In popular retellings of American history, capitalism generally doesn't feature much as part of the founding or development of the nation. Instead, it is alluded to in figurative terms as opportunity, entrepreneurial vigor, material abundance, and the seven-league boots of manifest destiny. ?In this collection of essays, Steve Fraser, the preeminent historian of American capitalism, sets the record straight, rewriting the arc of the American saga with class conflict center stage and mounting a serious challenge to the consoling fantasy of American exceptionalism. From the colonial era to Trump, Fraser recovers the repressed history of debtors' prisons and disaster capitalism, of confidence men and the reserve armies of the unemployed. In language that is dynamic and compelling, he demonstrates that class is a fundamental feature of American political life and provides essential intellectual tools for a shrew reading of American history.

Employing the first analysis of the entire population of any British town, this book examines how overseas migrants affected society and culture in South Shields near Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Resituating Britain within global processes of migration and cultural change, it recasts British society pre-1940 as culturally and racially dynamic and diverse.

The first book-length biography of John Thomas North (1842-1896), known as 'Colonel North' in Britain and throughout the world as 'The Nitrate King, ' this book utilizes sources in Britain and Chile and traces North's spectacular life from a mechanic in Leeds through his thirteen years in Peru and Chile culminating in his status as one of the richest and best-known men of his generation. North is today almost completely forgotten in Britain and remembered in Chile only to be vilified as the archetypal predatory capitalist. This book calls for a revaluation of North and examines several controversies--principally the enduring allegations that North manipulated the War of the Pacific and the Chilean Civil War of 1891. The book describes North's business activities; his re-invention as country gentleman at Avery Hill mansion; and his generosity, including the gift of Kirkstall Abbey to the city of Leeds.

In the days of the British Raj Calcutta was a great port city. Thousands of men, women, and children worked there, loading and unloading valuable cargoes that sustained the regional economy, and contributed significantly to world trade. In the second half of the nineteenth century, in response to a shift from sailing ships to steamers, port authorities in Calcutta began work on a massive modernization project. This book is the first study of port labor in colonial Calcutta and British India. Drawing on primary source material, including government documents and newspaper records, the author demonstrates how the modernization process worsened class conflict and highlights the important part played by labor in the shaping of the port's modernization. Class Conflict and Modernization in India places this history in a comparative context, highlighting the interconnected nature of port and port labor histories. It examines how the port's modernization affected the port workforce and the port's managers, as well as the impact on class formation that emerged as labourers resisted through acts of everyday resistance and organized strikes. A detailed study of state power, technological change, and class conflict, this book will be of interest to academics of modern Indian history, labour history and the history of science and technology.

This the first account of the emergence and demise of preventive health care for workers. It explores how trade unions, employers, doctors and the government reconfigured the relationship between health, productivity and the factory over the course of the twentieth century within a broader political, industrial and social context.

A History of Siena provides a concise and up-to-date biography of the city, from its ancient and medieval development up to the present day, and makes Siena's history, culture, and traditions accessible to anyone studying or visiting the city. Well informed by archival research and recent scholarship on medieval Siena and the Italian city-states, this book places Siena's development in its larger context, both temporally and geographically. In the process, this book offers new interpretations of Siena's artistic, political, and economic development, highlighting in particular the role of pilgrimage, banking, and class conflict. The second half of the book provides an important analysis of the historical development of Siena's nobility, its unique system of neighborhood associations (contrade) and the race of the Palio, as well as an overview of the rise and fall of Siena's troubled bank, the Monte dei Paschi. This book is accessible to undergraduates and tourists, while also offering plenty of new insights for graduate students and scholars of all periods of Sienese history.

The first electronic communication network transformed language, distance, and time. This book researches the telegraph system of the British Indian Empire, c.1850 to 1920, exploring one of the most significant transnational phenomena of the imperial world, and the link between communication, Empire, and social change.

In many ways this book tells a familiar story in British industry: of innovation and enterprise in the early decades ...of worldwide dominance at a time when Britain was the workshop of the world ...of wars and economic downturns ...of foreign competition ...and of relative and absolute decline on the path of de-industrialisation in the latter part of the twentieth century. For most of this period the farm machine industry grew and matured. It is an inspiring story of technological achievement and of industrial success, as farmers and engineers brought iron and steel to fields which had previously been the domain of locally made timber implements and power provided by horses.Agricultural technology moved on, inexorably, from broad-cast seed and the sound of the threshing flail, via the portable steam engine and the threshing machine, right through to the modern world of giant tractors - each with the power of 200 horses - combine harvesters and impressively efficient farming methods.This book traces the broad sweep of the whole industry over 200 years, looking at many individual companies and products to explain how and why the farm machinery industry developed in the way it did. Important individual machines are described and illustrated in detail. The British farm machine industry is unlikely ever again to be large by world standards, nor to dominate the world stage as once it did. Yet the author traces a rich vein of innovation, enterprise and technological inspiration, often taking place within the large number of relatively small-scale, craft-based workshops which were so prevalent in the early decades. Rather than mere manufacturing, therefore, perhaps it is this tradition of technical innovation and invention which marked out the British farm machinery industry for historical greatness, and perhaps it is this tradition which will continue to mark it out in the future.

