports, to uncover a cascading series of scandals. A kaleidoscopic view of the corruption that resulted when local land owners, media barons, and railroads converged to build the city, this suspenseful narrative explores how new governmental technologies and engineering feats propelled the rationality of privatization using their property-owning servants as tools.

Valle's tale of corporate greed begins with the city's founder James M. Stafford and ends with present day corporate heir, Edward Roski Jr., the nation's biggest industrial developeruco-owner of the L.A. Staples Arena and possible future owner of California's next NFL franchise. Not to be forgotten in Valle's captivating story are Latino working class communities living within Los Angeles's distribution corridors, who suffer wealth disparities and exposure to air pollution as a result of diesel-burning trucks, trains, and container ships that bring global trade to their very doorsteps. They are among the many victims of City of Industry.

On the banks of the Pacific Northwest's greatest river lies the Hanford nuclear reservation, an industrial site that appears to be at odds with the surrounding vineyards and desert. The 586-square mile compound on the Columbia in eastern Washington is known both for its origins as part of the Manhattan Project, which made the first atomic bombs, and for the monumental effort now under way to clean up forty-five years' of waste from manufacturing plutonium for the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. Hanford routinely makes the news, as scientists, litigants, administrators, and politicians argue over its past and its future.

It is easy to think about Hanford as an expression of federal power, a place apart from humanity and nature, but that view is a distortion of its history. "Atomic Frontier Days" looks through a wider lens, telling a complex story of production, community-building, politics, and environmental sensibilities. In brilliantly structured parallel stories, the authors bridge the divisions that accompany Hanford's headlines and offer perspective on today's controversies. Influenced as much by regional culture, economics, and politics as by war, diplomacy, and environmentalism, the story of Hanford and the Tri-Cities of Richland, Pasco, and Kennewick illuminates the history of the modern American West.

John M. Findlay is professor of history at the University of Washington. His focus is social and urban history. Bruce Hevly is associate professor of history at the University of Washington. His focus is history of science and technology.

""Atomic Frontier Days" captures one of the most interesting and controversial places in the American West in all its surprising particularity. Technologically sophisticated, shrewd, at once analytically unflinching and generous, it belongs on the short list of books necessary to understand the West and its complicated relation to the nation." -Richard White, author of "The Organic Machine"

"This richly detailed study takes us beyond big government programs and corporate contracts to show people coping with the intricate dance of science and technology, warfare and welfare, the mess of making bombs and the business of cleaning up." -Virginia Scharff, Center for the Southwest, University of New Mexico

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.

The contributors to this collection of seven essays (plus an editor's introduction and a comparative afterword) have framed debates about the construction of commercial culture in China. They all have agreed that during the early twentieth century China's commercial culture was centered in the private sector of Shanghai's economy and especially in the "concession" areas under Western or Japanese rule, but they have differed over the issue of whether foreign influence was decisive in the creation of Shanghai's commercial culture. Between 1900 and 1937, was Shanghai's commercial culture imported from the West or invented locally? And between 1937 and 1945, was the history of this commercial culture cut short by Japanese military invasions and occupations of the city or was it sustained throughout the war? The contributors have proposed various and even conflicting answers to these questions, and their interpretations bear upon wider debates in historical, cultural, and comparative studies.

Since the Middle Ages Europe has been one of the most urbanized continents on the planet and Europe's cities have firmly stamped their imprint on the continent's economic, social, political, and cultural life.
This study of European cities and towns from the fall of the Roman Empire to the present day looks both at regional trends from across Europe and also at the widely differing fortunes of individual communities on the roller coaster of European urbanization. Taking a wide-angled view of the continent that embraces northern and eastern Europe as well as the city systems of the Mediterranean and western Europe, it addresses important debates ranging from the nature of urban survival in the post-Roman era to the position of the European city in a globalizing world.
The book is divided into three parts, dealing with the middle ages, the early modern period, and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries - with each part containing chapters on urban trends, the urban economy, social developments, cultural life and landscape, and governance. Throughout, the book addresses key questions such as the role of migration, including that of women and ethnic minorities; the functioning of competition and emulation between cities, as well as issues of inter-urban cooperation; the different ways civic leaders have sought to promote urban identity and visibility; the significance of urban autonomy in enabling cities to protect their interests against the state; and not least why European cities and towns over the period have been such pressure cookers for new ideas and creativity, whether economic, political, or cultural.

