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

In the early nineteenth century the major English chocolate firms,Fry, Rowntree, and Cadbury,were all Quaker family enterprises that aimed to do well by doing good. The English chocolatiers introduced the world's first chocolate bar and ever fancier chocolate temptations,while also writing ground-breaking papers on poverty, publishing authoritative studies of the Bible, and campaigning against human rights abuses. Chocolate was always a global business, and in the global competitors, especially the Swiss and the Americans Hershey and Mars, the Quaker capitalists met their match. The ensuing chocolate wars would culminate in a multi-billion-dollar showdown pitting Quaker tradition against the cutthroat tactics of a corporate behemoth. Featuring a cast of savvy entrepreneurs, brilliant eccentrics, and resourceful visionaries, Chocolate Wars is a delicious history of the fierce, 150-year business rivalry for one of the world's most coveted markets.

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

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

Anyone interested in the real London needs to read this. - Andrew Marr No city can survive without water, and lots of it. Today we take the stuff for granted: turn a tap and it gushes out. But it wasn't always so. For centuries London, one of the largest and richest cities in the world, struggled to supply its citizens with reliable, clean water. The Mercenary River tells the story of that struggle from the middle ages to the present day. Based on new research, it tells a tale of remarkable technological, scientific and organisational breakthroughs; but also a story of greed and complacency, high finance and low politics. Among the breakthroughs was the picturesque New River, neither new nor a river but a state of the art aqueduct completed in 1613 and still part of London's water supply: the company that built it was one of the very first modern business corporations, and also one of the most profitable. London water companies were early adopters of steam power for their pumps. And Chelsea Waterworks was the first in the world to filter the water it supplied its customers: the same technique is still used to purify two-thirds of London's drinking water. But for much of London's history water had to be rationed, and the book also chronicles our changing relationship with water and the way we use it. Amongst many stories, Nick Higham's page-turning narrative uncovers the murky tale of how the most powerful steam engine in the world was first brought to London; the extraordinary story of how one Victorian London water company deliberately cut off 2,000 households, even though it knew they had no alternative source of supply; the details of a financial scandal which brought two of the water companies close to collapse in the 1870s; and finally asks whether today's 21st century water companies are an improvement on their Victorian predecessors.

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

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

Fashion studies is a burgeoning field that often highlights the contributions of genius designers and high-profile brands with little reference to what goes on behind the scenes in the supply chain. This book pulls back the curtain on the global fashion system of the past 200 years to examine the relationship between the textile mills of Yorkshire - the firms that provided the entire Western world with warm wool fabrics - and their customers. It is a microhistory of a single firm, Abraham Moon and Sons Ltd, that sheds light on important macro questions about British industry, government policies on international trade, the role of multi-generational family firms and the place of design and innovation in business strategy. It is the first book to connect Yorkshire tweeds to the fashion system. Written in lively, accessible prose, this book will appeal to anyone who works in fashion or who wears fashion. There is nothing like it - and it will raise the bar for historical studies of global fashion. Here you'll find intriguing stories about a tweed theft from the Leeds Coloured Cloth Hall, debates on tariffs and global trade, the battle against synthetic fibres and the reinvention of British tweeds around heritage marketing. You won't be bored. -- .

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

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

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

Throughout history, the use and workmanship of metal has been used as a defining characteristic of civilization. Never was this more important than during the Metallurgic Age which coincided with England's Victorian Age and the Gilded Age in America. This period of 100 years, covering essentially the 19th century, saw unprecedented advances in a number of areas. This work explores in depth the connection between Victorian creativity and the advance of engineering. In many ways the entire mindset of the Victorian age revolved around invention and innovation. This new passion for technology and learning resulted in a period not only of discovery but practical application of the sciences. Intense interest of amateurs as well as professionals gave rise to numerous inventions, many of which were arrived at simultaneously often resulting in disagreements and patent battles. This volume examines this age of accelerated invention and the evolution of new fields such as metallurgy, automotive engineering, aerodynamics and industrial arts. The author discusses the ways in which metallurgy permeated all areas of Victorian life and affected changes - literally from the kitchen to the battlefield. Topics include the birth of scientific publications which provided direction for the inventors of the day and the inspiration received from international technological competition. Forgotten inventors, who were often lost historically due to the Victorian need to assign a winner to any contest, are remembered here along with the concept of the meta-invention. The final chapter provides an overview of inventions of the age.