Cycling advocates envisage a future in which bikes are a widespread daily form of transportation. While many global cities are seeing the number of bike commuters increase, this future is still far away; at times, urban cycling seems to be fighting for its very survival. Will we ever witness a true "bike boom" in cities? What can we learn from past successes and failures to make cycling safer, easier, and more accessible? Use of bicycles in Britain and America fell off a cliff in the 1950s and 1960s thanks to the rapid rise in car ownership. Urban planners and politicians predicted that cycling would wither to nothing, and they did their level best to bring about this extinction by catering to only motorists. But in the 1970s, something strange happened, cycling bounced back, first in America and then in Britain. In Bike Boom, journalist Carlton Reid uses history to shine a spotlight on the present and demonstrates how cycling has the potential to grow even further, if the right measures are put in place by the politicians and planners of today and tomorrow.He explores the benefits and challenges of cycling, the roles of infrastructure and advocacy, and what we can learn from cities that have successfully supported and encouraged bike booms, including London; Davis, California; Montreal; Stevenage; Amsterdam; New York; and Copenhagen. Given that today's global cycling "boom" has its roots in the early 1970s, Reid draws lessons from that period. At that time, the Dutch were investing in bike infrastructure and advocacy, the US and the UK had the choice to follow the Dutch example, but didn't. Reid sets out to discover what we can learn from the history of bike "booms" in this entertaining and thought-provoking book.

Civil defence was an integral part of Britain's modern history. Throughout the cold war it was a central response of the British Government to the threat of war. This book will be the first history of the preparations to fight a nuclear war taken in Britain between the end of the Second World War and 1968.

Colonialization has never failed to provoke discussion and debate over its territorial, economic and political projects, and their ongoing consequences. This work argues that the state-based activity of planning was integral to these projects in conceptualizing, shaping and managing place in settler societies. Planning was used to appropriate and then produce territory for management by the state and in doing so, became central to the colonial invasion of settler states. Moreover, the book demonstrates how the colonial roots of planning endure in complex (post)colonial societies and how such roots, manifest in everyday planning practice, continue to shape land use contests between indigenous people and planning systems in contemporary (post)colonial states.

Intelligent and Honest Radicals explores the Chicago labor movement's relationship to Illinois legal and political system especially as seen through the eyes of the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL). Newton-Matza focuses on the significant era between the great strike in 1919 and Franklin D. Roosevelt's inauguration and the beginning of the New Deal in 1933. He brings to light a number of victories and achievements for the labor movement in this period that are often overlooked. Newton-Matza shows the Chicago labor movement as a progressive agency intent on changing the workers' world through words and peaceful actions, drawing upon their personal experiences and ideology.

In 1789 Hannah Lightbody, a well-educated and intelligent young woman of means, married Samuel Greg and found herself at the centre of his cotton empire in the industrial heart of England. It was a man's world, in which women like Hannah were barred from politics, had few rights and were expected to be little more than good, dutiful wives. Struggling to apply herself to household management, Hannah instead turned her attention to the well-being of the cotton mill workers under her husband's control. Over the next four decades she fought to improve the education, health and welfare of cotton girls and pauper apprentices at the mill. Her legacy helped turn the north-west into the pioneering heart of reform in Britain. Here, the story of Hannah's remarkable life is told for the first time.

This book discusses the transformation of labour movements and trade unionism in post-liberalised India. It looks at emerging collectivism, both in formal and informal sectors, and relates it to changing political and industrial relations. Bringing together studies of resistance, struggles and new forms of negotiations from different industries -agriculture, fisheries, brick kiln, plantations, IT, domestic workers, shipbreakers, sex workers, and miners -this book exposes the myths, realities and challenges that the present generation of workers in India face and struggle with. With contributions from leading thinkers in the field, the work deepens the understanding of the current Indian labour spaces, possibilities for contestations and articulations from below. The volume will be useful to students and researchers of labour studies, economics, sociology, development studies and public policy. It will be an invaluable resource to those engaged with industrial relations, trade unions, human rights, social exclusion as well as labour organisations and research institutions.