London's Industrial Past gives the reader an opportunity to read about a selection of factories that were once scattered across the city. While older generations may look back at the names that have gone with great affection, for the younger reader it may come as a surprise that so many 'things' were once manufactured in Britain's capital city. The sheer wealth and breadth of products that were made is staggering, from the mundanity of biscuits to the hightech of aircraft production. This volume sheds light on those lost names, many of which are still with us, but no longer made in London, or indeed in the UK. Areas of manufacture covered include brewing, toys, aircraft, cars, sweets, biscuits, electrical goods and art and photographic supplies. Brands mentioned include Truman's, Lesney, Handley Page, Bentley, Trebor, Peek Freans, Lyons, Hoover, Kodak and Beechams. Packed with archive images and illustrations, this volume will be a great addition to the library of anybody with an interest in London's history.

Ordinary working people, convinced their life could be better than it was, demanded not only a fair share in Mexico's progress but also to be respected for their contribution to that progress. Anderson integrates the story of these workers into the broader social experience of the Mexican Republic as it underwent the transition from a rural-agrarian society to an urban-industrial complex. This study demonstrates how the workers resisted the radical ideology of foreign revolutionary dogmas and based their demands on indigenous sociopolitical traditions.

Deindustrialization is not simply an economic process, but a social and cultural one as well. The rusting detritus of our industrial past the wrecked hulks of factories, abandoned machinery too large to remove, and now-useless infrastructures has for decades been a part of the North American landscape. In recent years, however, these modern ruins have become cultural attractions, drawing increasing numbers of adventurers, artists, and those curious about a forgotten heritage.

Through a unique blend of oral history, photographs, and interpretive essays, Corporate Wasteland investigates this fascinating terrain and the phenomenon of its loss and rediscovery. Steven High and David W. Lewis begin by exploring an emerging aesthetic they term the deindustrial sublime, explaining how the ritualized demolition of landmark industrial structures served as dramatic punctuations between changing eras. They then follow the narrative path blazed by urban spelunkers, explorers who infiltrate former industrial sites and then share accounts and images of their exploits in a vibrant online community. And to understand the ways in which geographic and emotional proximity affects how deindustrialization is remembered and represented, High and Lewis focus on Youngstown, Ohio, where residents and former steelworkers still live amid the reminders of more prosperous times.

Corporate Wasteland concludes with photo essays of sites in Michigan, Ontario, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania that pair haunting images with the poignant testimonies of those who remember industrial sites as workplaces rather than monuments. Forcing readers to look beyond nostalgia, High and Lewis reinterpret our deindustrialized landscape as a historical and imaginative challenge to the ways in which we comprehend and respond to the profound disruptions wrought by globalization."

A commercial company established in 1600 to monopolize trade between England and the Far East, the East India Company grew to govern an Indian empire. Exploring the relationship between power and knowledge in European engagement with Asia, "Indian Ink "examines the Company at work and reveals how writing and print shaped authority on a global scale in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Tracing the history of the Company from its first tentative trading voyages in the early seventeenth century to the foundation of an empire in Bengal in the late eighteenth century, Miles Ogborn takes readers into the scriptoria, ships, offices, print shops, coffeehouses, and palaces to investigate the forms of writing needed to exert power and extract profit in the mercantile and imperial worlds. Interpreting the making and use of a variety of forms of writing in script and print, Ogborn argues that material and political circumstances always undermined attempts at domination through the power of the written word.
Navigating the juncture of imperial history and the history of the book, "Indian Ink "uncovers the intellectual and political legacies of early modern trade and empire and charts a new understanding of the geography of print culture.