Factories, with their ingenious machinery and miraculous productivity, are celebrated as modern wonders of the world. Yet from William Blake's "dark Satanic mills" they have also fuelled our fears of the future. Telling the story of the factory, Joshua B. Freeman takes readers from the textile mills in England that powered the Industrial Revolution to the steel and car plants of twentieth-century America, Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, to today's behemoths making trainers, toys and iPhones in China and Vietnam. He traces arguments about factories and social progress through such critics and champions as Marx, Ford and Stalin. And he explores the representation of factories in the work of Margaret Bourke-White, Charlie Chaplin and Diego Rivera.

Samuel Smiles published his "Lives of the Engineers" in 1862, presenting engineers as heroic characters, conquering nature and often overcoming impossible problems on their way to success. He also invented much of it, so while an interesting historical document, it must be taken with a pinch of salt. Anthony Burton has turned his attention to a new book collating the lives of the great engineers of the 18th and 19th centuries, the extraordinary men who made the industrial revolution possible. This definitive study investigates the common themes that run between each man's story, and how they learned from one another, truly standing on the shoulders of giants. This book presents ten incredible engineers: Jack Metcalf, James Brindley, John Smeaton, William Jessop, John Rennie, Thomas Telford, James Watt, Richard Trevithick, George and Robert Stephenson, and Isambard Brunel.

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

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

This book provides a detailed account of how Bristol was transformed by a growing population, industrial change, technological innovation and urban expansion over the course of the nineteenth century. Overshadowed by more economically vibrant towns of the industrial north, Bristol's prospects in 1800 were far from certain. This book provides a detailed account of how Bristol was transformed by a growing population, industrial change, technological innovation and urban expansion over the course of the nineteenth century. It explores the development of the physical fabric of the city, looking at the impact on the landscape of new types of buildings, increased housing and the repurposing of older areas, the growth of manufacturing, and the disruptive technologies of the railways and steam-powered ships. The book examines how the population responded to the opportunities, and challenges, afforded by national economic growth and world trade and which groups had the power to decide what solutions should be adopted. Finally, it considers the growing influence of central government on local decisions in relationto issues such as public health, education and housing. The book offers a distinctive and original contribution not only to the historiography of Bristol, but also to the study of urbanisation in nineteenth-century Britain in general. PETER MALPASS is Emeritus Professor of Housing and Urban Studies at the University of the West of England, Bristol.

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

While the success of Disneyland is largely credited to Walt and Roy Disney, there was a third, mostly forgotten dynamo instrumental to the development of the park - fast-talking Texan C. V. Wood. Three Years in Wonderland presents the never-before-told, full story of ""the happiest place on earth."" Using information from over one hundred unpublished interviews, Todd James Pierce lays down the arc of Disneyland's development from an idea to a paragon of entertainment. In the early 1950s, the Disney brothers hired Wood and his team to develop a feasibility study for an amusement park Walt wanted to build in southern California. ""Woody"" quickly became a central figure. In 1954, Roy Disney hired him as Disneyland's first official employee, its first general manager, and appointed him vice president of Disneyland, Inc., where his authority was exceeded only by Walt. A brilliant project manager, Wood was also a con man of sorts. Previously, he had forged his university diploma. A smooth-talker drawn to Hollywood, the first general manager of Disneyland valued money over art. As relations soured between Wood and the Disney brothers, Wood found creative ways to increase his income, leveraging his position for personal fame. Eventually, tensions at the Disney park reached a boiling point, with Walt demanding he be fired. In compelling detail, Three Years in Wonderland lays out the struggles and rewards of building the world's first cinematic theme park and convincing the American public that a $17 million amusement park was the ideal place for a family vacation. The early experience of Walt Disney, Roy Disney, and C. V. Wood is one of the most captivating untold stories in the history of Hollywood. Pierce interviewed dozens of individuals who enjoyed long careers at the Walt Disney Company as well as dozens of individuals who - like C. V. Wood - helped develop the park but then left the company for good once the park was finished. Through much research and many interviews, Three Years in Wonderland offers readers a rare opportunity to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the men and women who built the best-known theme park in the world.