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

This book links the world of finance directly to the fate of the cotton and textile industry, long a metaphor for the rise and fall of Britain as a manufacturing economy, for the first time. The cotton and textile industry, at the centre of the industrial revolution, has long been a metaphor for the rise and fall of Britain as a manufacturing economy. This book links the world of finance directly to the fate of the cotton and textile industry for the first time. Using a unique underlying data-set drawn from financial business records of over 100 cotton and textile-manufacturing firms based in Lancashire, and ranging from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first century, Financing Cotton analyses the dynamics of industrial capitalism by uncovering the interaction between financial systems and technological development and innovation. It offers new perspectives on business practices and their evolution, as well as decisions taken by entrepreneurs, managers and employees. The book broadly investigates five questions: how and why were individual firms profitable and what happened to these profits; how did the firms' financial structure and performance influence their attitudes to employment regulation; what were the effects of financial networks and institutions on the characteristics of the first and second phase of industrialisation; how did the financial system enable or stifle entrepreneurship and investment in new technology and, finally, why did consolidation and industrial restructuring offer survival options for some firms, but not for others?

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

This book vividly reconstructs the social world of upper middle-class Belfast during the time of the city's greatest growth, between the 1830s and the 1880s. Using extensive primary material including personal correspondence, memoirs, diaries and newspapers, the author draws a rich portrait of Belfast society and explores both the public and inner lives of Victorian bourgeois families. Leading business families like the Corrys and the Workmans, alongside their professional counterparts, dominated Victorian Belfast's civic affairs, taking pride in their locale and investing their time and money in improving it. This social group displayed a strong work ethic, a business-oriented attitude and religious commitment, and its female members led active lives in the domains of family, church and philanthropy. While the Belfast bourgeoisie had parallels with other British urban elites, they inhabited a unique place and time: 'Linenopolis' was the only industrial city in Ireland, a city that was neither fully Irish nor fully British, and at the very time that its industry boomed, an unusually violent form of sectarianism emerged. Middle-Class Life in Victorian Belfast provides a fresh examination of familiar themes such as civic activism, working lives, philanthropy, associational culture, evangelicalism, recreation, marriage and family life, and represents a substantial and important contribution to Irish social history.

Churchill's American Arsenal reveals how the technology, know-how, and production power behind the victorious Allied partnership during World War II extended beyond the battlefront and onto the home-front. Many weapons and inventions were credited with winning World War II, most famously in the assertion that the atomic bomb "ended the war, but radar won the war." What is less well known is that both airborne radar and the atomic bomb were invented in British laboratories, but built by Americans. The same holds true for many other American weapons credited with the Allied victory: the P-51 Mustang fighter, the Liberty ship, the proximity fuze, the Sherman tank, and even penicillin all began with British scientists and planners, but were designed and mass-produced by American engineers and factory workers. Churchill's American Arsenal chronicles this vital but often fraught relationship between British inventiveness and American technical might. At first, leaders in each nation were deeply skeptical that such a relationship could ever be successful. But despite initial misunderstandings, petty jealousies, and continuing differences over priorities, scientists and engineers on both sides of the Atlantic found new and often ingenious ways to work together, jointly creating the weapons that often became the decisive factor in the strategy for victory that Churchill had laid out during the earliest days of the conflict. While no single invention won the war, without any one of them, the war could have been lost.

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

A CHOICE OUTSTANDING ACADEMIC TITLE The disappearance of China's naturally occurring forests is one of the most significant environmental shifts in the country's history, one often blamed on imperial demand for lumber. China's early modern forest history is typically viewed as a centuries-long process of environmental decline, culminating in a nineteenth-century social and ecological crisis. Pushing back against this narrative of deforestation, Ian Miller charts the rise of timber plantations between about 1000 and 1700, when natural forests were replaced with anthropogenic ones. Miller demonstrates that this form of forest management generally rested on private ownership under relatively distant state oversight and taxation. He further draws on in-depth case studies of shipbuilding and imperial logging to argue that this novel landscape was not created through simple extractive pressures, but by attempts to incorporate institutional and ecological complexity into a unified imperial state. Miller uses the emergence of anthropogenic forests in south China to rethink both temporal and spatial frameworks for Chinese history and the nature of Chinese empire. Because dominant European forestry models do not neatly overlap with the non-Western world, China's history is often left out of global conversations about them; Miller's work rectifies this omission and suggests that in some ways, China's forest system may have worked better than the more familiar European institutions. The open access publication of this book was made possible by a grant from the James P. Geiss and Margaret Y. Hsu Foundation.