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

This book's predecessor, The Grapevine of the Black South, emphasized the owners of the Atlanta Daily World and its operation of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate between 1931 and 1955. In a pragmatic effort to avoid racial confrontation developing from white fear, newspaper editors developed a practical radicalism that argued on the fringes of racial hegemony, saving their loudest vitriol for tyranny that was not local and thus left no stake in the game for would-be white saboteurs. Thomas Aiello reexamined historical thinking about the Depression-era Black South, the information flow of the Great Migration, the place of southern newspapers in the historiography of Black journalism, and even the ideological and philosophical underpinnings of the civil rights movement. With Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration, Aiello continues that analysis by tracing the development and trajectory of the individual newspapers of the Syndicate, evaluating those with surviving issues, and presenting them as they existed in proximity to their Atlanta hub. In so doing, he emphasizes the thread of practical radicalism that ran through Syndicate editorial policy. Practical Radicalism and the Great Migration is a supplement to The Grapevine of the Black South, providing a fuller picture of the Scott Newspaper Syndicate and the Black press in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

The Tenants' Movement is both a history of tenant organization and mobilization, and a guide to understanding how the struggles of tenant organizers have come to shape housing policy today. Charting the history of tenant mobilization, and the rise of consumer movements in housing, it is one of the first cross-cultural, historical analyses of tenants' organizations' roles in housing policy. The Tenants' Movement shows both the past and future of tenant mobilization. The book's approach applies social movement theory to housing studies, and bridges gaps between research in urban sociology, urban studies, and the built environment, and provides a challenging study of the ability of contemporary social movements, community campaigns and urban struggles to shape the debate around public services and engage with the unfinished project of welfare reform.

This book reflects on the motivations of creative practitioners who have moved out of cities from the mid-1960s onwards to establish creative homesteads. The book focuses on desert exile painter Agnes Martin, radical filmmaker and gardener Derek Jarman, and iconoclastic conceptual artist Chris Burden, detailing their connections to the cities they had left behind (New York, London, Los Angeles). Sarah Lowndes also examines how the rise of digital technologies has made it more possible for artists to live and work outside the major art centers, especially given the rising cost of living in London, Berlin, and New York, focusing on three peripheral creative centers: the seaside town of Hastings, England, the midsized metro of Leipzig, Germany, and post-industrial Detroit, USA.

In this holistic approach to the study of textiles and their makers, Colleen Kriger charts the role cotton has played in commercial, community, and labor settings in West Africa. By paying close attention to the details of how people made, exchanged, and wore cotton cloth from before industrialization in Europe to the twentieth century, she is able to demonstrate some of the cultural effects of Africa's long involvement in trading contacts with Muslim societies and with Europe. Cloth in West African History thus offers a fresh perspective on the history of the region and on the local, regional, and global processes that shaped it. A variety of readers will find its account and insights into the African past and culture valuable, and will appreciate the connections made between the local concerns of small-scale weavers in African villages, the emergence of an indigenous textile industry, and its integration into international networks.

It is now almost impossible to conceive of life in western Europe, either in the towns or the countryside, without a reliable mains electricity supply. By 1938, two-thirds of rural dwellings had been connected to a centrally generated supply, but the majority of farms in Britain were not linked to the mains until sometime between 1950 and 1970. Given the significance of electricity for modern life, the difficulties of supplying it to isolated communities, and the parallels with current discussions over the provision of high-speed broadband connections, it is surprising that until now there has been little academic discussion of this vast and protracted undertaking. This book fills that gap. It is divided into three parts. The first, on the progress of electrification, explores the timing and extent of electrification in rural England, Wales and Scotland; the second examines the effects of electrification on rural life and the rural landscape; and the third makes comparisons over space and time, looking at electrification in Canada and Sweden and comparing electrification with the current problems of rural broadband.