Have you ever watched wagon after wagon of a goods train thunder past and wondered where it is heading, what it is carrying, and how it works its way between the passenger services? While goods services now tend to be shrouded in anonymity, in past times they were celebrated, prominently advertised, and in many cases were the raisons d'etre for a rail route. Throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, goods trains were the lifeblood of the nation, transporting precious raw materials, construction and industrial items, and fresh produce from coastal areas and farms into the centres of bustling cities. This informative illustrated history shows how rail freight has been carried since Victorian times, and how systems have been organized, from the train itself to the sidings, railway clearing houses, goods sheds and final destinations - whether villages, towns, cities, factories or docks. It also examines the basic rolling stock of these trains, from the humble coal wagon to today's hi-tech containers.

Securing Urban Heritage considers the impact of securitization on access to urban heritage sites. Demonstrating that symbolic spaces such as these have increasingly become the location of choice for the practice and performance of contemporary politics in the last decade, the book shows how this has led to the securitization of urban public space. Highlighting specific changes that have been made, such as the installation of closed-circuit television or the limitation of access to certain streets, plazas and buildings, the book analyses the impact of different approaches to securitization. Claiming that access to heritage sites is a precursor to an informed and thorough understanding of heritage, the editors and contributors to this volume argue that new forms of securing urban heritage, including community involvement and digitalization, offer possibilities for the protection and use of urban heritage. Looking more closely at the versatile relationship between access and securitization in this context, the book provides a theoretical framework for the relationship between urban heritage and securitization. Comparing case studies from cities in Angola, Bulgaria, Eritrea, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Mexico, Norway, Russia, Suriname, Sweden, Turkey, UK, and the US, the book reveals some of the key mechanisms that are used to regulate access to heritage sites around the world. Providing much-needed insight into the diverse challenges of securitization for access and urban heritage, Securing Urban Heritage should be essential reading for academics, students, and practitioners from the fields of heritage and urban studies, architecture, art history, conservation, urban planning, and urban geography.

Heritage and Sustainable Urban Transformations introduces the concept of 'deep cities', a novel approach to the understanding and management of sustainable historic cities that will advance knowledge about how the long-term, temporal and transformative character of urban heritage can be better integrated into urban policies for sustainable futures. Contrary to the growing emphasis on green or smart cities, which focus only on the present and future, the concept of 'deep cities' offers an approach that combines an in-depth understanding of the past with the present and future. Bringing together chapters that cover theoretical, methodological and management issues related to 'deep cities', the volume argues that using this approach will force researchers, managers and consultants to actively use the heritage and history of a city in the planning and management of sustainable cities. Exploring different definitions of 'deep cities', the book reveals varying and sometimes conflicting views among stakeholders concerning how, where and when the depth of a city should be conceptualized. Despite this, the book demonstrates how this new approach can help to create robust cities for the future, as new and innovative solutions are combined with the preservation and strengthening of historical features. Heritage and Sustainable Urban Transformations is the first international collection on the subject of sustainable historic cities. As such, the book will be of great interest to academics and students engaged in the study of heritage, heritage management, architecture, heritage conservation, anthropology, development studies, geography, planning and archaeology.

In this landmark study of American labor history, Meredith Tax charts the actions of women in working-class, feminist, and socialist movements between 1880 and 1917 in the USA. Caught between the hostility of male trade unionists, the chauvinism of male socialist organizers, and the assumptions of middle-class feminists, women workers forged their own demands for economic and political justice in the industrializing landscape of North America. In doing so, Tax argues, a unique form of socialist-feminist class consciousness was created, whose remarkable history is chronicled in this work. With a focus on the histories of the Socialist Party and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Tax shows how working-class socialist women navigated the terrain between the seemingly oppositional demands for suffrage and labour rights. The Rising of the Women also contains detailed case studies of two germinal moments in American labour history: the uprising of shirtwaist workers in New York City in 1909 - 1910, the real beginning of the International Ladies' Garment Worker Union; and the 1912 IWW strike of immigrant textile workers in Lawrence, Mass., making it an essential text for students of American labor history as well as readers interested in twentieth-century feminism. First published in 1980, the book is reissued by Verso as part of the highly successful Feminist Classics series, where it takes its place alongside texts by Sheila Rowbotham, Kathi Weeks, Stella Dadzie, Lynne Segal and more. The result of years of archival research, Tax blends original source material from the participants of the movements with her own sharp analysis into a rich narrative of women workers' struggle. The Rising of the Women is a classic of feminist labor history whose time has come to find the wide audience it deserves.